SO WHAT

A written creative work submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of The requirements for The Degree As 3C,

EMGiCU • VJ551' Master of Fine Arts In Creative Writing

by

Emily Jane Wilson

San Francisco, California

May 2016 Copyright by Emily Jane Wilson 2016 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read So What by Emily Jane Wilson, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a written creative work submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree: Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at San Francisco

State University.

Maxine Chernoff Professor of Creative Writing

Andrew Joron Professor of Creative Writing SO WHAT

Emily Jane Wilson San Francisco, California 2016

Three confessions chronicle the rise and fall of Gregory Thompson aka Sir Hefty: father, cokehead, husband, art handler, identity thief, friend.

I certify that the Annotation is a correct representation of the content of this written creative work.

Date 1

GREGORY

Sing Sing Correctional Facility, Summer 2010

I’m not the kind of guy who customarily goes around beating his chest but after my ex changed the locks on our brownstone I drove to the Verizon in McGinley Square where I mumbled at a clerk, “Gimme a phone before I kill myself!”

“Sir,” she said, “you have to get in line.” She waved me away in tandem with her ponytail’s sway.

Hey pretty pony. How'd you like it if I led you close and whiffed your Herbal

Essence? Hey pretty, pretty.

I edged up to the counter once more.

“Sir!”

“I’m just trying to see what’s in the showcase. It’s not my fault I’m nearsighted.”

I realized Pony’s hair probably wasn’t dirty, just dishwater-colored. I wanted to tug it down, down, down into the display case. Ooooh, the satisfaction of shattered glass, blood on my hands and the freedom to steal something I didn’t even want.

Yayyyyhooooo! Too easy, though. I’m not the kind of guy who takes the easy way out.

I swept past chiffoned brocaded braceleted cardamom ’n coriander ladies and assumed my place behind a guy wearing two Replica watches. He jittered within blue earbuds. His hair looked partially eaten. He was probably about my age. He blew his 2

cheeks out. He sucked them in. He blew them out. One of his buds fell. The door swung open. A teenage couple clung there, elaborately kissing, the logos of their hoodies merging. Jazzy fragments filled the room. I could have sworn I was overhearing Miles.

Maybe On the Comer. Better yet, Sketches of Spain.

My friends learned the heavy beats of my new number by calling the house—the old house, the one that used to be a sign of our marriage but is now in my ex’s name. “He’s got a cell now,” Sheila would say, adding, “Nine-one-seven-seven-two-two-five.” If my friends dialed it I made them into a contact. If they didn’t, I told myself I’d never speak with them again. To my knowledge Sheila never said, “I kicked him out.” Of course not.

She’s impeccable. Though I did discover she told at least one person, “He finally got a cell phone,” which basically meant, “It was all Greg’s fault.”

I avoided mobile service because of my trade. I used to be known as an Art

Handler though I prefer Fine Art Preparator. Most of my time was spent in traffic in my

1995 Dodge Dakota. Unhappy Betty, manager of Asphalt Forever Office Park in

Hackensack, simply called me “You,” as in, “You need to deliver twelve framed photographs on Thursday no later than three and you need to have them completely installed by five,” meaning I had to finish my other job fitting a six-by-nine-foot acrylic painting of a brown cow on a yellow hill onto a curved gray wall at a fairly upscale medical clinic in Chelsea by twelve-thirty so I could get to the framer on Amsterdam by one and, depending on how busy they were, maybe have to wait around for awhile 3

twiddling my thumbs and counting backwards from one hundred before inspecting each ink-jet sunset-and-bridge photograph to make sure someone hadn’t been eating a croissant while fitting the glass and irresponsibly leaving a few flakes inside—yeah, I know, I know, they’d be barely visible but as the middleman I’d be the fall guy if someone noticed.

Without a cell, all I had to do was keep a commitment, just like in the old days, when if you were late or changed your mind you were irresponsible, plain and simple.

When Sheila and I were still together I made appointments from our landline first thing in the morning and received messages when I returned at night. Black and white, just the way I like it. Maybe Betty, etc.’d be peeved I wasn’t going to instantly get their last- minute command that they had to change our time to two or two-thirty or Friday or next week because a meeting went over or the principal at the Little Red Schoolhouse wanted

Emma picked up early because she’d thrown a warm lavender wafer at Liam in her

World of Baking class but if you break my schedule I’m gonna think you don’t value my time. Or yours. I’m gonna think you don’t respect structure. And structure is pleasure. It means you care. And caring—too much caring—is deep in my nature. It’s the grain of my character.

When a phone asks, I answer. It’s gospel: call and response. “Hey, Greg? Can you come a little bit earlier?” “Sure,” I’ll say, thinking hey is for horses, opening the door to rupture. See, if I start saying yes to Unhappy Betty, etc., they will without one iota of doubt change the rules on me again. And again. I’ll wind up uncontrollably giving. 4

Think my unavailability cost me gigs? Me, the problem solver, the Magic Man?

I’m a guy who makes no mistakes. I’m all business before pleasure. Scorsese’s assistant once told me, “Marty’s really pleased with your sequencing. He’d like to watch you hang.

If you could come later in the day next week he’ll be happy to give you a bonus.” Marty doesn’t get up until at least four because he’s been in his dungeon all night rewatching the last ten minutes of Duel in the Sun. “No thanks,” I politely replied. If I changed my schedule for Marty it would mean I favored him. And I don’t favor certain customers over others. It’s just not fair. When the assistant asked if I was sure I added, “No only means one thing.”

My new apartment was decent enough. No droopy housekeeper around to make the bed like at the old place but I didn’t miss that, in fact I started liking how familiar my sheets got when left unwashed for months. Fingernails and drool and sometimes even shit stains though I’m not sure how the latter got there as I tended to sleep in my clothes so I wouldn’t have to suffer the tedium of taking them off just to have to return them to my aging bones. Sometimes I didn’t even bother to get in the bed. Sometimes I didn’t even go home, especially when I had one of those first-thing-in-the-morning de-installs at the

Brooklyn Museum. Instead I’d get a pack of Pabst, park in Flatbush, and spend the night

in the truck.

My favorite spot was on Ocean Avenue between Lincoln and Parkside where there was a building that reminded me of my Hoboken house. Ah, brownstone beside an 5

elm! I’d patched then painted your ceiling medallions in a glistening but unglossy high hiding white and I personally rescued your real crystal chandeliers from the ravishing thud of a predawn Williamsburg wrecking ball and I saved the lives of streaked-with- orange-and-white tiles tossed beside a curb when developers were making way for the

Greenwich Street Project—how I re- and re- and rearranged the marble’s disorienting surfaces within your fireplace mantel until they flickered in a perfect arc! Your walls lined with pine I’d meticulously sanded and glazed to mimic wood grain! Most would have whitewashed it. I’m not most people.

The afternoon after Sheila and I met with our lawyers across a long table in a small room

I drove my pickup to Manhattan, left it on University Place, and started putting one boot in front of the other. Ah, how my phone shook when I reached the Metronome at Union

Square!

“I’d recognize your voice anywhere,” I said. I was smiling uncontrollably. I was practically tripping over my own feet. Of course I was: Harriet was on the line.

Unonnnhhhhn. Harriet R. Hickman. The last time we’d spoken had been in Tribeca, on the evening of April 26, 2005, during a birthday party-slash-Cal reunion in a floor- through loft. Sheila’s old friend Keeler Cuthbert had reached a remarkable age and didn’t look it. While settling Sheila’s bottle of Prosperity Red on the marble kitchen counter I wished her happiness, looked around, and said, “I love your place.” I used to be able to seem like a sincere guy. 6

Five minutes later I had Harriet to myself beside a chocolate pie and a cutting board. Immediately my lips started shuddering. They always do this when I’m around her.

She could see—at least, I bet she could see—that one of my bicuspids had fallen out.

This was not the first tooth I’d lost. “I hate this place,” I said to her.

Sheila was reading a novel in a white beanbag chair (isn’t “introvert” just another word for hater?) while Fawnee ran around with one of those too-new, too-complicated cameras. Only fifteen years old and clattering around like a bimbo! After the shame of revealing myself to Harriet I decided to micromanage my kid. I found her upstairs on a toilet taking pictures of her scandalously high heels, the ones Sheila’d bought for her behind my back.

The bathroom was fucking huuuuuge. In-between His-and-Hers crappers a large iron bookcase held stacks of pulping Vogues and Ws and literary masterworks. Ulysses was the fattest. I could tell by the chill, elegant letters on the spine it was the same 1979 paperback version Sheila had had in her Berkeley apartment, the one-bedroom on

Benvenue with the bay window seat and purple cushions. We’d first kissed there. She’d tasted of bearclaw from the Nabolom Collective Bakery near her house. Ah, Ulysses.

Built by a guy who makes you spend a day on a sentence. You don’t read it. You see hear shit sleep fuck shave in it. I pulled the camera away while Fawnee was snapping, the flash flooding my eye. Hello instant migraine!

“Dad, don’t!” 7

The photograph would turn out senseless, masking the muck of the fact that the loft was owned by a guy so afraid of loss he refused to hire a housekeeper. Was Keeler’s marriage as rotten as mine? Where was her guy anyway? Wasn’t he one of those fancy traveling salesmen, i.e., Marketing Directors—no, make that COO of Communications, a

COOC?

I tailed Fawnee downstairs, pausing with her at the landing to take a good look at my generation. Soon most of us would require monthly touch-ups on our increasingly gray crowns. With only one semiautomatic round I could save them the time and trouble.

I watched Sheila struggle to open our bottle of Prosperity Red. If Dad had been there he’d have shot off the top of the bottle with a whisk of his Ruger.

By the time Harriet dialed my cell, oaks were red, Fawnee had been dead for nearly a year, and I’d lost another tooth, this time one of the ones in front, on top. My snorting habits were, ah, becoming transparent, shall we say. It had become nearly impossible for me to charm anyone unless it was over the phone and the person at the other end had a thing for dry lisps.

“I can’t believe you’re picking up,” Harriet exclaimed. Ah, those scratched, scorched tones! “When I called your house Sheila went, ‘He finally got a cell.’ What made you break down?”

“She didn’t say anything else? Like the fact we signed a Marital Settlement

Agreement this afternoon?” 8

Except for my lawyer, this was the first time I’d ever come out point blank about

it. My real friends had gone through the mess with me and avoided the subject. Yeah, yeah, Harriet was an old buddy and not a bad one but she lived in Cali and we only spoke a couple of times a year when she called or came to New York and then she seemed to only want to be with me for fifteen minutes.

For example. On May 27, 1999, at 10 p.m. on the fucking dot I pulled the Dakota to the curb of the Gramercy Park Hotel, where you could still have a whole, only slightly

shabby suite filled with genuine deco furniture for the price of a couple of months of

gasoline. Bitch wasn’t waiting outside like she’d said so I had to turn the truck over to a valet for a couple of twenties, make the front desk lady ring room B8 three times, twiddle my thumbs beneath ringlets of smoke, and count backwards from one hundred. After

Harriet finally appeared, OMG, in yellow-and-red pippi longstocking tights and high-cut bangs, we leaned toward Stoli within the hotel’s great old bar. I was working for MoMA back then. Sheila was still letting me keep my entire paycheck. Those were the days my

friend, those were the days. I was gonna get my princess drunk and then I was gonna

drive.

I used to be a cabbie. Friends and family are charmed by this fact. Many have

begged me for traffic-weaving running “taxi rides” around Manhattan, and, until she

started hating me, even Fawnee would sit in the back seat, giggling at every hair-raising turn and pedestrian near-swipe. My kid got more thrills out of my driving than the Jet

Star rollercoaster at Atlantic City. With Harriet, though, I left my body, cringing along 9

with her at every single one of my brake slams and horn honks and refusals to use my turn signals as I ploughed into Harlem toward the Lenox Lounge with its sidecars and deco lights. Took me half an hour to park. We weren’t jazzin’ more than fifteen minutes when Harriet pulled her usual “I’m tired” shit which really meant she was bored with me.

We got back in the truck and headed south. I tried to make her feel bad in a jokey way except I wasn’t kidding. Just because I smiled a lot around her didn’t mean I was a nice guy. I said, “Someone told me your hero Brian Eno dumped house paint into a river for one of his art school projects.”

“That’s what they call hearsay,” she replied.

Hearsay? Oh yeah, she used to be a legal assistant. Family Law . ..

Back to our phone call—I mean, her phone call to me. Oak leaves were red and

Fawnee had been dead for nearly a year. By now I was at the comer of East 18th and

Second, about a block away from headshrinker Asch’s office. Time to veer away! Harriet was probably lounging on a red velvet sofa beside a leaded glass bay window that was pressing against mature fruit trees. Ah, Berkeley, Berkeley, Berkeley! Maybe she was petting her cat. Her voice sputtered. She probably had AT&T. I pushed my clam against the hole in my ear. She wanted to know what had happened to Fawnee, of course, but I wasn’t going to spill those beans, not yet at least. Withholding information is my habitual way of gathering reins. I might not be in control but I’m in charge. Harriet’s big bug glasses and pale hands whirled into my brain. Then her hair darkened and she turned into 10

Fawnee. Her head in the road an egg filled with meat. Christ, I never knew people had so much blood in them. A stretch limo honked and swerved around me.

Harriet started yelling. “Greg! What’s going on? Get out of the street!”

I put one boot in front of the other. My ear was turning numb. “Sheila’s giving me

25 percent of the house. That’s it.”

“You were married for twenty years. Tell her you want fifty.”

“You think I can get that?”

“I don’t know Jersey laws but 25 percent is way low. Try bargaining with her.

She has that salary and you gave her that kid and remodeled that house and—”

She was ADHD-ing. But I salvaged a useful nugget or two. When I reached

Stuyvesant Town I said, “I’ll talk to you,” hung up, leaned against a parking sign, and listened to voices competing within my cortex before putting them into boxes like Asch always advised. I’d been crazy about Harriet before but now I was her donkey. I entered her number into my contacts, determined to never speak with her again.

I headed Northeast. My boots were made for walking.

LUBAR lit the screen. I answered and said, “Meet me in Bryant Park on the bench closest to Gertrude Stein. Seven p.m.” I didn’t give him license to say no. Lubar wouldn’t do that to me anyway for I’m his one and only. Rejects are rejects for a reason but they’re more likely to need me. They won’t leave. I trust them. The people I care about the most could do without me in a second. Who changes the locks on you? Not someone with bloody dog doo on their shoes. The person who’ll change the locks on you 11

will be a tenured, well-published academic who also happens to be your wife of twenty years.

I was on the dot. Lubar was already on the edge of his seat, practically pawing the air. “Gregsteriski.”

I sat beside his yammering Polish accent, his grammatically perfect English: a girl wouldn’t let him buy her a drink/his landlord tossed out his entire 1959 World

Encyclopedia set/the Chelsea Flea Market vendor wouldn’t sell him ten 1970 flower- power decals for a quarter.

“The guy kept repeating, ‘Buck only, Lubie!”’

When Lubar got like this I’d smirk, “You’re your own best friend and your own worst enemy.” He’d say, “Tell me something new. What about the time you stole a painting because you didn’t like the frame? What about the time you scratched a car because they parked one inch into your driveway?”

Yeah. What about the time. I always like to know the time. I pulled out my phone.

7:08.1 scrolled through my contacts. There she was. Harriet Hickman.

“And what about the time,” Lubar said, “When you called Fawnee fat at John’s

Pizzeria?”

Harriet’s number turned into her ice-cream face before flowering into Fawnee’s, her shadowy hair swinging as she ran out of the restaurant.

“Leave my kid out of this,” I said. 12

“Then she ran into the street,” Lubar persisted. I shoved my phone in the front pocket of my jeans where it swelled the knobby bulge of a dozen keys and probably five bucks in change.

I remained calm. “Lubie. You know what I am capable of.”

“Gregsteriski.” Lubar started crying. He’s one of those everytime cry guys. I put my arm around him. I’m the kind of guy who’ll do that.

The guy was literally sobbing on my shoulder. “You’re so-so-so-so mad. But it’s okay. I understand. We’re artists. We know tragedy.” He lifted his head. His high wet cheekbones looked like glistening boobies.

Ahhhhhh. Lubie. My little Pole bro’ on parole. We met at MoMA a couple of years before their union-busting reno. Ahhhh, the hub of the twenty-first century: Lubar

Crycinzki, staff photographer; Gregory Thompson, man on a white horse. I was the guy they paged when a painting got stuck in the racks. Storage was my destiny. I’m the kind of guy who just can’t let go.

One afternoon my beeper sent me to Lubie of the uncut fingernails clawing at a plastic-wrapped stretcher warped from MoMA’s spotty climate control. “A crime,” he muttered before shouting, “I am Lubar Crycinzki the Great and by Great Mistake I am working for The Man! The Man worships property yet cares nothing for its integrity! The

Man cares only for reproduction!”

I flipped the blade of my pocketknife. 13

“Whoa, you giant American!” Lubie leaped back, inadvertently kicking an abstract Richter leaning behind him. “Look what you make me do.” His cheap hard heel, coated with his ten-block weekday trudge from his jumbled bedsit in Sheepshead Bay to the Q, had left a soft dark magenta arc atop an impasto of orange-and-white oil paint. “I’ll lose my job.”

“Have you photographed it yet?”

“No.” He inspected the biggest boo-boo in the world.

I pulled a wad of Kleenexes out of my front pocket, spat on it, and rubbed the mark. The room started smelling of dog shit.

“You’re making it worse!”

“Don’t worry. I’m the magic man.” I pushed my expert thumb into the depths of

Gerhard Richter. I was doing the museum a favor.

“Gregeriski!”

“Shut up,” I said. “We don’t have time to argue.” Ten or fifteen million bucks’ worth of art needed to be captured before being dumped at Christie’s by the end of the week. “No one will know.”

“What about the smell?”

“They’ll think it’s their upper lip.”

We tilted our admiring heads to the left. We tilted our admiring heads to the right.

I’d turned the shit into a transparent glow worthy of a Renoir blush. Lubie fiddled with 14

his Hasselblad while I returned to the trapped painting. I slit its body bag and jilted its frame before patiently whispering it into the world.

A violet nude with silver eyes emerged from green-and-gray fog, shredded plastic at her feet. Unmistakable Bay Area abstract figuration lauded, vilified, forgotten. The painting wasn’t even labeled.

“Eeeeeeeew! That’s from a bad shopping trip to one of your minor cities.” Lubie detested contemporary figurative painting. “There’s a reason photography was invented.”

Lubie clicked faster than seconds tick tick click tick tock tocky tock dialing me back into the field trip my Advanced Color Class took to the Oakland Museum fifteen years before. I’d stood on stiff gray carpet in front of a woman caught in stratosphere,

Harriet’s plush lips popping Bubble Yum beside my ear. Dang. And there I was, shacked up with Sheila, even scheduled to marry her despite the fact that phony liberal mom of hers had called my mother at the bank to yap, “We need to put a stop to this marriage.”

“Look at this purple Beetch,” Lubie said. “You’ve been with one, you’ve been with ’em all.” Sheila babysat me fucked me married me got a kid out of me locked me out of my house. That meant Harriet would’ve been much worse. That so what way she chewed her gum. I paced away from Lubie’s camera, my eyes brimming. Beeeeeetch.

“Ohkeey, I’ve shot enough. Time to cut da coke.”

I followed Lubie into Staff Men’s. It seemed I was always following someone.

Lubie toed a used syringe into a comer and screeched, “This filthy place has turned me into an immigrant slave. Not only do I have to photograph paintings by the worst artists 15

in the world and make them look respectable, 1 have to take photographs of pictures! Did you see that Golden Gate portfolio that just came in? Mere posters by some West Coast hack playing around with an 8 by 10. Me, Lubar the Great, frittering my talent with propaganda! Me, Lubar the Great, able to replicate hate, grief, desire!” He rubbed his hands over our snow. His tears dripped perilously close. “You wanna know why I’m not even the next-to-the-top staff photographer? It’s my too-big talent.” Lubar Prycinzki of

Lodz, fully funded prize-winning graduate of the Fine Art Academy in Warsaw, wanted to be remembered as a dream catcher.

Sheila and Asch called Lubie “Greg’s Trigger” and told two judges they wouldn’t have been forced to neutralize me if I’d kicked Lubie to the curb. If, if, if. These supposedly intelligent caregivers never considered Lubie’s use value. For one thing, his coke paved the way to my long-gone, big art career.

My breakthrough began right around the time Fawnee started junior high, when her hair was still blonde. She and Sheila would spend evenings chattering Spanish in front of me when they very well knew I understood little beyond “Yo la tengo” and that’s only because Yo La Tengo practiced in my warehouse. (Sometimes the bassist smiled at me in the elevator.) After kiddo had been sent to bed I’d get Sheila to screw around. Yeah, yeah, I know girls complain when you split afterwards but come on, I wouldn’t leave right after. I usually waited until she’d fallen asleep or was at least pretending to. I habitually snuck out of the house to make a little work in the studio or 16

hang with friends or walk around a block or two but hadn’t stayed out all night until the

Friday Lubie sold me a gram of coke. I was only going to walk to the 7-11 for a pack of cigarettes but after I snorted a line I decided I needed to get far, far away from tacos dorados por favor. In other words, straying had a lot to do with my, uh, domestic situation. Now that Sheila was on the board of the Modern Language Association all she seemed to do was prepare lectures or mole or shop online for $99.99 wedding presents for cousins she’d only just discovered online. You’d never think she’d been the one to tell me about X. Ah, Exene! How you unsteadily wailed in Barrington Hall, cockroaches rumbling around your boots while a couple of older punks filmed the back of Sheila’s spiky bleached hair! I’m the tall skinny guy behind her. See the yellow vinyl vest I’d cut out of an old raincoat? See those safety pins dangling around the armholes?

I got in the truck. Thanks to Lubie’s powder I was a bumper-car navigator supreme, mostly a sly one though there were times I didn’t care if even I got whiplashed from my, uh, nudges. Destination? The Lunatarium. Though only recently open it was already big in big-ass Dummmnnboh. Unnnnhnn. Yeah. Basically it was supposed to be a place where you could burn mattresses while gazing at four bridges while being spied on by brainiac superwomen wearing pink dreads while DJs spinned until black holes started collapsing.

Had Fawnee lived she’d have most likely spent long pressured evenings in a club like the Lunatarium where the only beats are whomp whomp whomps. She’d have held 17

onto a red cup that a stiff-haired dude had enhanced with E and god knows what. They’d

thwack their limbs beneath the black-white-black-white strobe. The dude’s—let’s call him Mario—bronze chain would be too heavy to sway more than moderately, but the real

gold heart strung on Fawnee’s barely there necklace would whiplash like the head of a

crazy eel. Maybe her date would think about dancing my kid out the Lunatarium’s

colossal window. Standing beside it, considering an impossible future, I wished for a pink-haired girl to levitate me toward the glass and swing me—no, not swing me, I

wanted her to play me, curl me, lock me, leap with me—and she was nowhere to be

found, despite all those luscious rumors I’d overheard at MoMA.

When Bean and I were little Dad would threaten to pitch us into the East River.

“You kids gonna pump up my muscles!” He’d arc us over the rippling plasticated sofa.

Later I learned he liked to terrorize subway taggers by hanging them upside-down over

the tracks. Dad. A guy with fading tattoos. What if he were a pink-haired girl, arms rippling my big guy-ness through glass?

A girl offered me a pink pill. She could’ve worn fantastic magenta dreads but no,

her hair was brown, long and curvy. Her boobs could’ve been modestly wadded in

Balinese cloth but nooo, they were pushed out and up through a nylon blouse that seemed to have lost its buttons. Worst of all was her oversized orthodontic smile. This was the never-to-be future Fawnee whose no-chest mama’s sole focus was to exhibit her

daughter’s tits for all the world. What happened to you, Sheila Hair of Spike? You babysat me fucked me married me had a kid with me changed the locks on me. You 18

brought the light of my life into this world and you fattened her into a common denominator. Whomp whomp whomp. Ah, my little pink pill! The girl with curvy brown hair sprouted dreads. Her calves popped muscles defined by the tattooed rings of Saturn the Strong. Unnnnnhhhhhn. If Mario tried to get my girl into a taxi she’d swat his shoulders to the concrete. She’d pierce his balls with the blade she kept sheathed within her fanny pack.

Didn’t Sheila understand that unlike my hot girl, her version of our daughter could be drugged and slugged, her overfed breasts kicked blue, her mouth knuckled into a violet? Don’t forget that scene in Godfather II where the call girl died from a shot in the puss.

Whomp whomp whomp. Under the strobe my rosy girl morphed from youth to crone and back. Whomp whomp whomp. Yah, flashcards of age flipping to the beat!

Lashes of time riffing on Miles! Bitches Brew? No no no no no. I was hearing Agharta.

I needed to get to the root of the sound but couldn’t feel my feet. I looked down.

Whooooaaaannnooo! My boots were elaborating! Before my eyes the toes twisted into prows sailing toward the DJ and her two, three, four turntables! I was about to swim over snaking electric cords. Hissssssss.

“My brain is plastic!” On the sidewalk outside the Lunatarium I tumbled over a ridge of bursting garbage bags, ripping into them with my Viking boots, presenting their wounds with jets of brown barf (hey, thanks for the Mexican food, Sheila). Ah! Art is nothing but priceless trash! In less than a year I became known as O, Sir Hefty, Curator of Filth: a 19

benevolent, useless giant of New Genres, persistently lugging bagged residue from one side of the street to another. My family called me difficult but I received a Joan Mitchell

Foundation grant and got a savvy dealer on West 26th Street where Peter Schjeldahl once spent about an hour watching my “Worthless POV” video. That’s the one where I put a

Sony Handicam inside a bag of trash, poked a hole in the plastic for some light, and lugged the thing around the Bronx during a freak October heatwave.

Meanwhile, Sheila gave Fawnee a cell with a rubbery lime-colored case and took her to a little salon on West 57th where a stylist advised her to grow out her bangs. He even gave my kid a bottle of leave-in conditioner! Afterwards Fawnee got in the habit of spending hours with a wide-toothed tortoiseshell comb. She was always preparing to be in a picture. She allowed no strand to be accused of wrongness.

Lubie’s other contribution to what Asch and Sheila called my pathological character was a vision that allowed me, O, Sir Hefty! to help create a completely new and specious planet called FacePinch. See, after MoMA fired everyone Lubie became too spastic to get another gig that let him replicate legitimate beauty. Instead he learned Photoshop backwards and forwards in order to “correct” advertisements in teen mags I sent his way, basically doing what I always did when we worked together at MoMA—providing him with pictures. It was my job. In other words, I couldn’t help myself.

Here Sheila really needs to understand her role. She needs to imagine herself in my place, coming home too late after a day spent scavenging metal on Flushing, snagging 20

bites of broekwurst on rye at the red lights on Bedford followed by a late-afternoon beer with the boys, maybe a Chelsea opening or two for snacks, then braking through the

Holland toward the studio after picking up a sixer, usually Anchor to remind myself of the Berkeley Days. Ah! Those golden years! Ah, Berkeley, Berkeley, Berkeley, I’d cry within while dipping dry macaroni wheels into chartreuse fluorescent paint.

Sheila needs to imagine what it feels like for a guy like me to come home too late to magazines of yawning flesh toppling off his cherry kitchen table onto the four-inch- wide planks of white oak he’d personally sanded on his hands and knees. How would you feel, Sheila? Didn’t you know that because I’m the kind of guy who gathers what’s available I reached my glow-in-the-dark paint-splattered right hand for our kid’s Spanish teen magazines, some glossy, some newsprint, all assigned by Mrs. Budde, Fawnee’s heavily eyelined eighth-grade Spanish teacher? Have you ever considered the conditions that lead to ravishment, as I helplessly did when returning home after hours in the outside world, sliding my glow-in-the-dark paint-splattered left hand into my front pocket, the one filled with five bucks’ worth of change and keys to the front door side door garage back door studio car door by then long-useless keys to MoMA’s service entrance? I pressed metal into my stiffy. Yow. No no no no no I whispered, withdrawing my paw.

Let’s make this Lubie’s problem. I collected the magazines and piled them on the counter.

With the cheapest brown string in the world (despite all those bux of hers, Sheila never spent money “unnecessarily”) I tied them into a pile that I smothered in the baby-soft cloth used to protect museum-quality glass. 21

I figured Lubie would go nuts over a stack of Motivos but I didn’t think I would.

As far as I was concerned, our collaboration was intended as a joke, an online trashy archive of Western Culture’s contempt for authenticity.

Fawnee missed her Motivos. I didn’t admit anything and no one asked. I’m sick of Italian, especially pizza, but clearly everyone knew who’d lifted the pulps, ergo, I took wife and child to John’s Pizzeria in the West Village a few evenings later. Sure, there’re other

John’s around town, but this is the original “no slices, no reservations, no credit cards” on

Bleecker Street, smack around the comer from Christopher Station where there’s that triangular park with those so-serious-they’re-hilarious George Segal bandage sculptures.

Rain. The weather begged for beer. I ordered a pint but didn’t even finish half.

Maybe you could say I was trying to turn a new leaf or at least hold my enemies close so to speak. After several beers would I have cared or even noticed Fawnee ordering a calzone after the three of us had already shared a large pepperoni thin-crust pie not to mention two house salads and a side of sausage? In my cups I might have ordered one as well, extra olives please. See, despite what Sheila and Asch say, beer diffuses me. It erases the staccato of having to be a watchful guy, singular guy, with unused genitals, a few locks in a ponytail, a pair of wavy glasses, untied shoes, missing teeth, constipated, unbathed for days, pathologically attached to the way my wife and child used to be. Beer let me loosen my resistance to time. 22

I was resisting my erection. “Fawnee,” I said, twiddling my thumbs, “You’ve had enough.”

Imagine me imagining myself tugging Sheila’s glass of burgundy from her fingers while she read initials romantically networked into the old soft wood of our booth.

Imagine her need to translate pierced hearts, plus signs, and forevers. For about fifteen minutes I imagined upending her wine over her head, turning it into a party hat, red dripping from her crown while she obliviously kept attempting sense.

I counted backwards from one hundred.

When Fawnee was several bites into her calzone I said, “I’m about to throw the F word around.”

My kid could have been deaf.

“Fawnee.” She ate. Sheila read. I turned into a remote satellite.

“Fawnee,” I said. “You’re just another booby girl. Chubbs! Chubbs!” I was ugly.

I was actually trying to be funny. I guess I wanted attention.

She dropped her fork. She ran out of John’s Pizzeria for the rest of my entire life.

My little clam was shaking. I popped it open. “Look,” I said, holding the phone under

Lubie’s nose.

“HARRIET. That’s the Cali girl you like, right?”

“She makes my phone blink and throb!” 23

“Gregster. All phone calls do that now.” He turned up the collar of his coat so his chin would look sharp as hell. “Answer it,” he said. I put the clam on the bench where it danced like a Mexican jumping bean.

Harriet. Harriet Rae Hickman. Unnnnghhhn. In the beginning? My first sight of her? She was painting. Her 501s were too small. I considered the possibility of her flitting about my knees like a toddler. I’d hover my hand beside the aura of her barely there honey-colored hair. Me, Gregory the Great, a super Daddy-O.

In the beginning I tried to go out with her. She said no. I’ve always been stuck in that groove.

When the phone danced perilously close to the edge of the bench I picked it up.

“Hey, Greg, what took you so long? I’m in town for a few days. Can we have dinner tomorrow night?”

Hey is for horses. No way. Forget it. “I might have to work.”

Lubie gave me strong, steady looks while stretching his lips into the exaggerated, face-strengthening silent vowels he claimed preserved his youthful skin.

“Too bad,” she said. “It’s the only night I can do it.”

“Wh-wh-where are you staying?”

“I rented this stupidly loud and tiny apartment in the West Village for a couple of days.”

“C-c-c-cl-ose to Hudson Street? My best bar is on Hudson. Called WXOU.”

“I’m sure I can find it. Lemme know if tomorrow works.” 24

Clearly she’d already made plans for the other evenings and could find no one else for tomorrow. I was the last person she’d thought to call. “I dunno, now that I think of it, 1 can remember I promised someone I’d frame their drawing.” Lubie’s mouth became a huge O. He batted his eyelashes.

I weakened. “But I can tell them something’s come up.”

What did she care? She was gone. She was a mere click.

Lubie wanted to know why she’d flown out.

“To hear the Drawing Center reject her work.” Gertrude Stein’s statue blinked.

“Take pictures of her while she tells you the story. We’ll put her up on

FacePinch.”

“Ungh. Ugnn, unn unng. You can call her Harriet Hickman vs. The World.”

“Yes!” Lubie cried. “Everyone is against this marked woman!”

“ Ungh. Gsseweraoidsauodlajwalsdkjalskdowowowowowoaskd. Waow. Wawo.” I flapped my arms. “Harry-harry-harry-harrrrrralskdjalsdkaliwueoqiweuoqi!”

“That’s it, Gregster! More! More! Harriet Hickman, vis-a-vis your lover, your wife, your daughter! Your tight, wet piss hole!”

“Unghnnnn'' By Saturday afternoon Lubie will have dressed her in a wifebeater, softball titties, and fuck-me shoes. She’ll dream over a dictionary on a rainy patio. Come

Sunday? A double F-cup in a baggy Axl Rose tee, wiping her nephew’s tears. Good

Lubie would make me a Harriet boiled young. And I’d be in charge of every single witty little shitty thing that came out of her mouth. Me, Lubie, a bong, and a little pile of 25

snortable horse would turn her into a flowing scroll of down, down, down. Her unbelievably bad luck could only escalate. Her hair would fall out. Ughhmmmmnn. I quivered with butterflies of assholedom.

In real life Harriet’s hair was even mousier than Sheila’s. You could practically see her brain. Fawnee’s used to be a champagne cap. Ah, how I’d cup my big ole hand around it, vibrating at the cusp of life and death! How I’d navigate her through the holiday crowds on Fifth Avenue, heading out of the American Girl Place! I wanted her to want Julie, the one who liked sports, but Sheila had already sold the kid on Rebecca, the

Jewish Edwardian who lives through others. Even while paying I didn’t take my hand off

Fawnee’s hair, my anchor, my safe haven from the impulse to rip Rebecca’s head off in front of the cashier. “C’mon,” I said, handing Fawnee the bag, “let’s sit by Gertrude

Stein.”

I’m not the kind of guy who yearns for Cali but Northeast winters don’t do much for me except when snow twirls and turns into air before hitting my shoulders. This was one of those days. I steered Fawnee to our favorite spot in Bryant Park. “Daddy, do you think Rebecca would like it if I asked her to sit with us?”

“She didn’t come with a coat. She might get sick.”

“Daddy, she’s a doll.” At this point in her life my kid was what I called schweeeetly smart, surely on track to grow into another Reese Witherspoon, a tough girl who liked boys and suffered over them but played in the same leagues. 26

Rebecca (now “Becky”) made us into a threesome. Snow started sticking to

Gertrude’s folded hands. Fawnee wrapped her new best friend in her scarf. I popped a

Klonopin, certainly not the first in my life but worth mentioning as it was the day K

started becoming my Kandy, for the day that I watched snow overcoming Gertrude Stein

turned out to be the beginning of Fawnee’s downfall. Overnight, it seemed, she turned

into a brunette.

“Don’t worry about the cold, Becky. I’ll be here for you, no matter what.” Fawnee

kissed the weather off her kid.

Could my life get more tedious? Thank god the Library Hotel was close. I badly

needed to be anywhere but where I was. While Fawnee coddled an inanimate object my

eyes bored through New York Public’s stones concrete bricks books wood toward slick

wood furniture and Egyptian cotton bedding. Ah, I could see a fragment of a rich girl’s

dewy calf! Kick, kick, kick. Could it possibly be worth eating? Snow singed my already

white old head.

Gertrude Stein blinked.

Lubie pulled out the coke. “Make sure to get a couple shots of Harriet Hickman vs. The

World while she’s walking to the bathroom. I can do a lot with those rear views.”

Snort-snort. “Unnggggghhn . . . You know what, Lubie? We’re a guild.

NoirecnoieruoqireiuroierNhhhhhhghhhhh. Ugnengnnnn." Snort-snort.

“Yai-yai-yai, we are buds forever! Forever young! We are filled with intentions!” 27

“Originalists!”

Snorty-snort-snort.

“Yai-yai-yai! We care for no one but ourselves! We do things ’cause we feel like it!”

I looked through the library past glass stone bricks concrete books slick furniture lilac organic cotton sheets. Unghnnnhhhgnnnn. What a luscious calf. I’m gonna make

Lubie scratch its lusciousness. Unnammmmmmjmmunnnnh. Leg of Harriet, warm and rare. A pinch of sage, salt, and a dash of Chianti. Lubie and I will make Harriet pray, “Let me obey you, love you, and most honor you.” Then we’ll make her past tense.

The whirligig of time is filled with revenge.

I got to WXOU early, taking a stool with just the edge of my rear. My left eye and motormouth were on the bartender, my right eye flickering toward the door. Twice

Harriet walked past the entrance, the first time without a care in the world, the second anxiously looking for the right place. Ummmmnh, unnnngh, unnnngh. Stupid girl. The bartender turned his back just in time for me to capture her before she entered. I snapped her the way Lubie told me to. I was a snake about it.

An extremely pretty, mistake-prone late-middle-aged woman is about to push open the door to a drinking establishment. She’s all lit up in a metallic blazer with padded shoulders. Could she be a planet or a moon or one of Saturn’s pulsing rings?

“Gregory!” She trotted over. We cracked wide smiles. 28

“God I love your coat.”

I’d never tell her I didn’t have to dig for this dusky navy-and-white-pinstripe fully

lined with satin wool overcoat. It was just hanging there in the first rack by the front door of the Century 21 near Wall Street, whispering, “If you buy this, Harriet R. Hickman will

love you no matter what.”

“Thanks, but my name is Greg.”

She stroked my sleeve and perched beside me.

“Do you think I’ve gotten, uh, kind of. . I looked away, at the pool table. “Uh, fat?”

She didn’t say no. She also refused to drink anything but water. When I told her to pay for it she thought I was joking but when it was time to go—two pints of water later

for her, three bottles of Guinness for me, I groped in the front pocket of my Levi’s for enough bills to cover us, hoping she’d come up with something on her own, but she just

left me there fumbling, turning her back on me, the rear of her jacket blazing. Snap-snap.

Taking pictures was like taking a bite out of someone.

Outside she was hugging herself. “Brrrrrr.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be. I love fall in New York.” Her hair was a gingery shag that could have been smoke spewing off a flaming boar on the river at sunset. Surely her brain was hosting a catastrophe. Surely she wouldn’t have long to live. I walked slightly behind her, caressing my clam, nervous about using it even though I have a talent for invisible sleight. 29

“I’d like a quiet dinner,” she said.

“Wallse is only a few blocks away.” Someone at Marty’s had mentioned the texture of its rabbit and its soft rock background music.

Harriet ordered lady food aka Atlantic salmon with spinach, and a Belvedere up with a twist. If we’d been in Cali we’d probably have been able to get dry-farmed Early

Girl tomatoes, maybe even apple-sweet purple peppers and a bottle of Sofia Riesling.

When the salmon and rabbit arrived piled atop potatoes, chicory curlicues, nuts, West

Village air, and diagonally sliced green onions I was in the bathroom, the third time that evening I’d excused myself. (The times I left her at WXOU I’d returned to find her flirting with the bartender, which shouldn’t have surprised me.)

Wallse’s bathroom sink was practically edgeless, a marble belly with a dimple of a drain just made for languid pissing. After shaking my cock I let it rest there while carefully drawing a baggie from the depths of my Levi’s. Snort, snort. I met my glance above the sink. My face was framed within a stained-oak square inlaid with blue-and-

gold marble fans. I traced their gentle lines with my powdered finger. This was the real deal, probably 1925 Weimar. I thought about pulling the mirror off the wall and running out with it. I made a happy clown face. Then I slowly slid my palm down over my image while turning myself into a tearjerker. Fawnee frowned back at me. I waved my hand up.

We smiled. I waved my hand back down. She was still smiling. I tapped the tip of her nose. When the door had been knocked on too many times I rubbed my finger along the

side of my cock before buttoning myself back into my jeans. 30

Harriet had eaten to the skin of her fish and was well into her second martini by the time I made it back to our banquette. I placed a leg of my still-tender rabbit on her plate but she didn’t test it and didn’t ask why I’d been gone so long. I started dipping toward her. A couple of stiff, bent, translucent hairs that had escaped my bimonthly homemade trim trembled from my forehead to hers. Unnnnnngh.

A car alarm went off. I clenched my fists and stood. “Let there be rats, let there be garbage, let there be roaches, but baseball bats to all car alarms!” I figured everyone looked. So what. I pulled a fistful of bills out of the front pocket of my jeans and fanned myself. “Sometimes ya just gotta poop yer money.” On my way out I handed a little over two hundred to the waiter. I’d hoped he’d say something like, “Thanks, Cher.”

I cared way too much whether Harriet followed me or not though I neither hoped nor expected her to. I missed her beside my elbow so bad I loped away from the restaurant two concrete blocks at a time, my dumpster-bin dress shoes scrape-landing on

Eleventh Avenue until overcome by a holler just before I turned the comer at Hudson. Ah,

Harriet, my fair gale warning!

“Shhhhh,” I said when she reached my left elbow, chattering with a string of

Whys, forcing me into a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn that had me a quarter of a block away before she resumed her pursuit. Right before she caught up with me again I decided to stop and let her, no, force her to plunk into me, Gregory Thompson, lamppost, my terrible eyes turning her slippery silveriness into a black star. Surprise! I’d have just 31

enough time to clap my hand over her mouth with a nice ’n low “Silencio,” hoping she’d bite my palm. I wouldn’t show it, not that I felt much of anything these days.

I was starting to scare myself. Time for a change of subject. “Have you ever met

my sister? Of course you haven’t. You’ve never even wanted to spend more than fifteen

minutes with me.” After walking a few more steps with her I considered asking about her

family, about which I knew zero minus nothing, but decided I didn’t want to have to care.

As I’ve said before, caring too much is deep in my nature. It’s the grain of my character.

“Anyway. Donuts were Bean’s favorite food. Are. Yet she’s the only one of us

Thompsons who gets to be slender. Furthermore, donuts aren’t just her favorite food. She

eats them every meal.”

“The only thing?”

“A sunny-side up egg in the center of a chocolate donut, bacon on the side for

breakfast. Lunch is a powdered-sugar donut surrounded with almond-and-date-and-lamb

couscous, a star-cut tangelo in its hole. A cruller is served for dinner beneath shredded

beef and veggies. Oh, and all the donuts are from Dunkin’ Donuts.”

“Counterpoint,” Harriet said, “except for the breakfast. What about dessert?”

“Creme brulee donuts from the Doughnut Plant on Grand.”

“She sounds organized.”

“She knows what she likes.”

Bean would never make a point to visit a particular Dunkin’ Donuts and neither

would I. Basically they’re the same, right? I’ve noticed for a while, though, that the shop 32

at 395 Hudson intermittently sells jelly donuts with barely a baby’s breath of mold fogging their holes. I started testing other Dunkin’s to see if it was a system-wide glitch but only on Mondays, only at Hudson could I prove a flawed schweeet thang. But not every day, and not every Monday, and besides, this was Tuesday. The World Series was on hold. The Dow had fallen out of the sky. I was steering Harriet, but not consciously, not responsibly, toward 395 Hudson. I shouldn’t have abandoned Wallse before we’d asked to see their dessert card.

The first thing she did when we got inside was wave at the cashier. Clearly she’d fucked him. Why, though, would anyone choose to let a hairless pumpkinhead bob about their naked body? Wait. It’s what pretty girls like. No. It’s what pretty girls crave. Sure.

She probably went in there yesterday, ordered a jelly donut, got high from just two bites of its moldy carcass and made him polish off the rest. “Fire! Fire! Everybody out!” he’d trumpeted. When the store was free and clear he locked up and taped one of those Back in

15 cards on the door. After hustling my girl into the “Employees Only” washroom he blasted hot water. She couldn’t wait to pick at his ass.

I started grokking the flakey, fluorescent overheads. How could they not elicit a creepy smile from Harriet that would drive FacePinch nuts? A smile that would be the blueprint, the premise, the screenplay for a sinking, stinking tale? Captured within the confined putrefaction of Dunkin’ Donuts, Harriet’s smile would hang over her demise, a waning crescent of fate. I said, “It would be great to take some photos in here.”

“You brought your cell, right?” 33

Ah, my little clam, hot among the wealth within my Levi’s! I pulled it out and gave it to her. “Take me.” She popped it open. The cashier wiped the counter, advising,

“When you aim, hold it high and tip it forward.”

Pictures of me have lately reflected an unwashed yet damp, divorced loon.

Harriet’s portrait bathed me and combed my hair into place. I became a schweeet, like one of her paintings. (Sad how over the years her offhand, joyous messes have morphed into a vague sort of pretty, pastel decor. That’s what living in the Bay Area your whole life does to you, I suppose.)

Lubie would take Harriet’s version of me, smother it with honey and hot sauce, turn it into my original I, my core, a toddler cuter than a kitten, a terrible two. Lubie, bless his soul, would infuse me with the tyranny of baby fat.

She returned the phone. Ah, sometimes life is so simple! All I had to do was blatantly press a button a few times to make her my hidden charge. The cashier took care of the next sequence, bringing the evening’s bounty to a baker’s dozen, not counting what

I was able to manage in and around WXOU.

“I’m hungry, but not for that,” I said, pointing the phone at the donut she was wringing toward my lips.

“Not even a nibble?”

“Too dry. You trying to turn my shit into string?” My temple hairs wriggled, perhaps with pleasure at rejection’s power. She chewed her morsels of bad underneath 34

the sickening light, the kind of light that signals a drop in barometric pressure. I hoped she felt sad.

“But it’s good,” she said. I briefly pressed a finger into the tip of Harriet’s nose and started counting backwards from one hundred.

I had to get out of there. I blew our bill off the counter, plucked the remains of the donut out of her hand, squished it, and opened my palm to clinging crumbs. I backed away from the counter, hand open, toward the door. She followed. She was my fishy.

When we reached the exit I hollered at the cashier, “Hey! I’m robbing you!”

“We’ll just add it to your tab,” he said. As we slipped into the street he made his hands into a bullhorn. “I’m glad you have someone who puts up with you!”

“Here kitty, kitty.” I was scattering crumbs on the sidewalk while heading north. “Or are you my birdy?” Her eyes were on a morsel that I’d wedged between my thumb and forefinger, a tattered remnant of schweeet I was using to carve a whorl of infinity into the air. The wind sitting on my shoulder was heavier than I’d ever thought possible in the middle of fall, right before the Village Halloween parade. Last year was the first time

Fawnee hadn’t wanted to go. When she was the light of my life she nearly always wanted me to make her a tail. Papier-mache, rope, a braid of wires thick and thin. A splash of purple, a dot of white. Standard time would be just around the comer.

I stopped beside the just-completed neo-Italianate Palazzo Chupi, designed and built by Julian Schnabel, my plate-throwing omnivorous hero. He made it because he 35

could. Such a schweeet thang. If I could’ve had my way with Sheila I’d have carved arches into all our brownstone’s entry ways, hung wall-to-wall chandeliers in the bathrooms, and plundered ABC Carpet & Home’s antique rugs. Ah, if only if only if only she’d let me finish transforming our house into a real dream! If she had had enough faith to invest in our marriage I wouldn’t have had to wander with Lubie and if I hadn’t wandered with Lubie I wouldn’t have turned into an unmarried man with a head choked with nostalgic feelings for an aging hipster who didn’t want to spend even fifteen minutes with me, and even so, if there hadn’t been a car alarm Harriet and I could’ve ordered a towering, cosmic slop of dessert composed of fluffy pastry, real cream, blackberries, and champagne glaze. Two gothic squat sterling forks would have been placed face down on opposite ends of a Royal Vienna plate. Get back, Dunkin’ Donuts! Ah, if Sheila hadn’t stopped me from tearing out our smeary front doors and replacing them with Victorian stained glass, they would have opened to Rigoletto, specifically Gilda’s final aria rigged to soar through speakers hidden behind marble cherubs! It’s not as if Sheila didn’t have the cash.

Oh, Verdi! Put me in an opera!

Harriet’s eyes were on the bouncing white crumb, the final remnant of our over­ processed dessert now stuck between my thumb and forefinger. I smooshed it into my moneybag aka right front pocket of my jeans where it met its demise on my cell and empty baggie. Now there was nothing to get between me and the girl who never loved me as much as I loved her. I draped my arm around her silver padded shoulders as casually 36

as guys like me like to get when they’re not feeling casual at all, when they care too much, when they know they’re about to break, or break something.

The lowest hem of my coat started floating about my knees. What if it got trapped between them? What if she then ran away, causing me to slip and crash, my plastic brain helicoptering off? I had to hold her. I had to stop time. Unnnnnngh. “Did you notice the

Schnabel pictures in the restaurant?” 1 asked. She was gurgling. I whispered, “Naw, of course you didn’t, you rich gals never understand emotional art.” She’d never know that, without me, Schnabel’s vermilion splatters would still be stuck in a rack. Without me, the magic man, the guy who makes no mistakes, Julian Schnabel’s art wouldn’t have been

Art, for I and only I was responsible for its packing, transportation, and installation. Art isn’t real until it’s given an audience.

My chin was hanging over her shoulder. Ah! How tight we were! I could nearly read the back of her jacket. The first letter was most definitely an upside-down “W.”

MMMMMMMM. I squeezed. I rubbed her flat because I could. She’d end up a glistening ribbon snaking, westerly storming. 37

HARRIET

Berkeley, California

I found my doppelganger on FacePinch: Harriet R. Hickman, of Oil City, PA. Today,

Sunday, she’s had to unexpectedly and unhappily babysit her friend’s kid.

Can’t you girls get your self-esteem high enough to get yourselves over to Planned Parenthood and if condoms are beneath you ha ha get yourself a morning-after pill? Hear me, girls? Think the world needs another hunk o’ young blood who’ll sign up for the Marines when he hits seventeen? Huh? So fuck all you want to ladies, gorge yourself, get on top get below stick your finger in his hole just don’t let that fetus grow.

Three dozen likes. Comments are mostly deliberately misspelled back-and-forths between Harriet, a couple of girls, and a boy in her physics class. At one point her aunt dips in with but somebody’s gotta have ’em. Family war.

I know these kids. Me and Greg, cheek to cheek. Thanks to Adobe I’m a white­ wash teen. Greg’s a toddler. His stupid brow. His stare. I wear perky, humungous tits beneath an Orioles tee. Hoop earrings from the drugstore. Nose ring. Chipped, layered nail polish. An incisor swells out of the left side of my smile. In other photographs it swells out of my right. Sometimes it’s yellowish. My black frame spectacles.

Harriet’s father’s dead. She was crazy about him. She cries a lot but laughs a lot too. She’s an only child. Lives with her mother on SSI and food stamps. She hopes to 38

become a Greeter at Smokey Bones Cafe. Sometimes she has to skip class to help her mom get across town on the VenanGo shuttle. She’s on the honor roll.

Why in fuck’s sake won’t Mom let me put Dad’s LTD on Craigslist? It runs like a bat out of hell. It floats down the road. 66k unmolested miles courtesy original owner. Hardened valve seals for unleaded gas! No rust. 1969 classic, new navy paint, collapsible steering wheel, V-8, automatic tranny. It doesn’t even need a muffler. Christ! Just last week someone over in Pittsburg put out an ad for a ’72. Twelve thou! With that we could get a little Kia or maybe even a late-model Corolla. If Mom can’t bear to let the Ford go, can’t we just rent it out for weddings or graduations or even just to cruise, and then at least have fucking cash for a cab to CVS?

Her physics partner posts, “Bitch, can’t your momma drive that thang?” Harriet instants,

“Beetch, my dear mother misses Pappy so much she cannot slide into the front seat of the

LTD without a complete breakdown. Ah! Pappy! A real man. You, on the other hand, are infinitely deletable. Farewell, my ugly.” She doesn’t erase him. He knows too much about black holes.

Young Harriet considers becoming a psychologist. Her boyfriend’s against it.

Branden tested out of high school. One of those Pro Tools guys with a thick paycheck and a skimpy beard. He’s teaching her to make interactive prank websites. They call themselves Flashcatz. They talk about forming a band that hates on rap. He wants her to wear a long black ratty wig but she’s sick of Amy Winehouse. 39

Carolyn the Caroler whines, “Harriet can’t babysit worth shit.” Who is this bitch? I click.

Carolyn looks like Cher after a decade of strawberry ice cream and Cheetos. Her real last name is Gregory . . . OMG, OMG. Greg’s final hug. A long squeeze. He’s such a big guy.

We were so alone on that dark West Village street. It wouldn’t have taken much for him to crack my spine. There’d be resistance. A pop. My pain? His pain. We’d tumble. He’d

smush me with his boot. Remains? Thoughts.

He’s thinking about me all the time, just as he promised.

“ATT no matter what,” he said, instead of toodle-oo.

I call my best friend. “I found an upsetting profile on FacePinch. This chubby seventeen- year-old girl has my name and looks like me and has a tuxedo tabby with four perfect

1 Harriet & Friend, 2009, digital photograph by the author. 40

white paws just like Patti and its middle name is Lee just like Patti’s and you know what else? Her father also just died. I think Greg’s made a profile based on me.”

“Links, please.”

“No, I want you to come over, I need reassurance.”

“I can reassure you that Greg has nothing to do with it without having to come over.”

“Please. I’ve got fresh Stoli.”

Greg and I met at Cal on an early Monday morning. The Art Department had just whitewashed their undergraduate studios. I was setting up my paints and brushes. I was one of those brats who staked out a wall before the first day of class. I just had to have most of a west wall. If I didn’t have enough wall to flail I wouldn’t be able to make my art. I’d be a zero.

Slam. Greg bled into the comer of my left eye. He was a black sports coat in a

September heat wave. A small canvas of tentative brushstrokes dangled from one of his hands and bounced against his hipbone.

Reagan was in his first term. Waves of mental patients were hitting the streets. I was fragile and blonde. I was used to men encroaching. “I have a boyfriend,” was my line. I tried to act like I was sprouting diamonds. Away from me! How do they say that in

French? ALEE? Spelled “Allez.” The girl in Last Tango in Paris screamed it at Brando but he wouldn’t listen. He ran for her. His wafer-soled dress shoes. His quizzical death. 41

“N-n-no problem.” Greg backed off in long, narrow, untied dress shoes. They’d been pulled from the People’s Park bin. I would give my whole life to delete my rejection and that punk boyfriend of mine. (Brian. Now possibly as powerful as Obama. He wanted to get married. He now fronts a prominent insurance defense firm. NFL injuries.)

I puttered with budget acrylics. Behind me leather on concrete scraped.

Florsheims. Greg’s a guy who never really takes his feet off the ground. He’s choreographed by the earth. Finally I couldn’t stand not seeing him. I looked over my shoulder. He paced. He spied. He waved, his knees dipping a tad, his black hair flopping just a smidgen. He was like a long fish. Skin pale, practically transparent. Before Gregory

I painted for myself. For the rest of my life I had an audience.

I couldn’t believe his relationship with Sheila. This older student who just showed up in the studio. Wound around his arm. Around Halloween. I turned to find them standing on the east side of the room in front of a broken door he’d hauled in off the streets of Oceanview. Sheila was well described as homely. Greg could’ve had anyone.

He was the guy who’d paint the fish painting. No one knows what happened to it. I call it

That Lost Fish painting. A pair of flounder hovers over illegible, empathic graphite that’s scrawled over grimy beige finger painting. The canvas is the same canvas he toted the day we met. He worked on it all semester. He turned random brushstrokes into a woman’s face. Then he painted it out. He kept painting out and painting out. He was a pretty dissatisfied guy. The class had written him off. Loser in the corner. A slide of it’s slotted within my orange-and-white plastic viewfinder. 42

There was an end-of-semester prize review. Students dropped their work off in the downstairs gallery. We swarmed around Greg’s fish painting. It was better than anything we’d seen in Artforum or Art in America. One day it was just a fucked-up canvas. Then it was The Fish Painting.

Greg cleaned up all the prizes. Usually prize review was just another conduit for instructors’ favorites. But Greg had been too unpopular for that. No one could believe it.

The painting wasn’t even simply one helluva great painting. It was the greatest painting ever made. With it Greg went from zero to one hundred. He called it “my pain-ting.” I thought about it all the time. ATT. I wanted to copy it bad. It seemed to be about the inadequacy of words. Two fish swimming in the same direction. Hovering over fraud.

Two fish in love. I figured his woman wouldn’t last. Wasn’t he really in love with mel

He really was in love with Sheila. I drove him off. He backed away from me because I made him. I was the opposite of gravity. I guided his stride. In reverse, uI ’m

Gre-greo-gregor . . he said. He could have had any girl. But not until he made the fish painting. By then he was already with Sheila.

Later my best friend and I sit on stools beside my kitchen counter. One of the reasons I grabbed this apartment was for its counter. It’s made of wide, white-and- ultramarine Mexican tiles set within lumpy grout. We hang over my wobbling laptop.

Dana’s long gold nails dance. She’s leaning against me, Harriet R. Hickman. Her rambling black-and-white hair waves over the screen. My view is blocked but I know

Harriet’s pictures by heart. Bald Harriet standing next to Snoop Dogg; mohawked Harriet 43

holding a skateboard in one hand, a red Sharpie in another; shaved Harriet in profile, a naked shoulder swan with Amy Winehouse brows. I point at the photo of Harriet’s marching band. “Her uniform is blue and gold. Cal colors, in case you didn’t know.”

Dana meets my eyes. She turns me into a worm. She’s wearing too much makeup. I hate

Dana. Especially when she wears that low-cut lace shift. Eighty year olds have better skin than she does. She spent too much time sunbathing when she was a kid. She’s from Long

Beach. She went to Cal State Long Beach.

She dips back into the screen. “Haven’t you seen how many friends she has? Plus she’s on the trumpet. Have you ever played?”

Of course not. So what. Her trumpet is most likely a nod to Miles Davis. We were bom on the same day. May 26. If anything, Harriet’s enviably fat support system is a sign of her false front.

“Have you tried Googling her?” Dana whirls through the keyboard. “There.

Tagged on YouTube.” A blonde teen, a blue-and-gold uniform, a trumpet. The Oilers play “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Harriet gets a close-up. A boil oozes near her nostril.

Thick glasses distort her eyes. She’s way out of tune. “Would you wear those glasses?”

When Dana finally pulls her head out of the screen I can swear Harriet’s winking at the camera. Dana shuts my laptop. “I’m more than worried about you Harriet,” she says.

“What we’re talking about here is likeness. Resemblance. No one’s copying you.”

I open my laptop. Wait until she sees the donut shop pictures. “Dana. It’s the two of us. Me and Greg.” 44

“I know what you mean. But look.” She clicks left and right. “These aren’t the same shops.”

We assess the competition. “In both pictures we’re standing in front of the counter,” I say. “The light is the same sick green, and—”

“The donuts in the original are chocolate. The ones with Young Harriet have white sprinkles, and one of them is oversized, with pink glaze—”

“Yeah, but Photoshop—”

“Sure. And she’s nearly thirty pounds heavier than you. Photoshop can do everything. Everything takes time. Doesn’t Greg have to work?”

“Maybe this is his hobby.”

“This is a lot of hobby for one person.”

“Maybe this is his art.”

“He sure does a lot of art in the middle of the night.”

“Maybe that’s the only time he has to do it.”

Dana taps Harriet’s friends. “Even if Greg were behind this there’s no way he’d be able to do it all by himself. She’s a smartish white-trash teenager with a foul mouth and an electronically savvy boyfriend. Maybe her middle name is Raven, or Rachel. Maybe it’s even Rae, like yours. So what. By the way, whatever happened to that Stoli you mentioned?” 45

I know my name isn’t particularly significant. What is is the fact that this particular Harriet R. Hickman posts not only about my cat but Dad’s LTD. Most would say mere coincidence! Time to practice letting go! As Dana says, when a guy stops responding to your texts and phone calls and emails and finally asks you to stop contacting them and even blocks your number you need to realize they’re done. Gregory

Vale Thompson is never coming back.

I’m no stalker. I was only searching for myself.

2 Harriet R. Hickman x 2, 2015, digital photograph by the author. 46

After Dana leaves, I learn Harriet’s favorite song is “A Simple Twist of Fate.” “Lady boner,” she posts beneath the share. I want more. I slide my heavily socked feet vrrrhhhhhon unvarnished softwood toward stacks of stereo equipment in the living room.

Oh right. Blood on the Tracks is in the car. I push aside my handmade paper curtains

(crackle) and look at my Seaside Pearl Prius across the street. Too far away for 3 a.m. I slide cold feet some more. I’m bedroom bound. Green gouache splotches cover its walls.

They make my landlord furious. I’d used a dirty brush. Plus a shedding wide brush and a little new square bristle. I’d used all the Windsor & Newton variations of yellowish green. Bluey greens wouldn’t have gone as well with my ruby bedspread. It’s made of silk. I got it because I knew Patti would look good on it. I knew she would shred it. I’m into tatters. Life is one giant rip. I gently tug the spread out from under my kitty cuteness.

She barely protests. I wrap myself. I slide my cold feet vrrrrrh through the bedroom, the living room, the dining room I use as a studio. Back on a stool I lean into the meaningful counter with the wide blue Mexican tile. I’m back into Harriet. I play “A Simple Twist of

Fate” once more. Someone liked it while I was away.

Kira Mack is nineteen. She’s the weekday morning drive-time disc jockey at Oil

City’s WXOU-FM. She gets paid. She stuffs her hands in loose hoodie pockets. She holds her elbows against her waist. It’s 8:45 and you’re with Carrie Me, the teeny with the big pipes comin ’ at ya with some Guns N ’ Roses but first I wanna give a few words on the traffic out there, which I hear is pretty jungly on the freeway all ’cuz someone was 47

tailin ’ a texter. Remember the 3-foot rule between you and the other gal or guy in front of you even when you 're packed with your smartphones, alright?

Harriet’s all over Kira’s timeline. At the stables: muscular in Wrangler jeans, white broadcloth shirt with pearlized snap buttons, blonde pixie. At the bowling alley: slender in checkerboard tights, purple hot pants, stiff henna pageboy. At the boardwalk she wears a fluffy cerise sweater and beehive ’do. She leans against a winning slot machine. Zaftig here, in other pix she’s a cow. At the movies she’s got a distended belly, stretch purple pants, sausage arms. Her butt’s a sagging slab at the A&P. In each take

Kira stands beside Harriet wearing the same catty smile. Kira’s profile shot seems to have been pasted into each photo. I click fast. I find two black-and-white exceptions to the drop-and-drag. Harriet and Kira are eating sundaes at a nostalgic soda fountain. They’re captured from behind. Carrie tugs Harriet’s braid to the left in one photograph. In the other she tugs it to the right. My eyes flip left, right, left, right. These images move, I swear to Christ.

An entire album’s devoted to Harriet’s stint as a guest DJ. Harriet’s in a black cat costume with white feet. Her green frame cat-eye glasses flash beneath bright overheads.

There’s even a video. Harriet’s rockin’. Unnnh, unnnhhn herky-jerk neck. She’s holding a Kiss lunchbox. I realize Harriet is Halloween. She keeps glancing at the camera. Then the weirdest thing happens: a reflection of a donut swims atop Harriet’s glasses. Along with the radio she mouths, Shock me! Make me feel better! Shock Me! Put on your black leather! Shock me! We can come together! 48

It’s 3:30 in the morning. Patti’s whining. Her head sways rhythmically. (She’s always been a music lover.) I open a can of Organix chicken. She won’t eat. I pull her into my lap. She won’t stay. I crank Harriet’s tunes. Dylan gets liked again.

James Rosinscay’s the black-hole boy from Harriet’s physics class. A kid who thinks everything’s got joke potential. His profile is pretty much only horoscopes. He’s an Aries. Aries are strutters. They anger easily but only momentarily. They’re hardly ever sad—unless they lose, when they sob in swift dry bursts.

James’s fearful of health-care reform. He regularly feeds canned tuna to a gnarly tabby. He doesn’t own a car. Not even a license. His parents are also bus people. James’s

3 Harriet & Kira, 2015, digital photograph by the author. 49

bent on a different future. When he graduates he’ll join Branden at Fools Rush In. One of

his videos went viral. Revital: a boy dressed in blue lives with drunken cartoon parents.

Blows them up with his breath before turning them into 16mm-esque black-and-white

soft rock gods. An animation/cinema verite/magical-realism mash. Branden wrote the

soundtrack. Forlorn. Johnny Depp’s interested in optioning.

Branden’s got a WordPress blog he hasn’t updated in more than a year. Mostly lists of

questions. The only thing he’s sure of? “I Love Harriet Hickman.” Last entry. Made on

October 28, 2008, the last day I saw Gregory.

I’m Harriet. I’m not Harriet. I don’t live in Oil City, PA. I’m a Berkeley, CA, girl.

I’m not seventeen, I’m forty-nine, no gray, sandpaper neck. Haven’t entered a bus for decades. Harriet and I live in rambling 1909 buildings. A leafy sycamore looms just outside our kitchen windows.

I search Branden’s face for Greg’s lips. Cruel? Natch. Greg doesn’t have freckles,

though. Greg’s got an even pallor. Kira’s got Greg’s skin. His honker, too. Her teeth look

like plastic in chips. Kira, forever on Harriet’s side. Stalwart. “No matter what.” Greg’s

final words. October 28, 2008. World Series on hold. Stock market in full swag. Oh boy.

Greg in that overcoat. Barely there pinstripes. Slit backside. Wisps of salt and pepper ringing his face. The holographic man. The most beautiful man in the world. He used to be a daddy type. Once I lent Fawnee my camera. She photographed us at a birthday party.

Impromptu. From the side. I waved my hand over Gregory’s head. One of Sheila’s 50

friends was turning fifty. I can’t remember her name. Oh wait, now I remember, it

sounded valuable. Her loft had a brick wall. She wore a black sweater. Ruby bangs.

Fawnee kept staring at her. I didn’t know anyone there except Greg and his family. I

didn’t want to go. Greg insisted. What are you doing tonight? Nothing. Really? Nothing?

Would you like to come with us to a birthday party? For another Berkeley person? I didn’t feel like it. He made me. “Fawnee would like to see you.”

On Harriet’s profile James posts “Never Say Goodbye,” the saddest hopeful song the world has ever heard.

Harriet complains. “That’s not from Blood on the Tracks.”

4 James Rosinscay, 2015, digital photograph by the author. 51

“What difference does that make,” James retorts.

“Because tonight I only need Blood.”

Branden says, “Who cares what you need? You’re a seventeen-year-old girl.”

“If you want to keep your dick wet Branden Smythe you should know when to defer to Ladies’ Choice!”

“Seventeen. She’s what everyone wants, so no one cares what she needs.” James likes his own post. I trail him to his mom. She’s wearing a new wedge ’do. She wants to know if she’s cute enough to get a boyfriend. “If you lower your standards,” Branden writes, adding “(Joke).” He likes both posts. Then he returns to Harriet’s profile and unlikes what he last said.

Oil City’s got a lot of globby parents. Florrie, Harriet’s mom, belongs to a Moms

With Diabetes swimming club. Harriet takes monumental snapshots of Florrie’s pink shorts stretched on quarry rocks. In the distance, rippling, thin-skinned Rembrandt thighs convincingly chop water. These are moms you can count on. No matter what. Oil City kids don’t have gone-mom problems. These are not ambiguous mothers. These are moms who serve just-baked cookies every day when you come home from school.

My own Granddaddy Hickman made pecan fudge. W. D. was the people’s counsel of Dickens County, Texas. His office was a closet right off the family kitchen in downtown Spur. During the Great Depression he fed his family on donations. Braised rabbit. Sometimes a couple of chickens. Quail when the weather was right. Bags of hominy. Sugar. Pecans. His fudge was killer. His secret was waiting for it to completely 52

cool before cutting it with a butter knife. Sometimes Dad helped him. Dad especially liked it when old Mrs. Avery Donaldson rode over on her palomino. W. D. would pour

Jack Daniel’s over the slices. W. D. helped Mrs. Donaldson with her divorce. A deed to her uncle’s worthless mineral rights paid for it. Happiness: her unfettered, final decade.

Fifteen years later those minerals paid the tuition for Daddy’s law school. Texas

Tech. Daddy worked it. Order of the Coif. By the late sixties royalties paid for my mother’s tastes, including, but not limited to, per annum: three cashmere sweaters from

Saks, six permanents from Bonwit Teller, five makeup consultations with Elizabeth

Arden. Ferragamo shoes, French silk slips. Dad worked for Shell. Contracts. Taxes. I guess you could say we were oil people. I guess you could say our family was our very own Oil City. A very lonely Oil City. I wish I could’ve been part of Harriet R. Hickman’s

Oil City. Where oil lubricates. Not that the peeps there don’t fight. You could say they fight more than my family ever did. But it’s more like they bitch. It’s part of putting up.

My childhood had two acts. For the first I showed up as a stiff little New Yorker.

Pale lips. Limp bangs. Mom put me in a lot of red. Velvet, if she were giving a cocktail party. I also got to wear black patent leather shoes with a real heel. After Mom got into

Yale my wardrobe frayed. We had to quickly move. Mom was screwing or about to screw her Yale professor. She talked about him constantly. A certain Mr. Harry J. Benda.

Dad thoroughly knew what the courts would do if he got a divorce. To a family law judge

Mom’s public fits would not matter in the slightest. She made dinner every night. Coq au vin. Gateau au chocolat. A chef in a silk dress. Daddy asked for a transfer. His boss more 53

than understood. He’d seen my mother at those cocktail parties. Better to put women like that in the boonies. Shell would pay for lime green wall to wall. An LTD.

Hours before my family flew out of Kennedy I stood in Gramercy Park beside my favorite elm. I was waiting for an eclipse. My day camp counselor had been warning about it for weeks. First I stopped seeing my shadow. Disappearing sunrays then sprayed between large green leaves. My eyes went white. I covered them with my hands. I ran down Lexington, turning left on East 18th.

“I can’t see!”

Mom was in the foyer. Marble. She couldn’t find her chocolates. The Bekins guys weren’t that cute. “Harriet. Anyone can tell you’re peeking between your fingers.” She said I had a problem with reality. Once I overheard her tell Dad she was going to torch the dining-room curtains. I made a fist. I hit my poster of the United States. Mom came into my room. One big smile. “Sometimes people hear things and think it means something. For example, ‘Oh, that’s a baby.’ But what you’re really hearing is a mewing kitty.” She was more than a pretty face. Mid-thirties. Barely a gray strand. I get that from her. Dad was good-looking, too. Not much hair left on the noggin, but slim and natty.

Mom and Dad were jackpots. I was a beautiful child. Our surfaces made sense. Plus we were moving to California. I was mobbed at day camp. I was going to have a swimming pool!

The San Ramon Valley. Early 1970s. I turned eleven. Guns and German

Shepherds. Cattle. Saddles. Live oaks. Clots of fifties ranchers. Hot white light. My hair 54

turned green from the pool’s chlorine. My father gave me a transistor radio. Michael

Jackson and his brothers. I started slouching on purpose. Temporary schools. Itinerant workers. Catholics. Italian merchants ran spaghetti places and car repair shops. Then came the bad people. From back east. Mostly Jersey. They weren’t like us. My mother called them “nouveau fools.” They wanted to shit where no one else had. Who needs college when you can build cardboard communities on Blackhawk Ranch? Bed, kid, kitchen, car, Crisco. “The women have never heard of Julia Child.” The women said they were Cali. Land was momentarily, ridiculously cheap. The fools couldn’t let it be. They bred. They competed. Money was easy. They didn’t stop competing. They didn’t want to know things. They only cared about what they didn’t have.

I became “the girl who lives in the pink house.” My homework was easy. I stopped doing it. Mom cooked and I ate. Dad bought her an orange Maverick. Black vinyl interior. We got behind the hot wheel. Narrow switchbacks challenged us. “How’m

I doing, Harriet?” If I wasn’t in school I was strapped in her Maverick. “How’m I doing,

Harriet?”

A black-and-white heifer rested beside a battered one-room schoolhouse. “Watch this,” Mom said. She got out. She didn’t close her door. She snapped her fingers about the cow’s rump. Jazz. “You’re so cute, you’re so cute,” she sang, “A la lee la lee lah.”

She slipped her right sandal off with her left toe. Her empire dress rippled. Floral crepe.

Lumpy thighs. I’d seen them many times before. She didn’t have them before she had me. “A la lee dee, a lah lee ha!” She twirled her sandal over her head. I looked down at 55

my strap. My buckled legs. My purple cords. Thin wale. I ’m never having a family, I decided.

The cow was trying to rise. Wobbling on its hooves. Eventually racing into a ditch. “Just look at that,” Mom said. She put a hand on the roof of the car. She took off her other sandal. “Your mother knows a thing or two about the natural world.” She tossed her sandals on the floor of the back seat. She slid behind the wheel. “This is a real country road. A country road deserves naked feet.” She scrunched her toes. “Now make me safe.”

I reached for her seatbelt. I had to lean over her tough round stomach. It was like I had to put my head in her lap only there wasn’t one. She said having me took it away. No way was I ever going to have her belly. No kids was one of my first rules for life.

“Take off your shoes,” Mom said. This was the worst. My feet freaked me out.

Those high bluish arches. How little contact they could withstand. They cowered before a single ray of light. I was the kid who wore Keds to the beach. Now I won’t take my socks off even for Vinyasa. Mom’s feet were thick and flat from nearly four years barefoot in a

5 “Mount Diablo as seen from Newhall Park in Concord,” Wikipedia, accessed February 25, 2016, https://en.wikipedia.Org/wiki/Mount_Diablo#/media/File:Mount_Diablo_Panoramic_ From_Newhall.jpg. 56

concentration camp. “Come on, kiddo, you need to start enjoying life. You’re ten and act like a mushroom.” My eyes were on her salmon-painted toes. Dancing on the pedals.

That evening I’d probably have to sit on the floor of her study in front of her giant rattan swivel chair, her feet propped on a pillow on my belly. She called this peejeet, spelled

“pijat”—Indonesian for massage. “Oh child,” she’d murmur, “you are the best peejeeter in the world, even better than our jongos.” Mom’s houseboy on her parents’ Jakarta estate. 1935. Maybe he was really their slave. Mom’s heels were rocks. I knuckled them.

Dad was in the living room editing a contract. His eyelids trembled. He’d been shivering for weeks. Bucky, his new boss, joked, “Looks like Pat’s been breaking into the

Hennessy in that long pink house of his,” but Dad barely drank. Dad got high from the movies. He sipped on the independent channel out of San Jose. (“The Perfect 36,” Carol

Doda breathed during station breaks.) Sometimes he drove the LTD to the Danville

Grange. Five Easy Pieces with Take the Money and Run. He was one of those boys whose mothers had given them a nickel for a triple bill. Dracula and Buccaneers and Dr.

Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with Ingrid Bergman. Oh boy. Oh boy. Ingrid Bergman.

Dad didn’t marry until his mid-thirties. No one was cute enough. Mom turned up at a cocktail party in Gramercy. Oh her figure style face first name accent. Never mind that Mom’s voice, a mixture of colonialist Dutch and Indonesian, had little to do with

Bergman’s Swedish drawl. Ingrid thought movies were garbage. Only Hitch was worth it.

Hitch made sense. She also liked Rio Bravo. Dad said Texas wasn’t like that. The people in Shadows were more realistic. Ingrid nearly walked out of Shadows. “Who needs to 57

know someone’s dirty laundry?” The 400 Blows made her wail. “That kid killed himself in the end. He walked into the ocean.” “He was just hanging at the beach, Ingrid.” She started spilling her beans. She’d been in a camp, she said. A refugee. The sweet-talking southern man cried with her. When they got emotional their accents blended. This made them sound stupid.

The first half of my childhood had a key to Gramercy Square Park. The second?

Dry grass. An oak against a moon.

The Bay Area didn’t used to be called that. You just said “San Francisco.” No discussion of microclimates. No handcrafted beer. No fancy bread. There was fog near the ocean and sun further east. It rained heavily from October through March. You drank Anchor

Steam if you could afford it. If you’d even heard of it. Bread was Wonder or Sourdough.

Sourdough was for Italians and tourists. Kids from my high school sold their parents’ pocket ranchers. They spent all the money. They slipped away into Cool, Paradise, Lotus.

Alcoholic, lazy, economical Northern California towns. Horror houses sprouted in their wake. They looked like hotels. They looked like jukeboxes. The local schools improved.

Rain ceased.

To those of you who came here because you wanted to, you know who you are; you people seeking the Golden State to hold onto something that has already slipped away, please go back where you came from. I’m an emigrant. I had no choice. I was ten. 58

Mom got never got her PhD. Dad let her have her own room. Her study. He let her turn its closet into a bookcase. On the top shelf two mad Wayang dolls chewed tobacco. There was a pink rug. A thick wood judge’s desk. Mom painted it sunshine yellow. She planted a wisteria outside the window. After a few years it grew into a knotty labyrinth that pressed into the glass.

I sat on her rug. I thumbed lotion into her arch. “I’m never going back to New

York,” she said. “And neither will you, child.”

I power off my laptop. Again I yearn for Blood on the Tracks. Again I vhhhhrrron heavily socked feet to the window. There. My adorable car. Filled with CDs. My license

6 Harriet with Buddy Lee, 2015, digital photograph by the author. 59

plate holder says, “Toyota of Berkeley/Decidedly Different.” Beneath a streetlamp.

Today’s car of Berkeley. First there was the VW bug, then the Volvo, now the Prius 2nd

Gen. Greg used to say, “Everyone’s on vacation here.” He and Sheila were from

Westchester. Berkeley was their hideaway. They had my attention. Not only did I want to paint like Gregory, I wanted to copy his relationship. I bought a used camera. A Pentax

K1000.1 took it to school. It got me in trouble. Elmer Bischoff was the famous guy there.

He thought photographs distorted reality. He said they represented death. He wouldn’t let me paint from them. I snuck two black-and-whites of Gregory. I studied them at home. I deconstructed them. Memorized them. This is how he does it. 60

Fawnee wound up looking exactly like her dad. They ate too much. He brought her to

Sava’s. Jersey City. Kielbasa. Blood sausage. Thin and thick. Briney. All that process from life to production. Now cold. Rough cuts on rye. Chowed down in Greg’s truck.

Tuesday afternoons. Before her sewing lesson. Greg often parked nearly two feet from the curb. He knew he was fattening up his kid. Maybe he figured it would make her safe from men. Greg and Fawnee broadened in tandem. 61

Dad and I watched Sorry, Wrong Number on the Perfect 36. Barbara Stanwyck runs herself all over poor cutie Burt Lancaster. Her daddy appoints him VP in her family’s drugstore chain. The Walgreens of their day. 1948. Barbara takes to her bed. It always seems to be night. Burt plots her end. He changes his mind. He gets her on the phone. He urges her to leave her bed. “But I can’t!” she cries. There’s a shadow outside her bedroom. She screams. Burt yells. Shadow hangs up phone. Murder. Close on ringing phone. Murderer picks up. It’s Burt. “Sorry, wrong number,” sez the shadow’s voice. End.

For now. Sorry, Wrong Number seemed to play as often as I Love Lucy reruns.

7 Harriet Babysitting, 2015, digital photograph by the author. 62

The streetlight above my Prius flutters. After it dies sun will hit its headlights. I wait. I look at the oven. Its clock says 5:30. How the hell am I supposed to know when day will come? In Indonesia you can count on it. No matter what. Equal days, equal nights. 63

Horoscopes are often cast as if you were bom on the first day and hour of spring. It’s called the Aries Point. Cardinal. Starts. James’s sign. Fire. New. Brash. Not product. Not process. Insemination. Before the idea. What happens before the patent. The seed, in other words. The countryside.

Sheila was freckly. When you met her you might think, “farm girl from the land of the Jolly Green Giant.” You might’ve wanted to discount her before she opened her mouth. Then you listened. Halal. Osso buco. Stroganoff. Dinner parties. Wine from

Abruzzo spattered on ties and cushions. A top-floor, floor-through apartment on

University. Mise-en-scene. Greg found its furniture. Charades. An emphasis on Victorian literature. One evening the topic was Love & Torture. Sheila’s prop? A pair of old glasses. She glued magnets over the lenses. She put them on. She lay on her back on a dusky, floral oriental rug. She started sticking magnets on her magnets. Guests shouted,

“Black hole!”

“Wuthering Heights'.”

“I am Heathcliff!”

Sheila was a grinner. Her front teeth rested on her bottom lip, conjuring just a wee bit of blood. She was one of those people who liked the bus. Because she was wealthy.

Because she was Jewish. Examples mattered to her. Prominent Jews were obligated to properly represent themselves. Bob Dylan bugged her. His scary inconsistencies. She was ashamed that “Never Say Goodbye” used to be her favorite song. Even though it was a 64

love-no-matter-what song. By the time she and Greg started living together she preferred

Exene Cervenka. “The World’s a Mess; It’s in My Kiss.” It was a phase.

Over two years I received three invitations to Sheila’s dinner parties. “Of course,”

I said. Time came to put on my jacket. I took it off. I put it on. I took it off. I putit on. I walked out the door. I waited at the bus stop. The 51 arrived. I let it pass.

So what if I’m only seventeen! I have great stuff. Beyond garage sale/stoop sale stuff.

The Full Kiss Pak. Commemorative Love. Only 99.99 will get you KISS. MORE. LOVE.

Genuine: gold LP, Gene Simmons autograph, poster. Message me. I might have a sliding scale for you!

8 Harriet and Branden, 2015, digital photograph by the author. 65

Branden: You so do not have that Harriet: How would you know? Branden: !! Harriet: Ok, ok it’s my mama’s. But she’s forgotten about it Branden: I’ll take it off your hands for 50 Branden: 60 if you rat out your hair Harriet: XXXXXXX Branden: Did you hear what happened to Fawnee Thompson? Harriet: Whoozat? Harriet: I don’t know any Fawnee Thompson Branden: Yes you do. She’s BF with James’s older sister Beanie Harriet: ?? Harriet: Oh her. She did everybody Branden: Not me! Harriet: Just the fact you said that makes me wonder. Branden: Well, I wouldn’t have turned it down... Harriet: It’s not like I care! Harriet: So what happened? Branden: Disappeared. Harriet: She probably ran away with XXXXXX. Branden: James told me she was involved in an internet sex thing out of NYC Branden: Kids were getting cash for naked vids. James said he considered it himself, but the people running it were nuts Branden: Silence of the Lambs nuts Harriet: I don’t want to think about James without clothes Branden: I want to think about you without clothes Harriet: It’s not gonna happen without the cash, Branden Smythe Branden: Don’t you wanna know what happened? Branden: It’s not just about Fawnee Thompson

(Harriet’s getting another message. James’s mom is offering to trade her an unopened Foghat for the Kiss.)

Branden: Harriet, come on! Have some curiosity! You could be next! Harriet: Don’t worry Harriet: I don’t enjoy taking off my clothes Harriet: So what happened Branden: No one knows for sure...nubile young woman....strangely named bad men Harriet: I presume James told you all this Branden: So what Branden: It started with Beanie Branden: She was babysitting Harriet: Oh come on Branden Harriet: I suppose Branden: Hee-hee Branden: Okay Branden: Fawnee really did vanish, though Harriet: I don’t remember her anyway Branden: Yes you do Branden: F-cups Harriet: I have F-cups Harriet: F is not for failure Branden: You’re bigger than she is Branden: You are Harriet: I am Harriet Rae Hickman Harriet: Oil City, PA Branden: You’re not going to get more for the Kiss than what I offered. Branden: Face it.

9 Flashcatz, 2015, digital photograph by the author. 67

The oven says 5:30. I look outside once more. Little Prius! My phone quavers within your glove compartment. Alongside Dylan. Not only is it unheard, it is in a car beneath a streetlight that’s died. It might as well not be at all.

Greg and Fawnee were in the midst of a couple of Reuben sandwiches. Greg’s oily truck. The radio segued from psychedelia to an old-timey children’s folk tune.

At home with relations I tried for to see But there wasn’t a one like my little Mohee And the girl I had trusted proved untrue to me So I sailed o’er the ocean to my little Mohee.

“Dance?” Fawnee offered her hand.

“I’m no good.”

“Yes, you are! Remember when you’d whistle and I’d put my feet on the tops of your shoes and you’d lead me around the backyard?” He figured she was making fun of him again. He used to be able to meet her eyes no matter what. Even when he could no longer see anyone else. It had become easier to tile Martin Scorsese’s bathroom. Hang a

Jay DeFeo painting for the Whitney. He tried explaining that to his lawyer. “I can’t look you in the eye because I don’t trust anyone over the age of twelve.” Sure, it was funny.

Greg was a conversation piece. Those untied shoes. Mismatched shoes. Sometimes only one shoe. “I’m too busy to care,” he explained. “Bizzzy. Bizzzy, bizzzy, bizzzv.” He turned his arms into wings. He whirred around dinner parties. Bars. Sidewalks.

My pappy’s a chieftain, and ruler be he I’m his only daughter and my name is Mohee10

10 Burl Ives, “Little Mohee,” trad., on The Wayfaring Stranger, Columbia CL 628, 33'A rpm. 68

Dad pulled Mom to her feet. “Let me lead.” Back then he shook only slightly. If he kept his eyes open he wouldn’t get dizzy. He didn’t tell. He started falling out of chairs at meetings. “What is happening to me?” Drool on his chin. He started calling telephones

“ambulances.” His eyelids sagged. Flies buzzed about his head. 69

It’s five-thirty. Vhhhhhhhron vhhhhrrrrron on heavily socked feet I slide into the bedroom. Patti is passed out on a chair.

When will the sun rise over my shoulder? When will it be tomorrow? 70

Note to first readers: the following is a link to a password-protected video on Vimeo: https://vimeo.eom/l 55321710#t=0shttps://vimeo.com/155321710 - t=Os

PW: enogirl 71

SHEILA

New Jersey, June 19, 2015

God knows Gregory Thompson’s had more than his fair share of hardship. Rock bottom is the best place for him, though, after what he did to our daughter. Some people just don’t mature until they spend a decent amount of time in exceptional pain.

In the early seventies Mom handled his family’s case. The way she tells it, Greg and his kid sister were abandoned by their father at 49 Pickup the night the Orioles lost the series to Pittsburg. It wasn’t the first time Ed had brought his kids into the bar to gnaw on ham sandwiches and Wise potato chips. Within the dark-blue patched leather booth, their booth, the one directly opposite the television, the mayo, salt, and pickle juice would deliciously coat their fingertips while they chanted, “The Oriole way, the

Oriole way! We play the Oriole way!” Ed liked to whip off his birdie cap, slam it over

Greg’s head and yank the bill toward the wide-planked hardwood floor, forcing out

Greg’s ears as much as possible. “Little bastard’s brain’s almost as big as mine.” Then he’d turn the cap backward, pull it off, and wave its dank interior over his little girl, muttering “Beanie, Beanie, Beanie” until she giggled wide, her molars caked with smooshed potato. The Thompsons were on the winning side.

On the final night of the World Series Ed gripped the table’s edge; at the bottom of the 8th, his eyes simultaneously whitened and reddened. By the time Blass started 72

pitching in the 9th, only the birdie cap remained, crumpled, crown side down on the seat.

Beanie was only six. Greg tells it differently but Mom doesn’t lie.

The kids were almost placed in foster. Because Ed was a medaled Mount Vernon patrolman the family got off with supervision. This was where my mother, a social worker for Westchester County, came in. For her first visit with the Thompsons she wore the “hopeful, calming” outfit she said shielded her from potentially high-conflict homes: light-blue blouse, navy boiled wool skirt that glided just below the knee, sheer hose, loafers with twinkling new pennies. Turned out the Thompsons possessed no firearms beyond what Ed needed for work; no repos, no (documented) history of violence. After determining that Ed needed to get himself to AA and that Carol, his wife, no matter how good her intentions, had to stop going to night school, Mom said to me, “I can understand why the mother wants to get out of the house, but kids come first. Always always always.

Parenting is a privilege.”

At the time I was in my final year at Scarsdale High—eyeing, at my parents’ insistence, only public universities. Berkeley was their first choice—for its English

Department, sure, but also for its politics and cafes. “The Bay Area has the best coffee in the whole US of A. You can discuss anything under its influence,” said Dad, who had gone to Boalt on the GI Bill. Ensuring my application would show a sincere interest in

California, in my free time I learned about poppies and palms, San Antonio de Padua, the

Crookedest Street in the World, Angela Davis, Highway 101, Cesar Chavez, Mount 73

Diablo, Lake Tahoe, the Watts Towers, the Huntington Gardens, and the Sacramento

Delta, not to mention tacos dorados, por favor.

Spanish was taught nowhere near school. My parents therefore hired Lily, a Puerto Rican girl with wavy lensed glasses to roll r’s with me in our parlor. My grades were mostly

A’s. I bowed a more than passable violin. The only thing missing to clinch my acceptance to Berkeley was a verifiable commitment to service. Useful, most useful in this regard, the Thompsons turned out to be.

Mom brought me over on a Saturday. 1971 was nearly through. Greg’s family lived on the left side of one of those wood-frame vertically split duplexes that are all over the Northeast—if you ever take the Van Wyck Expressway through Queens from JFK you’ll know what I mean. I followed Mom to the front door. Its shiny lumpy black paint was the latest coat of many. A Grabber-Blue, four-door Maverick lounged on the grass beside the gravel driveway.

“Hello, Mrs. Frankfurter. This kid yours?”

11 “Mount Diablo as seen from Newhall Park in Concord,” Wikipedia, accessed February 25, 2016, https://en.wikipedia.0rg/wiki/M0unt_Diabl0#/media/File:M0unt_Diabl0_Pan0ramic_ F rom_N ewhal 1 .j pg. 74

Kid? I was seventeen! Moreover, we were Frankforts. Not that that sounded much better. I wished people didn’t have to say it at all. That’s my name don’t wear it out, actually don’t even think about it. Perhaps my last name is one reason I married as soon as possible.

“She doesn’t look like you.”

Carol’s nails wound around the door’s edge. A necklace of clunky red stones lay hard over her turtleneck. You could smell the old country on her, Mom said, and I want to add that that’s not what it sounds like, my mom’s actually a very confidential woman;

I didn’t hear this until well after Fawnee was born. From the beginning, though, I knew that appointments with the Thompsons gave her bouts of anorexia. Moms never understand how anyone could allow themselves to get fat. “I can’t help putting myself in their place, leaning over, putting on shoes.” I was surprised, then, that though certainly borderline obese, Carol Thompson turned out to be a real lady, even more composed than

Mom, maybe. She didn’t dress anything like her, of course—Carol was into blowsy greens and stretchy whites, and her hair was something you could get lost in—but her voice was steadier than Mom’s, deeper, a bass line running through her family’s chatter of offhand put-downs. She was Cher after a decade of Cheetos and strawberry ice cream. Eight ml plastic hugged her upholstery; in the dining room a couple of clown paintings hung face to face, their shiny noses hovering above mouths of joy and loss. A muscley hanging fern marked the way to the kitchen. Someone had knocked out the wall 75

facing the driveway: in its place floor-to-ceiling glass made you feel like you had a place in the world until you went outside and realized you were facing a two-way mirror.

While Carol served Liptons and tiny powdered donuts from a simple set and asked about my plans for the New Year, a rain slicker-yellow Ford F-250 filled the window fast enough to make Mom flinch. Smooth Carol didn’t look when Gregory rushed inside, haphazardly followed by Ed hoisting a giant Christmas tree, its springy tips dangling over Bean’s head. At the sight of Mom Ed fumbled. The tree tips started scratching Bean’s brow but she didn’t peep. Ed boomed, “Hey, who’s in my castle?”

Carol righted the tree and explained; Gregory tugged off his hat and picked up a donut. Together Ed and Carol sang, “No no no no, that’s for our guests, Gregory!” One thing you could always say about Mr. and Mrs. Thompson was that, as far as the kids were concerned, they offered a united front of No’s. Greg took a bite. Carol smacked his cheek. His hair was a mess; it was my favorite part of him. He was just about to turn ten.

After the New Year I became their free sitter. On Thursday evenings Carol took the

Maverick to her accounting class at SUNY while Ed was at St. Paul’s for Friends of Bill

W. Bingo. On first and third Saturday mornings both drove to court-ordered group therapy for parents on the verge. Dad lent me the keys to his new black Caddy. It had whitewall tires, leather seats, and power steering, a vast improvement over Mom’s old little Dart. 76

At first Mom didn’t want me going over there. Carol was disobeying her recommendation to commit to full-time motherhood. Dad laid down the law. “Mrs.

Thompson’s trying to remake herself in order to better serve her family. Sheila needs the experience so she can get into Berkeley.” By the time the Bicentennial rolled around

Carol was a vice president at Chase Manhattan; Ed kept turning up drunk in public, to the point where he had to turn in his revolver. “I admire Carol’s ambition, but maybe, maybe if she’d stayed at home more the household would have been more stable,” Mom said.

“Something to consider, She.”

“She” is me, Sheila, named after Mom’s tuxedo tabby, dead at nineteen years and four months in 1953, the year before I was born. Also, I want to mention I’m starting to realize most of what I’ve said so far is pretty conventional if not downright same-old.

Rich girl meets poor—OK, not poor, but working-class—boy. Wealthy only child yearning for otherness, some would say shadow, some would say playmate. But it’s my story to tell. Sure, there may be no drama—or not much—without Greg, but he was mine, all mine, no matter what, for a long, long time.

NOTE TO SELF: GREG ACES GIFTED CHILDREN’S MATH CLASS

“Ugly Sheila, ugly Sheila,” Greg chanted, jumping sideways in Keds and Pointer Brand overalls. It was a Saturday morning, 11 a.m. Soul Train blared. 77

“You’re in my view, kid!” I was fingering a can of Tab, my jeans rustling the loveseat’s plastic. At my house, where soda meant bottled ginger ale and sofa equaled velvet and carved wood, I was only allowed to watch PBS, or, if lucky, I Love Lucy, on our 12" black-and-white. Sometimes Dad was able to sneak in a couple of bottles of 7

Up.

“Groove!” Greg kicked the coffee table. Beanie’s dark braids bobbed out of the foggy hall bathroom. “Hey She! This is my favorite song!” A Toot-a-Loop radio dangled on her wrist. Greg untwisted it. “C’mon, Bean, let’s show Sheila how to dance.” He wrapped it around the base of the rabbit ears. “Boys against girls.”

Soul Train's singing queen wore an oval spaceship of black hair around her head.

It coiled right over her shoulders. Her arms writhed within a gray and silver caftan. The rest of her was a slab. Below, teens slithered in bright denim. “Think! Think about it!”

Greg twiddled his thumbs while pushing his knees together and apart. “Stop tryin’ ta be a Locker!” Bean called out, aiming her fist at his back. He dodged without moving his feet, leaning to his left, his right, and back again, his torso revolving around his sneakers. Bean kept hitting air. When I didn’t know what a Locker was Bean called me stupid. Thirty-four years later Fawnee called me to her room to watch a YouTube video.

“Have you heard of these dancers called Lockers?” “Ask your dad,” I said, stupid all over again. It was another one of those evenings I had no idea where Greg was.

The fact that Ed sometimes did weird things with his kids wasn’t obvious but I could always tell when something had gone wrong. For one thing, Greg would put on that 78

waffle-knit thermal that was way too big for him. It might have been one of Ed’s castoffs.

Its soft yellow cuffs would dangle over his wrists while he lay with his cheek on the arm of the loveseat, breathing hard enough to hear. Bean would poke him with the tip of her braid while rubbing that skinny butt of hers along the cushion’s seam. They’d point their eyes at the TV. They’d focus beyond the room. Bean would eventually nod off in my lap.

After my darling Fawnee was born I had all sorts of ideas as to how she’d be my personal cuddle-bun like Beanie but I was never anything more to her than chopped liver.

Fawnee was Greg’s baby. I know I sound like a jealous petty bitch—try to understand, though, that as a mother I might have a hard time handling the fact they fell so exclusively in love the instant they first looked the other in the eye. Mom says Greg probably wouldn’t have stuck around if I hadn’t had her. Even toward the end, when

Greg could barely stand practically anything she did, they’d pile in front of the TV.

Channel 11 often showed Vertigo, a movie that always had the power to make

Greg sit up straight, his head swiveling the way cats and dogs sometimes watch Animal

Planet. “There’s a lot of green and red in this movie. In school I learned they’re complementary. That means they’re colors that need each other.” To Kill a Mockingbird was broadcast even more. Greg’s favorite part was when Boo covers up Scout. Once he brought over Carol’s red-and-white striped blanket, wrapped us in it and said, “Now I’m gonna pull the wool over your eyes.” Our world went dark; for a second I believed I felt his lips on my mine—at least, that’s what I fancied while driving home, guiding the stick shift away from the boy I last saw padding away from me, following his mom down the 79

brown shag carpeted hallway, scratching the back of his neck, the folds of the humungous thermal shirt undulating.

I ought to have been thinking about Benny, whom I’d just started dating. A

Columbia freshman, large and neat, he lived in a house behind an elm or two, and had been one of Scarsdale High’s football heroes. His mom taught second grade at Heathcote

Elementary; his dad was a pro jazz drummer. Greg didn’t meet Ben until our wedding, which was in 1985? ’86? No, I think it was earlier than that, in ’84, ’cause I remember I’d just turned thirty. He’d heard about Ben, but wasn’t prepared for what he called “that stance of his,” and later would say, “You like black guys too much.” Now, it’s true that right after our divorce I did go out with a black guy—Charles worked as a secretary, but had an MA in comp. lit. so it’s not like we didn’t have anything to talk about, and by that

I mean it wasn’t just about the way he’d spend a perfect slice of the evening stroking my thighs exactly per my instructions.

The one and only time Greg and I met with both our attorneys the first thing out of his mouth was, “Basically Sheila’s always had a thing for magnum dick. Me, I’m Irish.

You know what that means, right? Red snout, short stick?” I was just sitting there, two- inch paperwork in front of me, my face a weeping balloon. Why did he always have to be so competitive? Even his dad wasn’t that bad. I mean Ed would freak if his team didn’t win but it wasn’t a personal thing, and if you didn’t vote for Reagan he’d think you were a communist but it didn’t mean he wouldn’t buy you a Coors. If you disagreed with 80

Carol, you could just get out of her sight. She wouldn’t get bitter if people weren’t on her side, she’d just walk on.

What Greg couldn’t handle was losing. And this was a guy who regularly bowled over two hundred! Problem was, I told him that Benny once—and only once—bowled three. If Greg couldn’t be the best he considered himself less than zero, which often made him give up before even trying. One of those “it is what it is” guys, he compared and contrasted until he was blue in the face but was never able to handle life’s grays.

I know this might seem trivial, but take the way Greg often said “basically” before one of his pronouncements as if that made them truths. “Basically you’ve always preferred black guys” was a totally Greg Thompson thing to say. Whenever Harriet came into town he’d complain, “Basically Harriet doesn’t want to spend fifteen minutes with me.” Another favorite of his was, “Basically Michael Jackson’s ‘Billie Jean’ is a song you want to hear all over again even before it’s halfway done.” Greg was great. I guess you could say I basically miss the guy! Even Bruce, my attorney, started giggling when

Greg said that stuff about my, ahem, preferences—and I’m not going to say I wouldn’t rather screw Ben or Charles the secretary but with my daughter in a foot-high urn, dick wasn’t the first thing on my mind.

NOTE TO SELF: MANICHEAN THINKING 81

“I can’t wait to be a mother,” I said to Ben, hoping he’d return with, “I know what you mean, let’s start as soon as you get out of college,” but he took his hand off my sweater and looked at his fingernails. Maybe he didn’t want to be a patriarch; maybe he didn’t think I was all that smart. I had one (though only one!) grade lower than A minus, and it was for PE, but it was a D; because PE was my first period of the fall semester of my freshman year it rode the top of my transcripts. When Mom got the report card she meticulously whited it out and replaced it with a firmly typed “B.” Dad said, “How can they mark you for something that makes you feel bad?”

Maybe Ben didn’t think I’d produce genetically competitive kids. For example, my chest is a board with a couple of bumps. And my hair! I may not write like a mouse but trust me, picture my hair, which I get from my dad, Mr. Not Quite Bald: it wobbles around the worst face shape for pretty, otherwise known as oblong. I might not have been contemptible if I wasn’t such a homely vessel. Without my servility I would not have become Mouse.

“You let Greg and Fawnee get too exciting,” Mom says. “They never learned to make the best of things. Now take Ed Thompson. He was honest with himself. Maybe not as amusing as he used to be, but at least now he’s got peace of mind.”

My biggest fault isn’t being Mouse. It’s that no matter what I’m doing I feel like

I’m watching TV. Mom should have let me watch it more when I was a kid. I might have gotten the need out of my system. 82

NOTE TO SELF: MOM AND DAD CONSIDER MONEY A NECESSARY EVIL. CAROL AND ED LOVE IT BUT ONLY CAROL RESPECTS IT. I AM AMBIVALENT ABOUT IT; GREGORY EITHER LOATHES OR CRAVES IT.

Ora Blau was my first Cal friend. She culled stiff wool suits from the Salvation Army and gold-plated earrings from St. Vincent de Paul; her hair was a sleek, dark pageboy; her short painted nails were retouched after the slightest nick. We met in Shakespeare and

Film the day Othello broke. While Orson Welles jittered and flickered, she whispered,

“I’m starting to feel drunk. Wanna sneak out and have a real glass of wine at my house?”

Her breath had an edge.

It wasn’t even noon. Spent leaves scuttled in the scorching, Eastern, late-

September wind that Ora called “Devil Air.” Talk about humidity at the level of zilch. I could barely stand it; my dream was a phlegmatic one, suited to another season: a thick book, a lamp, a room with whitewashed moldings. Ora’s place had it all. 83

It faced eucalyptus trees on the north side of campus and must have been built soonafter the fire that destroyed the area in the nineteen twenties. Her dining-room table was set with deco silverware she’d stolen from the Faculty Club where she occasionally worked; her living-room walls were lined with books and records and framed photographs. A

Marantz receiver and turntable always sent tunes through Quadraflex speakers poking five whole feet off the ground.

“My older brother used to work at Pacific Stereo,” she said, taking a short fat unfiltered cig out of an enameled box before tapping an end on the wall behind her.

Smoke twisted around After Lorca, Them, The Recognitions.

12 Near Spicer’s Place, Berkeley, 2015, digital photograph by the author. 84

“May I have a puff?”

She hesitated. “It’s clove,” she explained, harvesting a couple of flakes from her tongue before lending.

While Ora pulled out a Kleenex I dragged for a split second. I was unused to smoking. Actually I’d never inhaled before. “Can I keep this?”

She nodded, patting me on the part in my hair. “I’m going to take you to my head pruner,” she said. “Yorque’s fantastic. Very feminine. Hasn’t shorn his locks since nineteen sixty-seven.” Turning to her record collection, the first I’d seen in plastic sleeves, she asked, “You know Bowie?”

Jazzy staccato notes wandered around the room; she poured two glasses of champagne. “Super French today ’cuz I’m out of regular.” I wondered how she afforded herself. While she struck a match, the sycamore outside her window cast its last leaf; her bangs, cut just beneath her brow, were both silky and stiff.

“You need to toss those John Lennon specs,” she said. “Only hom-rims befit

English majors.”

I swiftly removed them. The sycamore blurred into the sky; Bowie was uncertain about life on Mars and I blinked, overwrought with serendipity. A cloud marched from the top to the bottom of the sky, from red to blue. Purple.

“Fall,” she said.

At first I hung out with Ora after Shakespeare and Film but soon Saturday nights became UC Theatre nights no matter what was playing. Fourth row left, two seats in, me 85

on the aisle side. Often Ora ordered Milk Duds and sometimes (but not usually) I’d have a couple, and water from the bathroom. After A Day at the Races and Take the Money and Run followed by Harold and Maude (for example) we’d walk down University toward the pier for a bite at Under the Fork and Spoon, which wasn’t its real name though everyone called it that because someone had tied a large wooden spoon and fork on a string and hung them at the top of the frayed entrance where they dangled low enough to hit customers. Since the place served tip-of-hip soy and peanut and vegetarian everything and because back then it wasn’t so easy to find tofu in restaurants or even stores, even in

Berkeley, we always had to wait for a table, giggling and cringing while the cutlery slammed the unsuspecting—mostly jocks or young children held proudly aloft—in foreheads and eyes. Under the Fork and Spoon only provided chopsticks, by the way, unless you asked otherwise.

Red curry with lemon-yellow com looked orange from afar. Steaming, caramel- hued, deep-fried bean cakes crackled on yesterday’s Chronicle. Picturing our potential orders through the window, we’d listen for our names to be called while beside trees getting their lives sucked out by aphids whose excrement smothering the sidewalk and adhering to the soles of our shoes was less like gum or filthy linoleum than dried marmalade: a smacking kiss of shit that grounded us long enough to give us space to overhear what might be the insects’ well-fed song or merely the hum of a utility line, a witness. 86

NOTE TO SELF: BERKELEY LOVED MY OUT-OF-STATE TUITION

I spent Columbus Day hanging out on my bed, trying to get through one of those Letters and Sciences breadth requirement textbooks (Bio, I think) but mostly watching the

Congregational church across the street waver in haze. Just before dinner there was a knock on my door. “You’ve got a man downstairs,” the resident manager announced. She seemed a little antsy-pantsy—or maybe I was projecting. I didn’t know any Berkeley guys well enough to have one just show up at my dorm so thought maybe oh maybe it would be my Ben though that would be impossible—he was in midterms all the way across the country. Come to think of it, though, his last, impeccably typed letter had concluded with a scribbled postscript: “I have a surprise in the works for you.” I slipped on my loafers and padded down the stairwell. Sure enough, there he was, proudly standing next to the big plate-glass window while my dormmates lined up for spaghetti.

Columbia had just given Ben another athletic scholarship. He’d taken a week off to celebrate.

We were unprepared for acrid California stares of contempt vastly different from the green, scared glances we got on the East Coast. Ben’s closely barbered hair seemed uptight beside the funky ’dos and hand-tooled belts of my dormmates; beside me, the

Mouse, his veiny muscularity looked like a joke. I could tell because I am proudly self- conscious: my father taught me the value of assuming another’s perspective. “It’s the 87

privileged, simplest path to self-responsibility,” he liked to say. “And self-responsibility is civic responsibility.” Dad consistently elicited unexpected courtroom confessions.

In California, Ben represented unhip colonialism. But those Berkeley boys with their sociology books had nothing on my Benny—they were mostly just avoiding the draft. Not that I was pro-war. I wasn’t. Neither was Ben. He wasn’t in college, though, to turn in a handwritten essay. He was destined to be my father’s partner.

Dad’s known as Arrow Aaron, the attorney who represented Mimi Duglass in the big harassment case against Columbia Records that was all over the news back in the eighties. When people found out they’d often wonder why he hadn’t become a judge or run for office. Mr. Victor, my high school chemistry teacher, told me he’d give me an A+ if I could convince Dad to enter the ’70 race against Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. “Why don’t you just ask him?” I thought but was too timid to say. It rarely came up in family discussions, at least not when I was around. I guess I don’t think it was ever an issue for

Dad. He liked helping on his own terms, in a Cal T-shirt, sipping a mocha on the top floor of one of those eighty-year-old rotund wood buildings just southwest of the Church

Street station. His lunch hours were spent with the phone unplugged, his heavy legs stretched across a soiled chaise longue squished into a wood-paneled walk-in closet where he’d read from the Western canon; between chapters he’d gaze at the closet’s eye, a round window the size of a baby’s head where a red stained-glass rose dimmed and brightened according to the weather, season, and time of day. The center of our earth boils with inequity, he’d think. Only underdogs have the right to a fair trial. 88

Dad didn’t stay in touch as much as Mom did, but sometimes he phoned on Saturdays from Brooklyn, which meant he was preparing for a trial. “Daddy-o,” my roommate would whisper, handing me the receiver.

His transistor radio pinged around his voice. “Still reading The American?”

“I’m almost done. I can’t understand why Newman doesn’t like Noemie.”

“They’re alike.”

“They seem like opposites.”

“Opposites are mirrors. Newman and Noemie are both opportunists. Listen. I’m going to hold the phone to the radio. For a few minutes I want you to pay attention.” It was Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, the last of his string quartets, courtesy WQXR.

“It’s sweet before it curdles,” he said. “It makes sense, it becomes illegible, it disintegrates. And vice-versa. You want to smile, you want to cry. Then you’re giggling!”

“You’re trying to tell me about life.”

“Sure. Sadness and happiness are interchangeable. Comparing and contrasting them is a waste of time. If you stick with James you’ll find his late style, like

Beethoven’s, psychedelic. Categories are toppled. Meaning is conveyed through tone.

When you look within The Ambassadors you’ll find it as impossible as a legal brief.

Spend time with it and its mixed-up sense might convince you that to think is to inhabit a

Cubist land. To think is to inhabit the glories of high modernism, a movement built for the common man.” 89

Though I’d heard variations of this speech before—often incorporating

Beethoven—this was the first time Dad had mentioned James. Odd—I’d never seen any of his novels in the house or his office.

“Before entering the Navy,” he continued, “I wanted more than anything to get a

PhD in literature. After the war I realized my calling was the repair of social inequities.

When I met your mother she seemed to be me; after you were bom I learned that not only her body but her character was the product of the preexisting rules that benefit her vast inheritance. The fact that you and I have been purchased, Sheila, paid for with Wall

Street shenanigans, does not mean that your mother is not unlike me, a completely sincere missionary. We’re both trying to ensure the Thompsons’ survival. I don’t think

Rachel can stop Carol from trying to get the family out of Mount Vernon, but I worry that if those kids aren’t mentored in some way they’re going to wind up right back where they started. The little girl might turn out okay, but the boy—I worry about Gregory. He’s too smart for his own good.”

“Let’s help him get on a college track,” I replied.

NOTE TO SELF: GREG KISSES MICHAEL JACKSON POSTER

“Like to see my room?” I didn’t mean it. Norton Hall was brutal about overnight guests.

“No need,” Benny said. “I checked in at the Shattuck Hotel.” When I returned with my things Ben held the door, looking at a spray of high, thin clouds. “Cirrus,” he said. The 90

courtyard’s low, lumpy concrete benches looked rigorous, not harsh. “This whole town needs a shower,” he said, leading me to Shattuck Avenue. “And it’s gonna get one,” he said, “tonight or early tomorrow.”

After dropping my bag with the porter Ben took me to a quaint cafe that turned out to be Chez Panisse, American pioneer of the daily letterpress menu. Then and there I decided that when I got my doctorate in English Chez Panisse would be celebration headquarters.

Ben paid cash for a three-course meal that tasted like nothing I’d ever known: heirloom salad (gold tomatoes!); whole quail; apple cobbler topped with real whipped cream; a sweet thick wine called Sauternes (no one ever dared card Ben). Afterwards we headed over to the California Theater, where The Godfather was showing. Again Ben paid. While Brando toyed with a kitten we climbed over patrons in search of the perfect middle seat. When there, he turned into a cold spectator, the only sign of life from him a crunch-crunch during the hit in the Italian restaurant: A1 Pacino popeyed and shivering but exact. After the movie Ben insisted on stopping by Edie’s to share a Black and Tan.

He kept wiping up the caramel that dripped from our spoons onto the table.

The first thing he did when we finally got back to his room was point to the foot of the twin bed furthest from the window. I didn’t sit but he did.

“Are you on the pill?”

I shook my head.

“Diaphragm?” 91

“No.”

He took off his sports coat. “Condoms?”

“Isn’t that a guy thing?”

“I didn’t want to plan,” he said. He rolled up his sleeves. “You’re the one who always wanted it... I figured since you were in California you’d already . . .” He lay on his side and cupped his head on his palm. With the other he unbuttoned his shirt; his wifebeater had been washed in hot water with something red. He glanced at the ceiling, put a finger over his mouth and mouthed, “Listen.” Clicks against the windows sounded like fingernails, then steel tacks followed by a curtain of weather. As I panned away from

Ben, he eased onto his back, closed his eyes, and floated in the rain’s voice.

Two suits were hanging in the closet, each paired with a dress shirt: black with yellow, blue with red. I fingered the sleeves, picturing Ben completing them. An unfashionably thin gold silk tie dangled alone. I coiled it around my hand. I walked out. I left the door open. I didn’t turn around.

NOTE TO SELF: BEFORE ROE V. WADE, PREGNANCY WAS ABOUT AS POTENTIALLY LIFE-RUINING AS AIDS.

For my American Lit class I’d been reading about Eliot’s “objective correlative”:

“Something (as a situation or chain of events) that symbolizes or objectifies a particular emotion and that may be used in creative writing to evoke a desired emotional response 92

in the reader.”13 Could my Columbus Day date be an objective correlative? Could the tie represent a snake? It was embroidered with black oil rigs, figures adding up to centuries of pillage. The tie’s colors could also represent black gold: oil. The fact that its edges were also stitched with black thread enhanced its object-hood. It was definitely not a simile—Ben wasn’t like the tie, he was the tie. Exxon was one of Ben’s sponsors. He was

Metonym; he was Tie. There was no way to wear him without getting noticed, especially if you were an eighteen-year-old girl in 1972.

NOTE TO SELF: THE JEAN GENIE AT THE MARS HOTEL, HOWARD STREET, SAN FRANCISCO.

Winterland was hosting Bowie right before Halloween. Ora and I started outfit-shopping two full weeks beforehand, beginning at the Goodwill on the treeless, restless, liquor- drenched south side of town. Ora decided that everything I tried on had to go with Ben’s tie (“It’s a Goddam Herms!”) and that I had to wear a dark skirt or pants with a boy’s white shirt.

“We need to dress consciously and ironically,” Ora said, as I showed her a pair of

Sta-Prest Levi’s. “We are the future AND the past.” Moving toward the skirts, she was respectful, nearly reverential as she confidently laid the tie against fabric.

13 T.S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” The Sacred Wood (1921), accessed February 27, 2016, http://www.bartleby.com/200/sw9.html. 93

“This one has something,” she said, hooking a hanger sideways on the rack.

“Yes,” she said, stroking the shaggy wool skirt. “A nice bit of alpaca.” She held up another and brushed her bangs out of her eyes. “Though not for you, Sheila dear—with those hips of yours, it’d fall right off.” Draping it against herself, looking down, she pressed the flickering outfit over her stomach. “Silk. That’s what’s holding and giving light, letting us see blue green red yellow and everything in-between at once.”

I’d made a point of staying out of dresses ever since my mom finally let me choose my first pair of pants at Bonwit Teller Girls when I was twelve. “Make them sensible, okay, She?”

After Mom left for Country Club Ladies I found dizzying red-and-blue vertical striped denim jeans. Another pair had bright yellow daisies. I peeked ’round the right side of their legs as I held the low-slung waists close, the wide cuffs bumping my side as I headed toward Fitting Room within a dark short hall fronted by a mannish lady on a red stool. “Girls’ 6, that looks about right. Room 3.” Closing the slatted door, locking the jittery silver knob, I pictured myself lounging in my backyard, a book by my side, the crabapple tree just about to show. My first pair of pants: when standing and looking down, the ballooning bell-bottoms would ensure I wouldn’t have to be embarrassed by my ridiculously long feet. I don’t think I’ve yet mentioned that at the age of twelve I already had a size nine-and-a-half foot. 94

“Sheila.” My door clicked open. “MOM!” I hurriedly put my foot through one of the legs and lost my balance, falling against the mirror, watching my selves collide. My mother reached out her three-quarter sleeve .. .

Ora said, “Seems your Twiggy-ness has rubbed off on me. How are you doing with those slacks?” She giggled; her lips parted just enough to show traces of Alexandra de Markoff Windsor Ice lipstick streaking her upper teeth. She never called jeans anything but slacks. I wiggled them up and fastened the buttons. Unworn, practically antique peg-leg Levi’s in black. With a white boys’ dress shirt, Ben’s tie, and a dark velvet blazer ... whoa, world, watch out!

NOTE TO SELF: SPORTSCAR JETTING THROUGH THE BROADWAY TUNNEL

“This neighborhood throbs,” Ora said, tucking her Z within a just-out-of-the-red snatch of curb on Fillmore near Post. As she turned off the ignition I opened my door to a guttered wad of paper towels studded with razors and infused with earthy stains. A reek of endings and beginnings arose. I considered the possibility of cramming my mouth with shards of bloody pain.

Ben! Benny!

If I started dying someone would have to call him. If he didn’t come I would at least know for sure there was no hope for us ... 95

“What’s wrong with you?” Ora had already crossed the street. “Hurry up!” I stepped over my potential death and slammed the car door. “Break my car, will ya!”

Ora’s shoulder bag slipped toward her wrist. Beside her floated a lady with a tail: two jerky teen boys sucking on swizzle sticks, their pant cuffs brimming over the ankles of their naked feet. Lady’s purple blouse clung to her wobbling tits. One of the boys rushed to her and leaped, jamming a translucent plastic comb into her ’fro. “Heyyyyy, Mama!”

Lady kept ambling. Her tan-and-blue slacks ribboned in the shade. A Fringed Jacket jaywalked toward Ora while smoothing his sideburns.

“Gimme!”

Ora pressed her elbow into her purse and folded her arms.

“Gimme!”

Fringed Jacket looked like he weighed under a hundred pounds. One of the kids— the one with the gum-wrapper necklace—quickly muttered “Dad''

Soot clung within the curved fissures of broken Victorians. Some homes were missing altogether, sand lying in their wake. Shadows were long. Gum-Wrapper

Necklace handed Fringed Jacket a pink-and-green swizzle. Lady kept on keeping on. I made my way across Fillmore, my star-soled sneakers padding toward Ora’s ice-blue, six-inch platforms. The sun was fading yellow. 96

We were first in line for the show, the only ones until nearly half an hour before the doors opened. Ora’d been worrying herself into one of her flounces—not a physical recoil but a psychic resistance to the loneliness that seizes when you find yourself on the misguided side of hip: the possibility of a band performing to the extreme audience reduction of two college girls. We’d be able to get instantly close to the stage, sure, but Bowie and Ronson would despise us. We’d be defective for being the only ones to care, and Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, well, they’d just reflect our worthlessness. Perhaps they’d love us too much instead—perhaps as much as we loved them, though hated or cherished we’d be forgettable, me and Ora and the rockers, out of time yet trapped, little figures dwarfed by Winterland, hurtling toward the wrecking ball.

14 “Fillmore Redevelopment by SF Redevelopment Agency,” San Francisco Bay View, accessed February 27, 2016, http://il.wp.com/www.sfbayview.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Fillmore- redevelopment-by-SF-Redevelopment-Agency-web.jpg. 97

Fringed Jacket crept past. “This isn’t the best neighborhood to be hanging out in,” I said, immediately regretting my mousey words. “Best for what? Maybe it’s time you expanded your comfort zone, She,” Ora said, casually balancing herself against the auditorium’s thick pale slabbiness with one shoe. Her ankle trembled; her glittery platform twinkled beneath the scrolling neon red-and-white marquee. The chalky wall was damply odorous.

Someone had dragged a sharp pencil across decades of white paint—the line concluded with a partially erased daisy. Ora lit up. I decided that 2000 Post Street was the site of a wild wondrous galaxy. I tapped my lips and made a “V” with two fingers. Ora slipped in

15 “Winterland, Post and Steiner, San Francisco, CA,” blog entry, February 1, 2013, Jerry's Brokendown Palaces, accessed February 27, 2016, http://jerrygarciasbrokendownpalaces. blogspot.com/2013_02_01 _arch ive.htm 1. 98

her Djarum. I inhaled. I coughed. I adored. “Smoking outside can make people respect you,” she said.

A pony tailed guy wearing a Spiders from Mars jacket emerged from an unmarked

side door. I caught a name embroidered on his lapel. Oh My God. Ben. Ora waved. After he trotted around the corner she said, “Adorable but too skinny.”

“His arms seem muscular.”

“Duh. He’s a roadie. In ten years he’ll be all slack stomach. I need a man with powerful thighs. Only guys with lower-body strength have lifelong stamina.” She flicked the Djarum onto the sidewalk.

Ben reappeared hauling an amplifier with another roadie. He managed to free a hand to wave to us, nearly toppling the amp. As the guys struggled into the side door the beams of Ben’s green-and-white Adidas flashed once under the marquee before dimming into the corridor that led backstage.

The sound check swelled; the line behind us lengthened. There were now about a dozen elaborate men behind us smoking pot. Some waved feathers; many wore blue eye shadow. Lately I’d been coveting Bonne Bell Blues—a compact of four shades of denim- ish powder, plus a wedge of a misty color—but it seemed so Californian. Frivolous. Or not frivolous, exactly, but too fantastic for a nice Jewish girl.

Ora let her foot drag down the thumping wall, momentarily losing her balance before repositioning herself with her other giant shoe. She pushed back a cloudy bong that was offered below her knee. “I bet these guys don’t even know the meaning of 99

Bowie,” she said. She was definitely in a flounce. “They just want to forget about their jobs.”

At exactly 7:30 the doors were opened by . . . ta-da: Ken. (I’d misread his name.)

Time to upgrade my spectacles, I thought. He dallied beside the hand-stamper, chatting.

His laughter was filled with gums and baby teeth. Suddenly he let out his ponytail: thick brown hair cascaded upon his shoulders. Without asking for our IDs a mountainous Bill

Graham Presents guy pressed underage logos—horseshoe-esque “U”s—into the backs of our hands.

NOTE TO SELF: TUTORING GREG ACROSS THE COUNTRY

Ora slid a pack of pantyhose out of her bag. “100 percent silk. Two drawers of them at

Hinks.” After slitting the plastic with a thumbnail she dangled the stockings over her arm.

“Look. Old, untouched, and only a quarter.”

It was right before Thanksgiving, two weeks before finals, and definitely coffee time. In pint glasses darks and lights shifted near a browning fern that hung against a leaded glass window in Cafe Renaissance. I started thinking that lattes were sundaes and that the ribbed seams of silk French leggings could be menstrual blood or urine when Ora said, “There were so many Yucks in Tower Records buying Joni Sorry-for-Herself

Mitchell I could barely stand in line behind them. But I did. Look.” She pulled out another prize. 100

Four longhairs made fists, their thumbs sticking out, the letters S-L-A-D-E on each digit. Two of the guys were shirtless; one was throwing out his left fist instead of his right. At the bottom of the cover, thick yellow paintbrush letters wondered, SLAYED?

f Their font made me think of ’50s Technicolor Westerns. We’d recently seen Duel in the

Sun at the UC.

“Don’t you find this cover completely brilliant?” When she tapped the shrink­ wrap it bounced light from the overhead onto my spoon. I took this as a cue to homogenize my latte.

“I prefer categories,” Ora said and took one of those brief, hot, bitter sips that inevitably shoot through the foam of unmixed lattes. She folded the hose over the album and returned the goods to her bag. “Those guys in Slade”—she sipped again—“were born in the aftermath of the blitz. Do you think you’ll ever know what it’s like to be a real survivor?”

At the next table two Parted-in-the-Middle Gals whispered over textbooks filled with graphics of escalating waves. “How am I supposed to get an education when I have to be around statistics? If I have to sit next to another split-end Yuck for another second

I’m dropping out.”

On Thanksgiving, when most out-of-state students fretted with highlighters while managing calls from Aunt Judys, Grandpa Erles, or moms called Sue, Ora’s phone just rang. I knew because I dialed her number each time I finished a chapter from The 101

Portrait o f a Lady. When Isabel Archer became Lord Warburton’s idea of an interesting

woman I thought hmmmm, maybe Ora’s in her white-and-red checked tennies, taking

what she called “my natural amusement,” twinkling up crumbling outdoor staircases until

she found herself alongside fairies in the land of the Temple of Wings.16

In Chapter 4 I underlined “I don’t like originals; I like translations,”17 then printed

“safety first!” in the margin before calling. Perhaps Ora had unplugged her phone,

something she often did before she tried to sleep, explaining, “They’ll get back to you if they really care.” I envied her nonchalance. Missing someone’s even frivolous need had the potential to brand a girl unsympathetic, useless, and, eventually, the most secluded of

females.

I tightened my guts enough to be able to set Ora aside; for a few paragraphs and a quarter of an hour there was nothing between me and my James, a man who could never

leave me. Only I had the power to put him down. From holding his hand I learned that

Isabel’s father had been a too-fun guy and that she was a too-fun girl. Her sisters were

unamusing, but they were married, therefore able—at least on paper—to escape

loneliness. I had a crush on one of Isabel’s suitors, the super-American Casper

Goodwood, a guy with a “Jaw of the somewhat angular mould which is supposed to

16 “Temple of Wings,” Berkeley Historical Plaque Project, accessed May 24, 2015, http://berkeleyplaques.org/plaque/temple-of-wings/. 17 Henry James, The Portrait o f a Lady (Middlesex: Penguin, 1982), 31. 102

bespeak resolution.”18 By the end of the chapter his chin was pointing toward Isabel; I slid off the bed to call Ora yet again.

Chapters started taking me forty-five minutes, even an hour, to finish. At it since just after breakfast, I’d planned on gobbling at least a third of the book before supper but by the end of the afternoon I was only on Chapter 9. Forty-six more to go! While Isabel visited Lord Warburton’s place I started thumbing ahead toward Isabel’s future with a cruel husband.

Suddenly it was five-thirty and I was down on the ground floor where ladies with peeling lips guarded turkey legs, cranberry salsa, and fries. Taped near the register was a handwritten sign: Have a Happy Cali-Mex Thanx. My dinner was a dollar—twenty-five cents over regular nights. I wedged my tray beside Violet’s, sat beneath exhausting green light and gnawed, unable to quit looking over her shoulder at the pay phone near the bathroom.

“Back in a minute.”

I dropped a nickel and dialed. Eight-four-three-two-six-seven-three. I couldn’t tell if my finger was sticky from the dinner or the numbers. Beep-beep-beep. I canceled the call, wiped my hand on my pants, returned my money, redialed, waited. My hail was one thing and Ora’s response quite another. I was determined to close the rift.

NOTE TO SELF: ORA LOST HER HUSBAND IN VIETNAM

18 Ibid, 36. 103

I ran past a line of liquid ambers then into that little concrete alley lined with cramped collegiate shops selling not Cal pullovers and mugs but irregularly issued periodicals, or gold-filtered Sherman smokes, or crumbling maps. Against my back, not hot not cold not warm not cool yet all of them was breath barreling up from the south, the intelligence known as the Pineapple Express, toppling and lifting and abiding by me, twisting me toward the girl of my world, Ms. Ora Rose Blau.

19

19 Glitch: Sather Lane Steps, 2015, digital photograph by the author. 104

A bank of pay phones loomed inside the Student Union. Though the door was chained I yanked its bar several times. My stringy hair lifted; the wind hollered, then paused—a glitch—before sending me into Sproul Plaza.

The Daily Cal kiosk was flanked with two phones. Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep held me until I remembered there was a booth inside Wheeler Hall. The three minutes it’d take to get there might make all the difference. Wheeler’s far left door was open but that wound up not mattering—I was too disappointed to retrieve my only nickel, something I greatly regretted a couple of minutes later as I passed the phone on Euclid that used to be just after Rather Ripped Records when you headed up the hill.

My tennies were starting to slip in the rapidly increasing rain; I had to catch myself from hitting the pavement. I wouldn’t let myself die until I’d reached Ora’s voice.

NOTE TO SELF: CLASS DIFFERENCES SET UP INCONSISTENT PARENTING

While writing this I’ve often considered flying back to Berkeley—maybe even driving, or taking the train—letting its good air return me to an age without much of a past, to thoughts empty of Fawnee and the Man Who Belongs at Rock Bottom, the man who might’ve stood beside me and said, “Our family: you, me, and our child, are beautiful as is, therefore our family, you and I and our child, right now, this very moment, are enough.” 105

Mom once said, “Sheila. It’s not that Greg couldn’t love you. He wouldn’t.”

“Just like you wouldn’t stop yourself from throwing ice cubes at Dad when he forgot the Dijon?” I shouted before slamming down the receiver—or so I wished. I’m

Mouse, remember? I nod and umm-hmmm until my neck aches.

After the decade was over I’d be pogoing to X in Barrington Hall but wouldn’t mean it. I was just tagging after Gregory. I’ve always been a rat without a tail. After I had

Fawnee, wouldn’ts became couldn’ts, but on the night of Thanksgiving, 1972, I refused to stop myself from mounting the marble stairs to Ora’s front door (gingerly, for they were dangerously sleek in the torrent), consumed by the memory of Chancellor Bowker’s reception at the Faculty Club, when Ora’s white-gloved hand pinched an out-of-season strawberry as if it were a boxed chocolate. “They get everything from Alpha Beta,” she said. She lifted her stained finger to her lips.

I pressed her bronze doorbell.