Sleeping Tigers

by Robinson, Holly

  Glumly, I stared at the tidy row of uneaten pizza crusts on my plate. At least if Peter were here, he would have eaten those crusts. “Don’t you ever think about getting married or having kids?”

  “Whenever I do, I put a cold cloth across my forehead and lie down until the thought goes away.” Karin raised her wine glass and touched it to mine. “Here’s to your new freedom, Jordan. Enjoy it while you can.”

  Two days later, I woke early and vowed to make it to the laundromat before my jeans stalked out of the apartment without me. I gathered my things and stepped onto the brick walk outside, then wavered. I should really meet the landlord. I didn’t like being this anonymous.

  I walked around to the front of the house and leaned on Louise’s intercom bell. My only witness was a woman walking her dog, a black Scottie. When I turned to smile at her, I realized that the woman’s flannel trousers were covered in tiny black Scotties. Her socks were, too.

  “State your business,” Louise said, “and make it snappy.”

  “It’s Jordan, your new tenant. Look, sorry to bother you, but I just wanted to come up and say hello.”

  There was an audible sigh through the metallic speaker, and then the door buzzed. I opened it, deposited the laundry bags in the hall, and climbed the stairs.

  Louise shouted, “Open, Sesame!” when I knocked. Inside, I was greeted by the stench of cigarette smoke. The room was so dimly lit that the furniture appeared as hulking animals. A four-legged table and two chairs had been herded into the middle of the room, where a vacuum cleaner stood guard with its hose snaked around the furniture legs. A brilliant red cloak hung on one chair and a romance novel with a lurid cover lay on the table.

  “Pay no mind to my hell hole of a kitchen, Hon. Just pick your way through the mess and pray you don’t break a leg.” Louise’s accent was Southern. I followed her voice into the next room, expecting to find a seductive blonde in a filmy black gown, lounging on the couch with a pearl-tipped cigarette holder until the arrival of her next gentleman caller.

  I was partly right. Louise’s hair was cheesecake yellow and she was dressed in a black rayon gown clasped shut at the neck by a cameo brooch. However, my landlady was no ordinary seductress. Louise lounged, one thick arm spread along the back of the couch, with the sleepy gaze and beefy torso of a Roman emperor reclining after a post-battle feast.

  “Hello, Jordan-My-New-Tenant,” she said. “Need something? Or just couldn’t stand the suspense of not meeting me?”

  “I’m fine, thanks. I just wanted to say hello.”

  She fluttered a hand in my direction. “And now you have.”

  So much for that myth about pathologically friendly Californians. “It’s a nice apartment. I’m really glad you let me sublet it.”

  “I actually thought that nice nurse friend of yours was going to rent it,” Louise said. “It was the old bait-and-switch, as far as I was concerned. I was hoodwinked.”

  “Oh! Sorry,” I fumbled.

  “No worries. You’re only here for three months. How much can you trash the place?”

  “I promise I won’t do that,” I said, taken aback.

  My landlady waved an arm, flesh rippling inside her gauzy sleeves. “That’s fine, then. So long as we understand each other. You have a nice day, now, doing whatever you need to do.”

  I shook my head as I went downstairs, feeling dismissed and irritable. I had left my cell phone on top of the laundry bags; now I saw that the message light was blinking.

  I had two messages. The first was from my mother, anxious about my whereabouts despite the fact that I had called her just a few days ago. The second message, amazingly, was from my brother.

  “Hey!” Cam’s voice blared. “Super sorry it’s taken so long to connect. Let’s do Ocean Beach, all right? Come to our Lie-In! That’s L-i-e, as in lie down.” He snorted. “Sounds weird, but what doesn’t? Anyway, we’re going way early, like 10 o’clock tomorrow morning? Ocean Beach, okay? Be there, or be square.”

  I grinned and played the message again, relieved that my brother had surfaced at last.

  Chapter four

  The next morning, I drove through Golden Gate Park, smelling the heady scents of eucalyptus and pine. Ocean Beach was completely fogged in. I heard the water long before I saw it, tall green humps feathered in white as the beast breathed along the shore. The beach was empty except for a few dozen shapes lying on the sand. I thought they were seals at first. Once I’d parked the car and started walking towards them, though, I realized that the shapes were people.

  I walked fast. The sensation was a strange one, walking with the fog hovering all around, the unseen waves grumbling along the shore. The water shone every now and then, glinting like glass whenever an occasional needle of sunlight pierced the fog. I was acutely conscious of the patterns in the sand beneath my feet, where circular ridges rose like tiny mountain peaks, as though I were flying above the earth.

  One of the bulky shapes on the sand turned out to be Cam. Wrapped in a blanket from head to foot, he lay on his side facing the water. He had dug a depression in the sand so that he was cocooned there, nested. My brother’s eyes were closed and he looked just as he had when I last saw him, two years ago at Christmas. He still wore a mustache and the scraggly whisk broom of a beard that made him look like an Amish farmer. His skin gleamed bright pink between the whiskers. He looked so young! But he wasn’t. Almost thirty by now, I reminded myself. Practically middle-aged, like me.

  I nudged his backside with the toe of my sneaker. “Hey. Wake up, Sleeping Beauty.”

  Cameron stretched, but didn’t bother to stand. He squinted at me, his blue eyes bright, and flashed a crooked grin. “Hey yourself. Join me.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Lying down.”

  “Doesn’t sound like much fun.” I hovered over him, uncertain. Now that Cam was actually there in front of me, I realized how little I knew about how his life had gone for the past two years.

  “Uh, Jordan? The fog’s breaking up and you’re blocking my rays.”

  “Sun’s bad for you.”

  “Don’t believe everything you read. Here.” He nodded towards his backpack. “Look in there. I brought you a blanket so you can try this.”

  “Try what?”

  “Dig a sand bed. Make yourself a little sand pillow, wrap yourself in the blanket and lie down. Give yourself over to the rhythms of the planet. You’ll love it.”

  “The rhythms of the planet?” I repeated. My brother really had been in California too long. “Oh, come on. Get up!” I nudged him again, harder. “Let’s go for coffee.”

  The shapes around us stirred. Cam shushed me. “Later! Lie down. You’re disturbing the moment.”

  “Forget it. I didn’t travel 3,000 miles to take a nap with you. I want to talk. You’ve been a real jerk, not calling. We’ve all been worried sick.” I bent down and tugged at his blanket.

  Cam caught my wrist. “You didn’t come to San Francisco just for me. And it’s been two years. What’s another few minutes?”

  We glared at each other. My brother’s hand around my wrist reminded me of how Cam used to challenge me to an arm wrestling match almost daily when he was in seventh grade and I was in tenth. He didn’t beat me until three years later; he kept trying until he succeeded.

  “You’ve made your point,” I said now.

  Cam let go. “Fine. Don’t lie down. Don’t relax. Don’t do anything!” His voice drifted and he closed his eyes again. “But let me do my thing.”

  I couldn’t very well lift him up and carry him off the beach. “Oh, all right,” I grumbled. “As long as we can talk later.”

  That grin again, and then my brother’s face went still, all expression extinguished.

  I tugged the extra blanket out of the backpack and followed Cam’s instructions. It was surprisingly comfortable. I soon fell asleep, lulled by the sound of the ocean and the warmth of the sun and sand.

  I woke to the smell of baking bread.
Only it wasn’t bread I smelled; it was me. The sand, my cotton blanket, the sweat trickling down between my breasts: the smells were a combination of sweet, musky, and yeasty. The fog had lifted and the sun-drenched beach was so noisy now with surfers and families, joggers and dogs, that I could scarcely hear the waves. I sat up, shook my hair free of sand and looked around. Cam was still asleep.

  I studied his peaceful silhouette. Who, after all this time, had my brother become? My firsthand knowledge of him stopped, really, after Cam’s senior year of college, when he had invited friends to our house for a blow-out college weekend party that had included a live band.

  Cam’s girlfriend at the time had appeared in an outfit she’d made herself by drilling holes into nickels and stringing them together. She writhed and shimmered to the music like a shiny fish just pulled from the lake.

  Dad had whistled appreciatively at the sight of her. “That little girl’s the one damn thing Cameron has ever done right in his piss poor life,” he said, and my mother ran out of the house at that point to ply the girl with coffee.

  Later that night, there was an argument in the garage. Cam, drunk as I’d ever seen him, struck my father, clipped him hard enough on the jaw to send Dad reeling backwards into the neat row of rakes, shovels, and push brooms hanging along the far wall. It wasn’t the first time that Cam, cornered, had lashed out at Dad. Nothing extraordinary, other than the fact that this particular time it was Cam who was drunk, not our father, who had finally sobered up five years before that.

  The event had stayed with me as some sort of turning point. After that night, Cam really “managed to drop off the family radar screen,” as he put it the next Christmas. My brother dropped out of college during the last semester of his senior year without explanation. After that, he stumbled through odd jobs whenever he wasn’t traveling. His few postcards to me were limited to quotes from philosophers, literary figures, and musicians, conveying little about his life other than geographical locations: Wyoming, Oregon, India, Thailand, Bali, and, finally, California. The last post card he’d sent was postmarked on my birthday and showed San Francisco’s skyline at night, with the Trans Am building lit up like that Egyptian hotel in Las Vegas.

  “Yo!” Another sand cocoon sat up suddenly and faced me over Cam’s inert body, studying my face closely. “Jordan?”

  “Yes.”

  “You look just like your brother. And I mean that strictly as a compliment. Cam’s one of the beautiful people.”

  “Are you one of his roommates?”

  “I own the house.” The man nodded, his arms still wrapped in his blanket. “I’m Shepherd Jon.”

  I laughed. “And these would be what, your sheep?” I gestured around the beach, where I counted three other blanketed cocoons besides Cam’s.

  Jon gave me a tolerant look. “Housemates of like mind and spirit. I rent out rooms to a chosen few. The house used to belong to my parents, but now it’s mine.”

  Something about this man made the hairs on the back of my neck prickle. He was being civil. Even friendly. Yet, I didn’t trust him. “This lie-in was your idea?” I asked.

  “Sure.” Shepherd Jon grinned. “And not a bad one, was it? You looked like you weren’t hurting any. Snoring away.”

  I was snoring? Well. So very gallant of the good Shepherd to tell me. The man might as well have pointed out the drool on my chin, too, which I now hastily wiped away with one hand.

  “I needed a nap. Jet lag.” My voice sounded cranky. Elderly.

  “It’s the negative ions in the air that does it.”

  “Does what?”

  Jon shrugged. “Whatever you need.” He stood up, dropping the blanket in a heap on the sand.

  Jon began walking around the beach, tapping the others on their shoulders. He had a swimmer’s build and a rock star’s swagger. His blonde hair was caught at the nape with a piece of rawhide and snaked over one shoulder in a thick ponytail. He wore ordinary clothes–a gray t-shirt and blue jeans–but, on him, the clothes looked alive, electric as an animal’s fur coat. His eyes were the same green as the glassy sea.

  Shepherd Jon was in his early thirties, judging from the lines on his face, but he was so tightly wound, bouncing on the balls of his feet as he walked across the sand, that he appeared much younger. Must be all those negative ions. Either that, or no mortgage. He was free and clear. Probably scrounged a good living from boarding his flock of sheep, including my brother.

  “Coming?” Jon touched Cam’s shoulder, but he was looking at me.

  Cam sat up and let the blanket fall to his waist. “Absolutely.”

  “Where to?” I stood up and shook out my blanket.

  Cam scrambled to his feet and looked at Shepherd Jon. “We really gonna make this thing happen, Bro, or what?”

  “You bet your ass.” Shepherd Jon grinned and unzipped his jeans. Within seconds, he was undressed and so was Cam. The two women did the same, as did the fifth member of the Lie-In party, a chubby man.

  Now I was surrounded by naked, shivering people. I kept my eyes averted from my brother, who I hadn’t seen naked since we bathed together as children. Jon did a few stretches, standing on one leg like a heron, still watching me. Probably waiting for a reaction. He was like that kid in my fourth grade class last year who liked to set fire to trash cans: any attention was better than none.

  “Coming for a swim?” Jon challenged me.

  I laughed. “Are you nuts? That water’s about 50 degrees!”

  “You don’t know what you’re missing.”

  “Oh, I think I do. Cam and I used to go swimming in Maine.”

  I was having trouble not looking at his penis, which sprouted like a dark mushroom from a tangle of hay-colored pubic hair. Then again, I didn’t know where else to look, since the five nude lunatics on the beach around me were whooping and spinning like tops, arms outstretched, while the Sunday family strollers and picnickers scattered away from us like seagulls.

  Where were the cops? Who was going to order these people to put their clothes back on? But no, this was San Francisco. The human whirligigs sailed themselves into the water with shrieks of pain as a few teenaged surfers, sensibly enveloped in wet suits, paused with their boards to watch, yelling, “All right, oldsters! Go for it!”

  The sheep didn’t last long in the water. I barely had time to shake out Cam’s blanket and fold it. The women came out first, bellies jiggling, nipples blue with cold, hair as slick as seal skin. They rubbed themselves with towels, ignoring the cheering surfers, and didn’t speak to me. Their teeth were chattering too hard.

  Jon, Cam, and the third man came out together, holding hands and shouting, doing a sort of high-stepping jig over waves that threatened to catapult them back under water. Jon and Cam were streamlined, all stringy muscles along their tanned arms and legs. The plumper man plodded between them. They dressed hurriedly, their balls as shriveled as dried figs, their penises as tiny as crunchy cocktail pickles.

  I drove Cam to his house in Berkeley, following Shepherd Jon’s battered orange van. “Is that your van?” I asked. “I don’t remember it being that vegetable color.”

  “Nah. That’s Jon’s. Mine blew up in the desert on the way to Baja. It was good ‘til then. I made many a fine meal of radiator rice and had zero problemas fitting in the hitchers. I had, like, fifteen people in that baby when it blew. We got busted by the Mexican policia, though, and it wasn’t pretty. That’s why I wasn’t around when you first called me.” He shuddered slightly. “Cost us everything to cut loose from those bastards.”

  This was the most I’d heard my brother speak since seeing him, or maybe ever, I thought, slowing for a stoplight. Cam was always quiet, even as a young child.

  The only time I ever saw him speak freely was to Grammy, my mother’s mother, after she had her stroke and came to live with us. She was eighty by then, a woman built like a fireplug with a pale yellow mustache. Dad called her hillside mobile home “that Tinderbox on wheels,” but it had been a chi
ldhood paradise for my brother and me. During one of our visits, for instance, Grammy offered us jewelry boxes full of crispy locust shells. She helped us spray paint them silver and stick them to the curtains, saying, “There, now doesn’t that add a bit of sparkle to the room?”

  By the time she came to live with us, Grammy’s cataracts were bad, her hearing was shot, and she was paralyzed on one side. She had trouble making herself understood, chewing through her words. I was shy around her, afraid to look into those rheumy eyes, but Cam spent entire afternoons curled up beside Grammy on the couch. While our grandmother huddled in a nest of quilts, Cam kept up a stream of chatter, explaining his television shows or video games to her.

  “How can you stand to talk to her so much?” I asked Cam once, as we both said good night to our grandmother and climbed the stairs to bed. “I never understand a word she says. And she can’t even see the TV, you know.”

  My little brother gave me a look that stopped me cold. “I do it because once Grammy told me she feels like she’s sitting alone in a dark tunnel,” he said. “I don’t want her to be afraid.”

  Cam’s reticence had been his best defense against our father, I thought now, glancing at my brother’s profile as we approached the Bay Bridge. Dad began drinking off and on early in his twenties. My mother had once told me that he even drank in the waiting area when she went to the hospital to deliver Cam. By the time the nurses told my father he had a new son, he’d already passed out on a plastic chair. When he came to, he tried to belt one of the doctors, rushed past the orderly who tried to restrain him, and fell to his knees beside Mom’s hospital bed, weeping.

  “He called me his Madonna,” Mom sighed, telling me this story. “It was difficult to stay angry with your father, because he was always so sorry for the things he did.”

  Dad’s drinking escalated slowly. I mostly remembered him being like the other fathers in our neighborhood who came home and had a couple of highballs. His real drunken, raging fits didn’t begin until I was in high school, after Dad was laid off from the lumber sales job he’d held for fifteen years.