"Are you going to marry Mia?"
The morning was cold and cloudy, and I wasn't ready to be awake, but missing an outing with Russell wasn't worth a few hours of extra sleep. Seven o'clock had reared its ugly head and I dragged myself out from under the covers, pulled some clothes on and climbed into the car with him. We drove up 280 until it regurgitated us on a city street, and as we drove, the street turned into my former home. It was the first time I had been back to Ferry Park.
"What kind of question is that?" Russell said.
"I dunno. You seem to spend a lot of time with her." It came out sounding like a guilt trip, but it wasn't. I just wanted him to know that I liked spending time with him, too. "I thought you were maybe, like... getting serious or something."
He glanced down at me in an expression that world-wise adults so often seemed to reserve for children; had his lips been moving he might have commented on the charm of my naivete. What did I know about getting serious? As it turned out, not much: "I've known her for three months, Hazel. That's not long enough to get serious about anyone." He paused. "Or, I should say, that's not enough time for me to get serious about anyone."
"Three
months is a long time," I said.
A
street performer, one of the fixtures of my previous life, played an
assortment of pots and pans like drums in the middle of the big
traffic island between the lanes of Embarcadero Street. It sounded
like appropriate music for an introductory segment to the city:
Upbeat percussion the backdrop to a shot of a crowd walking toward
the camera, passing the big garage doors of the piers, then a
sweeping pan of the city by helicopter, shots of entrepreneurs, a
homeless man begging change, and at last, the camera comes to rest on
Alton Brown or Anthony Bourdain as he samples produce from the
farmers' market. Which was where we were headed, cloth shopping bags
in hand. I felt more like a resident of the city this morning than I
had at any time I had actually been living here.
"Three months," Russell said, "is enough time to get used to anything."
He
held the door for me, and we went into the crowded Ferry Building,
full of tourists and the local affluent, paying too much for sausage
and cheese and wine. I stayed close to Russell, my barrier between
now and the Before; if he noticed my discomfort he never said
anything.
"Let's go around the back," he said.
This was an exercise in trying to find blood oranges. We frequented a tiny market behind the mall (where I had developed a taste for cider from Apple Hill), and for the most part it was satisfactory, but for some reason lacked in some of the more obscure fruits from the citrus family. "Sure," I'd said the night before as Russell had griped. "I bet I know where you can get those." I had not actually lived in the city the last time that blood oranges were in season, but I was familiar with the variety of fruits and vegetables available on Saturday mornings. "Didn't you ever go on the weekdays?" I asked him, and he told me that he'd always stayed away due to the crowds.
Blood oranges appeared to be worth crowds, though, and so off we went. "Tell me if you want anything for dinner this week," Russell said, and I followed him around slowly. As during my initial forays into the market, I didn't know what half the produce was, and I wasn't going to ask now. There was broccoli, carrots, big purple cabbage, potatoes, cauliflower, but there were also round white things with purple tops, big pale tapered things that might have been a variety of carrot, green flowery vegetables that I was sure started with an A. Russell hesitated at a stall and I, waiting, picked up a green, knobby plant that looked like a torture device. All the little pieces it consisted of looked like tiny copies of the entire vegetable - later the next week I would learn the term "fractal" in my geometry class and remember it. "What is this?" I said, feeling it was sufficiently weird enough to comment upon.
Russell looked over his shoulder. "Romanesco."
"Oh." I put it back.
We walked around the back twice, and Russell took his time. I began to grow bored and swung the bags around as I filled them with produce he handed me. I was beginning to regret coming along.
And then I began to regret it more.
In the next stall, a familiar assortment of greens was presented on a table, and a familiar face, not preoccupied this time around, caught my eye. I caught hers, too. "Ivy," she said. It was Gwen.
I would have pretended not to see her, but Russell had noticed and my cover was blown. He stopped and looked at me.
There was no way out of this. "Hi," I said.
"I haven't seen you in a long time," she said. "I was wondering." And then, with interest: "Is this your father?"
I tried to remember what I had told her. I couldn't even remember when I had seen her last. October? November? I glanced at Russell but found only an unreadable expression. "Well," I said. And then hoping Russell would forgive the lie: "Yeah."
"It's good to see you doing better, Ivy." She turned to Russell. "She told me about what happened with her mother. She just seems so much happier now that she's here with you."
"Ah," he said. "Well. Glad we could make it happen." He only smiled because the situation dictated, but behind his sunglasses I knew he wasn't smiling at all.
*****
"'Ivy?'" he said. We had found blood oranges and finished up the shopping, Russell bothered and wordless until we were out of the crowd. He had parked the car in my old parking garage, and we took the elevator down. It was a good thing it was Saturday, I thought, because if we'd run into Beth, things would really have been bad.
"I made up a story," I said. "I had to. Or she'd get suspicious."
"How do you know her?"
"Back like when I got here? I tried to get a job from her. Putting out her herbs and stuff. We talked."
"And you lied to her."
"I had to." I was fumbling, not for the truth (which I told him readily) but for understanding: Why did that bother him so much? "People get concerned. She's off in her perfect home in like Chico or Stockton or something and she doesn't know how it is out there. For all I knew she thought 'better off' was someplace I wouldn't be better off at all."
"So you lied." He opened the trunk and we lifted our groceries in.
"Yeah."
"Why did she call you Ivy?"
"Because that's the name I gave her."
Russell looked at me hard, and then he turned away and closed the trunk.
I was frantic. He was upset again, the sort of upset he had been when I'd gone through his safe, and this time I had no idea what I'd done. I climbed into the passenger seat. "Why are you so upset?"
"What's your real name?"
I stared at him. And then I committed the biggest untruth, bigger than even the story I'd fed him about my past. "Hazel," I said.
"You're sure about that?"
It was so unfair, never mind that he was right, I was living under a hastily-chosen pseudonym and had been lying to him about it from the beginning. "Yes."
In a way it was the truth. Hazel was who I had become. The name had wrapped around me like an identity, so much prettier and more unique than the one I had grown up under. It was the name Russell used for me. It felt like home.
"I just don't like lying," he said.
"You lied to the school. About who I was."
He sighed and rested his forehead on the steering wheel. "I know."
"They think my name is Emily."
"I know."
"So why is it a problem that some lady at the Ferry Building thinks I'm Ivy?"
We drove out of the parking garage and back down Embarcadero and sailed onto the freeway. I watched the exit signs go by: Cesar Chavez, Alemany, Monterey. "I wouldn't lie to you," I said.
And sitting next to me, he said, "I know."
