My daughter was just down from up North, to visit, with my little granddaughter. Here, I’ll show you the pictures they brought. Yes, I know. Goats. My granddaughter runs around butting heads with them. It’s all part of this commune idea, milking, chickens… They all sleep in little cabins with no electricity.
My granddaughter is all the time drawing pictures. She’s practically a genius, but who am I to say? Look at this one. And she’s only seven years old!
She’s like me. I had a very good eye. When I was younger. I still have my old portfolio, and I was very good in sculpture. You’ve seen my nudes. This one here on the coffee table and the other in the bathroom. The teacher was a cute little thing; well, I guess she was taller than me, but petite. Not like me. She said I had a wonderful feel for the female body. There was an exhibition at the end and I won a prize. A book about art. But I don’t do it so much now. One of these days I’ll finish that bust in the back room.
You watch Dynasty? How about Dallas? I don’t care for the stories much, I just watch to see what they wear. Last week Joan Collins had on a beautiful evening gown. Sequins in peacock blue. The women all have good figures too. But I say, it’s how you dress that counts. Like that Nell Carter. She’s on the heavy side but she keeps herself neat. She looks good. Just as good as Joan Collins. She knows how to carry herself. That’s what I like.
Last week at the store we had in a gorgeous piece. Long beige skirt with a silk draping over the bodice. I set it aside for Bertie’s daughter. She likes to dress up once in a while. New Years especially. My daughter? No. You know what she wants? Ma, she says, I could use some work boots. So I found some. Nice. Good leather. Darling, I say, whatever you want.
How do you like it? Want a little more? A little cake? My granddaughter likes it too. She likes meat. We were out to eat and she had a hamburger, then she finished my ribs! But she’s skinny, and with those long braids. Well! She’s my pride and joy. My daughter, though, won’t eat the red meat now. I don’t know. All politics.
Things are always changing. Women’s skirts, ideas. I remember when they put in that theater down the street. The Fairfax, that’s right. Bertie and I went to the opening and do you know who cut the ribbon? Vivian Vance. My, was she elegant. That was a long time ago. I don’t know why I thought of it. The girls were just little then, and Bertie’s two boys in the buggy. We used to take them all out to the beach in summer. Bertie had those long brown legs. She always looked good.
You know what my daughter told me? She’s in a relationship. That’s what they say now. In a relationship. Divorced? Yes, two years. I was so worried. So she says, in a relationship.
With a woman.
I was a little surprised, I’ll admit. But I really wanted to know, is she Jewish?
Sometimes, though, I get worried. You know, concerned. Late at night looking at the ceiling. Live and let live, but what’s a mother to do? And besides, she has my granddaughter to think of.
So I said to her, I apologize if this is none of my business. But. This lifestyle you’re living, it’s not healthy, it’s not right. I don’t mind the commune, it’s pretty up there in the country. Or the No Nukes and getting arrested and all that. And I don’t mean this loving of women. You know something? When I was young, if I could have, maybe I would have gone that way too.
It’s the other I can’t understand, I said. It’s not good. No, it’s not. I’m begging you to change your mind. What are you doing it for? Why, Darling?
Why are you a vegetarian?
Five
Up on a Mountain
Berkeley, California 1977
Tuesday night Kirk and Rita arrived home late from their encounter group. They kicked off their Birkenstock sandals and sank down into two of the homemade bean-bags that furnished the living room. There was a creak in the floorboards overhead, then the sound of running water. It must be Al, or B.B. or Jane --someone of their household awake to use the bathroom. If it’s yellow, let it mellow.
Rita had a splitting headache. She’d had it up to here with Kirk, and they weren’t even lovers anymore. It had been his idea to go to the encounter group because some friend of his was the leader. This was the third time they’d been, and Rita still didn’t get it. You were supposed to say what was really on your mind and then everyone clapped, even if you called someone an asshole or said who you wanted to screw.
Now she just wanted to go the heck to bed, but she was too exhausted to get up. She rummaged through the macramé purse Cynthia, her friend from work, had given her for her birthday last month. The bag was a real work of art, but full of holes. So far she’d lost a dozen pens, a nail clipper, two tubes of electric blue mascara, even her keys, and now she was sure she was losing her mind.
After a minute her groping fingers closed around her cherry-flavor Chapstick. At least there was that. She shut her eyes and smeared it over her lips. She was that long-legged blonde at the top of the snowy mountain, ready to ski down into the honest-to-God Olympics. Except she wasn’t.
She raised her head and looked over at Kirk, narrowing her eyes. He was rubbing his beard, as usual. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if B.B. and Al hadn’t gotten into it that morning over whose turn it was to rinse the sprout jar. The yelling, clear from downstairs in the kitchen, woke her up, which was why she left the house early. Without her coffee. If she really wanted to keep on hearing the A-word she could have stayed home and skipped the encounter group. She could have sat there in the kitchen and clapped.
Rita adjusted the halter-top of her dress, and said, “I’m going to bed,” though she still didn’t move. Kirk didn’t answer. Just kept rubbing that damn beard. She sulked a moment, but then had a flash of inspiration. She struggled up out of the bean-bag, over to the Hi-Fi and flipped through the house record collection. What was right for the mood? Aretha? The Stones? Maybe Cat Stevens, or better yet, Joni Mitchell. Yeah. She exhaled as she let the needle down onto the spinning black edge of the vinyl. It crackled in the darkness, and then the golden notes of a guitar, and then Joni…
Rita stretched out on the red shag rug in front of the stereo and closed her eyes again. She didn’t care if she stayed there all night. She didn’t even care if she missed work the next day. What was one less girl in the typing pool at MacNamie and Sons? With Mr. MacNamie and his red comb-over, and his striped shirts with no tie and two buttons always open, chatting you up like he didn’t have a wife to take to lunch. It wouldn’t matter about missing work except she was meeting Cynthia afterward for their pottery class. She heard the bean-bag shift and then Kirk’s footsteps going up the stairs. She let herself float on the music. Joni’s voice was magical.
* * *
Thursday evening she went out with Cynthia again, this time to Cynthia’s ashram in Oakland. Rita wasn’t sure what she’d expected. She guessed that she had expected the Guru to actually be there, rather than just the shrines: large gold-framed photos of him, with dark eyes and long grey-and-white streaked hair and beard, wearing a red tunic. The portraits hovered in various nooks and corners of the ashram over knick-knack shelves with candles and incense. The ashram itself was a maze full of those nooks and corners, little rooms and lofts, and a few larger halls divided by partitions and hanging sheets. Cynthia seemed to know where to go.
The chanting was alright, with funny little sweets served afterward. At least it was something Rita could tell her brother Jack about later. But then she nearly got lost trying to find the bathroom, which made her wish she had a cigarette. She’d quit though, three weeks ago, and was sticking to it. What she wouldn’t give for a piece of mint gum right now. The stronger the better. Menthol had been her thing.
Finally Rita found the bathroom, a bare space with a sink and two toilets, and no hanging sheet when you needed one. She left the light off. There was a small sliding window, the kind with chicken wire embedded in the glass. It was open a crack and Rita could see the alley outside. A dumpster, some broken bottles, the adjacent warehouse, a wedge of nigh
t sky.
Rita bent over the sink and splashed some water on her face, and then fixed up her hair a little in the mirror. It was dark and wild, just like her brother’s but longer. She had it tied back with a white kerchief. What had been wrong with Cynthia yesterday at pottery class? She wondered for the fourth or fifth time. Rita had noticed that her friend seemed a little uptight, but then when the bowl she was throwing collapsed Cynthia had all but started bawling. She wouldn’t tell Rita what the heck was wrong.
Rita passed the unsmiling Guru several times on her way back to find Cynthia. He reminded her of her old grandfather, Papa Luigi, who had come over on the boat from Palermo about a hundred years ago, to escape a life of goats. Cynthia was always talking about running off to a goat farm up north near Eureka or somewhere. She made it sound like a storybook, but Rita couldn’t see how Cynthia would keep her manicure. Old Papa Luigi used to joke that goats were okay for girlfriends but made lousy wives. Rita and Jack could never hear Julie Andrews singing that “Lonely Goatherd” song from The Sound of Music without cracking up.
Rita found Cynthia in a corridor, on a long bench with all the shoes, tying up the straps of her high-heeled sandals. She smiled at Rita, but it seemed a little forced. Rita thought chanting was supposed to relax you.
“Ready to go?” Cynthia asked.
“Sure,” Rita said.
Cynthia was quiet behind the wheel of her old Wagon as she gave Rita a lift home. Now and then she chewed a cuticle. Finally they pulled up in front of Rita’s house.
“Thanks, Cynth,” Rita said, and was about to add, “It was interesting” or “Have a good weekend,” but Cynthia broke in.
“I’m sleeping with him.”
Rita gave a little jump. “What?” she said. “With who?”
“Ralph,” Cynthia said, which Rita knew instantly was Ralph MacNamie. Mr. MacNamie. For a second she thought she’d be sick, but instead blurted out, “What about the goat farm?”
Cynthia turned to her with pursed lips and another forced smile. “It’s mellow,” she said.
Rita didn’t know what to say. She needed some air.
* * *
She didn’t work on Fridays. Four days a week was plenty to live on for a single girl, even to start a savings account. She slept in and then took BART across the Bay to the City, her old stomping grounds; she’d grown up her whole life, in the same little house in North Beach where her mother was raised, attending the same parochial school. It was where the best air came in, straight off the Pacific.
Deep under the Bay Rita watched the occasional lights outside the window as they came and went in the dark train tunnel. The lights slid through the reflection of her own face. Light... face. Light... face. She felt a pressure on her ears; all that water up above. She dozed, and for just a moment dreamt she saw her old parish priest, ancient Father Sebastián, going down the aisle of the train car, swinging a jar of sprouts on a chain...
Sunlight streamed through the window when the train popped above ground. Rita shook herself awake, gathered up her things and took the streetcar from Embarcadero over to the Haight. She wanted to stop in at her favorite record store before going home. She couldn’t believe the Summer of Love was already ten years ago, not that she’d had much to do with it. She was thirteen back then, just a kid, but already had a curvaceous figure and her father had threatened to lock her up if she went anywhere near all those damned hippies. Both her parents feared the worst, but they needn’t have worried. Rita wasn’t about to jeopardize her future, and she wasn’t about to go without a brassiere --not at her size.
The catcalls she got on the street she ignored; and when she started dating, having said goodbye to her schoolgirl uniforms and enrolled in a secretarial course, she was choosy. She was all for Women’s Lib and what have you, but if a guy didn’t treat you like a lady then to heck with him. Okay, maybe she’d made some mistakes --Kirk was no prize-- but she’d never stooped as low as this thing with Cynthia and their boss. Maybe Rita wasn’t fine china, but she wasn’t cheap.
At the record store Rita combed through the bins, macramé bag slung over one shoulder, bumping her hip a little in time to some Disco the guy at the counter had on. She noticed he was giving her the eye and she gave him a half-smile.
Music was her weakness. Every month she figured she had enough for two albums, three if she absolutely had to have something. She found a Donovan album she wanted, an Earth Wind and Fire, and on a whim went through an orange and gold beaded curtain to the smaller back room with the “Classics.” She found Frank Sinatra recorded live at Carnegie Hall for her mother. “Here, Ma,” she’d say, winking, “your boyfriend.” Ma was as true as they came, but she did have a special place in her heart for Ol’ Blue Eyes. And Rita’s father was never the kind to run around. A family man through and through. But if ever he had a special love it was Joe DiMaggio, whom he idolized as a kid, even more than the others in the neighborhood, which was saying something.
She tucked the albums under her arm and headed toward the front of the store, and then the weirdest thing happened. A string of beads from the curtain somehow got tangled up in the macramé strap of her bag, and when she moved to get fix it, several more strings wound up in her hair and even around her neck.
“Oh, for crying out loud!” Rita gasped as she struggled to free herself. She was loose after a minute, though one beaded string managed to just hook the back hem of her dress, snagging the embroidery and yanking out a thread, and then the records slipped and clattered to the floor.
She noticed flashes of red and turquoise as the fellow behind the counter rushed over, his tee shirt and donkey beads emitting an unnatural light. He had a few wilting dandelions stuck in the little pocket of his tee shirt, this was clear, but his face was a blur. She thought she heard herself say, “You ought to have that thing shot,” and she must have paid because the next thing she knew she was back on the street holding the records in a paper bag, and the streetcar was whistling up to the curb, pointed back toward North Beach.
* * *
Her mother was upstairs when Rita went in the front door into the small, sun-dappled kitchen. Rita could hear water running and the clinking and clunking of Friday afternoon housecleaning. She put the records on the table and took Sinatra out of the bag, laying it on top where her mother would find it.
“Hi, Ma!” She yelled up the stairs. She had to try a couple of times.
“Hi, Doll,” came her mother’s voice over the vacuum cleaner.
“Is Lou around?” Her brother was named Luigi, after their grandfather. He’d been calling himself Jack since graduating high school, but he was still Lou at home. He always brought over some fish on Fridays.
“He’s out at the Cove, I’ll be right down.”
“Don’t worry,” Rita called over her shoulder, already out the door, “I’m going to find him.”
* * *
The sun was lowering and a new layer of fog was drifting in from the ocean. Rita approached the bit of bay nearest the house folks in the neighborhood called the Cove. Her sandals sunk into the pebbly shore.
She saw Jack from a distance. Not tall but not short, compact, with broad shoulders, an exact male version of herself. The hair, and the same features, though his were rough and masculine, and weathered from working on all kinds of fishing boats.
As soon as she saw him her shoulders relaxed, and something tight in her belly went soft. After all this time, he was still her favorite person in whole world. He was looking out at the water with one foot on a hunk of driftwood and his thumbs hooked in the pockets of his jeans. He was probably composing one of his crazy poems.
“Jacky!” she called, hurrying over.
* * *
Back in ’67 Jack did a lot of hanging out with the flower children. He was already nineteen and out of the house, living in an apartment with their older cousin Marco. He worked on the boats, started writing his poetry and didn’t get drafted because of his bad eye, the one Marco had nearly
shot out with a pellet gun when they were kids. Nowadays he read his poems on poetry nights at the Blue Lantern, where his friends called him “The Old Man of the Sea” because he was philosophical and pushing thirty. Rita went occasionally with Cynthia or other friends, even though poetry wasn’t her favorite. There were usually a few folk singers to liven things up, and she always felt proud of her brother. He even once wrote a poem for her, when she turned twenty, and surprised her that night at the Lantern. It went like this:
* * *
That little girl
With the daisy chain in her hair
And stars in her eyes
That laugh like a kite flying
Higher and higher
I know she’s flying now
To someplace like tomorrow
Like tomorrow, like the road
Like the mountain
I know she’s going there
Like I knew yesterday
That little girl
Of the daisy chains
The stars
That little girl
* * *
Rita was trying for sophisticated and grown-up, with a cigarette poised in two fingers by her cheek, and he practically had her crying like an honest-to-God baby. And for some reason, she was about to cry now.
Jack turned and smiled as she came up, that grin that showed all his teeth.
“Hiya, Kid.” He always called her that.
“Off work already?” Rita asked, even though she knew he was always off by three at the latest. The boats went out so early.
“Oh yeah,” Jack said. “How’s B-town?”
For the Love of Meat Page 4
