MINOR GODDESSES by Megan Harlan
One time when my mom went on summer vacation with her new boyfriend, Jeffrey Nash, I had to move in for a while with my Grandma Evie. Grandma Evie’s house is not a normal grandma house. It’s filled with pictures of what she looked like in her twenties. She got her break working as Jane Russell’s body double. My Step-Grandpa Mac used to say about this, “That says it all!” while he wiggled his eyebrows. Once, a casting agent told Grandma Evie she didn’t need to have a thing cut–not even her nose, he said. Early on she played a Court Lady in Ingrid Bergman’s Joan of Arc and then co-starred in a Roy Rogers movie as a Mexican mayor’s spoiled daughter who could ride a horse better than anyone except Roy Rogers. She did another Roy Rogers where she played a contessa visiting from Spain, but she didn’t ride a horse in that one, just shook her handkerchief a lot. She also starred in a romantic comedy with the guy who played the Tin Woodsman that had to do with the New York publishing industry. She says she worked for ten years, “in B movies, C movies, whatever kind of movies would pay a girl a decent wage.” And she got to keep her real maiden name for the screen, Evelyn Davies, because her manager said it had a nice ring to it. She’s Welsh and Irish, not Spanish, even though they liked her to pretend to be Spanish or Mexican or sometimes Cuban. She had shiny, wavy brown hair and huge, liquidy brown eyes. Her skin was as pale as mine according to my mother, but Grandma Evie took care of that by sunbathing on aluminum-foil sheets with Crisco rubbed all over her body.
Grandma Evie’s hair has gotten darker over the years. Now it’s pretty much black, and she wears it twisted up. On her Pasadena Lady Horse-Riders Society meeting days she puts it in long girlish braids, even though she can’t ride anymore because of her hip. She owns a duplex in Redondo Beach, and she rents out the apartment she doesn’t live in herself. Grandma Evie was alone when I stayed with her, because my Step-Grandpa Mac had died of a heart attack the year before.
Grandma Evie talked that first night about some things she had tried to do right with my mother, like sending her to tap-dancing classes. We ate in the dining room with the huge framed poster of Grandma Evie dressed like a toreador for an old cigarette ad.
“Your mother,” said Grandma Evie loudly, as if I was being accused of something, “never listened to a word I said. You’d think she’d want to learn something from me, with all my experience.” Grandma gazed at her almost life-sized younger self wearing lipstick that matched the red of the bull-fighting flag. “But maybe most daughters can’t stand to listen to their mothers. If it came from anyone else . . .” She took a sip from her can of Coors.
I also never listened to my mother. But that was different. I pretended to listen.
“Someday I’ll tell you all about the time your mother almost won Miss Teen L.A., had it not been for that stupid mechanic she was dating who talked her into cutting her hair.” I’d already heard all about the Miss Teen L.A. story. My mom’s talent was vaulting, which is gymnastics on horseback. They had a vault on the stage as high as a horse and she whirled her legs around it like one of those guys at the Olympics. It would have looked better with her long blond hair, supposedly.
Grandma Evie then told me she never let a proposition go to her head, unlike my mom. “You can’t imagine some of the men I’ve turned down,” she said, staring down at her meatloaf.
“Cary Grant?” I asked. It was the only old-time actor I could think of right then.
“A lady never tells,” Grandma Evie said, and cackled through her dentures. Then the line between her eyebrows darkened, and her eyes wavered as she looked right at me. “Always remember that beauty is a game of skill,” she said. “I’ll teach you how to put on make-up so it’ll last you all evening and into the morning, if it’s a dinner-and-breakfast sort of night! It’s gonna take you an hour, even an hour and a half depending on how good you are at eyelashes. But there’s a time and a place for everything. And love is never a game.” She patted my hand reassuringly.
During dessert, which was always Neapolitan ice cream with salty cocktail peanuts on top, Grandma Evie talked about how in love she’d been with my Step-Grandpa Mac, and tears bunched up in her mascara. Step-Grandpa Mac used to work as a draftsman for Disney cartoons, one of the artists who did the millions of drawings of Donald Duck throwing a ball or a broomstick coming to life.
“He was an amazing man,” she said. “He stayed by my side through the twilight years.” The twilight years were the ones just after my Grandma Evie stopped being in movies, and she and my grandfather, who I’d never met, split up. Step-Grandpa Mac always seemed to me like an ordinary nice old guy who worshipped the ground my Grandma Evie walked on. Every time I visited, he would take me around their house pointing at the photos of my grandmother and telling their stories all over again. “A strong woman needs to find herself a strong man,” said my grandmother between peanuts.
I first saw Luis Orozco when he was sniffing one of my grandmother’s roses.
“Hey,” I said, running out the sliding glass door to the backyard.
He was my age or maybe older. He didn’t jump back or stop sniffing. Luis just looked at me, then said, “These small ones smell best, I think.”
He was the cutest boy I had ever seen in person. His eyes were bright green like the color of a parrot. Maybe they looked greener because his skin was a nice dark gold.
“You live in the other half of the duplex,” I said, with hope. “Your dad is an electrician.” I didn’t say anything about his mom, though I knew. My grandmother said the walls were like cardboard back near her bedroom. She’d heard everything the night Mrs. Orozco left.
“Which is your favorite color?” he asked, looking up and down my grandmother’s long row of roses.
I said, “I like the blue ones, they’re more like white with lavender, but they’re called Twilight Blue.”
Luis walked over to me as I spoke, and I couldn’t stop looking at his perfect face. Before I knew it, he grabbed my right arm with both his hands and twisted my skin in opposite directions until it burned.
“Ouch!” I yelled. I pushed him hard on the stomach to get away. He had muscles there. He smelled something like heat or salt.
Luis just laughed at me. “Look at that color,” he said, pointing to my arm. “You look like you’re sunburned.”
“You’re crazy,” I yelled.
“I think you’re pretty,” he said casually, as if he hadn’t just attacked me, or maybe as if that explained it. “My dad says you go to Catholic school and that your mom looks like she’s a single lady.”
“I know about your mom,” I said right back to him, rubbing my arm.
We met eyes for one second, two, three. Then Luis said he had to go in. He smiled just around his mouth as he walked by me too close. As he passed, I didn’t know whether I wanted to kiss Luis or hit him hard.
I was too far to see my friends back in Pasadena, so most days I spent the morning at the community pool nearby, where I’d get crowded out by a Bluebird swim class on paddleboards or senior citizens backstroking down all the lap-lanes. I’d walk home and have a marshmallow and peanut butter sandwich for lunch. Then I’d watch reruns on TV. It felt like my real life must be going on somewhere else, without me.
The last time I’d had to stay with my Grandma Evie this long was when my parents split up for good and my dad moved back to St. Louis where he wouldn’t try to be an actor any more because it didn’t give enough structure to his life and added all kinds of temptations, which my mother said she probably didn’t know the half of. I slept in the same shadowy white bedroom I had this time, only that time my mom wanted me to bring my posters with me. I brought my Lynda Carter Wonder Woman one, but I never put it up.
Back then, those first nights, I had some dreams I’ll never forget. I dreamt my dad was a gigantic moth in the corner of the room, wrapped up in a dense web. His face was smushed into a white moth face, and he was twisting around like crazy, trying to get free. I had another dream where he was an eagle or some kind of large bird like that and all I could see was his shadow on the ground and I kept yelling, Dad, I’m down here! I chased the shadow all over the place, falling down hills and things to keep up. I’d wake up from these dreams yelling, though not making any sound. My mouth would be open and I’d be whispering a yell at the top of my lungs.
After I moved back home, my mom started dating different men, but she never brought them home because she didn’t want to confuse me, she said. I’d know she was dating someone new because she became suddenly very interested in Northern Italian cooking, or she’d give me lectures about firemen being the greatest heroes in society. My grandmother called the way my mother dated “her disappear-ing act.” When my mother was seeing a California politics reporter at the Los Angeles Times, she started complaining loudly over breakfast about disparities in local tax codes. But after a while she’d forget about all of it. If I asked her why she wasn’t making spaghetti carbonara with pancetta anymore, she’d laugh with this sharp look in her eye that I love–like she was about to tell a secret joke, or like she’d been in on the big joke all around her the whole time–and say that we all make mistakes and she never really liked pancetta anyway and that she would make me anything I wanted for dinner that night, as long as it didn’t include pancetta. Sometimes I thought only I knew how smart my mother was. Except she only seemed that way after she realized she’d made a mistake and before she was making the next one. And I wished she could be that way all the time.
My mom surprised us by calling to say she was bringing her boyfriend Jeffrey Nash by. They were driving back from Big Sur where Jeffrey Nash had led a class on Buddhist Meditation over the weekend. He was also a defense lawyer for poor people. This would be the first time I’d laid eyes on him.
My mom showed up wearing weird orange lipstick and a small white dress. She wasn’t smoking because of Jeffrey Nash and I figured that was why she looked pale. When she brought Jeffrey Nash into the living room and introduced me to him, she said, “This is my pride and joy, Jessamine. Such a good girl, the easiest child.”
“She’s always been that way,” Grandma Evie interrupted, as if she was correcting my mom.
I mumbled hello to Jeffrey Nash while taking the chance to stare at his needly eyes and fluffy beige hair. The rest of him was all neck and legs.
Grandma Evie put out a bowl of salty cocktail peanuts on the glass coffee table. Then she asked Jeffrey Nash if he wanted a Manhattan or a martini, because those were the two drinks she could make as good as any bartender.
Jeffrey Nash looked confused. It was hours before dinner. “I don’t drink,” he said in his booming voice. “I don’t need to get high to be happy.” He shot a big smile my way like I would find this especially interesting.
Grandma Evie gave my mother a look. I could tell what the look said: Not another recovering alcoholic. She hadn’t bothered to change out of her gardening t-shirt and into one of the silk blouses she normally wore for company. I still had a bathing suit on under my shorts.
My mother was giving me her big blue “say something” eyes. I felt bad for my grandmother, who was the only one holding a filled crystal tumbler. I said to Jeffrey Nash, “Did you know my mother is Catholic?”
Jeffrey Nash laughed at this, for no reason. “No,” he said. “I didn’t realize.”
“Catholics are allowed to drink,” I told him. “I guess Buddhists can’t.”
“I’m not really Buddhist,” he said, again like this was all very funny. “I teach Buddhist meditation, but you don’t have to be Buddhist to meditate. You don’t have to believe in their gods and goddesses. They have a lot of them, depending on the type of Buddhism.”
I looked at my grandmother, who shrugged. She asked Jeffrey Nash, as she hitched her thumb at my mother, “Is this one meditating too? Because she can barely sit still for two minutes. Couldn’t focus on her schoolwork to save her life.”
Jeffrey Nash didn’t answer. My mother’s smile got wider; she was doing her force field thing where she pretends nothing bad can get through. She got up and started peering closely at photos hanging on the wall, as if she’d never seen them before.
My mom said, “Look at this one of my mother, Jeffrey. Wasn’t she gorgeous?”
Jeffrey strolled over and pushed my mother out of the way a little with his shoulder. He whistled low and said, “Christ, Evelyn. What a body!”
From her silver TV-watching armchair, my grandmother patted her stomach. “Still ticking along, thank you.”
“The power of woman,” said Jeffrey Nash, now gazing at the photo of Grandma Evie wearing a strapless blue gown at an awards dinner and being ogled by Lou Costello. “Built to mess with our heads.” He stood straight and looked my mother up and down. “You must take after your dad,” he said.
“Thin as a whippet,” said my grandmother. “Good on a horse, though. Have you ever seen her do barrel riding?”
Jeffrey Nash shook his head slowly with his lips scrunched tight. “I wouldn’t know it, if I had,” he finally said.
“Oh I haven’t done that in years, Mother,” said my mom, smoothing down the top of her hair. Her face looked soft at the memory. “He’s going to think we’re cowgirls.”
“You can take the girl out of Montana,” said Grandma Evie, “but you can’t take Montana out of the girl. I was born on a ranch outside Billings and my father always wished he’d had a son, but he got stuck with me. So he raised me to do all the things a boy can do . . .”
Jeffrey Nash looked at his watch. “Well,” he said, “I hate to say this, but we better get going if we want to beat the traffic.” I guessed he didn’t want to hear about barrel riding. It’s when you ride a horse around a set track of barrels, back and forth. You have to be fast and good at turning to get the best score. My grandmother had my mother learn tap-dancing, Western horse-riding skills, and the French horn when she was a little girl. My mom said that growing up, when she wasn’t alone, she was in a class of some kind. I think she was lucky she got to take all those things, but she didn’t think so. Grandma Evie said my mother had potential but no follow-through, which was one of her problems.
My grandmother hoisted herself up, saying, “You can’t be leaving this soon.”
“Oh Mother,” said my mom. “I told you we could only stop by . . .”
We all walked outside to say goodbye to my mom and Jeffrey Nash. It had been hot that day and the lines of rosebushes out front still had some bees buzzing in them, and their smell was thick as a sweet fog. Behind the flowers, I noticed Luis sitting against the front wall to the duplex. He looked like he was dozing. He later said he’d lost his key and was waiting for his dad to come home.
My grandmother and Jeffrey Nash were arguing about which road to take. My grandmother said, “If you’re in such a damn hurry, you’ll take the freeway. If you want the scenic route, that’s a whole other story.” She crossed her arms under her large chest.
My mother’s lips quivered. The next second she was talk-crying, just nonsense things at first–“I can’t,” “why don’t you,” “you never”– until she raised her voice to finish her sentences, about how much she wanted them to get along, and why couldn’t my grandmother ever be open to the choices she made in her life, and that this was serious this time, and as she spoke tears got more and more in her voice. This kind of thing just makes my grandmother angrier. Women should never cry in front of men, is what she tells me, unless somebody’s died. Jeffrey Nash put his arm around my mom and scowled at my grandmother.
I walked quickly back and forth through the rosebushes to Luis and sat down next to him. He glanced at me through half-closed eyes. I put my hand on the thigh of his stretched-out leg. In one motion I leaned over and kissed him hard on the lips. He moved them a little, enough so that it felt good. It went on for a while. I had never kissed anyone like that before.
My mother, Grandma Evie, and Jeffrey Nash stopped talking. My grandmother would later say she was afraid I was turning into my mother, falling into the arms of any boy who looked my way, and after all of our talks. My mother would later say she was embarrassed in front of Jeffrey Nash, to have her only child running around like a little slut. Luis would later tell me he wasn’t sure I was his type; he liked girls who didn’t just go and jump on top of him. Jeffrey Nash, who’d become my step-dad that day only I didn’t know that then, never said much of anything to me about anything, except that I should only call him Jeffrey and how lucky I was not to be from the inner-city because so many of those kids never even have a chance, and that’s why he feels he needs to make a difference as a court-ordered defense lawyer. He also sometimes talks about spirituality and meditation. Spirituality is different than religion because you don’t have to believe in one particular god since all the good ones say basically the same thing, he says. And from what I can tell, if you’re spiritual but not religious, you get to think about sex and it’s more okay than say for Catholics. He put a little statue of the beautiful Buddhist goddess of artists, childbirth and carnal joys on the shelf over the TV. She’s built like something out of Playboy, and she’s not wearing a shirt. She’s a consort, is what Jeffrey Nash told me; a consort is like a wife or a girlfriend. Usually you’ll see her seated next to the main god she’s hooked up with, but sometimes she’s all alone like his statue. In that case you could worship her too, just as if she was her own independent force.
Megan Harlan’s stories and poems have appeared in Sycamore Review, Meridian, TriQuarterly, and AGNI.