by Sarah Ockler
Frankie scoops up the dishes and food and continues humming. When she finally catches me spying, she stops and giggles, and for a moment I see her — not the distorted Matt composition but the real Frankie, the one who used to bake cookies for me when I was sad, the one who picked dandelions for her mother on the way home from school, the one who’s embarrassed to get caught singing.
“Don’t listen to me,” she says softly, letting out a fake cough. “I wasn’t,” I lie. “I just heard you coming out.”
She sets her breakfast staples on the table and begins the meal by reaching into the box for a handful of little beige Os. Satisfied with the magnitude of their crunch, she pours a bowl full and drowns them in milk.
I hate milk slurping more than all other breakfast idiosyncrasies combined, but Frankie is unable to enjoy her breakfast any other way.
“I’m pretty sure the San Fran bus leaves every two hours on Sundays.” Milk pools in the corners of her mouth as her spoon dives for another lot of Os like a heron for fish. “It’s, like, a two-and-a-half-hour ride. We can catch the ten and spend the whole day there.”
Over the course of our vacation I’d become quite comfortable with lying to Red and Jayne in two- or three-hour increments so that we could spend more time on Sam and Jake’s side of the beach. It wasn’t really lying, anyway. We were still on the same beach, just a few hundred feet from where they thought.
The San Francisco trip was my idea, but lying to Red and Jayne for the entire day seems much worse than our previous tales, especially since we’ll be sixty or seventy miles from where we’re supposed to be.
“Why don’t we come back before dinner?” I ask. “Then your parents won’t be so suspicious.”
Frankie almost drops her spoon at my suggestion.
“God, Anna. You’re so provokial sometimes!”
“Parochial — and no, I’m not. I just don’t think we should —”
“Look, telling them about Jackie’s boat was your idea. If we come back for dinner it will look fake. Boating is an all-day thing, plus I’m sure Jackie’s parents will invite us to stay for dinner.”
“I guess.”
“Come on, Anna. You were right. We need some girl time. Now finish up here and go get ready — we’ve got to look good today.”
I pick up my journal, mug, and granola bar wrapper, look up to the sky, and curse the God of Summer Vacations for getting me into this whole albatross-ditching, Sam-avoiding, aiding-and-abetting mess in the first place.
eighteen
Since the Perinos are under the illusion that we’ve proven our capacity for responsibility by coming home before curfew, avoiding alcohol and boys, and being all-around nice girls, it’s not difficult for us to secure an all-day freedom pass when they return from their run. Frankie tells them about nonexistent Jackie’s nonexistent parents inviting us out on their nonexistent boat, throws in a well-placed “I love you,” and we’re good until bedtime.
Getting ready for a day at sea is rather different from getting ready for an unsupervised jaunt to the city, so we quickly shower, throw on casual shorts and T-shirts, and stuff everything else into backpacks so we can get ready for real in the locker room at the community pool down the street.
Uncomfortably coiffed, dressed, accessorized, and stuffed into strappy black sandals that weren’t made for walking, we lock our “boat clothes” in a locker for later and walk down to the bus stop, camera rolling. Men and women in khaki shorts and appliquéd golf shirts stare as we approach.
“Is this the bus to San Francisco?” Frankie asks one of the women. “We’re making a documentary.”
“Yes,” the woman says firmly, trying to smile for the camera but unable to stop her eyes from their natural path to the slit in Frankie’s denim skirt. I love watching older women react to Frankie. They either stare disapprovingly as if to question what kind of mother would let her daughter out of the house like that, or they look at her longingly from their little white Keds, realizing that their husbands — consumed with thoughts of car insurance and prostate monitoring — will never again sneak in through their unlocked windows or kiss them on the mouth in the middle of the day for no reason.
Men, of course, always look at her the same.
Hungry dogs, whimpering for a scrap of food from the table.
The ride to the city takes forever, the bus stopping every few blocks to drop off and pick up passengers. Like Frankie and me, the tourists sit still the entire ride, our worlds composed solely of the resort town and downtown. To us, the little gray villages in the middle are largely invisible. Haggard people board and disembark in between, a constant exchange of strangers carrying groceries or children or heartbreak or some other unknown weight with every step.
Frankie and I don’t talk much on the trip, taking turns watching and aiming the camera out the window as buildings and cars and patches of another world sail by. It’s like we really are on Jackie’s boat, heading toward the horizon at a constant speed while everyone else sits bobbing and listless on the water.
When the diesel engine finally cuts out at the downtown station, I’m startled from my daydreaming by the driver’s final announcement.
“Last stop — San Francisco. All passengers must exit.”
We hop off the bus and head toward a diner on Market Street. Cars rush past as though we’re not even there, splashing heat and exhaust over my bare legs and arms. I’m surrounded by people and colors and sounds and smells unlike any I’ve ever seen.
If the bus made me feel like I was in a speedboat, the city streets are the ocean, full of the flotsam and jetsam of every race and culture in the natural world, bobbing and weaving along the sidewalks toward an unknown end.
Even Frankie is unnerved, and I realize that she hasn’t been here in two years, and never without Red and Jayne and her brother.
“Let’s just get lunch,” she says, pulling me into the diner once we’re across the street. “We’ll figure out what we want to see after.”
From the safety of a sparkly red pleather booth, we order veggie burgers, fries, strawberry shakes, and an extra paper place mat, noticing a map printed on the back. Typical of tourist attractions listed on a place mat, nothing sounds interesting, and we switch to plan B, which involves finishing lunch and wandering up, down, and sideways through the city streets until something jumps out at us.
We find plenty of fresh vegetable stands and hippie stores with lots of handmade jewelry and blankets and sweaters we can’t afford, even when Frankie offers to put the hippies in our movie in exchange for a discount. We film in Chinatown, Frankie flirting with the men wrapping salmon as all the leftover fish heads fall into the gutter and slide down the street. Next to the fish market, an old woman sells postcards and magnets and little green statues in the shape of Buddha.
“I could live here forever,” I say, enamored by the bright blue sky and the ocean sleeping in the distance.
“Not me,” Frankie says as we wander toward our next unknown destination. “Too crowded. Too expensive. And not to mention, too smelly.”
Frankie laughs, and suddenly, right behind her, there it is — City Lights. I’ve seen the old bookstore so many times in Matt’s pictures, I’d recognize it anywhere. He loved to come here on day trips with Red, Jayne, and Frankie — but she doesn’t seem to notice it.
“Frankie, look — City Lights! Come on!” I grab her hand and drag her toward the doorway.
“What’s the big deal, Anna? It’s just an old bookstore. It doesn’t even have a coffee place. Let’s go somewhere else.”
“Frankie, not all of us equate great literature with nonfat caramel lattes. Don’t you know this place? It’s where Matt used to —”
“I know what it is, Anna. Go ahead,” she snips. “I’m going next door for a drink. Meet me over there when you’re done.” She disappears across the street into a place called Vesuvio. It looks like a bar, but when she doesn’t come back out the door, I assume they gave her a table.
Five minutes.
I’ll just take five minutes.
I pull open the glass door and walk to the middle of the store, letting the smell of old books soak into my lungs. It’s different than I expect; it feels more like a library than a store, and I can totally picture Matt hanging out here. He loved to read. He loved words, the way they string together into sentences and stories. He wanted to study them, to know and create them, to share them with the world. Often, Frankie and I would sit on his bed while he read passages from his favorite books, pacing frantically as he turned the pages for the best parts of a story. He read with intensity and was passionately in love with every character, every turn of plot or twist of language. He made the characters come alive for us, like he wasn’t reading a work of fiction but telling stories about his own friends.
Frankie liked hearing his stories, but she was never much for reading. I’ve always enjoyed books, and Matt would pass along his favorites, including those he’d picked up here — Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, a book that sparked a restlessness in me that was unrequited until this trip. Howl by Allen Ginsberg. Dharma Bums — another Kerouac book that left me equally longing to travel, to discover, to feel.
After my birthday last summer, in our short weeks together, Matt would whisper passages to me as I lay sideways across his bed with my feet up, waiting for Frankie to change or shower or whatever it was that gave me and Matt a few moments alone.
It’s my mission in life to make you care about these words, Anna. About these people and everything they say and everything they were. He traced the lines of my face with his fingers as he spoke. Every story is part of a whole, entire life, you know? Happy and sad and tragic and whatever, but an entire life. And books let you know them.
The sun would fall on his face as he read, lighting up the whole room. That’s how much he loved words.
Frankie privately collects her memories of Matt, but this one is all mine — a connection she can’t share, a memory she can’t hold in her hands or put in the tightly closed jar with the others. Love of reading was something I shared with him alone, because of him alone. It was everything to him.
I walk up and down the aisles and run my hands along the spines of books, old and new. An undisturbed layer of dust on one particular shelf makes me think that Matt may have touched the same books the last time he was here. I crouch down to read some of the titles on the faded spines, remembering a description of this exact scene from one of Matt’s postcards.
Books line the shelves in no particular order, waiting to be discovered. It’s like the spirits of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Ferlinghetti haunt the aisles, calling me to pick them. To read their stories. To let them be heard. You would love it, Anna.
He was right. I love it. And soon I can no longer tell the difference between my own real experiences here in Matt’s favorite bookstore and the ghost stories that have imprinted themselves in my mind from years of postcards.
I buy a book of poetry about the ocean by local writers from the seventies, thank the cashier, and take one final look around before crossing the street to find Frankie.
Inside Vesuvio, I move through the tables and bar area looking for Frankie’s auburn hair, but she’s not here.
“Have you seen a girl my age?” I ask the bartender. “She came in, like, a half hour ago? Short skirt?”
“Nah,” he says. “I just started my shift. Sorry.”
My heart pounds in my chest. I can’t believe I lost her. I dig in my bag for my cell phone, hoping she’s not too mad at me to answer.
“Try the second floor,” the bartender says.
Upstairs, there she is. Sitting at a two-top with some guy, stirring her drink with a straw, laughing with her head back at something her newfound companion says.
“Frank?”
“Oh, there you are.” She’s wearing her grown-up voice. “I’d like you to meet Jeremy.”
“It’s Jarred,” he says, standing to offer me his chair. He looks about our age but acts much older. “Frankie has told me much about you, Anna.”
“Jarred left high school to pursue his music in the city.”
“What kind of music?” I ask, wondering if Jarred has what it takes to break the Jake spell.
“I play drums for a few bands,” he says. “Mad Rabbit and Hex?”
“Cool.” I nod like I’ve been listening to his bands my whole life.
“Speaking of which,” he says, “I have rehearsal now. I should go.”
Frankie smiles over her soda. “Thanks for the drink,” she says. “Don’t mention it. So, see you at the show later?”
“Definitely.”
“Sweet.” Jarred smiles and heads to rehearsal, practicing to win the heart of his dream girl at tonight’s show — the one we’re apparently attending.
“What show?” I ask. “Or was it just to get a free drink?”
She smiles, no longer mad at me. “You’re learning fast.”
“All right,” I say. “We’re up to six.” I’m glad she’s the one growing and grooming the list. The last thing I need is more boy confusion.
“Get anything?”
“A poetry book.” I sit down across from her. “Mostly I just wanted to check it out.”
Frankie nods, sighs, sips her soda, sighs again, and then, as if possessed, apologizes.
“Sorry, Anna. I didn’t mean to ditch you. I got hit with this Matt-wave or something.”
“No,” I say. “It’s me. I should have been more sensitive. I just got really excited when I saw the bookstore.”
“It’s okay.” She gives me a sip of her drink. “I was just thinking about how he used to read to us,” she says. “Remember? He’d get so into it, it was like he was acting out the play or something.”
I smile and watch her closely, waiting for her to get that faraway look again. But she stays right here with me on the second floor of Vesuvio, wearing her short jean skirt with the slit up the thigh, drinking Diet Coke with lemon on our big sneaky trip into the city.
“I took some of his books,” she tells me. “Before Mom started freaking out and not letting anyone in his room. I don’t know why — I’m not a reader.”
I nod, trying to remember what his room looks like. I haven’t been in there since the day before he died, when he played Frankie and me this HP rehearsal bootleg he found online. Jayne keeps the door shut now, like the attic room at the beach house, confident in our silent understanding that no one will enter.
“You should take them,” she says, and for a moment I forget what she’s talking about.
“What?”
“You always liked to read his books. If he were here, he’d have given them to you already.”
“Frankie, I can’t. I mean, I —”
“He would want you to have them.”
I reach across the table and squeeze her hand and she closes her eyes against a single tear. In typical ridiculous Anna fashion, I still can’t find the words to break my promise and tell Frankie about everything that happened, but the lid on her memory jar has loosened, and for the moment, I’m grateful.
It’s after three when we leave Vesuvio. Since the Cartoon Museum is closed for renovation and neither of us can think of anything else we’d like to see in the city, we decide to take a bus to the Golden Gate Bridge and walk partway across, stopping every few feet to film the sailboats below.
It’s windy on the bridge. By the time we cross back and catch the bus downtown, fog and rain have rolled in, stamping out the sun and chilling the air around us.
Neither of us feels particularly enterprising, so we head back to the same Market Street diner to share an order of fries before we go home. Our server is wearing a Blade Surf Shop T-shirt that reminds me of Sam, and as he sets down two waters and takes our order, I realize that I haven’t really thought about Sam all day. Now, when I let him back into my thoughts, the prickly feeling that occupied my stomach for the past two days is gone, a few wandering butterflies bumping around in its place.
The rain picks up as
we leave the diner — cold, wet sheets that come hard and fast. We wrap our arms around each other and run toward the bus shelter, freezing and laughing and breathing hard. Along the road, cars speed past, drenching our feet. By the time we reach the Plexiglas shelter, we’re shivering and very aware of the weight of our wet clothes and backpacks as the electric glow of the city fades behind us.
This morning, Frankie said we’d catch the seven o’clock bus to be back before ten, perfect timing for the end of a long boat ride and late dinner with Jackie and Samantha. But as she repeatedly runs her fingers along the schedule posted in the shelter, I feel a tinge of concern.
“We didn’t miss the seven, right?” I ask. “It’s only ten till.”
“No, it’s worse.”
“What?”
“It’s Sunday.”
“So?”
“The buses back to Zanzibar stop running at five on Sundays.”
nineteen
Panic starts at my toes in little pinpricks that quickly move across my feet and into my knees so that I have to sit on the wet metal bench in the shelter. Before the fear reaches my already overworked stomach, I take a deep breath, pull out my cell phone, and dial information.
“Smoothie Shack,” I say. “In Zanzibar Bay.”
Frankie and I duck into a coffee shop behind the bus stop to wait. Two hours later, a car slows in front of us and pulls over, hazards flashing. Sam opens the passenger door and runs toward us, holding one hand above his face to shield himself from the rain that’s now falling kind of sideways. His green Smoothie Shack apron sticks out the bottom of that red sweatshirt, and I feel a little jolt when I think about unzipping it and climbing in there with him. His hair curls up in the rain, like it does when he’s in the ocean, and when he grabs me into a wet hug, I can’t remember why I was avoiding him.
Sam ushers us into the car, giving up the front seat for Frankie and climbing in the back with me.
“We were wondering about you two,” Jake says as he pulls onto the street.
