Monday through Friday at the furniture-rental store, I overlapped for an hour with Laurie, the woman who worked the day shift. Laurie was blond, heavyset, with a Bo-Peep face and a slightly wounded air. She sat behind the teak desk, and I took a seat in the customers’ chair, and gradually we got to know one other. Looking back, it seems to me that she took on the role of confessor or shrink, with the desk between us as bulwark. A practicing Buddhist, Laurie occasionally coaxed me into chanting with her when business was slow, and when I came in one day looking gloomy, she managed to tease out my worry: I was late for my period, and feared that my evening with Mike was the cause.
When a week had passed with no results, I found a free clinic in the yellow pages and drove out to Santa Monica for a pregnancy test. I sat in the waiting room with women eight months along, with teenage girls thumbing through fashion magazines, beside a pale young woman who clutched at her boyfriend’s hand. If only my mother could have seen me then: not much wiser, for all her frankness, than the girls whose mothers told them babies came from storks.
The test was simple. I filled out some forms, turned in a urine sample, then waited to be called into the examining room. “It’s positive,” the nurse practitioner told me, in that marvelously flat voice health care workers use to deliver ambiguous news. “Have you decided what you want to do?”
I shook my head.
“Well, if you decide you want to terminate the pregnancy, you need to make an appointment for a follow-up exam.”
Terminate, exam: I pushed away the words the way you kick off a heavy blanket on a stifling night. “Thanks, I’ll think about it.” I grabbed my purse, paid the receptionist, and hurried out to the parking lot.
Once in the car, with my seat belt fastened and the keys in the ignition, I realized I had nowhere to go. There wasn’t a soul I wanted to tell—not my dad or Leslie, not my mother, not any of my distant college friends, certainly not the father, whose last name, to my embarrassment, I suddenly couldn’t remember. I started the car and merged into the traffic on the Santa Monica Freeway.
I was only blocks from the Pacific, at the tab end of an interstate that unfurled all the way to Jacksonville, Florida, and for a moment I considered taking that road, past the downtown high-rises that jagged up from the freeway like a deadly EKG, past the palm flats of San Bernardino, into the desert, through Phoenix, Tucson, El Paso…
Just the thought of that drive made me weep. All those lonely towns and truck-stop motels. I would never make it. I wasn’t the running type. Besides, my trouble was my own, and it would come with me. Instead, I knew that I would get off at La Brea Avenue and drive to my father’s house and go through my sister’s room to my cubicle against the wall, trying to put on a cheerful face. Eva was only four, but she had a radar for sorrow, and thinking of her made me pull myself together. I found a tissue in the glove box and wiped my eyes and nose, and then out the side window I caught sight of a motorcycle cop, keeping a steady pace beside me. I had no idea how long he’d been there. He didn’t turn on his siren, but looked my way and tipped his helmet toward the shoulder.
I pulled over and watched in the rear-view mirror as he strolled toward me. I must have been speeding. Or perhaps my registration had expired. I felt a flicker of panic at the sight of his tooled belt and holster. When he came alongside my open window, he bent over and flipped up his windscreen.
“Miss, are you all right?”
I stared at him, baffled.
“You know, at times like this, it’s best to pull over and take a breather.”
Nothing fans my self-pity like the kindness of strangers. I leaned into my hands and sobbed.
“You wait here till you feel better,” the policeman said, putting a gloved hand on my window frame. “Then be careful pulling out into traffic.”
All that week I went to work as usual, and when I wasn’t sleeping or helping a customer, I chanted with Laurie. I didn’t call the clinic. I didn’t even keep track of how many days had passed. I told myself I would never go back to that place.
If you had asked me to define my character in those days, I would have said I was distractible, lazy, prone to fads of the spirit. But with fear at my back, I began to chant with an unwavering discipline. I chanted in my car, driving down Wilshire Boulevard to the showroom. I chanted in my bed at night, soundlessly, so I wouldn’t keep my sister awake. Keeping my mind clear was like trying to balance on a wet log. I slipped off and found myself listening to the traffic outside or trying to remember if I’d put gas in the car. Then I’d steady myself for the task and begin again.
In my mind, I traced an image of my reproductive tract, half remembered from my high school biology text, a narrow stag’s head with curving antlers. Somewhere in there was an egg, and now I hoped it would go the way of countless other eggs with bad beginnings. I hoped that it wouldn’t catch hold. But how to find a way to fix on something that was no more than a complicated infolding of my own flesh? I wanted to find a way to exert my will that bore the commencing life no ill feeling. I had set this thing in motion, and now I wanted it to stop. But it seemed callow—even dangerous—to make it alien or wish it harm. The chanting, those nonsense syllables, offered a way to focus my thoughts, a path of sound on which to make this moral stepping, and as I went on I began to feel a kind of unfamiliar hope—hope that I had the power to change the course of things. After all, wasn’t faith the agent by which people lifted cars, walked for days in the snow, or turned to someone who had wrecked them in some often revisited hour and said, “You are forgiven”? I walked around in the summer heat feeling alive to every shift and mutter in my blood.
When I came to work one Monday, Laurie had brought me a present, a small cardboard shrine with a scroll mounted inside. “It’s already been blessed,” she said, her eyes shining with reverence. That shrine must have been the starter model: a stippled brown box with an open front. It looked like the package for a blender or a baseball mitt. But the scroll mounted inside caught my eye. At the top and bottom were strips of Japanese paper—delicate leaf patterns highlighted with foil—and the columns of brush strokes were lovely, if inscrutable.
“These characters represent all the possible states of human existence,” Laurie said, running her pink nail down one column.
“Really?” I couldn’t quite stomach her solemn tone, and it must have shown in my face.
Laurie gave me a level stare. “Things are going to get better for you,” she said.
Despite my flippancy, I took the shrine home and mounted it on the back of the bookcase that walled off my bed. I didn’t believe it was the strongbox of my soul, but I had a tiny superstitious fear of throwing it out.
When I told Laurie that I’d hung the shrine in my room, she asked if she could meet my father: “I’d like explain to him a little about this stuff, so he won’t think you’re associating with a nut.”
“I don’t think he cares one way or another,” I told her, but Laurie insisted it was for the best. She came by on a Sunday evening and settled herself on the couch while I went to get my father from his study. He was at his desk, a welter of books and papers around him.
I rapped on the door frame. “Dad? There’s someone here who’d like to meet you. The woman I work with.”
He paused in his train of thought. “Sure, honey. I’ll be right out.”
Laurie stood up when he came into the room.
“Dad, this is Laurie. We work together at Easy Rents.”
She offered her hand.
“Nice to meet you,” my father said, looking vaguely confused by the formal mood.
Laurie sat down. She had both hands in her lap, and she was fidgeting. I’d never seen her like this. “I wanted to talk to you because Lisa has been getting interested in this group I’m involved with—I’m sure you probably saw the shrine she brought home—and I just wanted to let you know a little about it.”
My father smiled. “Well, you’re welcome to tell me about it,” he said, “but whatever Lisa wants to
do is okay with me.” He looked amused by Laurie’s earnest appeal to his authority.
“I don’t know if you’re familiar with Buddhism,” Laurie ventured. She had rehearsed her spiel and wouldn’t be stopped. When she was finished, she smiled expectantly, ready to answer questions.
“Well, like I said, I have complete faith in Lisa’s judgment,” my father said.
“Because a lot of families feel nervous—you know, with the chanting.”
“It’s not a problem with this family.” He and I exchanged a small smile. “We’ve seen it all.”
All that week the sun was scorching. The lawns looked like cut paper, heat shimmered up from the avenues, and I had to put a towel over the black vinyl seat of my car. I felt slightly sick—from the weather or the flu, I couldn’t tell. One night, when the midday heat didn’t lift, I slept on the couch in the living room, where a faint breeze came in through the western windows. After lying awake for hours, chanting softly under my breath, I slipped into a dream with an odd awareness of the change, as you might slip sideways though the curtain of a waterfall, surprised to find you can breathe on the other side. I was asleep, but I knew I was dreaming, and the knowledge filled me with a sudden exultancy: if this was a dream, I could do anything. Quickly, eager to do something impossible, I vaulted up toward the living-room ceiling. Once there, I felt a little sheepish, but it was pleasant to be weightless, and so I dipped out of an open window, out over the chain of headlights pulling down Olympic Boulevard, and floated west toward the sea. From my vantage point in the air, I could make out each street corner, exactly as it looked when I drove past it in daylight: there was that scrap of pink chiffon snagged in the fence at La Cienega and Wilshire; over there the store on Pico where checks could be cashed with a purchase of meat. I was floating above the Los Angeles basin, a great bowl of steel and light, and yet at that same moment I knew I was asleep in sweat-dampened pajamas, on the second floor of our tile-roofed apartment, under the boat-shaped leaves of a rubber tree. That doubleness was like another dimension; the world widened out on all sides. I skimmed out toward Pacific Palisades, executing rolls and barrel turns, and all the while I could hear the faucet drip in the kitchen at home, the refrigerator click on and whir. Up ahead was the ocean, and I moved out over it, unafraid. When I reached Catalina Island, I circled the lighted dome of the casino, flew over bison sleeping upright on the hills. Coming back, skimming low over the waves, I saw that the water wasn’t dark, as it looked from the shore. It was illuminated by the city lights, miles of extra wattage spilling over the sea, a broad gold band that broke to pieces on the chop.
I woke the next morning to an unmistakable cramping. In an odd way, I was grateful for the pain, for the corrective it seemed to apply. I had been granted a reprieve—I wouldn’t have to go back to the clinic, wouldn’t have to pay the consequences of my bad judgment—but I felt that I should suffer for my carelessness. I went into the kitchen to make tea, and my father came in.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “You look pale.”
“I’m fine,” I told him, lightheaded to say the words and believe them. “Everything’s fine.”
I drove to the showroom and sat down across from Laurie in the cushioned customers’ chair. I didn’t have to say anything. The relief was all over my face. Laurie beamed. “I knew it would work,” she said.
I could see she was happy, but the certainty in her face made me stiffen. “That what would work?”
She faltered for a moment. “The chanting.”
My friend was convinced those syllables did the trick, the magic syllables and the box and the scroll. I wanted to believe it was my own doing. But even that wouldn’t hold up under scrutiny. Nothing could be proved by a sample of one. It might well have been luck. It might have been chance.
“We don’t know that for sure, do we?”
“No, of course not,” Laurie said, glancing down at her nails. She deferred out of politeness, out of gentleness, but I could see in her tipped-down face that she still believed.
Eleven
I WENT BACK to school in the fall with three thousand dollars in the bank, a feeling of pleasant self-containment, and the vow not to fritter any more of my time away with men. Then, midway through the school year, I fell in love. I didn’t know then it would be more than a passing fling.
I got to know Mauricio through an American-history section. I sat up front, monopolizing the classroom discussion and mooning over the T.A., a sharp-featured young graduate student with an infectious passion for his subject. On our first day in class, Mark asked us to write our names, majors, and any other salient facts on a three-by-five card. Then he went around the classroom asking what we’d like to be called, and marking down any unusual nicknames or pronunciations. Somehow, despite his dedication, he got the idea that Mauricio wanted to be called Bruce, and Mau (pronounced like my old familiar, Chairman Mao) never disabused him of the error.
I never took note of Bruce’s presence—he sat in the back and rarely spoke—but he took note of mine. He claims he found me insufferable, my endless comments, my transparent crush on the teacher, but that couldn’t have been the whole story; he can still remember certain outfits I wore to class.
We were in his dorm room when this slipped out. I had been led there by Wendy, who knew Mau from the campus coffee shop. It was late on a Friday night, and I was bored. Mau didn’t make much of an impression. He was listening to Jethro Tull, and some high school friend of his was there, sniffing amyl nitrate from a tiny amber jar, then flopping backward on the bed. He kept offering it to Mau, who kept declining, which seemed prudent.
Then Mau told me that we shared a class.
“Really? I don’t remember seeing you.” This was odd. There were only thirty students in the section.
As proof, he slipped into an imitation of our T.A. at the blackboard. “So, what are the basic tenets of federalism? Class? Anyone do the reading? Lisa?”
“It’s my fault I do the reading?”
“No, of course not,” Mau said. “Just as long as you admit you’re motivated by lust.”
I fessed up. “All right, so I have a crush on him, a Jewish guy with a mustache and nice muscles. And he gives those inspired lectures on the Bill of Rights.”
Mau, I soon learned, was Jewish, too. A Jew from Mexico, no less, with freckles and blue eyes. He had left Mexico City at twelve and spent his adolescence in Orange County, trying to transform himself into a surf rat.
I sensed a fellow misfit. “That must have been a bizarre transition.”
“Yeah. I never wanted to invite anyone over for dinner. I thought our house was too ethnic. My mom served chilies with everything.”
Later, I would discover that we shared other connections—divorced parents, step-and half siblings to spare—and nearly shared a birthday. It seems Mau and I were born one day apart, in 1966, our mothers—one in Newark, one in Mexico City—overlapping in labor for a brief time.
Mau owned a truck, and for our first date we drove east, under a lid of singed air, to a library and botanical preserve in Pasadena. We had known each other two weeks, and this was our first official date: to go look at exotic plants.
We paid our entrance fee and walked a little through the landscape of succulents and cacti. Mau was absorbed in the plants, in studying them. He had a lack of self-regard and a wonderment at outward things that reminded me of my mother.
“I can never remember the difference between euphorbs and cacti,” he said, squatting down in front of one of the beds. He often began his sentences with a qualification, a doubt. “In one, the spines are considered leaves—hardened leaves coming off the trunk—and in the other, the spines are really modified stems and the leaves are so tiny you can’t see them.”
We moved from the desert to the flowers and manicured herbs of an English garden and sat on a bench. It was scorching there against the Pasadena hills. My mouth felt mothy and dry, and I asked Mau if he minded waiting for a few minutes in the
shade. We had been walking very slowly, almost drifting along the path, but even this began to feel like too much progress. He put his hand on my knee—a steadying gesture—and for a moment I couldn’t remember who he was. Friend? Brother? It was akin to that moment of waking in a strange room when you turn and turn, trying to latch on to some clue to your whereabouts, so that you can couple up to the world again and go on. Whoever he was, he had good manners. His eyebrows came down a little, and he cocked his head to the side: “I think I see a water fountain up ahead. Why don’t we walk a little?”
What I liked about Mau, early on, was his rationality and calm. And that he was humble and doubted himself. Much of this would cause us trouble later. One day I would throw a shoe at him to try to raise his ire, and at times his shyness became a trial. At parties, he’d often go missing without a word, and one night I found him in a closet, sipping a beer on a pile of dirty clothes, happier there than in company. But just then he seemed to be my perfect complement. Gentle, with an oddball humor, attentive and self-contained.
We strolled on into Japan: through groves of bamboo and over orderly rivers. Inside a high wall we found a rock garden, a bed of blue-gray stones combed into undulating waves, which a plaque told us was meant to inspire tranquillity. A handful of visitors milled about, staring at the rocks with expectant expressions, then grew restless and passed out through a door on the far wall. Mau squatted down beside the rock waves and, after studying them for a moment, reached his hand over the barrier.
“Can’t you read? The sign says no touching!” The voice was high-pitched, but the body that delivered it, which was advancing upon us, was enormous—a pear-shaped man in a security uniform.
Mau stood up, apologetic but calm. The rocks seemed to have worked their effect on him. “There was a break in the pattern,” he said. “I was going to smooth it out.”
I went directly into my unctuous mode, my ass-kissing authority mode, which I hated in myself and was helpless to resist. “Sorry about that,” I said, trying to arrange my face like that of a reasonable person. “He didn’t mean to disturb.”
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