Also lots of kids. Saint Ann’s High Mass must have the highest infant baptism rate of any Sunday service going.
And here I am, dandling my solitary glass of French champagne (I asked about seconds there, but none are forthcoming). “You know what I really wanted for my eighteenth birthday?” Great line to put the dampers on a celebration.
Papa (one of the tenured) lifts champagne bottle-mouth from glass in sparkling mid-pour.
“For you guys to truck down to the Savings and Loan and redo my bank account so I can draw money out of it.”
“You need money?”
“I’d like that little passbook in my purse to say ‘Miranda Dolores Falconer,’ not ‘R. Falconer or M.F. Falconer as custodians for M.D. Falconer.’ It’s the principle, that’s all.”
“What’s it doing in your purse?”
“Getting dirty, mostly.” I earned half that money myself. Minors are the world’s original second-class citizens.
But my setup is complete.
All that’s required now is to mouth “Cu-s-t-o-o-d-i-ans,” two or three more times in as loathsome a manner as possible. And pray: “Lord, ‘subtle as serpents’ is okay, so long as ‘innocent as doves’ goes with it. I’ve known I was devious since before I could talk. Just don’t let me be dishonest.”
The contents of my prayer life get a little odd. My contents are a little odd. I figure God knows that.
Papa waves the champagne bottle at my chest. “You realize, if you manage to blow your college money, it’s you that’s going to miss it at Berkeley in the fall?”
“Uh-huh.”
Sad, because I aced the SATs with scores impressive enough to show what a lazy clot I’d been at school. I got accepted into Berkeley, no sweat in the least, when lots of poor hardworking hot-to-study types are headed for the Junior Colleges. Sad that I’m a rank impostor. I never intend to go. And so far, nobody knows but me.
That was a week ago last Sunday; when the punch line of the morning’s Gospel was “Wherever your treasure lies, there your heart will be.”
———
Friday afternoon, here I go, off to the Savings and Loan. All by myself. A first. Food for a week for two is what I need, opulent (this time) but non-labor-intensive food for a week. I think about a hundred dollars. Gas money also, cash to reach the mountains maybe four times, up and back and up and back, untraceable. Thirty dollars a crack. To be safe, I took three hundred dollars. Put it in my little white purse, right in the envelope with the tickets and the invitation.
Saturday morning. I got in the old VW bus, and before Papa could stroll down the drive and request my flight plan, I roared away.
———
Oregon expressway to 101; 101 south to 237. Crossing below the marshy lower end of San Francisco Bay, I pick up northbound 680 on the other side, through the first range of summer-yellow hills. High above the freeway canyon a red tailed hawk wheels toward her nest, bearing a very long, very limp snake in her claws. I take it for some kind of omen.
Livermore valley. It was eighty-five degrees on our front porch in Stanford. Hot. Here a roadside time-and-temperature display stands proudly at 102.
The second range of hills.
The San Joaquin. Wide hazy valley, fertile and sweltering: orchards, alfalfa, corn. The food of a nation wells from here, as far as the eye can see. Dim black pillars around the rim of the world, the occasional inevitable grass fires, pour their summer donation of smog into the sky.
A place named for Joachim, husband of Saint Ann, father of Mary. The barren man who prayed so hard, and so hard and so hard—he got more than he asked for. San Joaquin, Grandfather of God.
Off the last freeway now, onto Highway 88 east of Stockton. Here begins my provisioning (farmers are opening their road stands for the day) with melons so fragrant they perfume the car, fresh sweet corn, some white, some yellow—and better yet—some bicolored. Viny tomatoes, still hot from the sun.
Into Jackson on the far side of the valley: time for a lightning pass through the local Safeway: bacon, eggs, bagels, cream cheese. Salad stuff. A twelve-pound slab of New York steak, still in one piece.
One more stop in Jackson. Main Street: where the curbs are two feet tall, and a sidewalk plaque commemorates the last public hanging. The last whorehouse got shut down in the ’50s, Papa says.
Old saloons have metamorphosed into slick boutiques, but in among the ticky-tacky is a cavernous dry goods store that still sells gold pans. Also the Jackson Bakery, home to glorious fat flaky turnovers. I buy all the blueberries they have plus raspberries to make a baker’s dozen, just as my mother and grandfather always did before me.
Still on the early side of noon, I begin my leadfoot run up the mountain. Five thousand feet. Six thousand feet. Where the granite bones of the world begin to show, and the sky gets darker blue, and the trees all smell like bitter incense. Meditating, as I go, about the food I’ve bought. All very homely and American. But so am I. The food is like me.
What if he doesn’t like it?
God, what if he doesn’t like me?
Why would he have sent me mail for three whole years now, if he didn’t like me?
———
My sister and I ran age group track for years: national level competition. Papa maintained a certain distance from the whole affair; it was Mama who drove us to practice and drove us to meets, and drove us up the wall. And as long as she kept after me, I excelled. The 1984 Olympics didn’t seem so far away. When I got too big to intimidate, I went down like a rock.
Hormones. I quit; fell in love with a Rock and Roll Star. Not supposed to work out that way, is it? Growing up means getting serious, taking charge of your life. The 1984 Olympics came and went. I never turned the TV on.
But Mama had a sort of system, a ladder of degrees to rate performance, from lousy to sensational. The bottom rung was “Don’t run last.”
And man, was I happy to be through with that forever.
Now here I go, rating my own chances from the bottom up: if Belshangles had played Oakland and Tommi didn’t contact me at all, that would be running dead last. Doing better than that already. I got tickets and an engraved invitation.
But to what event? Though Mama might not equate my bedding Tommi Rhymer with “Finishing in the Medals,” I had been prepared to grab for any level of intimacy I could get, depending on a whole galaxy of unknowns. That was yesterday.
And now, twenty-four hours later, I teetered on the last, the ultimate plateau, corresponding to Mama’s “Win.” I had my fantasy lover headed for Nevada; I was wearing his Day-Glo diamond ring, and he had on the matching one. So far it was working like a charm. The real question: why? What made him so unrealistically tractable—a matching Grand Passion?
He knew what the Grand Passion trip was about okay, and had embarked, I guessed, on one such journey in his life, but certainly not for me. More poetry surfaced (learned at school, would you believe—)
He hangs in shades the oranges bright,
Like golden lamps in a green night—
Andrew Marvell’s Bermudas is what it was:
—He makes the figs our mouths to meet,
And scatters melons at our feet,
But apples plants, of such a price,
No tree could ever bear them twice.
Passion fruit. Somehow, I wouldn’t even want to make Tom bear those apples twice.
But he was talking again. “Up till now,” he said, “well, up till now I’ve not been old enough. Few years from now I’d be too old, and it wouldn’t be seemly.”
I couldn’t think of any answer, plain, ordinary, conversational. I ached to stop the car, rush around to his side and crush him to me. Cover him, hide him, so he couldn’t ever be too old. I found the mental address where I’d left Bermudas, and vanished into it. Excellent way of keeping sane. See how much I can remember.
Where the remote Bermudas ride
In the ocean’s bosom, unespied,
From a small boat that
rowed along
The listening waves received this song—
What should we do but sing His praise,
Who brought us through the watery maze
Unto a land so far from home,
And yet far gentler than our own?
Where He the great sea monsters racks
That lift the deep upon their backs,
He lands us on this grassy stage
Far from priests’ and prelates’ rage—
I’d made it past the fruit, right down to the end in fact—
—Thus sang they in the English boat,
An holy and a cheerful note,
And all the while, to aid their chime,
With falling oars they kept the time.
—before he spoke again. “I don’t have AIDS.”
The car hummed along.
“Well I could have, you know that.”
We’d been on the road exactly one hour, tooling along through Vacaville now: dry gold hills and dusty oak trees all around, the little airstrip on our right humming with towplanes as they lofted one sport glider after another. An affluent swarm of multicolored dragonflies circled on the thermals overhead.
Lines of an old T. Rex song ousted Bermudas from my mind, something definitely not learned for school: Marc Bolan calling himself a sexual glider, imploring a current lover to be his plane in the rain.
Except there wasn’t any rain. Smoggy, brassy-hot California valley August. We drove along.
“I went and had that blood test done. They say I haven’t even seen the bug.”
“I’m not questioning you.”
He swung around on me with a shrug that almost looked like desperation. “Shouldn’t you? Shouldn’t you be?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because you told me you were well.”
Silence closed in again. The last of the coast hills dropped behind. I started the long straight run across the San Joaquin. This far north it’s properly the Sacramento Valley, but I still think about it as the San Joaquin, Spanish for Saint Joachim. Hazy fertile summer place.
“Maybe I was lying.”
I didn’t take him up on it.
———
Israel waited for a Messiah in Saint Joachim’s day, with the pious all set to go in their assemblies of tens, hundreds, thousands, and ten thousands, all shined up and ready for the great Assembly of Heaven, the coming of the Kingdom of God.
The Dead Sea Scrolls tell all about it.
Women weren’t allowed in that assembly. Neither were men with problems. Not just the reprobates, but the deaf, the blind, the retarded, the sterile, men who stooped from age, men missing a limb or lame in one—even men who were scarred in their hands or feet. “Because,” they said, “the Angels of God will be there, and it wouldn’t be seemly.”
So the irony was, when the Messiah came, they nailed Him through the hands and feet, and banned Him with the other undesirables. And kept on waiting, waiting—
I see Him like the kid in Alice’s Restaurant: sittin’ there with the mother stabbers and the father rapers, laughin’ and havin’ a wonderful time and playin’ with the pencils on the GROUP W bench. Joachim was His grandfather.
Joachim and Ann had no children, and the dumb priests wouldn’t let him worship. A man was bound under the Law to worship God and get children; if he couldn’t do one, he wasn’t counted fit to do the other. So Joachim ran away. He sat out in the hills and prayed. I guess he must have known the moment his grief was lifted; he went off leaping, back down the mountainside to town. Ann must have too; she left home and headed for the gate.
It’s just a legend, an old story. I never met anyone who believed such stuff but me. Most of the things I love are apocryphal. So they met and kissed in the public road under the city gate, kissed in front of everybody. Mary was conceived from that kiss.
What a kiss that must have been.
Thinking about that and driving along across the summer valley, it all drifted with the heat into the end of Alice’s Restaurant, where the crazy Sergeant reads off his paper to the litterbugs, mother stabbers, father rapers, etc., on the GROUP W bench, declaring them unfit for the draft: Then, on the other side—right in the middle of the other side—away from everything else on the other side, it said:
“Kid: have you rehabilitated yourself?”
———
The old VW hummed along. We passed the flood plain west of Sacramento, arched above the slow brown river. Capitol and State buildings paraded by at a leafy distance.
Unruly suburb infiltrates the miles of gold-dredge tailings north of Sacramento, baking scrubland stripped and jumbled in the last century, disguised with tract houses in this. But at Auburn, oh, at Auburn the road swings east again. Triumphant mountains which you never saw approaching are suddenly under your wheels.
We had been two hours on the road.
———
“Well what if I did?” He burst out finally, “What would you do?” Remembering the question wasn’t my problem. Knowing my answer wasn’t; I just couldn’t say it. Silence didn’t stop him this time. “Get the hell away from me, that’s what you’d do?”
I said, “No, I wouldn’t.”
Silence. Up and up.
Oaks give way to fir trees. Grass gives way to rock. Valley smog becomes Sierra blue sky. And the blue gets darker, and darker—
“So what would y’do? Hold my hand with rubber gloves and watch me die?”
“If that was my only option left, I guess I would.”
“Well, I’ll just say in advance, I want no part of it. Besides, I already got somebody with a pretty firm commitment to that job.”
“If you went first.”
“What?”
“I said, if you went first. What if it was him? Hey, what are we talking about this for? Is he sick? Is he exposed to AIDS?”
The white cap shook emphatically. “He’s got no chance of not having what I’ve got. Or of getting what I haven’t, for that matter. Which, right now, thanks to no virtues of mine, is nothing.”
“So?”
There’s a fine, fine art to getting up a long grade in an old VW bus. You have to stay above sixty-two miles per hour. So plan ahead, stand on it well before the grade, get the old momentum up.
Then hope like crazy nothing makes you brake, for if you do, and backslide off that cusp of speed, then it’s slower, slower, helplessly slower—gear down, move right, until you’re laying down a trail of oil, sweat, and tears: twenty miles an hour in the far right lane all the way to the top.
“—So it seems I’ve gone looking, and put myself in the goddamn middle of every ‘high-risk identity group’ I can think of, ’cept for being Haitian. Little late for that.”
“You’re no hemophiliac either.”
“No, thank God I’m English!”
“You could buy property in Port au Prince.”
“I’m not laughing! Couldn’t you just imagine me as AIDS Poster Boy of the Year?”
“Don’t do that to me!”
“Say, don’t do it to you? I don’t wanta do it to me! I don’t want to die of that stupid, goddamn ignominious disease! I don’t want to die at all!”
He was going to freak. I didn’t know what to do.
“If I lived in L.A., I’d be dead now!”
Headed up the grade to Donner summit at sixty-two miles an hour in the next-to-the-fastest of four lanes of traffic. I didn’t know what to do. Think about Saint Francis and his random-input enlightenment method. I bet old Francis never did it on a freeway. I shut my eyes anyhow, and prayed to see.
Instantaneous response: a screech of alarm from my passenger, “God! Look out! Bloody fucking car!”
I have entered the Realm of Seeing. Some big American tank with lots of chrome, stuck behind a yet slower vehicle in the right-hand lane, pulls ponderously in front of me at thirty miles per hour. Prominent on the born-again rear end I’m about to impact is a bumper sticker: “Jesus Gave Me
This Car.”
Input, if I ever saw it!
So Jesus Gave Me This Man!
(Breaking as hard as I can: sixty miles an hour!)
He can’t go bad on me: I prayed for him!
(Fifty-five mph!) He’s mine!
(Forty-five!) No backsies!
(Thirty-five!) Gear down, oh help, oh God, I’m so close on the guy, even his bumper sticker disappears from view!
Like it says: You love your kids; would you give ’em scorpions if they ask for fish, or stones instead of bread?
(Thirty.) The bumper sticker reappears, and placidly, unmindfully, begins to pull away.
You gave him to me; God doesn’t give no trash!
He looks as good and edible to me as loaves and fishes!
Be damned if I’ll believe he’s scorpions and stones!
No scorpions! No stones!
Good San Francisco French bread, a nice long baguette, fresh and warm, sweet as anything. And rich mahogany smoked salmon, straight off the North Coast!
No switches and ashes in my Christmas stocking!
Etc., etc.
———
“I’ve been thinking and thinking now, all the way here, how it was I ever planned to cut the coat I covet out of the cloth I’ve been given. You know—” he said, beginning to sound horribly tearful, “—in San Francisco, when Sim came down to fetch you from the lobby there? He got me out of Harlan’s bed before he went. Anybody looking for me who knew me at all’d try there second, and if he really knew me, might just look there first. I’ve almost no conscious cruelty in my nature, and I would call it more than cruel, not to make positive you understood that.”
“I think—” I said, “I think I understand that.”
“Well I don’t think you do!”
“What I’m trying to say: sooner or later I’m afraid you’ll end up by despising me, and maybe sooner is better than later. You think I’m joking, but I’m not. You’ll get inside, and see it’s all for real. You’ll say ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ and I won’t have any answer. Then you’ll want to get the hell out, and you will.”
White Leather and Flawed Pearls Page 5
