Autobiography of Us (18 page)

“Hey.” Someone was calling after me with an aggrieved edge to her voice, as though she’d been calling for a while. “Hey, you. Rebecca.”

If it was strange to hear my name being called, it was stranger still to realize as I turned that I hadn’t mistaken the voice. “Here I am,” I said, turning. I gave an awkward wave. “Happy graduation, I guess.”

“Cut it out, will you?” Alex leveled her finger at me. “I’d like to get something straight,” she said. “I don’t want you leaving here under any false pretenses.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” I said bitterly. “Everyone’s made themselves very clear.”

“Look at you,
summa cum
everything. You make me so mad, I could spit.”

I noticed then that the silk on my left shoe was yellowed around the toe, a spot like a watermark widening across a ceiling; it was the sort of detail that never would have escaped my mother’s eagle eye a year ago. “What do you want?”

“World peace?” She gave me a flash of teeth, the crooked one in the front like someone had pushed it in. “Justice for all? Or maybe I’ve just been thinking. Imagine, today marks the first day of the rest of our lives.” She said it grandly, biting every word off. I realized she was quoting our student president, a nervous boy named George who’d given a speech that morning and whom no one, so far as I could tell, remembered voting for. “Maybe I got a little sentimental.”

There was a small silence. I could hear the sounds of the celebration going on without us, the shouting and the laughter, the click of all those cameras going off, one by one.

“It’s over, Becky,” she said. Sighed it, really, in a voice so flat and quiet I hardly recognized it as hers. “
Finis.
I find the whole thing too terrible for words.” She turned away from me abruptly to frown across the quad in the direction of our old dormitory, the brick turned to orange in the sun, the windows shuttered. The rooms, I knew, emptied by now of everything that told of their former inhabitants: the photographs cluttering the bedside tables, the posters tacked up along the walls, the army of lipsticks lining the bureaus’ edges. When she turned back, I saw that her eyes were red, though she was smiling now, shaking her head. “Look at us,” she said, laughing. “We look like we’re going to a funeral. We’re supposed to be celebrating, for Christ’s sake. We’re supposed to be cracking open the goddamn champagne.”

“I can’t say I feel especially celebratory.”

“Me neither.” She exhaled loudly. “Pity. Most of the time, I’d kill for a glass of champagne.”

We stood another moment in silence.

“I’m glad it’s over,” I said finally.

“Mine eyes have seen the glory?”

“I have my principles.”

She produced a cigarette from her clutch and lit it. “Enlighten me.”

“I’m sick of it, that’s all. I’m so sick of everything I could scream.”

“So now what?” She blew out a ring of smoke, then another, another, the
O
’s loosening like lassos in the humid air. “What are your intentions for the future, young lady?”

“I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”

She flicked her cigarette impatiently. “Don’t be mean.”

“San Francisco.” There was a part of me that desperately wanted her to know—had been waiting to tell her, really, disappointed to think it might be some time before she heard the news. “Those are my intentions. Singular: I have exactly one intention.” I’d learned the bus schedule by heart weeks ago. It left three times daily from downtown L.A. I would take the overnight in no more than a few hours, the note to my parents already written and sealed in an envelope I would slip under their door.
By the time you read this,
it began,
I’ll be gone.

“City on the hill—Christ, that’s Rome, isn’t it. Or is it Philadelphia?” She looked at me.

I shrugged, summoning a confidence I can honestly say I felt no part of. “Anyway, I’m going.”

“As of?”

“Immediately. More or less.”

“Parents?” I shook my head. “Good girl. They’d just make things complicated. We’re twenty-two, for Christ’s sake. You’d think at twenty-two they’d stop making things so damn complicated.” She smoked another moment or two. “Listen,” she said abruptly. “I know things have gotten a little dicey these past few months—”

“You can say that again.”

She ignored me. “—But that doesn’t mean I don’t support the effort. I’m behind you on this one. One hundred percent.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well. Thanks, I guess.”

She watched me a minute, arms crossed. “Just promise you won’t go out there and fuck up your life,” she said finally.

“I thought I already did.”

“Don’t be idiotic.” I thought I heard my name:
Rebecca?
My parents would be looking for me.
Re-bec-ca?
“I choose you, understand? I get to say who, and I choose you.” She smiled faintly. “I happen to be rather fond of you, dummy.”

I looked down quickly to hide my blush. “And you?” I said. “What will you do?”

Another burst of applause broke out somewhere behind us; a man laughed, the sound of it so like my father’s I startled. It occurred to me that I hadn’t heard him laugh in some time now. “That’s sweet,” she said. “Don’t you worry. I’ve got my own plans.”

“Then I guess this is goodbye.”

She nodded as though I’d done something right. “You won’t forget,” she said—declared it, really. “A promise is a promise is a promise.” She winked. “God bless Stein, the old hag.” And then she turned and walked away, and, because of her white dress and the bright afternoon sun, she seemed to half-disappear. There one moment and gone the next.

III

I arrived in San Francisco during the summer of 1966. It will be difficult to reconcile what I’m about to tell you with what you already know of that time. I know what your history books say, that the streets of San Francisco were being stormed and the young people of that city and cities all across America were rising up against the old guard and tearing the country’s idols to shreds. Maybe so. But I’m afraid what I saw hardly amounted to a revolution, no more than a few groups of girls and boys my age or younger standing around on the sidewalks here and there, smoking and leaning up against the storefronts along Haight Street, their laughter drifting through the cool air. They might have been the younger siblings of my Windridge classmates, fresh-faced and eager but with that restless look to their eyes. The Bobby Pierce look. I will admit to crossing the street to avoid them when I could, though they parted amiably enough when I had no choice but to pass. I don’t suppose I would have been of any interest to them in my skirt and blouse, my purse slung over one shoulder, my hair clipped back from my face.

I was lucky in that I found a job easily enough. I worked as a waitress in an ancient Italian restaurant down by the Embarcadero, the kind with checked napkins and the tables set with old wine bottles choked with candle wax. It was a depressing sort of place, though at the time I believe I found it faintly glamorous, or I found the idea of it glamorous: me, a working girl with a pouch in my apron for keeping tips, the collar of my blouse ironed flat every afternoon before I came in. I’d never worked in a restaurant before, and I surprised myself with how slow I was to learn, taking notes as one of the girls explained, for the hundredth time, how to fill out the order tickets or fold the napkins into neat triangles, where to put the used silverware from the cleared tables, where to scrape the uneaten food.

In retrospect I wish I hadn’t been so shy around them, the other girls. They were nice girls, all of them, from small towns with funny names like Altoona, Kansas, or Higginsville, Missouri. Towns they shrugged off when I asked them, their pasts old skin they’d shed and left behind with what appeared to be the greatest of ease. I can still see them all as though it were yesterday: Lana, with the round, sweet face that reminded me of Betsy; Elaine, the blonde with the lisp and the pert nose; Marcy, the black-haired girl I’d overhead discussing an affair she was having with her father’s friend—
imagine
, she said, giggling; Anne, the small, less good-looking one who wore a constant look of mild agitation, as though she knew at any moment someone might come along and size up the group, find her wanting.

They were girls not so unlike the ones I’d left in Pasadena, the kind you might have found in any city across America at the time. They saved their tips in an envelope stashed under the mattress and called home every Sunday; they liked having a cigarette before service began and I joined them from time to time behind the restaurant, just to listen to them chatter, the smoke drifting overhead in a purplish haze.
Come out
, they called across the room at night after our shifts were done, the floors swept clean, the glassware polished to gleaming.
Come on
, one of them would say as they stood there good-naturedly pushing one another in front of the lone mirror, drawing on their bright mouths and sketching in those eyebrows that gave them a look of uniform surprise.
One drink won’t kill you.
But I only smiled when they asked, saying I was tired or that my feet hurt. I went home instead to the sublet I shared with another girl, a tense, heavyset graduate student named Isabel who was writing her dissertation on Catherine the Great, as I remember it, and who seemed, quite honestly, hardly to notice whether I came or went.

* * *

But you’ll want to know how I ended up with your father. I’m afraid it isn’t much of a story, in the end. As the new girl at the restaurant, I worked all the holidays—Thanksgiving and Christmas, New Year’s Eve, the last proving a particularly trying night, long and loud and full of big tables always needing this or that, all of them staying far too long. It was well past three by the time everyone cleared out. We were all exhausted, our aprons damp with God knows what, the floor littered with bits of colored confetti someone had thrown at midnight, our feet scattering it across the room as we ran back and forth from the kitchen to our tables until it looked, Elaine said, like a bomb had gone off in a rainbow. We brought the last of the dishes to the kitchen and wiped everything down, turned the chairs onto the tables, and went to work with our brooms and dustpans. I always liked that part of the night. The lights came up and everything that poor restaurant tried to be—a romantic place, a spot with a kind of old-world elegance—was exposed for what it was, the linoleum floor hideous, the bar worn and carved down by endless penknives, the wallpaper ancient, peeling.

“You.” I looked up from where I was sweeping one last pile into the dustpan to find Lana standing over me. “You’re not going anywhere tonight.” She turned to the others. “Agreed?”

“That’s right,” said Elaine, snapping her rag. “It’s New Year’s, for crying out loud.”

Lana smiled. “We don’t bite.”

I opened my mouth to protest and a vision of my room rose up in front of me—the drab walls, the light of my single lamp, Isabel shooting me a dour look from where she no doubt sat curled up in an armchair, thumbing through some treatise on one thing or another, her pen at the ready.

“One drink,” I said finally, and Lana clapped her hands and cheered.

We ended up in a part of the city I’d never seen before, somewhere not far from the Golden Gate Bridge. The air when we climbed out of Lana’s car was damp and heavy with salt; the breeze was surprisingly strong. I was glad to see the bridge through the fog, its shape distinct even in the dark. But then I have always loved the sight of bridges—they seem to me to be one of the great miracles of human ingenuity, testament to the kind of vision I attribute to nothing less than true genius. I remember reading once that the architect for the Brooklyn Bridge became paralyzed just before construction began, that he was forced to observe the goings-on from his home in Brooklyn Heights. It seemed exactly right. You would have to be trapped in order to pull off something as magnificent as that, to believe so deeply, with such absolute conviction, in the possibility of such freedom.

But I’m afraid despite the bridge I regretted coming almost immediately. I wrapped my scarf around my neck and hung back, watching the other girls stumble down toward the dunes, where a small crowd stood around a bonfire. When my eyes had adjusted to the dim light, I saw I was no more than a hundred feet or so from the water, the shoreline dotted here and there with birds glimmering palely in the predawn darkness: sandpipers, I knew the little ones were, their heads bobbing as they ran back and forth. Oliver had been a bird lover as a younger boy, the hummingbirds that came to my mother’s garden to feed an endless source of delight. We’d sat on the bench together countless times while our fathers made polite conversation and watched them, Oliver pointing out how to identify the black-chinned variety and the one called calliope, showing me pictures once in the little book he carried around in those days—woodpeckers, grackles, robins, terns. I squinted through the dark now, watching as a lone pair of gulls skimmed out over the waves and dove toward the horizon, their sleek bodies disappearing into the water without so much as a splash.

I must have kicked off my shoes at some point, wanting to dig my toes into the sand. Or maybe I was all at once hot, or claustrophobic, or maybe I felt a sudden sadness steal over me at the thought of Oliver, how poorly I’d treated him. I know I felt that loneliness that comes when I am around too many people, that I wished desperately to be back in my drab little room, where I could pull the covers up around my shoulders and fall into a deep, dreamless sleep. When I felt my eyes begin to prick with tears, I looked up to where a few scattered clouds blocked the stars and searched in vain for the moon, the sun still no more than a faint glow along the horizon. The sand turned cold as I headed toward the shoreline, the tide working at the skin between my toes. Another gull veered down not a hundred feet from where I was, and I watched it skim the waves, wings stretched out to either side like fingers.

I don’t remember where I read something about the idea of a vanished twin. It must have been in one of my biology classes, a lesson on the reproductive system or fetal development, or perhaps it was later, when I was pregnant with one of your brothers and read about it, the way women do, as though we might uncover some nugget of information to protect ourselves against the inevitable pain. I don’t know. But I thought of her that night, as I stepped into the cold water: my vanished twin. How could I not? Faced with a crowd like that one, she would have
done
something. Snapped to life rather than faded as I did. I watched the gull rise up from the surface, wings beating hard. For one odd, suspended moment, it seemed to me that I saw her out there in the freezing water, the outline of her half-submerged body gleaming white in the moon. In that moment I felt the absence of her friendship as sharply as though the break were fresh. Or perhaps I missed being young and foolish, or maybe I was simply cold, the water now up past my waist. The truth is that some things, even with time, never reveal themselves entirely. I raised myself up on my tiptoes, tucked my chin under, and dove.