Mendocino and Other Stories

by Ann Packer

  Finally Marisa reaches for her napkin and dabs at her face. She looks up at Bliss and says, “Sorry.”

  Bliss smiles and shrugs.

  Gerald gives Marisa's shoulder a final pat and straightens up. Then Marisa pushes her chair back and stands, too. “Well,” she says, as if nothing had happened, “are we done? I'll get going on the dishes. Why don't you two make a fire in the other room?” She carries a few things to the sink and begins to run the water. She turns back to Bliss. “I'm sorry we don't have any dessert,” she says.

  “We've got fruit,” says Gerald. “Want a plum?”

  “I'm fine,” says Bliss. “It was delicious.” She takes her plate to the sink and sets it down. This is not the right moment for the cookies.

  THE LIVING ROOM is sparsely furnished—just two armchairs and several large pillows on the floor.

  “Sit,” Gerald says, coming up behind her. He pats one of the chairs.

  “Don't you guys want the chairs?” Bliss says. “I'll sit on one of those.”

  “Nonsense,” he says.

  So she sits in one of the chairs and watches him build the fire. Marisa's scene has disturbed her—does she do this kind of thing a lot?—but curious as Bliss is, she hopes Gerald won't bring it up. She doesn't really want to talk about it.

  “That was a good dinner,” she says.

  “Thanks,” he says, without turning around. He lights a match and touches the flame to some newspaper, then sits looking into the fireplace. Finally he turns to face her. “Listen,” he says, “let's just drop what happened in the kitchen, OK?”

  “Of course,” Bliss says. “I wasn't going to—”

  “She's just a little on edge is all,” Gerald says. “Having a visitor.”

  Bliss blushes. It wasn't her idea to come up here.

  “I don't mean it like that,” Gerald says. “She just wants you to like her.”

  He doesn't seem to expect a response; he turns back to the fireplace and pokes at the logs with a piece of kindling. She should say, “Oh, I do like her,” but it would sound so forced; her mother used to sit on the edge of her bed at night and say, “I love you, baby,” and then, after the slightest pause, “Do you love me?”

  “That should catch,” Gerald says, standing up. He claps his hands together to get rid of the wood dust, then sits in the other chair. “We were thrilled when it started getting cooler again. There's a guy up the road who lets me chop firewood for free.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Well, I give him a hand when he needs it. I helped him build a new kitchen.”

  “How'd you learn how to do all this stuff, anyway?”

  “I must have a natural aptitude,” Gerald says. They both laugh; he was the kind of child who, in art class, used his Popsicle sticks for abstract sculpture when everyone else was making a birdhouse.

  “No, really,” Bliss says.

  “I wanted to,” Gerald says. “That's really all it takes.”

  Marisa comes in from the kitchen carrying a tray. “I made some tea,” she says. She offers the tray to Bliss, and Bliss thanks her and takes a mug. It smells strange, and she decides that it's some kind of herbal tea, made from their herbs. She would give anything for a cup of coffee right now.

  Gerald takes a mug, and Marisa sets the tray on the floor at Gerald's feet. She pulls a pillow over and sits on it, leaning against his legs. No one says anything.

  Bliss sips her tea, which tastes a little like almonds, and looks around the room for something to remark on. The walls are bare except for bunches of dried leaves—more herbs?—hanging in great clumps. There's a little stained glass something-or-other in one of the windows, and Bliss thinks, OK, that'll do; she's about to ask Marisa if she made it when Gerald clears his throat.

  “So,” he says, “ten years.”

  Bliss looks into her tea. It has been in the back of her mind that he might bring it up; she just hoped he wouldn't. She always thought they had a tacit agreement not to discuss it. She looks up and sees that Marisa has straightened a little, and she feels a flash of anger at her, as if she put the words into Gerald's mouth. They're both waiting for her to reply. “Yeah,” she says.

  “I think it was even a Friday,” Gerald says.

  “No,” Bliss says, “it was a Wednesday.” She remembers this distinctly. She was at home from college for the weekend and she'd driven back to school early on the Monday morning; then late that night her mother had called and said that her father hadn't come home, and she called again Tuesday afternoon to say he still wasn't home so Bliss drove back; and on Wednesday morning the phone call came from the police: a chambermaid at a motel a hundred miles away had found his body. “I'm positive it was a Wednesday,” Bliss says.

  They are silent again. Bliss remembers driving over to the high school and waiting in the office while someone was sent to get Gerald from his class. Her old French teacher had come walking in, and her face lit up at the sight of Bliss. “What a wonderful surprise,” she said. “How's school going? How are you?” Then Gerald appeared on the other side of the glass door, and for a moment, while Mlle. Barlow was still talking, Bliss looked through the glass at Gerald and realized from his expression that he had guessed why she was there.

  She looks at Gerald now. She can tell that he's struggling with something—is he trying to get himself to say something more, or to keep quiet?

  “Remember how I wanted to go back to school the next day?” he says. “What a jerk.”

  “No,” Bliss says, “I completely understood how you felt. I had a paper due that Friday and I kept thinking, My paper, my paper, like someone was going to be mad at me if I didn't get it done.”

  “And who do you suppose that someone was?” Gerald says.

  “No kidding.”

  “It was different, though,” Gerald says. “I just wanted to get out of the house.”

  Bliss nods. It was different and it was the same. Who didn't want to get out of the house? Even her mother kept saying she had to get to the store so she could make dinner, when all afternoon people were coming over with casseroles and stews, more food than they could eat in a week.

  “Why do you think he did it?” Marisa says, and Bliss closes her eyes.

  Why did he do it? This is the central question of Bliss's life. It's so central that it's no longer really a question at all, so much as a state of mind. She has made her accommodation to it: it's as much who she is as anything else—her name, her face in the mirror. She has always thought Gerald felt the same way, that there was no real answer. Now she can't help thinking that Marisa has asked this question for him, that he asked her to ask it, and the idea of the two of them going over it all—late at night, in the dark—makes Bliss want to get up and run. Leave it alone, she wants to say. Leave it alone. But then she opens her eyes and wonders whether she's wrong: Gerald seems surprised, almost fearful. Is he as reluctant to say anything as she is? She looks at Marisa and realizes that she's curious—she asked because she really wants to know.

  For every answer, there's another question. What was he so angry about? How did that turn into despair? Why did he finally give up? Out of nowhere Bliss remembers a time when she was thirteen or fourteen and so awkward and shy about going to school dances that she wouldn't tell her mother about them until the last minute, when it was too late to buy a new dress; she'd pretend to be disappointed that she couldn't go because she didn't have anything to wear. Her father got wind of it somehow, and at five o'clock on the afternoon of the Christmas dance he offered to drive her to the shopping center; he took her from store to store, waiting patiently until she found something she liked. He was so nice about it—it was a dark green velvet dress and he told her it was perfect because it matched her eyes and made her skin look luminous. He actually said that—“luminous.” How does this fit in?

  “I guess,” Bliss says, “he didn't want to go on living,” and although this is so much not an answer, Marisa nods, as if she's satisfied.

  Gera
ld puts his hand on Marisa's shoulder and she nestles between his legs and rests her head on his knee. He starts playing with the hair that's come out of her bun, twisting it around his finger, and it comes to Bliss all at once: her brother loves this woman. The business with the boots, his confession about the meatball sub, her outburst in the kitchen—they don't mean anything; they're the tiniest of truths about these people. He loves her.

  Bliss sinks back into her chair and sips her tea, which has grown cold. She looks at the fire. It's a perfect fire, really: the flames are spread evenly across the logs and leap to a dramatic peak in the center of the fireplace. She's not sure she even knows how to make a fire; isn't there some special way you have to place the logs so there's just the right amount of space between them?

  “Are you tired?” Gerald says. He's smiling at her, a sad kind of smile, and although she's not tired—she feels absolutely wide awake—she nods and yawns and stands up.

  “It was a long drive,” she says.

  Marisa moves as if to stand, and Bliss says, “No, don't.” She walks over and kisses Gerald on the cheek, hesitates for a moment, then leans down and kisses Marisa, too. “Good night,” she says.

  SHE LIES ON the bed in her room without undressing. She keeps seeing the morning with Jason when she first knew how it was going to be. They were at her apartment and they'd finished their coffee and were standing in the kitchen. She was waiting for him to suggest that they spend the day together, thinking, Say something, say something, until it was like an incantation in her mind. When he finally spoke, though, and said, “Bye, I'll call you,” instead of disappointment she had felt an enormous rush of relief—a feeling, she thinks now, of things falling back into place. She doesn't know what her reason for living is, but it could never have been him. He was never her reason for anything except wearing more makeup than she felt comfortable in and pretending, for a few months, that she was part of something serious.

  She changes into her nightgown and goes into the bathroom to brush her teeth. Lying on the counter, still in its wrapper, is a brand-new bar of scented soap. She's sure it wasn't there before. She picks it up and brings it to her face; through the blue paper she can smell the rich aroma of sandalwood. Marisa must have brought it in while she and Gerald were outside. It's an expensive soap, and she has a hard time imagining Marisa in one of those drugstores that call themselves pharmacies and sell imported brushes and combs one aisle over from the Maalox. She can't help feeling flattered—did Marisa buy this soap expressly for her?

  She unwraps the soap and washes her face; it makes her skin feel clean and tight. Then she brushes her teeth, turns off the bathroom light, and gets into bed. Tomorrow she will give them the cookies. If Gerald's pleased by them, Marisa will be, too.

  Lying in bed, still wide awake, she finds herself thinking of the last time she and Gerald had dinner alone together in San Francisco. He took her to a little Burmese place out by the park, and they pored over the menu, dismayed to find that everything sounded exactly like the Chinese food they'd had the night before. Then Bliss found a section of salads and they thought, Aha! something new! They agreed on a dish called Lap Dap Dok; it was described as a spicy salad made of tea leaves. It arrived at their table on a wide, shallow plate, and the waitress held it up for them to see. It was like a pinwheel: six different ingredients barely touching each other. Bliss had identified sliced chili peppers and peanuts and something that looked vaguely like chopped parsley when the waitress took a pair of spoons and mixed the whole thing together into a dark paste. Bliss helped herself to a large spoonful, then took a little bit between her chopsticks and put it in her mouth. Immediately she was horrified: it was bitter and sour and rotten-tasting all at the same time—easily the worst thing she'd ever eaten. She started to giggle, waiting for Gerald to taste it, and when he did his expression made her laugh even harder. “I wonder if this is what dung tastes like,” he said, then he turned red and started to laugh, too. Soon they were both laughing so hard that people began to look at them. She remembers now how familiar that laughter felt to her—the sick, giggly, helpless laughter of two children in a world of their own.

  HOW COULD A grown man with any self-respect sit in the Ghirardelli Chocolate Factory at eleven o'clock in the morning and eat a hot fudge sundae with mint chip ice cream, hold the nuts? It was Charlie's own question; his answer was that he wasn't a grown man, he was a grown boy, or maybe an ungrown man, pre-grown, never-to-be grown. He was in the process of honing his self-pity into a kind of artifact, an arrowhead he could keep in his pocket, its point ever ready. He spooned pure hot fudge into his mouth and told himself it was Linda's fault he was doing this—if he'd had someone to account to he'd never have indulged himself in this way—but it gave him no satisfaction to blame her. Linda was his wife, and fifteen days earlier she'd taken a suitcase full of clothes and gone to stay with her friend Cynthia “for a little while,” leaving Charlie lower than a dead man, as she would say. Maybe that was what had gone wrong: she no longer said things like “lower than a dead man” or “Nice play, Shakespeare.” Where was that girl? Not, Charlie felt sure, in San Francisco, this meanly cold, this coldly mean city to which they'd moved five months before, from his beloved New York, at her request. Whereupon she'd left him.

  Charlie looked at his watch. It was now twelve minutes past eleven, and although that left him thirty-three minutes to walk the ten blocks to his doctor's appointment, he was stricken by a fear of being late—a lifelong fear, one of his many crippling lifelong fears. He forced down the last of his sundae as quickly as he could and stood up. He put on his jacket, but as he was wrapping his scarf around his neck he felt a sharp pain scorch the surface of his upper arm, and he groaned and sat down again. He rubbed at the sore spot with his other hand, a futile gesture, he knew: the pain was too fast for him, disappearing so quickly he sometimes wondered whether it existed at all. It was the other pain, the one in his elbow, that he could count on. More of a dull ache, he would say to the doctor, a consistent dull ache. He stood up again, and as he headed out of the Chocolate Factory he patted his back pocket to make sure his notebook was still there—it contained a list of all the symptoms he'd had, back to the first radiating heat from his armpit to his fingers in June of 1988. A few months ago Linda had joked that he had a sore arm the way other people had a hobby. Sore? he'd wanted to say. I'm in pain. He knew it was a bad sign that he no longer saw any humor in his situation.

  Walking along Beach Street toward the Cannery he saw a cable car filling with tourists. Last to board was an elderly couple, and Charlie watched as the conductor gently helped them up. The conductor wore a dark uniform and a peaked cap, and for a moment Charlie thought, What a great job! Then he thought, a conductor? He was regressing—first the sundae and now this. And what do you want to be when you grow up, little boy? Charlie worked thirty hours a week at a frame shop on Chestnut, a few blocks from the apartment, and he liked it—he got a discount on framing materials. Linda said she knew it was a good job; she wanted him to have a career, but Charlie put careers in a group with pets and lawns—people were always talking about them and tending to them, but they just weren't that interesting.

  IN HIS SEARCH to discover what, after all, was wrong with his arm, Charlie had been in many New York waiting rooms during the past couple of years, but this was the first in California and he didn't know what to make of it: it was empty. He was accustomed to a two-hour waiting room wait followed by a forty-five minute examining room wait, sitting there in a paper nightgown. And the New York doctors, who'd never think to apologize for keeping you—Charlie had liked them: their clean, meaty hands, their arrogance.

  A tall, red-haired woman in a white coat opened a door and said Charlie's name. He followed her into the doctor's office, and when she circled the desk, sat down, and said, “So, your arm hurts,” he blushed and buried his face in his hands. Dr. Lee Price. He'd gotten the name from Linda, who'd gotten it from someone in her office, and he hadn't thought—h
e just hadn't thought.

  “Let me guess,” she said. “You thought I was the nurse. You assumed Lee Price would be a man. You feel like an idiot—you're really not like this.” She smiled at him. “Does that sum it up?”

  “You forgot the part about how I'm much more of a feminist than a lot of women I know.”

  “So I did,” she said. “So I did.” She unfolded a pair of glasses and slid them on, and her eyes seemed to open up, a delicate pale green. “It's really Leonora,” she said. “Big secret. Now tell me about your arm.”

  She didn't comment as he talked, but every few minutes she held up a finger for him to pause and scribbled something on an unlined sheet of paper. With her head angled toward the page he was free to stare at her, and he took in her softly curling auburn hair, her clear, creamy skin, her narrow body. Lovely, he thought, and then, lovely? It wasn't in his working vocabulary.

  “Any headaches?” she asked, still bent over her notes.

  “No more than two or three a day.”

  She looked up and narrowed her eyes. “And Tylenol does the trick, or no?”

  “Tylenol or a nap. I've always had a lot of headaches.”

  She nodded and wrote something. “Do you sleep well?”

  “I was all-state in high school. I only wish it were an Olympic event.”

  “A wise guy,” she said, laughing. “Are you married?”

  “I—” he said. “My—” There was an answer to this question—it began “Yes, but.…”

  “I ask because sometimes people can have small seizures in their sleep without knowing it. If you were married your wife might have noticed if your sleep were disturbed at all.”

  “I'm married,” he said. “But I'm pretty sure nothing like that's been going on.”

  “OK,” she said. “Through that door and I'll take a look.”

  It was the usual neurological thing: she asked him to turn his neck in every conceivable way; she produced a small hammer and tested his reflexes; she took a set of keys from her pocket and ran them along the soles of his feet. Holding his eyelids open with her fingers, she looked into his eyes with a tiny light. Listen, Charlie wanted to say, I've been through all of this.