by Sarah Reith
“Actually,” I said, as if I were getting ready to present the officers with a fascinating little-known fact, “I grew up with her daughter.”
I gave a perfunctory smile, like an English teacher who is unable to allow an imprecise construction to stand. Later, I would decide that I had carefully strategized the importance of my near-familial relationship with Alizarin.
“So where is she now?” Mauer asked softly, like he was Mata Hari and I was a love-drunk general, about to give away the coordinates of my troops.
“She’s in Israel,” I chirped promptly, and added, “for Passover,” as if I only associated with people who took their religious observations seriously.
To my amazement, I realized I was having a great time. I was alive to every flicker of meaning and motion. I hadn’t been this alert since I was nineteen years old, working in downtown San Francisco as a bike messenger. This moment here, with Mauer and the French braid, was more exhilarating than riding through the Stockton tunnel at rush hour. I could feel it in my teeth, like flying down Bush Street with no brakes, darting in between the cars and blowing all the lights and bursting onto Montgomery without losing speed.
A second patrol car glided off the road and pulled in beside us. I was savage with unreasoning invincibility, the kind that’s only possible when all your tender flesh is exposed to crushing metal, every working minute of the day.
“Excuse me, please,” grunted Mauer, lurching out of his seat.
He was ruining my beautiful danger with his beer drinker’s gracelessness. Another officer, a little younger and a lot beefier, heaved himself out of the second cruiser. They were starting to look like highly ineffective villains. The two men met about halfway between the vehicles, alert and lazy, like a couple of unneutered male fighting animals who haven’t thought of a good reason to attack each other. They stood for a long time by the side of the lake with their hands in their pockets, not at all like agents of other people’s destinies. They could have been telling each other tall tales about the fish they hadn’t caught. I could see their breath, warmed by the insides of their bodies.
The French braid began to flip through a manual furiously, fuming as the two men turned their backs on us. She gave every indication of bearing a serious, personal resentment for Isobel Reinhardt, whose name she had just learned how to pronounce. It occurred to me that she was just as likely as I was to be telling herself a story; to be casting herself as the victor in some epic battle between her people and mine. I thought I could sense the contours of her story. It was stiff and memorized, and every child knew it.
I began to look at her. I could see her slim, knuckly neck, bowed over the manual with the eager misery of someone small and weak and heavily armed. I suddenly felt very gentle toward this woman with her regulation hairdo, a few soft wisps escaping its severity.
I was overflowing with the sense that I had never known anyone as well as I knew her when the third officer approached the car. He had a sulky sneer on his fat pink lips and a look of flat contempt in his shiny black eyes.
“Forget about the manual,” he said abruptly. He sounded like a varsity quarterback, giving orders to a socially maladjusted lower classman. “I looked it up on this.” He held up an iPhone, diluting his air of athletic command with the boredom of a disaffected tech-savvy youth. “Write her a fix-it ticket if you want,” he concluded, in clipped, dismissive tones. He jammed the iPhone back into his pocket and turned away.
I saw Mauer duplicate his sneer as the two men passed each other.
“Catch you later,” the younger one muttered, exactly like a normal human being who is allowed to say things like that without terrifying large segments of the population.
And then an extraordinary thing happened. That little officer who peppered me with spit and fury and never got a chance to be a really good bad cop—she, whose name tag I never did see—scrambled out of her seat and pulled open my door. Now it was she who made the gallant gesture as she ushered me out of the car.
“You have a good night, ma’am,” she said earnestly.
She sounded almost devout as she released me into her county, calling me ma’am and holding the door. I realized that she had a certain callow classiness, the kind that lays a hand across its heart and bows its head; that says its prayers and is moved by words like “duty,” “honor,” and “brotherhood.” She was watching me.
“Um,” I managed. “Sure.” And I drove away with two coolers full of someone else’s actionable felony.
A Dignified Exit
I CALLED MORPHEUS at Serendipity to see if he knew anything about the proof of insurance. I didn’t want to seem overly eager to obey the French braid and Mauer, but I thought I’d carried my advantage far enough.
Morpheus was smacking his lips with tremendous enjoyment when he picked up the phone. “What’s new and exciting?” he inquired. He sounded like he was making out with a bowlful of grapes. Suddenly, I didn’t feel like entertaining him.
“Not a whole lot,” I replied. “Hey, look, I got pulled over and the cops gave me a really hard time about the insurance on that car. I need to get that taken care of right away.”
“Oh. Yeah.” He slurped at something with such ecstatic gusto, it made me not want to eat anything, ever again. “Chris called about that.”
“Who the fuck is Chris?” I wondered.
“The insurance agent,” he replied. He sounded like he’d just spotted the first signs of my impending dementia. “CHP in Lake County called him and gave him a bunch of shit and he called here to give you a bunch of shit. But you weren’t here.”
“How did they find out it was insured?” I inquired.
“They ran the VIN, or the license plate, or something.” He slurped diligently, like he wasn’t going to leave those grapes alone until they’d all had multiple orgasms. “Everything’s all connected to a computer.”
“Well, I got some fairly dire warnings about the terrible things that will happen to me if I don’t mail them exactly what they need by some specific date,” I remarked. “Is that pretty much what Chris said?”
“Yeah, pretty much. He said he mailed it days ago, and he couldn’t understand why it wasn’t in the glovebox, where it’s supposed to be.”
“He said that?” I could tell he was nodding by the way the grape juice sloshed up and down in his mouth. “Dude, he scolded you.” It was not the right thing to say. I could tell by the complete cessation of all disgusting mouth noises.
“It was Alizarin’s responsibility,” he declared, in a tone of such dark melancholy I could only hope he was trying to be funny.
“Well, if he mailed it,” I suggested brightly, “maybe it’s in the pile of mail by the phone?”
“Oh, there’s a shit-ton of mail here,” he agreed, sounding as if someone had indeed deposited a ton of something disagreeable, right there in the kitchen, where he was trying to have an affair with his food.
“So . . . is it there?” I prodded.
“I have no idea.” He sounded utterly disgusted.
“Maybe if you poked around a little,” I tried, remembering that Morpheus suffered acutely from male refrigerator blindness.
“Aren’t you coming out here?” he complained.
“I’m not. I’m looking for a job,” I explained. “Like everybody else this time of year. Look.” I sighed, wondering why the hell I had to explain this to a grown man. “This is a big hassle. I know. Maybe you could just run off a copy on the printer upstairs and pop it in the mailbox, to me, and I’ll mail it to the CHP in Lake County and then everybody will be happy and forget all about us.”
Happily ever after the end, I added like a prayer. There was a long, silent pause as he contemplated his role in this plan. It was the simplest one I could think of. I knew there was a scanner in Alizarin’s office, but I also knew there was exactly zero likelihood of getting Morpheus to scan and email anything. He expected all electronic devices to respond intuitively to telepathic commands. When they failed
him in this, as they did every time, he punished them the cruelest way he knew how, by refusing to talk to them.
“I can’t,” he said at last. “I’m eating soup right now.” And then, no lie, he hung up the phone.
He was still eating soup when I arrived at Serendipity forty-five minutes later, which is how long it took to get there from Foxglove. He reminded me more than ever of Effie the dog as he hunched over his bowl, surveying me with narrowed eyes. He really did have very small eyes, I noticed. I saw, too, that he had drops of glistening broth on his chin and shreds of something in his teeth.
“Got it!” I called so cheerily that even I could hear how much it sounded like an accusation. He nodded sullenly, like he was busy coming to terms with the fact that all women are incurably passive-aggressive.
“Alizarin thinks you’re mad at her,” he muttered as I sailed toward the door, determined to be as annoyingly cheerful as possible. I paused. He offered a grudging explanation. “She called right after I got off the phone with you.” He sounded like he’d been bullied into conveying the message and resented it deeply.
“Why would I be mad at Alizarin?” I could hear the hostility in my voice.
“That’s what I wanted to know.” He stared off into space for so long I finally realized he was waiting for me to answer my own question. “She thought maybe, because of the car . . . And the cops,” he added, acknowledging the possibility that there might have been something distressing about my roadside chat with Lake County’s finest while trying to commit a peaceful felony.
“I gotta get going, Morpheus,” I told him. “I have to get this in the mail.” And I concluded my dignified exit.
THE FACT IS, I was plenty mad at Alizarin. I thought having a husband who wasn’t even functional enough to go through a pile of mail was in extremely bad taste. Never mind that I had been married to The John, who was goateed and flatulent and panting over my mother.
I thought Alizarin should maintain her vehicle and her paperwork to a higher standard. Never mind the weather-beaten registration extension tags on the bucket of bolts I was pleased to call a pickup truck. I thought if she really cared about her investments, she wouldn’t drop them in someone else’s lap and leave the country at a crucial juncture, like a hard-hearted criminal cutting her losses.
My mind echoed with doubts and complaints. Had I really traveled so far and studied so hard to risk my liberty on a lonely country road? In my interview with Mauer and the French braid, I had put together an act, starring myself as the outlaw princess I had always wanted to be. I knew plenty of people who treated reality like it was an ongoing improv gig. Remember Morpheus, throwing gasoline-soaked rags into a stove to heighten the dramatic tension of his married life.
But my playacting with the CHP officers—which was only half a shade better than theirs—raised a question I had always shied away from, because I thought it might make people sneer. The John, who fancied himself a populist, would have sneered mightily at the faintest hint of it.
What if I really am too good to be a petty criminal? The thought of it produced a deep unease, as if I were setting myself above a class of people who were well-suited to trimming and muling and going to jail. Who did I think I was, to set myself above them in this way? I hadn’t taken the time to cultivate any special abilities. I had no ability to captivate the powerful. No one ever held his breath as I made my way across a wire or out of my clothes or past a police perimeter. I wasn’t dangerous to anyone, which meant I had no right to command anyone’s attention.
And yet: I was steadfast. I was trustworthy. In the cheesy Kung Fu movie that was not, after all, my life, there would be a special ceremony with flickering firelight and somber music. I would be pronounced ready for the next adventure.
But now, I wasn’t even sure I wanted an adventure. I wanted something else. It wasn’t a cooler full of someone else’s deferred prison sentence. It wasn’t a permanent seat in the audience to other people’s lives. I was sick to death of being a sidekick.
I wanted my own life, with my own risks. And I had no idea how to go about getting it.
MONYA CAME BACK to Foxglove. She looked like a poor dishonored creature about to throw herself into a well, haggard and forlorn.
“She should be glowing at this stage of her pregnancy,” Reina stated gravely. But Monya was singularly glow-free. Her hair was dull. Her skin was gray with yellow highlights, like she’d been smoking two or three packs of cigarettes a day since she was six years old.
Mother and daughter took long walks in the frigid garden. She may have lacked glow, but there was a steadiness to Monya Harmann, a calm as unalterable as the structure of her bones. She was a woman who could raise a child in the mouth of a cannon, and that child would grow up with a sense of ethics so refined, he’d have to write a book about it.
But Reina—fearless Reina, with lovers and marathon trophies—Reina Serrano was openly scared. She began preparing gourmet meals with lots of beets and chard and grass-fed beef. She insisted that Monya drink only distilled water, which she had delivered in hygienically sealed five-gallon jugs. The jugs were plastic, but Monya was only permitted to drink the water from metal or glass containers. She was forbidden all unpasteurized cheese, which, in the United States, is only commercially available in Mendocino county and certain corners of Maine. The fridge was papered with lists of the top ten fruits and vegetables that absolutely must be organic and the seventeen species of fish most likely to contain high levels of mercury. Finally, the anxious grandmother-to-be cross-stitched a baby sampler that read, in darling pastel yellow cursive letters, “Abuelita’s Leetle Angel.”
“That’ll look great with puke all over it, right?” She grimaced and snapped it sharply. “I might make it into a bib.”
“Abuelita’s Leetle Angel,” I said slowly. “Do you guys speak Spanish?”
“My mom is Mexican. More or less.” She bristled. “And no, as a matter of fact, I don’t speak Spanish. But I am not going to have someone calling me Grandma.” I had the distinct impression that things were going to keep on changing, just when I could use a little stability in my life.
I wasn’t lying when I told Morpheus I was looking for a job. I was several months behind my trimming cohort, all of whom had dispersed into miscellaneous endeavors with gentleness and grace, the way people do when they walk around with a working theory of the world. I seemed to be the only one left, like the last stubborn coffee grounds or particles of sand that simply will not be absorbed when it’s time to clean up and move on.
It was the middle of Passover when I responded to a flyer in the window of a local art gallery. Alizarin was still in Israel. Reina was compensating for her earlier negligence by scouring the Internet for stories about horrible things that happen to pregnant women. The articles on the fridge ran the emotional gamut, from motherly concern to paranoid screeds, with a few humorous gynecological sidebars for relief.
Now that’s the kind of work a girl can tell her mother about, thought I, as I tore a copy of an email address from the fringe along the bottom of the flyer.
Rubens’ Whores
MY PROFESSIONAL GOALS have always rocked steady on one simple theme: DO NOT be a whore. But then I found myself married, and Caitlin/Lilith was clacking away about how I’d joined her in the world’s oldest profession.
“You know that marriage certificate is just a plain old-fashioned business contract,” she purred. “It’s a simple exclusivity agreement. Now if he takes his business elsewhere, you can terminate and collect indemnity.” I was wondering how moving it would be to watch that smirk as I concluded my marital arrangements. “What will you do about your chattels?” she cackled. “Did you provide security in the form of a dowry? What will your logo—excuse me, please: your monogram be?” My mother has achieved a certain amount of notoriety for her incisive commentary on Hooker.organs.org. The result is that she tends to forget the simple fact that it is not her sole responsibility to eradicate every unreasonable psychoso
cial sexual convention.
“Why don’t you just pretend you’ve been hired to play the gracious girlfriend,” I suggested. “Pretend my wedding is a workday, and one of the conditions of the gig is that you have to be nice to everyone.” I tried not to think about how many johns had given her detailed role-playing instructions.
“Oh, so you want the fake me,” she exclaimed, suddenly affronted.
“Yes, please,” I affirmed. “I think that would be lovely.”
Caitlin was not invited to the wedding. She did not once allude to the event or the missing invitation, a combined omission that shone like two black holes until I ceased to be married, at which point they collapsed and lightened to the darkness of ordinary empty space.
But now, I thought I’d like to have a chat with the real Caitlin. Maybe Lilith, if she could refrain from playing the pedantic oracle for once.
“Mom,” I hailed.
I winced at the fake chumminess in my voice. Did I ever call my distaff parent “Mom”? I did not. I called her Caitlin, because she wanted me to call her Katy; or I called her mother, because she would settle for Caitlin. She was sure to be on her guard after such an artless opening. I braced myself for cold exquisite civilities. My mother reads vintage etiquette manuals, when she’s not keeping up on the latest happenings in the fetish community or scrounging around in feminist herstories for sexy morsels about female deities. She has been known to demand a level of graciousness that would not be out of place at a Civil War-era debutante ball.
“Is that my Izzie?” she crowed. “My Infanta! My Isabella of Borbon. And Borbon. Izzie, sweetheart, how the hell are you? You haven’t been disfigured, have you? I can still see you clearly in my poor old bleary mind’s eye?”
I hadn’t told her what I’d done to my hair. It wasn’t a real question, anyway. Some people just think it’s funny to joke about disfigurement.
“I’m in Mendocino County, Mom,” I told her. That phony-sounding Mom again. I could rip my tongue out. Isobel the First, that weak-chinned, strong-willed Servant of God, would have found that course of action ladylike and proper, considering all the Jews and whores I hung around with.
