And She Was (27 page)

AUGUST 24, 1986

I
parked my bike in the lot between the Elbow and the Old Voyagers. I needed to know more. Especially now. He’d been gone three days. In Thad’s wake, those old women became an obsession. Not much was different. I’d been alone most of the time before he left. The truth was that Thad’s leaving didn’t create the obsession as much as the obsession allowed me to let Thad leave. I just felt I was on to something, and I was willing to go manless for a while to track it down.

I’d finished or skimmed all the books by now, at least the parts about the mummies. But none of them had mentioned any current mummy use or anything about why old women would still be visiting the caves. In fact, according to the books, only men had used the corpses. Apparently mummies along with hunting weapons had been taboo for Aleut women. Few of the books mentioned women at all, except under the headings of kinship relations and labor divisions.

The wind was a hand holding the door shut, and I had to yank twice before I won.

Anna didn’t look up. “Why are you here?” She sliced the blade of an X-Acto knife through a strip of tape on a shipping box.

“I finished the books,” I lied again. “Thought I’d get more.”

“Over there.” She gestured with the knife toward a book-heaped table.

I perused the books, carefully keeping the piles the way she’d organized them. I didn’t see what I was looking for. I glanced back at Anna, slicing tape from another box. I took a deep breath.

“Do you have anything, any books that….” I paused, looked up at my Aleut Mona Lisa, hovering over a shelf of patterned baskets. “Anything about the women?”

“It’s all in the books I gave you. The menstrual customs, the birthing customs. What they ate, wore. It’s all there.”

“I know. I’ve read all that. I want to know what she knows,” I said, nodding toward the sketch.

She followed my gaze. Then she laughed.

“That,” Anna said, “is not in the books.” She lay the X-Acto on the counter and walked toward the picture. “Look at her eyes. What do you see?”

I stepped closer, blocked the lower half of her face with my hand. “They don’t focus,” I said. “She’s looking right at me but not seeing me.”

Anna nodded. “Yes. She’s disassociated part of herself. At least from the artist. Tell me about her mouth.”

I’d done this before, stared at that mouth, trying to figure out its secret. “I don’t know.” I kept looking, shielding the top of her face now. “It’s too perfect. Sensual. It doesn’t belong to the same face.”

“Yes.” Anna nodded again.

We both stared, heads tipped back, transfixed.

“The eyes of a victim. The mouth of a victor. It’s her little secret. The artist didn’t even see it.”

“What? What secret?”

“She’s won. Or she knows she will win. She knows her power is deeper and older than his.”

“That’s it.” I squeezed Anna’s arm. And she let me. Suddenly I got that twisted smile, and the knowledge sent a jolt of what could only be hope through me. She wasn’t a victim. The men are gone, people are dying, and still she’s not a victim. “She’s mocking him.”

She flashed her eyebrows up and grinned. “Um-hmm,” she said with a single slow nod. “They’ll never tell you that in the books or in the
schools. They tell you conquest is a man’s game and women are the innocent victims. But they forget what it means to be a mother. They forget that whatever merged culture comes next is hers.”

A wad of saliva collected in my mouth. I swallowed. “She’s in control, isn’t she. And she knows it.”

“Yes. No conqueror, no army, no force can stand against her. She is a mother. And her power will outlast them all.”

They weren’t victims. Shit, I’d had it all wrong. They knew how to pretend, but that’s all it was—a pretense. They had these warriors, conquerors all around them day and night, and they played the part. This girl wanted us, so many years in the future, to know. They weren’t victims, at least not for long. In contradiction to all the histories and firsthand accounts, she fixed an expression on her face that would outlast them all. That would tell us she had taken back the night.

With our heads tipped back and our fingers steepled in front of our mouths, Anna and I grinned at each other, wide and open. I cannot tell you how welcomed I felt then, how accepted. Anna was actually guiding me toward this revelation, speaking to me like I could understand, like I deserved to understand. I felt like we were on the same side. So I let my guard down, and I made a mistake.

“What about the mummies? Do you have any books about them?”

Her head shot up. The spell broke. “We’re closing now,” she said, marching back to the counter and starting in on the boxes again with the X-Acto.

“Oh.” I grabbed a couple of books on the table, one on kayak designs, another on edible plants. “Okay, I’ll just take these.”

“Time to go,” she said, and she sliced the X-Acto along the edge of her finger. I saw drops of blood splattered on the cardboard. When I didn’t move, she came from behind the counter, the X-Acto still in her hand, the blood dripping down her wrist. The blade scraped against the wooden door as she pushed it and held it against the wind. She fixed me with another of those pinned and wriggling stares.

I set the books down, suddenly aware that I’d failed before I’d begun. I eased by her out the door, keeping my eye on the knife. She pulled it shut as I stood on the tiny plank porch. I heard the lock slide shut. I felt for the edge of the step and backed away from the door.

Have you ever really felt the wind? I mean stood in it, let it beat against you, let it come inside you? The first week of September came like that. It blew from the hills, from the sea, never stooping to a breeze. It brought an eerie solitude to the cabana, where now I was alone for good. I’d heard he was in Anchorage. The skipper was moving the boat down to Seattle, and Thad would have some time off. Fall lurched into town. Patterns changed. The sun grew more cautious, hunkering lower every day. People stayed indoors. The Elbow Room’s usually thin afternoon crowd grew.

I pulled up a stool next to Carl.

“Look,” Marge said, holding a lopsided but somewhat charming and dainty grass basket on her open palm. “I finished it.” Marge’s red, red lips protruded ever so slightly, daring me.

I managed a neutral, “Nice.”

She set it carefully back on a shelf behind the bar, where it listed to the left over a slight concavity in its side. Marge admired it there for a moment then turned back to me. “Got a letter for you,” she said, sliding an envelope toward me. “Where’s Thad? I heard the boat’s moving down south for the winter,” she said as I ripped open the envelope.

“I don’t know,” I said, opening the letter. “Gone, I guess.”

“Gone?” She stopped when she saw my face.

The letter was from my mom.

My stomach lurched. I checked the post date. The letter had taken two weeks to find me. He’d been dead two weeks. And Mom, she’d been waiting for me to call. She’d wait for me to call, wouldn’t she? She wouldn’t just hop a plane?

Marge hunkered over the bar toward me. “What?” she asked.

I looked up at her. “My dad died.”

She stood back and stared at me for a minute. “Hey,” she yelled, and all conversation halted. “Brandy’s dad died. We’re gonna remember him with a round of drinks.”

I hardly heard her. Something was shouting in my head. The men are gone. The men are gone. Then in a whisper—you are alone.

I don’t know how long I sat there, closing my eyes to the sound inside. When I looked up I saw about twenty guys, some I knew, some strangers, crowding around the bar. Liz was there, sitting at her post. Marge poured each a new drink. When they were all served, she turned to me. “Tell us about him.”

I looked around the room. Was this all I had, a group of strangers and half-strangers, willing to listen because a free drink had been poured? Was this the way I would see my dad, the last man standing in my life, gone? I bit my lower lip.

“His name was Henry. He died in a car he lived in. He was a drunk.” I didn’t want to tell them anything else. How he’d been when I was little. The way his mind could take apart an argument, diagnose its flaw, and rebuild a towering scaffold of an idea. How listening to him do it made me dizzy with the freedom of it, the freedom to think anew and form fresh concepts out of flawed ones. The careful way he read, putting ideas into a spare parts box that would, on another day, be used to create something unspoiled. The way I knew our minds worked in the same way, and the anticipation I felt at knowing I would be able to do it too someday. That we were alike and all I
needed was time and to keep watching him and to keep protecting his fragile gift from her.

“Can’t you think of something good to say?” Marge shot at me.

I thought for a moment.

“He dreamed, I guess.”

Marge raised her glass. “To Henry, the dreamer,” she shouted and tipped her drink back.

“To Henry, the dreamer,” the crowd repeated and drank.

I tipped back my own shot.

I eyed the telephone behind the bar. I wasn’t going to call. There was no fucking way I’d call her. Let her stick to her marina, California, polo-shirt-wearing men.

I drank too much. Everyone had to buy me a drink.

And I drank. My eyes kept traveling to the phone. I knew I should leave and was going through the steps necessary to get myself up, using visualization techniques to improve my odds of getting home safe, when Liz appeared by my side. I hadn’t seen her make the trip from the other side of the bar.

“He die alone?” She looked up at me with her half-tooth grin.

The entire bar hushed. Liz so rarely spoke, it was as if royalty had stepped into our dim, liquid world and silenced it.

“No. There was a dog.”

She nodded. “A dog.” Then she began to laugh. She cackled all the way to the bathroom door, stumbled, and groped for the light switch. Then she stopped, turned back to me. “A woman’s courage,” she said, “is often mistaken for insanity.”

Spotty chuckles skipped along the bar. People didn’t know quite how to take the exchange, and the snickers helped push it toward lightness.

I was just pissed. I hated that woman.

I hated her like I hated my mother. No way was I going to call her.

SEPTEMBER 5, 1986

O
ne image returned to me those next few days. I couldn’t say I was mourning. I’d lost Dad years before. I just had this picture in idle moments, a memory. Dad and I are at the lake. He’s given me this six-foot-tall inflatable Wild Turkey bottle, the kind liquor companies hand out to bars as decorative advertisements. He holds me onto the thing as it rolls in the water under me. The other kids are floating around on pink air mattresses and sea horse–heads rings. I remember thinking I am special. My dad has given me a floaty a whole lot bigger and a whole lot better. I am the only kid trying to float on a bottle of whiskey. We laugh, Dad and I, as the bottle rolls and bobs. I am six years old and riding the waves on a whiskey bottle.

The next day I fucked up twice. The first time, I screwed Tom and promised myself never to do it again. The second time, I screwed Tom and told him I’d think about coming with him to San Luis Obispo.

He showed up at the cabana about ten in the morning, all loaded with money and eager to get home. I knew the moment I opened the door where this was headed. I let him in anyway. Maybe I just didn’t want to think about Dad and the way he had died. Maybe I just welcomed anyone who would keep me from being alone. I made another
pot of coffee and shared Tom’s offered joint. He talked about waves and California, bonfires and boards. The sex was better this time, without the booze. He left with a smile three hours later to catch a flight back to Anchorage, then San Francisco.

I sat on my porch afterward and watched the clouds roll in from the ocean. This storm came with forthright intentions, the line between blue, sun-happy sky and blackness clear and brazen. It wanted you to expect it, to think about its approach. By the time it hit, I knew I’d fucked up. I’d screwed Tom out of boredom and habit and my instinct to hunt a new man. Not much different from a chick who screws a guy for his coke—instinct, boredom, habit. If I replaced Thad with Tom, I’d fall behind. I’d be just doing the same thing over again. That’s what I kept telling myself, although I couldn’t fill in the blank—behind what? I promised myself it wouldn’t happen again. And because I knew keeping promises was not my forte, I stayed when the rain and wind hit. I made myself say it out loud over and over. “I will not fuck around. I will not fuck around.”

And I really meant it. I did.

By six that evening the storm had eased into a lazy mist. I’d been practicing my alone skills, which meant I watched myself meander around the place, seeing what I’d do. I’d decided the only way to deal with it was to create a kind of alternate me, who could watch in a detached way and provide its own feedback. Baby steps. So far all I had done was play a tape, fold some laundry, smoke, make orange juice, and experiment with various hairstyles. The observer-me had been able to ascertain only that I was still pathetic, but there didn’t seem to be any more flakes on the floor.

I was riffling through the bookshelves, looking for something that had nothing to do with them and their past, when I found it. A card, tucked inside a pink envelope. At the bottom of the envelope a silver chain slithered from side to side when I tilted it. I was afraid to read the card and pulled it out slowly. Spires of monkshood, purple clusters reaching for the sky on the front, and Thad’s words inside—Think of me. I tipped the envelope up and the necklace slid out. A heart-shaped locket fell into my palm.

I stared at it, my mother’s warning tumbled from some locked space. “Who gave you this?” she says, ripping a tiny heart locket from my
neck. I am eleven and Nicky Robins gave it to me that afternoon at school. He shoved it into my hand and ran off with his friends. I’d been mesmerized. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I slipped the smooth chain over my head. Nicky. Nicky. Nicky. I’d said it as my fingers traced the shape.

“A boy at school,” I say, the tears heading for their ducts.

“Shit, Brandy.” Her tone softens, and she touches my cheek. “Didn’t I tell you, Never, ever, ever wear a locket like that, honey. It just sends the wrong message.”

“What message?”

“Just the wrong message. Remember that.”

I held Thad’s gift and brushed the heart’s face with my thumb, feeling the silver slip under my skin. I raised my palm above the envelope and let the locket fall, then tucked the card back inside and replaced it in the bookshelves.

No heart lockets. No heart lockets.

I heard her laugh again, soft at first, then spiraling upward until it filled the cabana.

I mistook it for my mother, at first.

“Shut the fuck up,” I yelled. “You were wrong, weren’t you? All wrong.” But as soon as I’d let the words out, I realized my mistake. It was Liz.

“Shut up,” I whispered.

The cackling sunk lower, eased into the floorboards, and left me in silence again.

I was still standing there, for how long I don’t know, when I heard the knock. I really didn’t expect it to be Tom. I suppose I should have known that his plane hadn’t been able to land, but I’d been so busy imagining my virtuous self and teetering near the insanity precipice, I didn’t prepare.

“Hey,” he said, all sheepish and wet.

He looked like one of those unkempt Eurail traveling guys you see crashed on airport seats, hair too long, bulky sweater, always alone, always drawing you toward them with the question “What did you find?”

Boredom, instinct, habit. “Why not,” I said and let him in.

We settled into the living room, cups of warm Baileys and coffee in hand. “I’ve spent the last several hours promising myself I wouldn’t
screw guys like you anymore,” I told Tom. I held my cup near my face, letting the steam drift over my skin.

“Are you shitting me?”

“No.”

He smiled. “That’s heavy. I can respect that, but you’ve got to ask yourself why.”

“Why not?” I realized then that by bringing up my promise, I’d offered him the role of adversary. I’d laid out the debate and given him a side to argue. He did it well. Of course, I hadn’t had much practice at refusing to be easy.

“No reason. Just, it doesn’t get you anywhere. What’s your destination? You gotta ask yourself that.”

“Somewhere else.”

“You’re stuck.”

I sipped my Baileys and thought about the way his hemp pullover pulled tight across his biceps when he gestured.

Then he laid the Zen-and-the-art crap on me. Seduction à la Robert Pirsig.

“Maybe your thinking’s too narrow. You ever read
Zen and the Art
?”

“Yeah.”

“This guy says you should just be okay with being stuck. He calls it the ‘psychic predecessor of all real understanding.’ You’re like stoked for something.”

“And what psychic gem am I stoked to understand?”

“Yourself.”

“Of course.” I actually hadn’t read all of the book. That quality section had done me in. “He also said motorcycles are rational machines. He’s full of crap.”

“Naw, you just aren’t letting yourself get into it. His stuff is major.” He pulled a copy of the book from his pack and flipped through pages. I’d seen this before, even done it a bit with
Atlas Shrugged
. You read some book at the right time in your life and start thinking that if everyone else read it too, the world would remake itself. You carry it around, underline parts, read it to friends, who say things like, “That’s deep, man.”

Tom knelt on the floor in front of me. “Listen to this.” He read from an underlined section. “‘We take a handful of sand from the endless
landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.’” He closed the book. “You got to open yourself up to it.”

“What you mean is I’ve got to open myself up to boinking you again.”

“Yeah, but to everything, to living radical. Come with me. Tomorrow morning, get on the plane with me. I need someone like you—you’re free. You’re like me. I can feel it. We’ll get an apartment on the beach. I’ll teach you to surf. It’ll be awesome.”

He pushed my legs apart and leaned in to me. I imagined myself on a beach, watching the surf, smoking a joint, the sun a poultice of heat. Trading men; trading lives. “‘We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people’s lives.’ Don’t pass unseen through mine.” His breath brushed my ears, and when he kissed me, I wanted him badly. Not because his sloppy philosophy had convinced me of anything but his irrelevant optimism, but because he was a man, and I had a habit of needing one.

As my shirt came off, he whispered, “The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans.” As my pants came off, he whispered, “‘The present is our only reality.’”

I wondered if I’d have to listen to this Zen shit through the whole thing, or if he’d shut up once my panties came off.

I didn’t go with him. Sun-drenched beach living seemed too bright, too hopeful. Besides, he’d be just one more, and I’d be just as stuck in the sunshine as I was here in the fog. He handed me his dog-eared copy of
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
at the door. “Read page one thirty-four, the underlined part,” he said and left me with a kiss and a couple of joints.

I sat down and flipped to the page.

So he’d known my frantic promise to myself was crap. The very words “I promise myself” convey the predicament. They set you against you—the advocate and the adversary. If you have to promise yourself, you’re doomed. Tom had known this.

Now I knew it too.