“I want to make normal love with you. Can’t we still do that? Even just for half an hour? You can tell your sister you’ll be home a little late.”
“Listen. Pip.” He frowned. “Is that your real name, by the way?”
“It’s what I call myself.”
“Somehow it doesn’t seem like I’m talking to you when I use it. I don’t know … ‘Pip.’ ‘Pip.’ It doesn’t sound … I don’t know…”
The last traces of apology drained from her face, and she took her hands away from him. She knew she had to resist an outburst, but she couldn’t resist it. The best she could do was keep her voice low.
“OK,” she said. “So you don’t like my name. What else don’t you like about me?”
“Oh, come on. You’re the one who left me up here for an hour. More than an hour.”
“Right. While your sister was waiting for you.”
Speaking the word sister again was like tossing a match into an oven full of unlit gas, the ready-to-combust anger that she walked around with every day; there was a kind of whoosh inside her head.
“Seriously,” she said, heart pounding, “you might as well tell me everything you don’t like about me, since we’re obviously never going to fuck, since I’m not normal enough, although what’s so abnormal about me I could use a little help in understanding.”
“Hey, come on,” Jason said. “I could have just left.”
The note of self-righteousness in his voice set fire to a larger and more diffuse pool of the gas, a combustible political substance that had seeped into her from her mother and then from certain college professors and certain gross-out movies and now also from Annagret, a sense of the unfairness of what one professor had called the anisotropy of gendered relationships, wherein boys could camouflage their objectifying desires with the language of feelings while girls played the boys’ game of sex at their own risk, dupes if they objectified and victims if they didn’t.
“You didn’t seem to mind me when your dick was in my mouth,” she said.
“I didn’t put it there,” he said. “And it wasn’t there long.”
“No, because I had to go downstairs and get a condom so you could stick it inside me.”
“Wow. So this is all me now?”
Through a haze of flame, or hot blood, Pip’s eyes fell on Jason’s handheld device.
“Hey!” he cried.
She jumped up and ran to the far side of the room with his device.
“Hey, you can’t do that,” he shouted, pursuing her.
“Yes I can!”
“No, you can’t, it’s not fair. Hey—hey—you can’t do that!”
She wedged herself underneath the child’s writing desk that was her only piece of furniture and faced the wall, bracing her leg on a desk leg. Jason tried to pull her out by the belt of her robe, but he couldn’t dislodge her and was apparently unwilling to get more violent than this. “What kind of freak are you?” he said. “What are you doing?”
Pip touched the device’s screen with shaking fingers.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Jason said, pacing behind her. “What are you doing?”
She pawed the screen and found the next thread.
She slumped to one side, put the device on the floor, and gave it a push in Jason’s direction. Her anger had burned off as quickly as it had ignited, leaving ashen grief behind.
“It’s only the way some of my friends talk,” Jason said. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Please go away,” she said in a small voice.
“Let’s start over. Can we just, like, reboot? I’m really sorry.”
He put a hand on her shoulder, and she recoiled. He took the hand away.
“OK, look, let’s talk tomorrow, though, OK?” he said. “This was obviously the wrong night for both of us.”
“Just go away now, please.”
* * *
Renewable Solutions didn’t make or build or even install things. Instead, depending on the regulatory weather (not climate but weather, for it changed seasonally and sometimes seemingly hourly), it “bundled,” it “brokered,” it “captured,” it “surveyed,” it “client-provided.” In theory, this was all very worthy. America put too much carbon into the atmosphere, renewable energy could help with that, federal and state governments were forever devising new tax inducements, the utilities were indifferent-to-moderately-enthusiastic about greening their image, a gratifyingly non-negligible percentage of California households and businesses were willing to pay a premium for cleaner electricity, and this premium, multiplied by many thousands and added to the money flowing from Washington and Sacramento, minus the money that went to the companies that actually made or installed stuff, was enough to pay fifteen salaries at Renewable Solutions and placate its venture-capitalist backers. The buzzwords at the company were also good: collective, community, cooperative. And Pip wanted to do good, if only for lack of better ambitions. From her mother she’d learned the importance of leading a morally purposeful life, and from college she’d learned to feel worried and guilty about the country’s unsustainable consumption patterns. Her problem at Renewable Solutions was that she could never quite figure out what she was selling, even when she was finding people to buy it, and no sooner had she finally begun to figure it out than she was asked to sell something else.
At first, and in hindsight least confusingly, she’d sold power-purchase agreements to small and midsize businesses, until a new state regulation put an end to the outrageous little cut that Renewable Solutions took of those. Then it was signing up households in potential renewable energy districts; each household earned Renewable Solutions a bounty paid by some shadowy third party or parties that had created an allegedly lucrative futures market. Then it was giving residents of progressive municipalities a “survey” to measure their level of interest in having their taxes raised or their municipal budgets rejiggered to switch over to renewables; when Pip pointed out to Igor that ordinary citizens had no realistic basis for answering the “survey” questions, Igor said that she must not, under any circumstances, admit this to the respondents, because positive responses had cash value not only for the companies that made stuff but also for the shadowy third parties with their futures market. Pip was on the verge of quitting her job when the cash value of the responses went down and she was shifted to solar renewable energy certificates. This had lasted six relatively pleasant weeks before a flaw in the business model was detected. Since April, she’d been attempting to sign up South Bay subdivisions for waste-energy micro-collectives.
Her associates in consumer outreach were flogging the same crap, of course. The reason they outperformed her was that they accepted each new “product” without trying to understand it. They got behind the new pitch wholeheartedly, even when it was risible and/or made no sense, and then, if a prospective customer had trouble understanding the “product,” they didn’t vocally agree that it sure was difficult to understand, didn’t make a good-faith effort to explain the complicated reasoning behind it, but simply kept hammering on the written pitch. And clearly this was the path to success, and it was all a double disillusionment to Pip, who not only felt actively punished for using her brain but was presented every month with fresh evidence that Bay Area consumers on average responded better to a rote and semi-nonsensical pitch than to a well-meaning saleswoman trying to help them understand the offer. Only when she was allowed to work on direct-mail and social-media outreach did her talents seem less wasted; having grown up with no television, she had good language skills.
Today being a Monday, she was telephonically harassing the many 65+s who didn’t use social media and hadn’t responded to the company’s direct-mail bombardment of a Santa Clara County development called Rancho Ancho. Micro-collectives only worked if you got near-total community buy-in, and a community organizer couldn’t be dispatched before a fifty percent response rate was achieved; nor could Pip earn any “outreach points,” no matter how much work she’d done.
/> She put on her headset and forced herself to look at her call sheet again and cursed the self she’d been an hour earlier, before lunch, because this earlier self had cherry-picked the sheet, leaving the names GUTTENSCHWERDER, ALOYSIUS and BUTCAVAGE, DENNIS for after lunch. Pip hated the hard names, because mispronouncing them immediately alienated the consumer, but she gamely clicked Dial. A man at the Butcavage residence answered with a gruff hello.
“Hiiiiii,” she said in a sultry drawl into which she’d learned to inject a note of apology, of shared social discomfort. “This is Pip Tyler, with Renewable Solutions, and I’m following up on a mailing we sent you a few weeks ago. Is this Mr. Butcavage?”
“Boocavazh,” the man corrected gruffly.
“So sorry, Mr. Boocavazh.”
“What’s this about?”
“It’s about lowering your electric bill, helping the planet, and getting your fair share of state and federal energy tax credits,” Pip said, although in truth the electric-bill savings were hypothetical, waste energy was environmentally controversial, and she wouldn’t have been making this call if Renewable Solutions and its partners had any intention of giving consumers a large share of the tax benefits.
“Not interested,” Mr. Butcavage said.
“Well, you know,” Pip said, “quite a few of your neighbors have expressed strong interest in forming a collective. You might do a little asking around and see what they’re thinking.”
“I don’t talk to my neighbors.”
“Well, no, of course, I’m not saying you have to if you don’t want to. But the reason they’re interested is that your community has a chance to work together for cleaner, cheaper energy and real tax savings.”
One of Igor’s precepts was that any call in which the words cleaner, cheaper, and tax savings could be repeated at least five times would result in a positive response.
“What is it you’re selling?” Mr. Butcavage said a mite less gruffly.
“Oh, this is not a sales call,” Pip lied. “We’re trying to organize community support for a thing called waste energy. It’s a cleaner, cheaper, tax-saving way to solve two of your community’s biggest problems at once. I’m talking about high energy costs and solid-waste disposal. We can help you burn your garbage at clean, high temperatures and feed the electricity directly into the grid, at a potentially significant cost savings for you and real benefit to the planet. Can I tell you a little bit more about how it works?”
“What’s your angle?” Mr. Butcavage said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Somebody’s paying you to call me when I’m trying to take a nap. What’s in it for them?”
“Well, basically we’re facilitators. You and your neighbors probably don’t have the time or the expertise to organize a waste-energy micro-collective on your own, and so you’re missing out on cleaner, cheaper electricity and certain tax advantages. We and our partners have the experience and the know-how to set you up for greater energy independence.”
“Yeah, but who pays you?”
“Well, as you may know, there’s an enormous amount of state and federal money available for renewable-energy initiatives. We take a share of that, to cover our costs, and pass the rest of the savings on to your community.”
“In other words, they tax me to pay for these initiatives, and maybe I get some of it back.”
“That’s an interesting point,” Pip said. “But it’s actually a little more complicated. In many cases, you’re not paying any direct tax to fund the initiatives. But you do, potentially, reap the tax benefits, and you get cleaner, cheaper energy, too.”
“Burning my garbage.”
“Yes, the new technology for that is really incredible. Super clean, super economical.” Was there any way to say tax savings again? Pip had never ceased to dread, in these calls, what Igor called the pressure point, but she now seemed to have reached it with Mr. Butcavage. She took a breath and said: “It sounds like this might be something you’re interested in learning more about?”
Mr. Butcavage muttered something, possibly “burn my own garbage,” and hung up on her.
“Yeah, bite me,” she said to the dead line. Then she felt bad about it. Not only had Mr. Butcavage’s questions been reasonable, he also had an unfortunate name and no friends in his neighborhood. He was probably a lonely person like her mother, and Pip felt helplessly compassionate toward anyone who reminded her of her mother.
Because her mother didn’t drive, and because she didn’t need a photo ID in a small community like Felton, and because the farthest she ever went from Felton was downtown Santa Cruz, her only official identification was her Social Security card, which bore the name Penelope Tyler (no middle name). To get this card, using a name she’d assumed as an adult, she would have had to present either a forged birth certificate or the original copy of her real birth certificate along with legal documentation of her name change. Pip’s repeated fine-toothed combings of her mother’s possessions had turned up no documents like these, nor any safe-deposit key, which led her to conclude that her mother had either destroyed the documents or buried them in the ground as soon as she had a new Social Security number. Somewhere, some county courthouse may have had a public record of her name change, but the United States contained a lot of counties, few of them put their records online, and Pip wouldn’t even have known what time zone to start looking in. She’d entered every conceivable combination of keywords into every commercial search engine and ended up with nothing but an acute appreciation of the limitations of search engines.
When Pip was very young, vague stories had satisfied her, but by the time she was eleven her questions had grown so insistent that her mother agreed to tell her the “full” story. Once upon a time, she said, she’d had a different name and a different life, in a state that wasn’t California, and she’d married a man who—as she discovered only after Pip was born—had a propensity to violence. He abused her physically, but he was very cunning about inflicting pain without leaving serious marks on her, and he was even more abusive psychologically. Soon she became a total hostage to his abuse, and she might have stayed married until he murdered her if he hadn’t been so enraged by Pip’s crying, as a baby, that she feared for Pip’s safety as well. She tried running away from him with Pip, but he tracked them down and abused her psychologically and brought them home again. He had powerful friends in their community, she couldn’t prove that he abused her, and she knew that even if she divorced him he would still get partial custody of Pip. And she couldn’t allow that. She’d married a dangerous person and could live with her own mistake, but she couldn’t put Pip at risk. And so, one night, while her husband was away on business, she packed a suitcase and boarded a bus and took Pip to a battered-wives shelter in a different state. The women at the shelter helped her assume a new identity and get a new, fake birth certificate for Pip. Then she boarded a bus again and took refuge in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where a person could be whoever she said she was.
“I did it to protect you,” she’d told Pip. “And now that I’ve told you the story, you have to protect yourself and never tell anyone else. I know your father. I know how enraged he must have been that I stood up for myself and took you from him. And I know that if he ever found out where you are, he would come and take you from me.”
Pip at eleven was profoundly credulous. Her mother had a long, thin scar on her forehead which came out when she blushed, and her front teeth had a gap between them and didn’t match the color of her other teeth. Pip was so sure that her father had smashed her mother’s face, and felt so sorry for her, that she didn’t even ask her if he had. For a while, she was too afraid of him to sleep alone at night. In her mother’s bed, with stifling hugs, her mother assured her that she was completely safe as long as she never told anyone her secret, and Pip’s credulity was so complete, her fear so real, that she kept the secret until well into her rebellious teen years. Then she told two friends, swearing both to secrecy, and in college s
he told more friends.
One of them, Ella, a homeschooled girl from Marin, reacted with a funny look. “That is so weird,” Ella said. “I feel like I’ve heard that exact story before. There’s a writer in Marin who wrote a whole memoir with basically that story.”
The writer was Candida Lawrence (also an assumed name, according to Ella), and when Pip tracked down a copy of her memoir she saw that it had been published years before her mother had told her the “full” story. Lawrence’s story wasn’t identical, but it was similar enough to propel Pip home to Felton in a cold rage of suspicion and accusation. And here was the really weird thing: when she laid into her mother, she could feel herself being abusive like her absent father, and her mother crumpled up like the abused and emotionally hostage-taken person she’d portrayed herself as being in her marriage, and so, in the very act of attacking the full story, Pip was somehow confirming its essential plausibility. Her mother sobbed revoltingly and begged Pip for kindness, ran sobbing to a bookcase and pulled a copy of Lawrence’s memoir from a shelf of more self-helpy titles where Pip would never have noticed it. She thrust the book at Pip like a kind of sacrificial offering and said it had been an enormous comfort to her over the years, she’d read it three times and read other books of Lawrence’s too, they made her feel less alone in the life she’d chosen, to know that at least one woman had gone through a similar trial and come out strong and whole. “The story I told you is true,” she cried. “I don’t know how to tell you a truer story and still keep you safe.”
“What are you saying,” Pip said with abusive calm and coldness. “That there is a truer story but it wouldn’t keep me ‘safe’?”
“No! You’re twisting my words, I told the truth and you have to believe me. You’re all I have in the world!” At home, after work, her mother let her hair escape its plaits into a fluffy gray mass, which now shook as she stood and keened and gasped like a very large child having a meltdown.
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