Tacoma Stories

by Richard Wiley

  When she patted the back of her head, the other two smiled.

  In the booth beyond them sat three more women, and beyond them four more, up to a total of twenty-two women. Was it an etiquette club? A sorority reunion? A meeting of AA, perhaps, since none of them was drinking?

  I couldn’t keep my eyes off the nearest three—Roberta Parks, Brenda Ball, and Georgann Hawkins, I called them—Georgann the one who’d just cut her hair. What came into my mind as I watched her was the image of a vivacious brown-eyed girl, happy and dancing in the fall of ’73, at a party at the University of Puget Sound. I even knew the name of the band that played, Blueport News, for I was also there, fresh from my law school tutorial. Had Bundy followed me, then, to spot this beautiful girl?

  The people at the tables in the center of the room took no interest in the women, nor did Junior and Mariah. And the waitress, when she brought the Coke and water, didn’t stop to look their way. Were the women our companions, then, conjured up at Bundy’s house and brought into the tavern with us?

  The moment that that idea struck me, the three nearest women, and then those beyond them, began to look sketched in black and white and posed like in old high school yearbook photos, their heads cocked oddly, their interest in the pizza minimal, while the other tavern patrons sat in living color, with animated bodies and voices.

  I couldn’t help thinking that I could break this spell, that they would either become members of the living world again or go back whence they came if I simply leaned past the boundary of our booth and said hello. And I couldn’t help noticing also that Georgann’s short hair was common to the others, that each had cut her hair, as if, through that one act, they might escape Bundy’s fetish. Each, that is, save the farthest two, who weren’t yet women anyway but girls. Their names were Kimberly Diane Leach and Anne Marie Burr.

  When I tested my theory by leaning into their territory, the air grew instantly cold, as if I were still touching the glass in the basement, on the other side of that horrid sheet. Roberta and Brenda didn’t look at me, but Georgann said, with barely a glance in my direction, “Each and every one of us was loved.”

  Back in our own booth, the woman I hoped would one day love me and a boy we both hoped would find his way in the world were eating their first slices of pizza, which the waitress had just then brought.

  “Why are you all at the age you would have been had you lived,” I asked, “while the girls at the end down there have remained at ages twelve and eight?”

  “God only knows,” said Georgann. “Maybe because they hadn’t yet reached puberty? We like having them that way, but they don’t like it very much.”

  The cold against my face was such that I thought it would freeze if I didn’t lean back into the life I was trying to forge. But I also had to ask another question, needed to come away with some sort of truth. “Each and every one of us was loved,” she had said. Could I ask if she meant only each and every one of them, or if I was included in it?

  Georgann seemed to wait, but I couldn’t ask that, couldn’t ask a murdered girl for words of hope for myself. So I asked, instead, “Did we bring you with us, or were you here before we arrived?”

  Immediately, I knew that that was another wrong question, that to ask about our influence on them rather than about something solely theirs, like were they still in pain?—or something important to everyone, like was there ever any justice in the world?—was a failure the likes of which I had exhibited in both my marriages.

  But what could I or anyone else ever find to ask Georgann Hawkins?

  When I leaned back into the booth with Mariah and Junior, the waitress was arriving with our pizzas. I’d been wrong in thinking that they’d started without me.

  “Finally!” Junior said. “I’m starved.”

  “But it’s worth the wait,” said the waitress. “Can I freshen that Coke for you, hon?”

  Before she headed back to the bar, she took a stack of bills from her apron, laying one on each of the other booths in calm succession.

  And with that, the women pooled their money and grabbed the coats and scarves that they’d apparently placed beside them. Only the girls farthest from us stood quickly, but they weren’t paying anyway, because they were still too young.

  When Georgann got up, she looked at me. “I hope you enjoy your meal,” she said. Then she lined up behind the others and they left the tavern, led by the two girls.

  We ate our pizza in silence.

  “We ordered too much,” Mariah said after a while. “Junior, you’d better take the rest home to your dad.”

  Who knows why that made me think of the morels we had pillaged up on Mount Rainier, in that long-ago time when the only danger we had known came in the person of Kahuna. Morels, not morals.

  Junior said his father would be thankful for the pizza, that after a hard day of baking he rarely remembered to bring any real food home.

  Mariah and I smiled at “real food,” though, slathered as it was with sausage and mushrooms, that was what Junior clearly thought the pizza was.

  On our way out of the Cloverleaf a half an hour later, I noticed that the booths the women had occupied were clean and ready for other customers.

  I didn’t think anyone had come to clean them, but I could have been wrong.

  eHarmony Date @ Chez Panisse

  (2011)

  HE ARRIVED SO EARLY that he actually called the restaurant from the sidewalk outside, asking if he might move his reservation up from 1:15 to 1:00 P.M.

  “I’ll try to work you in,” the hostess said.

  Good. To be sitting there calmly would be best. It wouldn’t do to arrive after her, nervous and sweating. Nor would it do to arrive together, for he knew from her profile that she was taller than he was—she was five ten against his five nine and a half.

  Once inside the restaurant, he glanced into the downstairs dining room. He’d intended to offer her dinner, but his brother, Angelo, warned him away from such ostentation. Dinner at Chez Panisse was too much, Angelo’d said, like buying a house when all he really needed was an apartment. He thought about calling Angelo now to tell him about the reservation change, but when he took out his phone, he remembered Angelo’s last bit of advice—“Be with this woman, Bert, don’t be elsewhere”—and powered the thing off once and for all. Or until he was on his way home anyway.

  When he walked upstairs to the café section, the hostess sat him in a waiting area and gave him a glass of sauvignon blanc when he asked for one. He would have another with lunch. Two glasses of slowly sipped wine was an accoutrement to conversation. Angelo had said that, too, but when he also said, “Like a belt holds up your pants, the wine will keep your face from falling down,” Angela, Bert’s sister-in-law, had shut Angelo up, kissing Bert and wishing him luck. Bert had met Angela first. He’d introduced her to his brother, and the rest had been years and years of sorrow on the one hand and gloating on the other.

  “We can seat you now if the rest of your party will be here soon,” said the hostess.

  Those were her words, but her look said, Why don’t we seat you, get your back against the wall so you can have some support?

  She gave him the warmest of smiles, but was he that transparent? He’d been here twice before with dates but fully believed he’d been invisible. He walked behind her, not glancing at the other diners. His table (for two) was in a line of three such tables with not much space between them. He would have to remember to keep his voice down—another bit of Angelo’s advice—and also not to eavesdrop.

  “It really just floored me. I mean, forty grand a semester? Why couldn’t she stay right here and go to Berkeley?” said the woman at the next table. It was as if she were his date and had chosen those words as an opening line, since he knew the subject well, having taught at Berkeley for the last twenty years. It made him think that, far from not eavesdropping, perhaps he should engage these lunch neighbors. Wouldn’t it make him look at ease if his actual date saw him listening to the opin
ions of others and giving advice? When he turned toward the woman and peaked his bushy eyebrows at her, however, he saw immediately that she didn’t even know he’d sat down. He also saw that half his wine was gone, and put a finger on the rim of his glass. He ate a piece of bread, then swept its crumbs onto his lap, though a waiter stood nearby with a crumb scraper.

  SHE FOUND A PARKING SPACE A BLOCK AWAY, bought two hours’ worth of parking from a nearby machine, and put the receipt on her dashboard. She didn’t suppose she’d need two hours, but if the date turned out well and she lingered, she wouldn’t want to get a ticket and spoil things. She’d had eleven Internet dates and told herself that she would quit at an even dozen. And, of course, a last date should not be rushed, somewhat like a last supper.

  She was early, too, so walked past Chez Panisse twice. On every previous date, she had promised herself two things: to pretend that each was her first and to say what she thought, not what she guessed her date might wish to hear. She’d spent nine years pretending to interests she didn’t have with Steve. That her marriage had ended in widowhood, not divorce, in fact, had forced her to pretend again. This time to the success of it.

  During her first three Internet dates, she’d caught herself not only talking about her marriage but presenting the men with the very version of herself that Steve had invented, or, more fairly, that she had invented when trying to make Steve happy. She didn’t mean to begrudge him…. Steve had had his good side, which, if she remembered correctly, was his left. She laughed as a man came along the sidewalk toward her. When he looked at her, his eyebrows peaked, like the roofs of the birdhouses her father used to build up in Tacoma.

  WHEN HE SAW HER MOVING across the dining room toward him, he stood up too quickly, knocking the table with his thighs. Some of his water sloshed out, but he’d drunk enough of his wine that it only frowned up the inside of its glass and then settled back down, somewhat like the grouchy expression she was trying to hide. She had already given him the nickname “Birdie,” because of his eyebrows. He needed one of those hair clipper things she’d seen advertised on TV, not only for his eyebrows but also for his ears and the portals of his nose. He looked very Italian, though it said on his profile that he was only Italian on his father’s side. Not that she minded … She liked Italians just fine.

  “I’ll have one of those,” she told the hostess, pointing at the wine.

  “Sauvignon blanc,” said he, lest the hostess had forgotten.

  “You’d better be Bert,” she said. “I mean, what if you weren’t? Wouldn’t that be funny? What if you were some other Internet guy waiting for someone else?”

  She couldn’t help thinking, Would that it were so.

  “I’m Bert to most people, Alberto to the members of my family,” he said. “You know what I do whenever I get a little free time? I make my own salami.”

  Shoot me now, he told himself, while she thought, What if I called him Birdie out loud? He might think it was Bertie, a twelfth-date diminutive, an excessive amount of cuteness spilling out.

  “Well, I’m Liz, though I used to be Mary,” she said. “To my family, I’m Mary Elizabeth. My mother says I’m working my way down the syllables of my names, so I guess Beth is next.”

  She thought that was clever, and waited for him to acknowledge it. This didn’t have to be a disaster, did it? But he was still in mourning over that salami comment. “I’m Bert,” he said again, his eyebrows so evenly flatlining now that they looked like someone’s just-clipped hedge.

  Her wine arrived before she was properly seated, and when she scooted herself in, a bit of it sloshed out onto the tablecloth, making a Rorschach rabbit, she swore. Was this what they’d have in common? Thigh butts and sloshings, fat legs rocking the table? Not that her legs were fat; they were exactly what they had been when she was twenty.

  “Your profile said you moved down here recently,” he said. “How’s it going so far? I’ve been here for twenty years myself.”

  He could feel himself pushing, and placed his fingers on the stem of his wineglass. She was actually prettier than her profile photos. When did that ever happen? Angela had told him that he looked like Tony Curtis in his profile photo, while Angelo said he looked more like General Curtis Lamay. Angelo was a World War II historian and also taught at Berkeley. Angelo had bullets from the Battle of the Bulge on his desk, which was what he’d been fighting all these years, Angela said.

  “It’s an experiment, moving here,” she said. “I thought I could leave Tacoma behind, but I’ve brought it with me. Any fool could have guessed that would happen, but I’m not any fool. As you can see, I’m a very specific one.”

  Neither of them had any idea what that meant, but it was certainly true that Tacoma sat within her like a bullfrog on a lily pad, croaking away. Now, however, it was her turn to ask him something. That was the unwritten rule of Internet dating. “Have you ever thought of buying one of those rotating eyebrow cutters?” came to mind, but she said instead, “Your profile listed your field as organic chemistry. When I was in college, organic chemistry used to scare the living shit out of me.”

  She paused, sorry for “living shit,” then added, “You know, I have this theory that scientists often know the arts but that artists never know the sciences. Would you say that’s true? Tell me something artistic, why don’t you?”

  She pressed the fingers of both her hands into the tablecloth. She’d never thought of herself as mean, but there it was.

  “Actually, I think Beth suits you better than Mary or Liz,” he said. “You have the softness of the th around your eyes.”

  He’d been thinking of saying that the whole time she’d been talking. He’d never said anything remotely flirtatious on his other dates, but Angela had told him just that morning to loosen up, to tell the woman she was pretty if he thought so, to tell her whatever came to mind.

  When she peaked her own eyebrows at him, he said, “In chemistry Th stands for thorium. It was discovered in 1828 by Jöns Jacob Berzelius of Sweden. He named it after Thor, the Norse god of thunder.”

  “Glad you cleared that up for me, or I might have thought he named it after John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt,” said Liz or Mary or Beth.

  Oh God, she had to stop this. None of it was his fault. Except, of course, for the outdated photos on his profile. There ought to be a rule about those, some sort of statute of limitations. She said rather wistfully, “You’ve never been married, have you?”

  “Married to my profession” was his usual reply, but something in the way she’d made fun of Jöns Jacob Berzelius made him turn off the tape recorder in his head. What did it matter what she thought of him?

  “I had a close call once with the woman who is now my sister-in-law,” he said, “but she chose Angelo and now we’re friends. That is, not Angelo and I but Angela and I.”

  “Here’s to close calls,” she said, once more raising her glass. She reached across the table and tapped his wrist, as if saying, Hello in there, hello? Can we not both simply stop this, act like human beings for once in our lives?

  “What about you?” he asked. “Are you still in love with your dead husband?”

  THEIR WAITER HAD COME BY TWICE, so they fell into a moment’s silence, both of them staring at their menus. The two hours of parking she had purchased now seemed to her like a prison sentence, while he decided he would let loose the force of his personality on her soon, which Angela always said was his great secret weapon. Their waiter loomed above them like a dirigible, so he asked for the daily special—an edible schoolyard garden salad, followed by spicy Monterey Bay squid roasted in a wood oven with chickpeas—while she decided on the yogurt-and-cucumber soup, then pan-fried sea bass, which didn’t sound good but seemed to be the dish that most reminded her of this man. She smiled but felt meaner than she’d felt since Steve died. She had no idea what gave her this urge to make fun of him.

  “They don’t call it ‘Chilean’ sea bass here,” she said once the waiter had left. “‘Chile
an’ is code for ‘unsustainable,’ and an absolute no-no in this place.”

  She’d read up on Chez Panisse, and gave him a genuine smile.

  “Do you think the actual Chile will turn out to be as unsustainable as its bass?” he asked. “I mean, one never knows with these fledgling democracies.”

  He felt like slapping his face. God what an imbecile he was! That wasn’t letting loose the power of his personality but simply saying something banal! Everything he knew about Chile he had learned when watching TV coverage of the coal mine disaster. He didn’t know how “fledgling” their democracy was, wasn’t even absolutely sure it was a democracy.

  “I sure hope not,” she said. “I like their wine and I want it to keep on coming.”

  There, she had said something equally dumb. She thought to ask him if he believed the final t in Pinochet to be spoken or silent—to say that it, along with how to say Qatar, seemed to cause havoc with journalists around the world. But instead, she simply let him try to read her look, which didn’t have any meanness in it for once.

  “That science and the arts thing you said a moment ago,” he said. “I think so, too, though it might seem arrogant of me to say it. But I wanted to ask, are you an artist, then, saying it in self-deprecation? If you are, you didn’t say so on your profile.”

  He picked up the saltshaker, lining it up with the pepper mill. He clicked them together at their bases, making them do a little dance. He thought of that scene in Fiddler on the Roof where the Russians and the Jews had a dancing contest.

  “If someone says he’s a scientist … if he truly is a scientist, then, by definition, there is a world of study behind it,” she said. “But to throw the word artist around is easy, don’t you think? About like choosing yellow or blue from one’s paint palette. The only thing worse than calling oneself an artist is calling oneself a poet. Or maybe artist is worse, I don’t know.”

  My God, he had had that thought, too! He distrusted many of those in the arts for just that reason.