Stop That Girl (19 page)

Last of Our Tribe

One morning, like every morning, I walked my son to the corner to catch the bus for school. And then I just kept on going. I have to emphasize how uncharacteristic this was. I am not the type you see engaged in solo activities, jogging by or cycling up an incline. My pattern at that time was to struggle out of bed after pushing the snooze alarm three or four times and to throw a sweater on over my pajamas, fixing Will eggs and toast and dressing him, though not quite awake when he told me his dreams. After he took off in the school bus I’d walk quickly home and climb back into bed. I didn’t sleep the day away, however. Like a schoolgirl sneaking out for a smoke, I just liked knowing I could get away with those few extra moments unaccounted for in my room.

That day I simply didn’t feel like turning back. For one thing, I was having second thoughts about where we lived. It was poorly constructed, the part we lived in barely resembling a house. We had to climb forty shoddy wooden steps from the street to enter a side door next to a bare hill of mud, into a laundry room with cement slab floors, adjacent to an ancient Formica counter and a half-sized refrigerator that posed as a kitchen, before turning a corner and finding ourselves in either of two small bedrooms that looked down through the telephone wires at the street. We didn’t have a living room or any other rooms. Those were all upstairs. In other words, we lived on the bottom floor of a large ungainly structure that was built on an eroding hillside. The kind that folds up like a house of cards if there’s a lot of rain or an earthquake.

Because I lived in a house that didn’t resemble one, I noticed that I had started to feel somewhat less real myself. When we moved in, I thought I was a full standing member of the community, but by now I was starting to slouch around in the grocery store like a bottom-feeder. It wasn’t easy for Will to invite friends over, because there was no backyard or jungle gym. I couldn’t grow a garden on the dissolving hillside. I hated bringing groceries home and carrying them up the forty steps, especially if I had more than two bags. But it was hard to find places in this town. I really couldn’t complain.

It was a small beach town in central California called Rio del Mar. Will and I liked walking along the shore, pretending we were California Indians pushed to the edge of the continent. The rest of our kind had long ago been wiped out. We were the only two left. We had to find clever ways to survive. Anthropologists from Berkeley wanted to collect us and study our language, but so far we’d kept them at bay. We knew they wanted to put us in pants that were too short for us, publish books full of our secrets. We knew we didn’t want to end up that way.

After I walked another hour or so, it struck me that I’d really blown a fuse. I didn’t have a watch on, but I sensed how much time had passed since I’d said goodbye to Will. The sun was now high and bright, the birds taking wider circles in the sky. I began to wonder when I would stop and decide to turn around, and why a simple walk felt like something illicit. Yet I felt compelled to keep going in spite of my day’s plans, which included some typing I did for a few employers, some errands, and throwing the ingredients for beef stew into an electric crock.

I was good at humoring people, I thought, as I trudged through the sand. But it took its toll.

Last month my sister and her boyfriend paid us a visit from New York. My sister does modern dance, the real thing, her body as taut as a rifle. Her boyfriend is a statistics professor at NYU. Why they were coming I hadn’t been sure, considering how little they see of value in our life out here. To make it worse, the second day of their visit I was told by my landlord I had an hour to remove everything from our false kitchen and hide it so it didn’t look like we used it as a “real” kitchen. The inspectors were coming. Our whole arrangement depended on this. We could be evicted. The so-called kitchen was only there to make the bottom floor a separate unit and was not up to code. Some former tenant with a grudge had tattled. So my landlord, a melancholy Chinese man by the name of Jiao, had been plagued by surprise inspections ever since.

We had to act fast. My sister and I ran with our arms full of canned goods back and forth to the bedroom closets, and I filled up bags with food from the refrigerator, and she stacked dishes, even the dirty ones, into a big box, and then the statistics professor helped me lug the boxes out around the back of the house onto the muddy slope. All the while, Jiao was removing the rice-paper wall by the main stairs so that it looked like we all shared the real kitchen and lived together in one happy group.

“Couldn’t you find somewhere else to live?” my sister groused.

Stuffing kitchen things under my bed, I came upon a packet of photos from a time Will and I went to visit her. Will was a bald smiling baby then. My sister looked pretty, as usual. Her blond hair was longer, shiny and thick like a cascade of honey coming out of a beehive. Even as I was visiting, she accused me of never visiting, and I remembered how we had a rare quarrel.

“Next thing I know, we’ll find you living in a chicken coop,” she said to me now.

“What a great idea,” I said.

At that moment Jiao stuck in his head. “They are here,” he whispered.

The whole time the inspectors were inspecting, my sister and the statistics professor stood huddled together looking guiltier than criminals. I don’t think they’d ever done anything fishy between them in their lives. My sister thought our childhood was a Norman Rockwell painting, and the statistics professor was as colorless as a root from spending all his time in dark old buildings chiseling out figures. When the inspectors looked in on them, my sister and the statistics professor turned bright red.

“Nice day,” the man with the clipboard said.

“We’re just visiting,” the statistics professor said.

One night, soon after I moved back to this area, my sister and I both happened to watch a documentary about wolves. We talk a lot on the phone since our mother died, and chatting away we discovered the coincidence the next day. These wolves lived just like families as we knew them. The female wolf would send her man off to hunt, while she stayed home and took care of the children, giving them miniature lessons in hunting and warren-keeping until the father wolf came home at the end of the day. At that time, she would be so overjoyed to see him that she would begin to quaver. She would wag her tail so hard her whole body wagged too. She was quavering and wagging her body around and around her mate, unable to conceal her joy at seeing him again. That, my sister told me, was how she wanted to feel about the next man in her life.

It was an unusually good conversation. I had wanted to feel like a wagging, quavering wolf about someone someday too. At the time I was distracted with figuring out what I was doing here, but I still had a few old contacts and felt relatively at ease. I liked the sound the leaves and bushes made when a storm was coming in from the sea. Like they were shivering and quaking in advance of something special. I liked how long a day could seem when the weather was changing.

I had an odd habit in those first few months. I would drive downtown, park in a garage, then discover I was afraid to get out of my car. You’d think I’d not bother going downtown anymore, but I was optimistic that the problem would resolve itself and I would sit in the yellow light of the parking structure, listening to other car doors open and close, to the cries of young children pulled too hard by the arms, to radios suddenly snapping off and leaving the place quiet again for a moment or two.

And finally one day I managed it. Something propelled me from the car that day, perhaps the feel of a warm breeze scented with fish and madrone or maybe because I was still feeling charged up from that wolf-conversation I’d had with my sister. Anyway, I sat in a café with a notebook and started to jot down some thoughts. A man with a laptop before they were widely available smiled at me from across the room. He had long black hair and a big walrus mustache and it occurred to me that he was exactly my age, though it becomes harder and harder to tell. I smiled back and he made a beeline to my table.

“Whatcha working on?” he asked. “I saw you scribbling like crazy a few minutes ago.”

“Me?” I didn’t remember scribbling anything, but when I opened my notebook I saw that I had drawn a big tree. It was childish and the ballpoint of my pen had punctured the paper in several places, and an ugly blue tree in a lonely person’s notebook was not something to be proud of. “Funny,” I said. “I have a habit of doing that when I think.”

“And what were you thinking about?”

“One thing I like to think about,” I said, not hesitating at all, “is the series of events that led me to this spot, going back as many generations as I can hold in my head. I place everything in its historical context, of course, but I also try to figure out what kind of neurotic personal decisions my ancestors made too. Like stubborn qualities or perverse instincts that caused chain reactions and confusion and misery. Mistakes they made when they married, and so on. Does this make any sense?”

He nodded. “And then you draw family trees,” he said.

I looked at my awful picture again. I hadn’t even realized it! I felt beholden to him for seeing more than I thought was there.

We talked some more. He was a software entrepreneur. He was on the cutting edge. He was going to release something soon that would be on every computer desktop in the world. It was almost frightening him, this imminent success. He felt he ought to relax and enjoy the slow lane for now.

“There’s a show of Woodies today on the wharf,” he said. “Want to go down and take a look?”

“Woodies?”

“The original surfermobiles. The Ford wagons with actual oak panels. My childhood dream car.”

It was a beautiful day in this fish town, the water deep blue and restless with whitecaps, the breeze moving just enough to make everything seem alive. Even the fur on mice shines on days like this. The sparrows enjoy the cool grass on their feet. Gray pelicans gulp air into their salty beaks. We sauntered on the wharf for a few hours, our voices lapping at each other like the small bay waves beneath us. We never let up for a second. We ate fresh shrimp with horseradish in little cups and considered every Woody that had made the trip to our wharf. Each stood proud. The beauty of the waxed wood and the effort it had taken to preserve the vehicle in mint condition startled me with the range of human energy. While some people were splitting atoms or untangling DNA, others were shining up their Woodies. Both important in the overall scheme. But what was I doing yet that counted?

As we walked off the wharf, I started to wonder if I could ever quake in circles around this man. It seemed a possibility. Something about him was alluring and unknowable.

“It won’t be long before we’ll be able to see and hear everything at our desks that we see and hear right here,” he said.

“But what about the way the wind feels and the smell of it?” I asked.

“Or the feel of human skin?”

I reached out and touched his arm. It was warm and covered with hair. It had a scar on it, and the muscle stuck out like a blade. “Are
you
real?” I asked.

“I can assure you that I am,” he said.

This man brought me a bouquet of dahlias the size of baby heads the next time I saw him. And though we had a little ceremony, and had Will, and lived together a few years, I had basically married the first person who was nice to me when I was down. It was a mistake, and painful to realize it. Sure, Will and I’ve not been without our hard times. But we’re doing all right. Meanwhile, my sister went to a baroque music festival and met a statistics professor. Is that any better?