Chapter Eighteen Judy
Chapter Eighteen
Judy
It takes me only a day to recover from the vaccinations, and on my third day in the Bay Area, I am ready to move into the house in Burlingame. I drop a postcard at the front desk, addressed to Ronelle and telling her of my whereabouts. Unsigned with disguised handwriting, as usual. But she’ll know.
Beverly is still away on her first assignment to Honolulu. Grateful for all she did to find us a place to live, I want to return the favor. So I gather her things as well as mine and leave the airport hotel in a taxi. Having left almost all my belongings in Pennsylvania, my whole life now fits into a moderate-size suitcase. But Beverly has boxes and boxes that take up the entire trunk of the cab and most of the back seat. She hadn’t had this much stuff with her in Miami, but her mother had shipped all of this ahead to the hotel in San Francisco.
Whether her father is aware of that is unknown. I hope that someday, he can see Beverly for the remarkable young woman she is. That she will know the same kind of love my dad gave me.
The taxi pulls up to a bungalow, and I am immediately struck by its charm. It’s everything I imagined California to be. The one-story home is made of bright-white stucco and topped with a terra-cotta tile roof. The well-trimmed lawn boasts a perimeter of flower beds, and I wonder which of the ladies in the stew zoo has a green thumb. I see lemon trees and orange trees such as I’d never seen in the cornfield country of Red Lion.
I think back to reading The Secret Garden with my mother when I was a child, and I imagine it would have looked something like this.
She would have loved to see me here.
I step out of the cab and pull the fare from my wallet. The driver watches me as I glance up.
“Those are eucalyptus,” he says, following my gaze to the trees lining the street. The treetops look like they would graze the roof of a four-story building, and they cast a pattern of shadows onto the pavement.
“You’ll see them all over this area,” he continues. “They were brought over from Australia.”
“Did they send koalas with them?” I ask. The clean air is strengthening me even to the point of being able to joke.
He scratches his beard and shakes his head. “The wildest animal you’ll find around here is the occasional bobcat. And maybe an opossum once in a while.”
I think back to my day at Villa Vizcaya with Joe and the feral iguanas we saw roaming around. It takes very little, I’ve discovered, for my thoughts to go to him. Even with something as unrelated as a koala and an iguana, my mind seems inclined to make any connection it can.
I try to shake it from my head. Joe is an entire continent away.
And I am still married.
“Let me help you,” the driver offers. It takes him six trips between the front door and the cab to fully unload all of Beverly’s boxes. I look under the welcome mat for the key that was promised, and there it is.
He insists on helping me inside, and it’s only after I’ve tipped him generously for the unexpected assistance that I get a chance to look around.
The boxes form a perfect throne, so I sit down to catch my breath. The living room is just as charming as the outside, and though I quite like the turn toward modern decor that I see in magazine advertisements, this cottage woos me with her arched doorways, nicked wood floors, and colorful tile fireplace. It sparks my imagination and makes me wonder about all the people who might have lived here before me.
What were their stories?
What will mine be?
Already, I like that this chapter of my story is beginning in California. The very air feels fresh in my lungs.
It is then that I notice the sound of a radio coming from a door down the hall. Ricky Nelson singing “Travelin’ Man.”
“Hello?” I ask into the emptiness, loud enough—maybe—to be heard over the music.
The radio turns off.
“Who’s there?”
A woman comes out of a bathroom brandishing an electric curling iron as if it were a weapon. Half of her long blond hair is straight as a pin and the other half cascades down her shoulders in spirals.
I put my hands up. “It’s me. Judy Goodman. I’m renting a room here with Beverly Caldwell. Is this the right address, 9812 Clarendon Road?”
“Oh!” She puts the curling iron down on the counter behind her and takes wide strides over to me.
“Pinky Martin. I’m sorry—we weren’t expecting you for a few more days.”
“Didn’t Beverly start our lease for today?”
Pinky grins, and I take the moment to look her over. She’s wearing a pink housecoat and fuzzy pink slippers. A nickname, perhaps?
“No, tomorrow! But it’s not a problem! We were just planning to scrub everything nice and shiny for y’all and have some champagne ready to welcome you. Now you’re stuck with just me, a few dust mites, and half a carton of milk.”
“And a hot curling iron?”
“Oh!” she says, looking behind her and picking the device up by its handle. “I wasn’t thinking. I was just startled to hear someone come in.”
I smile at the whole scene. She has no idea how dreamy this is to me. The girls in school never liked me since my father wasn’t from Red Lion. This kind of camaraderie was something I wished to have my whole life.
My mother would console me, holding my head against her shoulder and stroking my hair, promising me that these silly high school hurts were not what friendships were based on. Someday, I would have more friends than I could count. I was only now beginning to believe it.
“So how about it?” Pinky asks. “Ice water or milk? Don’t let it be said that I’m not a generous hostess.”
Her grin reveals blindingly white teeth. All straight, no gaps.
“I like milk,” I offer.
“Perfect. And now that I think of it, I’ll warm some over the stove, add some Swiss Miss, and we’ll have ourselves a party!”
That sounds incredible. But I’m sorry to have intruded. “You look like you’re getting ready to go somewhere,” I offer as an invitation for her to recant.
Pinky shakes her head, and I find it amusing how differently each side of her hair reacts. One side flat, one side bouncy. “Just practicing with that thing.” She points to the curling iron. “I got it on a layover in Paris last month, only to realize that our electrical voltages don’t match up with Europe’s. So an electrician finally came in today and jerry-rigged something for me, and now I’m getting to test it out before a date I have on Saturday night.”
“You’re a stewardess too?” I had thought she would be based on what Beverly said, but it was good for conversation anyway.
“Mm-hmm. All of us are. The Blue Meatball girls of Pan American Airlines.”
It’s my turn to grin. I’ve heard the nickname of the Pan Am logo, and I love that these girls adopted it so cheerfully.
I’m thinking about a statement she made a few moments ago. “There’s a flight from San Francisco to Paris?”
We’d had to memorize all the routes that Pan Am flies before our final exam, and I didn’t recall that one.
“Oh, honey,” she says, stepping closer to me. From here, I can see that she’s chewing gum. Pink, of course. “There’s what you learn and there’s what you learn . Dear old San Francisco might be your home base, but when you really get adept at the bid system, you can route yourself all over the world as long as you manage your minimum of sixty-seven hours a month and don’t go over the maximum. That’s not to even mention what you can do with standby. You can fly anywhere that Pan Am flies at no cost to you as long as you have space in your schedule and a flexible personality. And ”—she takes a breath—“if you watch for it, you can catch a ferry flight between here and the East Coast. Sometimes, you have the whole plane to yourself—just you and the pilots.”
I knew this in theory. It had been covered in class, but only briefly. Now that I’m meeting someone who actually knows how to navigate the complicated system of route bids and standbys and empty planes being ferried coast to coast, I can taste the very real possibility that I might, in fact, see all those places that Frank Sinatra sang about on that album.
Just think—Judy Hall Goodman of Pennsylvania, tacking pins into her childhood map and dotting the world with her adventures!
Not for the first time, I am struck that this endeavor was about far, far more than escaping from something. It is heading toward my new life.
Pinky snaps her bubble gum with such polished perfection that it reminds me of Beverly. Beverly, who is hopefully sipping tropical drinks on Waikiki Beach right about now.
“You girls lucked out. The room that Marsha had was the biggest one. Picture windows right in the front of the house, lots of light. Two beds. But that broad could afford to pay for both beds, and she liked her privacy.”
“Where did Marsha go?”
“Married! Can’t have a husband while working at Pan Am, but you sure can meet one!”
So I’ve heard.
Pinky shows me to the space I’ll share with Beverly. Right off the living room, so I won’t have far to move all these boxes. She wasn’t exaggerating. The sun sits high and bathes the room with light. I step into one of the largest beams, and the heat is as satisfying as taking a long bubble bath.
But blessedly much less intense than Miami.
As soon as Pinky leaves the room, I open my hands at my sides, close my eyes, and tilt my head upward.
This. Is. Glorious.
I feel like I’ve been born into a new skin.
One bed is closer to the window than the other, and I want to let Beverly have it, especially after her efforts to get us this place. So I walk toward the one by the closet and fall forward, muffling a scream of delight into the quilted mattress. I kick my legs up and down.
I can’t remember the last time I was this happy.
I wake up from having apparently napped in that silly position, sprawled across the bed with one leg hanging over the edge. I’m feeling better than I have in days, though I rub the base of my spine to work out the kinks that formed while I was sleeping.
The house is quiet, and I find a note attached to the refrigerator with a flimsy magnet that has a tiger on it and says Bangkok .
Sorry you didn’t have the welcoming committee we’d anticipated. But everyone will be here tomorrow night, so don’t make plans! In the meantime, we’re just a few blocks from Burlingame Avenue, where you’ll find most everything you need to settle in. Take a left as you leave the house, and then your first left at the corner. In six blocks, you’ll cross the tracks and be at the start of the avenue. Alpha Beta is on that end. I’d start there. And if you haven’t been to one, be prepared to be surprised.
Pinky
P.S. You fell asleep before I could even make the hot chocolate. Rain check!
I sling my macramé bag over my shoulder and head out, thankful for her anticipating what I’d need to know. The sun is setting, but just barely, so I should have enough time to get to the store and back before it’s dark.
I arrive at Alpha Beta, and as soon as I enter, I see what Pinky meant. This is not your average grocery store. I have never seen anything like this in Red Lion or Miami.
Within their categories, everything is alphabetical. Anise next to apples next to asparagus. This makes some sense in the perishable sections of the store, but down the aisles, it is quite different.
Cheerios next to Cocoa Krispies. Chicken noodle next to cream of tomato soup.
And farther down: Skippy peanut butter, Spam, Starkist tuna.
California is surely a different world.
Though I have to admit, it makes everything easy to find.
I pick up what I think I can easily carry back and walk up to the register.
Large tote bags are nice in theory, but now that I need to dig around for my wallet, I find it cumbersome. My hand moves past a tin of peppermints and a wool sanitary pad and brushes up against a package that I don’t remember putting in there. I ignore that and finally find my wallet, paying the $4.35 in exact change.
It’s not until I’m back in my bedroom that I empty the contents of my purse onto the bed. There is a package. I hadn’t imagined it. I open the brown-paper wrapping and find a purple leather notebook. And a letter. A letter from Joe.