Did her mother spoil the child? Yes, absolutely. There were endless afternoons at the beach with a red plastic bucket and shovel, the seashell collections and the dried starfish, trips to feed the ducks in the canals, cones and sundaes at the ice cream parlor, a parade of toys and dresses and shoes. Children were meant to be spoiled, that was her mother’s attitude. And if Kat wanted a story right in the middle of dinner, well, she got it. And another at bedtime and then at breakfast too. In the beginning there were the nursery rhymes Beverly had received from her mother’s lips when she herself was a girl, “Goosey, Goosey Gander,” “Little Jack Horner” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” in the very same worn volumes she’d kept on a special shelf in her room till she was old enough to be embarrassed by them and banished them to the garage, and then the narratives stretched out and the three little pigs came to the table along with the three bears, and after dinner each night, before she switched on the radio — and in later years, the TV — she and her mother traded off from book to book and still Kat demanded more. After the nursery rhymes it was “Dick and Jane” and “Winnie the Pooh” and on up the ladder till Kat was already beginning to read on her own by the time she started kindergarten.
School illuminated her. She was an eager student, utterly absorbed in the task at hand, no matter how repetitive or frustrating it might have seemed to her classmates. Her report cards were glowing. And when the achievement tests came round in sixth grade and then again in seventh, she consistently ranked in the highest percentile. She was a happy child. She bloomed. She grew. And then came adolescence, which hit with the sudden impact of a meteor — one day Kat was a little girl with a Minnie Mouse barrette in her hair and the next she was filled out and there were boys mooning round every day after school, junior versions of the men who’d come to the house before them — but Kat never seemed to fall under the spell of one or the other of them and never, even for a day, even for prom, let her schoolwork flag. Beverly began to hope for college, a scholarship even, because she really felt there were no limits to what her daughter could do.
To that end, she put aside money each week from her paycheck. She hadn’t had the opportunity of college herself, graduating from high school in the midst of the Depression and then going right to work in a defense plant during the war, but she’d taken a secretarial course and it had paid off. She’d begun working as a secretary in the main offices of the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District when Kat entered first grade, and the work was steady and guaranteed, and since she lived with her mother and her mother owned the house free and clear, what would have gone to rent went into a special savings account. And this was no dollar-a-week Christmas club, this was the real thing. A college fund. For Kat. Kat was her hope. Kat, whose mother was a secretary and whose father was dead and drowned in the roiling waters of the Anacapa Passage, was going to be the first of her family to go on to college and thus have access to all the professions a college degree would open up for her — law, medicine, education, science.
When she was accepted at UCLA on a state scholarship that paid tuition and a modest living allowance, they celebrated — all three of them, though Beverly’s mother was by then having difficulty walking and hadn’t left the house in months — with a lobster dinner at a hotel on Ocean Boulevard overlooking the sea. The first year Kat lived at home, then went into student housing as a sophomore, so that they saw her only on weekends. After a while she began skipping a weekend now and again, then two in a row, pleading her workload. Sometimes a whole month would go by before she’d come home, and when she did come she brought a duffel of dirty laundry with her, which Beverly was only too glad to wash and fold and stack neatly for her, all the while trying to keep from worrying, from nagging. Because Kat was too thin and she wore her hair long and parted in the middle, like the hippies they read about in the paper and saw on TV, and like the hippies she wore flared hip-huggers with stars and flowers stitched into them and blouses that showed off her midriff, which anybody — not just her mother — would have considered provocative. And what about drugs? Marijuana? Did she use marijuana?
Kat never said a word about it. She never mentioned her grades either, though when the reports came at the end of the semester, Beverly — who would never dream of opening her daughter’s mail — couldn’t help quizzing her about them. Was everything all right? Yes, Kat assured her, everything’s fine. And added, in a tone Beverly didn’t like, Stop harassing me. In her senior year, she started dating seriously. She was in love, that was what she told her mother over the phone and on the odd weekends when she came home, but who was the boy? What was his name? What was his family like? What was he majoring in? He was a student, wasn’t he? He doesn’t smoke marijuana or anything, does he? What does his father do? Where are they from? This went on for a whole weekend, from dinner Friday night till Sunday morning at breakfast, the washer churning on the enclosed porch and a pale tired sun smeared like grease over everything in the kitchen. “You can’t even tell me his name?” Beverly said, setting a plate of waffles and two poached eggs down before her. “Your own mother? I mean, what’s the secret? Is he a dwarf or something”—she let out a laugh—“or a Communist? Or is it us. Your nana and me. You’re ashamed of us, is that it?”
“Greg,” Kat said finally, her face twisted in sudden fury. “His name’s Greg. All right?”
Her mother, who’d been hounding her since she stepped in the door Friday night, looked as if she’d been slapped, and Kat, despite herself, instantly regretted it. “Listen,” she said, “I’m sorry, Mom. I’ve been under a lot of pressure, that’s all. At school. I just need some space, okay?”
At the table, her fingers gnarled and her head bent close to her task, her nana peeled shrimp for scampi as if she’d never done anything else in her entire life. The shrimp, gray and denuded, lay mounded in a glass bowl while their translucent shells accumulated on a sheet torn from the Times. She never glanced up, though there was revolution in the air.
Her mother gave her a hurt look, bunching her lips over a strip of green pepper she kept shifting round her mouth like a toothpick. She said, “I don’t want to pry, but—”
“Then don’t.”
The next time she came home, for Christmas break, her mother emerged from the kitchen the minute the key turned in the lock of the front door. She was wiping her hands on a dishtowel and her smile of greeting flared and died as she crossed the room to peck a kiss to Kat’s cheek before turning to the table in the front hall to retrieve an envelope there and hand it to her. “This came for you yesterday,” she said, fixing her eyes on her.
It was from Greg — Kat could see that at a glance. She’d had a late exam in childhood psychology, but he’d finished earlier in the week and gone home to Santa Barbara to be with his parents for the holidays. He was going to drive down to pick her up the day after Christmas for a camping trip to Ensenada they’d been planning for the last month, six days alone on the beach and in the tent at night, in the same sleeping bag, like (Greg’s joke) Robert Jordan and his Little Rabbit. She might have blushed when she took the envelope, folded it once and stuffed it in the back pocket of her jeans. She didn’t say anything, but her mother was watching her so closely she might have been lasering right through her like in that scene in Goldfinger.