A street ran by the house where she was staying in Phoenix, the house where she lived, the house where Eve and Al were paying “good money” for her to be. She didn’t know what street it was or what part of town it was in or whether it followed a river or led to a highway.
The house was in the country, or nearly in the country. At least, there weren’t any stores or other houses nearby. Not that she could see. It seemed like maybe there was a railroad. At night she imagined a freight train running right across the street, which she knew it didn’t do. But it was definitely in the country because there were lemon trees in the back and grapefruits and limes, plus a stone walkway that led to a little cottage where a grandmother lived, though René had never seen her.
There have to be neighbors somewhere, she thought. Maybe way down the road where the cars disappear?
But she was too young to drive, and the parents at this house never continued down the road in front. They simply turned left out of the driveway, rounded the nearest corner, and went straight ahead onto a street that was empty but for large warehouses set off in dusty fields dotted with sparse bunches of what must have been cactus. And suddenly—instead of far-off jagged mountain peaks like back home—there were low-slung strip malls popping up, multiplying, coming to line both sides of whatever thoroughfare they’d ended up on.
*
All her life she’d been told she was beautiful. In summer the sun streaked her hair with gold and sprinkled her nose with pale freckles, and her mother said she was beautiful and her grandmother said she was beautiful and everyone she met seemed to comment on some aspect of her appearance—her dark blond hair falling down the length of her back or woven into two long braids, her long legs and lean build, her dark brows and long lashes, her blue-gray eyes and Cupid’s bow mouth and sweet smile.
“Well, isn’t she a picture. Isn’t she a beauty! Look out. Hahaha,” people would say, winking at Al or giving Eve a look of warning.
And she was all right. She was good-looking, for sure.
But no matter that everyone seemed to agree that a girl should be at least pretty enough to attract a stranger’s attention, she could see now that, for her, being “pretty” was going to be complicated. Because the dad at this house in Phoenix—who was thin and hairy and supposedly an orthodontist, though he never seemed to go to work—sat every night in his chair pretending to watch television as he snuck sidelong glances at her in her white cotton nightie. Every night, after she’d changed out of her ballet clothes, he trained his eyes on her as if she were the fox and he’d gone a-hunting—scratching his head and thighs with abandon, enormous flakes of dandruff raining onto his bathrobe as he ogled her through thick Coke-bottle glasses, grinning and blushing.
“He’s taking time off,” the mom told her quietly one morning, seeming to be both apologizing and attempting to explain.
Though René hadn’t asked why the dad sat in his chair day and night like that, she’d been wondering.
“He had a heart attack last spring and he’s very weak,” the mom whispered, pouring milk into a serving pitcher.
And strange as he was, René felt sorry for him. Not just because of the heart attack. She could see how his whole life must have been. Lonely. So she figured that, under the circumstances, she shouldn’t mind if he looked at her that way, piercing the thin white of her nightie with his big round eyeballs. But she did mind. It bothered her. She’d only brought the one nightie, since there were other, more important things she’d needed to pack when she left home. And it was white—not sheer but not not sheer, either.
Still, the mom’s explanation clarified one thing, and René began to understand why they’d agreed to let her live with them here—wherever this actually was—in the first place. Despite the blooming succulent garden, the hearty fruit trees, the meandering pink stone walkway, the lush green vines winding up to the awnings, with the orthodontist spending whole days in his leather recliner in front of the television, they likely needed the money Eve and Al were sending.
The mom was a tall German-looking housewife who kept her hair in a long, smooth roll at the base of her neck, ear to ear, like a croissant, and maintained a constant cheerfulness, wearing a grin that wasn’t really a grimace, though it often seemed to René that it might be. She kept to an internal code of conduct and had a simple way of being nice while at the same time making you notice that she wasn’t losing her temper.
But the grandmother—who lived in the little cottage at the end of the pink stone path, just beyond the grove of citrus trees—was only for the real children, their children: a younger boy, Heinrich, called Henry, and a girl René’s same age, Galiena, called Gali, who was in both René’s ballet class and her class at school.
Catching sight of René in the school hallways, Gali would lean into her circle of friends and laugh into her hand, clearly whispering about René’s tall knee-highs and too-long uniform skirt, since the rest of the girls at Mother Mary Ignatius wore shoes with no socks, in defiance of dress code, and skirts hemmed up to just under their bums. She’d perform the gesture even when the other girls didn’t join in, even when it caused them to look at her skeptically.
And she applied variations of the same at ballet class, pulling girls close to make side-eye remarks about her new roommate—about the way René’s leotard fit low and flat around the tops of her legs and high around her neckline, like some “dancer from the olden days,” or how René pinned her two long braids across the top of her head for class, in what René’s own grandma had called a “golden crown,” but which too easily suggested the name Gali made sure René overheard: Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.
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From Starting From Here by Paula Saunders. Used with permission of the publisher, Random House. Copyright © 2025 by Paula Saunders.
