Car Pool (8 page)

Shay adroitly missed the two potholes lurking in the Emeryville curve. She was glad she hadn’t offended Anthea. The fog was lifting to make way for moist spring heat. It would continue to warm up into June, Anthea had said, then the fog would come in and it would be summer in San Francisco.

Anthea murmured, “God, it’s a beautiful city. It always looks so fresh and clean in the morning.”

“I like Berkeley, but I wish I could afford to live in the city.” She kept her eyes on the traffic, but stole glances at the tiers of hills behind and south of the skyscrapers marking the financial district. She’d

driven around the Noe Valley and Mission neighborhoods. Some were pretty bad, some were pretty nice, but they were all part of an amalgam of people who looked different. The kind of people she never saw at the refinery. The kind of people who looked alive. She’d been in more countries and American cities than she could count. New York had been home base for much of her youth, but San Francisco had caught her fancy.

She lost sight of the city as they merged onto 580. They chugged past an ancient VW minivan that was plastered with stickers bearing slogans like “Promote Homosexuality” and “Queer is Here.” Well, that was another reason she liked the Bay Area. Shay liked all the gay people. She saw Anthea glance at, then away from the minivan, and wondered, not for the first time, what Anthea would think if she knew Shay was a lesbian. Anthea seemed so … unreachable that Shay was sure they’d never discuss it.

Given the fun they’d had flipping off the Volvo, maybe Anthea wasn’t as square as she seemed. She’d just found out yesterday that Anthea was 34. She looked 34, but Shay had thought she looked young for her age — lots of good makeup could do that — somewhere near 40 from the way she acted. No way did she think Anthea was only six years older than herself.

If they weren’t in the car pool would Shay ever consider making a friend of Anthea? They spent a lot of time together and it was slow going getting to know her. It probably would have been too much of an effort if she’d met Anthea at the supermarket or the library. About once a week they would do

something — like flipping that Volvo off — that was in complete harmony, as if they’d known each other for a long time. And sometimes they’d have conversations that touched on more than the weather, food and Star Trek — although Anthea’s conversations about food bordered on the deliciously obscene and orgiastic. Shay guessed she was a heck of a chef. But on just about any other topic Anthea had a wall around her that Shay respected. She understood wanting privacy.

Traffic slowed to a sedate fifty as drivers spotted a CHP car on the shoulder up ahead. Shay gave up the complex thinking and concentrated on survival.

During Memorial Day weekend, it came to Anthea that she was turning into a mushroom. Except for the necessities of shopping, she never went anywhere. She’d even turned her ballet tickets back to the box office as a donation so they could sell them again. Was she just sitting around waiting for something to happen? She refused to think that subconsciously she was waiting for Lois to come back. Maybe she was waiting for something else to fill up some of the hole Lois had left. Granted she looked forward to work more since she’d been able to hire another analyst, and to the car pool and talking to Shay. But wasn’t life supposed to be more than that? It had been nearly six months since she had broken up with Lois and those ties were still there, like Jacob Marley’s chains, weighing Anthea down until she could hardly move.

On Saturday afternoon, she found herself

considering reading Pride and Prejudice again. That or Anna Karenina — now that would certainly cheer her up. She had finally managed to wade through the Proust she’d told herself to read just about all her life. She clicked through all sixty-three cable channels, watched an episode of Perry Mason she’d seen before and ate a box of crackers, then enjoyed two of her remaining eight cigarettes for the day. She let herself sigh over Delia Street, whom she’d had a crush on since she was twelve or so. The fact that she was still smoking really depressed her. She thought she’d be able to drop off two cigarettes a month and by now, she’d have just about kicked the habit.

As she shuffled back into the kitchen to forage for more junk food, she realized she felt cooped up and stifled. She never went anywhere anymore. What’s the matter, she asked herself. Afraid you’ll run into Lois? The least she could do was go to the library. She hadn’t been in weeks, and then it was just to toss the books into the return deposit. Well, it would be something to do and she could pick up a burger on the way home. As if, she told herself, she didn’t have time to cook.

An hour later, after spending too much time deciding how one should dress for the library, Anthea strolled between aisles of fiction. She pulled books she had read from the shelves, put them back, and wondered what she might like to read that was new and exciting… anything to make Saturday nights shorter.

As she turned the corner, a thin, tall trade paperback caught her eye. She casually read the title, then casually slid it off the shelf. She turned

away from the rest of the aisle for maximum privacy and examined the back cover. Yes, it was a novel for lesbians. And she hadn’t read it.

She glanced over at the checkout counter. A woman who looked just like the librarian at her junior high school was working there. She couldn’t just check out one book… could she? Maybe she should look for some others. But she wanted to rush right home and read this book. Hurriedly, she gathered a few mysteries she’d read a long time ago. She carefully hid the trade paperback among the other books and then waited in line at the counter. It’s the Gay Nineties, she told herself.

When she reached the front of the line she handed the stack over and held her breath. A few moments later, the librarian handed the entire stack back with a mere “happy reading.” No significant eye contact, no disapproval.

Gees, Andy, what did you expect? This is Berkeley, for God’s sake.

She picked up a burger at Oscar’s on the way home, then spent the remainder of the day on the sofa. She devoured the book — she wanted more. It had been a while since she’d read any fiction for lesbians. She’d go back to the library after work on Tuesday. Heck, she could just run over to Boadecia’s Books. Just because she’d only gone there with Lois didn’t mean she couldn’t go by herself.

Sunday was looking to be tedious, so Anthea knuckled down and cleaned. She got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed the laundry room floor — something she hadn’t done in a year at least, and Lois’s running shoes had left black marks everywhere. She applied every ounce of pressure she

could to the marks and realized she was scrubbing away Lois, not the black marks. Well, the black marks came off too, but every one of them was Lois. It had been too many months and Anthea finally felt as if she was free of needing Lois.

If I had a daughter, Anthea thought, I’d give her one piece of advice: never date or sleep with anyone you meet in a support group, even after the support group is over. She’ll know too much about all your buttons. Lois, she knew, had pushed them all.

She sat back and studied the floor. She could eat off it now. Her shoulders ached, but she was a woman with a mission.

Anthea decided it was time for an extermination which required stamping every bit of Lois’s essence from every corner of the house for personal health and safety reasons. She’d spent nearly a half a year in a blue funk. No more moping! In addition to good old-fashioned dusting, scrubbing and vacuuming, she cleaned out the closets, organized the pots and pans, and threw away every piece of Tupperware that did not have a functional lid. She consolidated multiple cans of the same spices into one and then organized them alphabetically. Lois had said her spice rack was anal retentive and Anthea had believed her. Now she decided there was nothing wrong with organized spices, not when you cooked a lot. Her conscience reminded her that she hadn’t really cooked anything in six months.

To her eyes, as she looked around, everything was shining and bright, almost as it had been after construction had finished. Her nose, which smelled more scents now that she smoked less, appreciated the aroma of furniture polish. She could think of the

fire and starting over without a wrench of pain — that was thanks to the support group, just to be fair. A support group for lesbians who had lost everything in the fire had brought Lois into her life. When they had realized that Lois also worked for NOC-U, having dinner, then car pooling, then sleeping together, then living together — it had seemed like fate. Hah, Anthea thought.

Nearly six months was long enough to recover from Lois. She’d gotten over the fire faster than that. She’d worked out the strongest of her mixed love-hate feelings about her parents in less than that. It was time to get over Lois. And, just because the house smelled so nice after she’d vacuumed the carpet freshener up, she decided she wouldn’t smoke in the house anymore. She’d only smoke outdoors. She’d been trying to quit since New Year’s … it was time to finish the job. She fell into bed exhausted and slept better than she had in weeks.

She used her holiday to reward herself, so she made an extravagant trip to Macy’s at Hilltop — it was White Flower Day — and returned with new kitchen towels, linens and comforter for the bed, bath towels, and a silk plant for the table in the foyer. She had chosen less exotic colors and patterns than Lois would have, but screw Lois, she thought. She neatly packed several boxes of brilliant-hued linens and wrote herself a note to call the Salvation Army tomorrow. Bye bye, Lois.

She sat down on a low ottoman to assess her last big job. The albums and CDs were a mess, partly because Lois’s had been removed willy-nilly and partly because Lois had never bothered to file back anything she removed. Anthea pressed her lips

together. Okay, maybe organizing spices was not essential, but Lois had actually implied Anthea was anal retentive for wanting her music organized. Suddenly awash with fury, she pulled all the CDs off the shelves and began stacking them by classification. Bach was the start of one stack, with the Tallis Scholars and Paganini, but not REO Speedwagon or the Police — they went in the Rock stack — was that too much to ask? And Teresa Trull and Bonnie Raitt and Sweet Honey in the Rock were in a class by themselves, not just hodgepodged in with the GoGos and the Carpenters — was that too much to ask? Was it too much to ask for order and just a bit of discipline?

Halfway down the stack she found one of Lois’s CDs: Hall & Oates’ Greatest Hits. How did I actually sleep with a person who owned this? She took the CD out to the garage and set it down on the small workbench. Bye bye, Lois.

It only took one whack with a hammer to bust the case and two more to mangle the CD completely.

Well. That felt better than a bataka bat on a pillow. She dumped the pieces into the garbage can.

A couple of hours later she forced herself to stop smiling because her face was actually beginning to hurt. She wished she knew how to whistle. Lauren Bacall had made it sound so easy.

“How was your day?” Anthea buckled up and started the car, immediately pressing the control for air-conditioning. The car interior was searing hot after sitting in the sun all day. Shay smiled her

answer as she buckled herself in, wincing as the heat penetrated her thin T-shirt. She resisted the temptation to close her bleary eyes.

She could easily let the heat relax her muscles and drop off to sleep. Anthea handled the car so smoothly and competently that Shay had often been able to sleep on the way to work without a single disturbed moment. The extra half hour or so was keeping her alive. But sleeping on the way home, too … well, that seemed rude and it made her groggy at the pizza parlor. So she held her eyes open wide and watched Anthea’s hands on the wheel, not gripping too tightly or too casually. Smooth, controlled. She wondered if Anthea was always that smooth.

Shay blinked several times and realized where her silent musings were drifting. She had promised herself that she wouldn’t do this. It just wasn’t appropriate, nor did it have any chance of coming to fruition. Still, Anthea was easy on Shay’s tired eyes. She tried to remember why she had initially disliked Anthea.

She hadn’t had a lover since Kuwait — a tempestuous affair with an engineer who, after the job finished, had gone back to the girlfriend she’d finally told Shay existed. Shay hadn’t really been upset. Her father and her career had absorbed all her time. Maybe that had been the wrong thing to do. Without her father, it had all just slipped through her fingers.

And for months now, she had been spending two hours each day with, in Shay’s humble and lustful opinion, this womanly-soft and attractive person. Still, Anthea was not her type. She was a Yuppie

for starters. And not in the least political. And not possibly a lesbian, something that really was key to a successful affair. She was only thinking this way because they spent so much time together — it was inevitable, yet inappropriate. Besides, Shay told herself sternly, she had other things to think about.

Like the two paychecks in her fanny pack. Shay sighed. Her libido catalyzed from a helium isotope to lead. They totaled just over twelve hundred. Somehow, when she’d taken this job, she’d thought the pizza parlor would be just temporary. Just a few more months. Well, it had been a few more months. She’d even worked Memorial Day. She tried to add up her finances and make the reality come out differently. Four hundred for rent, fifty for water and utilities. Eight hundred left. Two fifty for the car payment, one hundred for food — peanut butter and jelly was her staple — about one hundred for gas and insurance. That left three hundred.

And that was fifty bucks short of what her first-of-the-month pay had to contribute to the middle-of-the-month checks for the hospital and funeral bills. Her tip money would probably just cover the gap as usual, but that meant no movies or paperbacks, which is what her tip money usually went for. She went over the numbers again in her head. The bottom line remained unchanged. A couple of hours of overtime at the refinery would have made all the difference, but there had been a month-long moratorium on that. She chewed the inside of one cheek and tried not to resent Anthea. The Legend’s hubcaps would probably cover a month’s rent.