“They want the kids to live here with your mother and me. I told them, ‘No way!’ They need a place of their own.”
So why have I always been expected to live there?
“I’d pay half for an apartment. That wasn’t good enough. It’s all on us or nothing.”
“What’s Mom say?”
“Your mother’s sick about it.”
Sick and drinking more.
“Rita is going to live at home and give the baby up for adoption.”
“That’ll be hard.”
“Better than two seventeen-year-olds trying to raise a kid.”
“I just wanted to check in and see how you’re doing. I’m going to be really busy at work for the next few weeks, so I don’t know when I’ll be able to call again, but I will before too long. Tell Tommy I’m sorry about this.”
“Call as soon as you can. Your mother can’t talk right now. One of her bad headaches.”
“Sure.”
Sheila hung up the telephone and watched people running for their airplanes.
People were rioting all over the country, but these passengers seemed oblivious. The Dotys, so wrapped up in their own dramas, probably hadn’t even noticed. And now, a new life would, at least temporarily, enter the tumult.
After a much more comfortable flight than her first one, Sheila stood at the arrival gate in San Francisco International Airport. It took her several moments to recognize the gypsy woman waving madly, with a long dress sweeping the floor and wrist bangles jangling. The last time Sheila had seen Mary Beth she was wearing a dark blue skirt which hit right above her chubby knees and a roomy white blouse. Her fine brown hair had been tied in a tight, skimpy ponytail. Today, clumps hung in her eyes, and a few wilted daisies perched haphazardly on one ear.
“I’ve been waiting and waiting,” were Mary Beth’s first words.
Sheila stiffened as this unfamiliar person smothered her in a huge hug. Some kind of musky scent floated around her soft body, and a black cord with a large hollow metal circle—a three-lined symbol within—dangled from her neck. She squeezed Sheila so hard that the metal circle poked into her breastbone.
When Mary Beth let go, she backed up and squinted at Sheila’s gray jacket, matching skirt, and black pumps. She shifted her head so that her double chin increased to three. “Did you bring any other kind of clothes?”
“Some shorts and T-shirts and sandals. Mostly things for work.”
“Yeah, work.” Mary Beth had told Jane she was employed at a convenience store.
After the initial shock of her appearance, one thing after another bombarded Sheila. It felt like being dropped into some foreign country—maybe Czechoslovakia. On the bus ride to the city, most of the people she saw looked as if they were dressed for a costume party in crushed-velvet coats and long, garishly-printed skirts and a motley assortment of hats. Once they were walking on the street, she and Mary Beth squished through hordes of noisy, dusty young people surrounded by strange odors—onions, garlic, unfamiliar spices—and sweat, lots of sweat.
Mary Beth toted the smallest red train case and charged on ahead.
Sheila kept saying, “Excuse me,” maneuvering the two red suitcases she carried up the hill. They bumped against her knees.
Only one person responded. A man with a peacock feather in a pointed hat muttered, “Out of sight, man.”
At an intersection, she took a breather, her black pumps wobbling in the sidewalk’s cracks.
Mary Beth waved toward a street sign. “This is Haight-Ashbury!”
By now sweating herself, with arms aching and feet burning, Sheila thought, So what?
After walking about six blocks with the crowd thinning, Mary Beth turned onto an uneven cement path that led to a faded, orange Victorian house. They stumbled up several bouncy steps to a warped wooden door that she shoved open with a loud squeak. Inside, she gestured to a wall with peeling red and gold embossed paper. “Leave your suitcases here so no one trips.”
Despite leaded glass windows, the entry hall was dark, and a heavy, almost sweet, smell of something burning filled the air. Sheila put her three suitcases next to a scratched oak chest. On top sat an obelisk light. Within the glass column floated thick, orange globs, oozing upwards, shapeless like amoebas, before sinking to the bottom. An ornament in the gloom.
To the right, through half-open pocket doors of battered carved wood, was a room, even darker than the hallway. String music came from within. A low, simple melody line kept repeating as if the needle had gotten stuck.
“C’mon.” Mary Beth beckoned, entering the room. Sheila took a deep breath and reluctantly followed.
Several shabby sofas stuck here and there, had no apparent rhyme or reason to their arrangement. Threadbare rugs lay willy-nilly over a scarred parquet floor. The stalled music came from a record player set precariously on a small, tilted table. The burning smell was much stronger in here. Flickers from the end of a cigarette glowed as someone took a long drag and passed it to someone else. As Sheila’s eyes grew accustomed to the shadows, she identified a couple, half sitting, half lying, arms and legs entangled. The guy’s tied-back hair fell over his shoulder and made her think, for a moment, that he was a woman. Then, she noticed his scraggly beard. His lover, or whatever she was, had dark hair covering her arms like a shawl. A person on another sofa was definitely a man. He sprawled with legs draped across several threadbare cushions. A full black beard started under his nose and covered his cheeks up to his ears where wild, uncombed hair met it. The beard rested on the front of his shirt like a woolly bib. Taking a puff from the cigarette, he narrowed his dark eyes and scrutinized Mary Beth.
She ambled over, moved the cushions and slithered down next to him. Taking his bare feet onto her lap, she said, “Miss me?”
“Always.” The man handed her the cigarette.
Mary Beth inhaled deeply. After a pause of several seconds, she exhaled and strained to say, “This is Sheila,” bobbing her head toward where Sheila stood.
She considered turning and running from the place. If the people on the street looked like they were headed for a costume party, this group looked like they belonged in a horror movie. Her heart thumped, and her palms grew clammy. Where will I go?
“Greetings.” The big, bearded man gave a half nod.
“Lucas,” Mary Beth introduced him, then waved a hand to another sofa. “Sit down.”
The tangled-together couple still hadn’t looked Sheila’s way. They rubbed each other with slow, sensual movements. Occasionally, one of them murmured, “Hmmm.” Mary Beth didn’t bother to say who they were. The cigarette went around again, and then she walked over to the sofa where Sheila perched, slippery hands grasping each other, feet planted firmly on the floor.
“Here, you’ll like,” Mary Beth offered.
Sheila paused, “You know I don’t smoke.” It looked like something her uncle, on a farm back in Minnesota, used to roll. This is marijuana, she realized.
“Just a toke.”
Toke? Sheila hated regular cigarettes. They made her throat hurt. She never minded the smell on Jim. That was part of him. Since they’d parted, this became one of the many things on her growing list of dislikes. And she’d always hated the smell on her father. Strange as Mary Beth had become, she didn’t seem to be an addict. How would I know? Feeling Lucas’s amused eyes, Sheila waved the cigarette away, relieved that it wasn’t offered to her again. Mary Beth resumed her slouch onto Lucas’s sofa.
All at once, Scraggly Beard stood up and scratched his genitals. “Gotta whiz.”
This signaled everyone else to move. Mary Beth disengaged from Lucas, giving his feet one last pat, and said, “I’m famished.” She took the needle off the record and headed toward the back of the house.
Not knowing what else to do, Sheila followed.
The two women—Mary Beth referr
ed to the shawl-haired one as “Magdela”—prepared a meal while the men continued to smoke at the table. Sheila leaned against a corner, trying to be inconspicuous, until Mary Beth brought in a ladder-back chair for her to sit on. Dinner consisted of rough-textured, pale brown rice, barely cooked carrots and zucchini, and dark-colored beans. The smell of onions and garlic permeated everything. They passed cooking pans from person to person, much like sharing the marijuana. “Monk,” the scraggly-bearded man, took a large bite from each pot, using the serving spoon, then dumped piles on his chipped plate. Along with the food, they drank dark, brown cider, thick as sauce, from Mason jars.
After a couple of meager tastes, Sheila asked Mary Beth, “Could you show me where the bathroom is?”
Mary Beth pointed down a hallway with the wooden spoon she used to scrape a few last remnants of beans onto Lucas’s plate.
No one seemed to notice that Sheila left the table. Within three feet of the bathroom’s door, she smelled urine, like an outhouse in a campgrounds back in Minnesota that she had gone to with Jim. The toilet seat, made of brown, chipped wood, hung askew. Lifting the lid, she felt dizzy taking in the soupy mess. At least there was toilet tissue—rough and thin as dried leaves.
Mary Beth hollered, “Don’t flush. Lucas needs to fix it.”
Before rejoining the group, Sheila rinsed her hands in cold, rusty water. There was no soap or towel.
While the women cleaned up the kitchen, the men drifted back into the main room, put on another repetitive record with flute-sounding notes, and dozed. When the women came in, Sheila sat on the same sofa, this time loose-muscled from fatigue, for what seemed to be an eternity, as they passed another marijuana cigarette around. In order to occupy her mind, she tried to make out the many posters on the walls. One advertised a “Mantra-Rock Dance” held in January at the Hare Krishna Temple. Sheila had no idea what a Mantra or Hare Krishna could be.
At last, Lucas said, “Time for bed,” and they all started to move.
Mary Beth offered to help carry Sheila’s suitcases upstairs. On the second floor, she pushed open the door to a room with a couple of mattresses lost in mounds of rumpled bedding that smelled of unwashed bodies. “Peace and Harmony are gone. You can stay here.”
Sheila couldn’t help but think of Jane, and the immaculate guest room in Long Beach where she had spent so many nights. Jane would fall to pieces seeing Mary Beth living like this. “Who are they, Mary Beth?”
“Two girls from Newport. Call me Willow Tree.”
“Yeah, sure, I will.”
“See you tomorrow.” With that, Mary Beth left.
Sheila shut the door that didn’t latch. The largest red suitcase fell over sideways and she collapsed onto it, arms clutching each other, rocking herself, never before feeling this alone. When they had moved to Long Beach, Jim was there to hold her and calm her worries. When he was gone, she had her own clean apartment at least.
After several weepy minutes, she lay down, with all her clothes on so that as little skin as possible touched the bedding, and listened to creaks and groans of the old house settling. A short while later she heard more of the moans and whimpers like earlier from the sofas. If they were making love, it was exactly that. Gentle, companionable. It sounded like puppies nuzzling into a pile.
This made her miss Jim more than ever—his muscular arms and his deep smooth chest. How many times had she pressed a cheek against his skin, listened to his strong heartbeat, and felt like the rest of the world could keep spinning without her? She spotted a crack in the wall below the uncurtained window’s ledge. Inside, a mass of spider webs trapped dozens of squirmy black bugs that would never get free. This made her think of Tommy and his current problem. Mostly, Sheila kept coming back to the dismal, smelly room, and wondering how she could possibly stay. Through the window’s mottled glass, she saw a lit-up hotel sign blinking. She whispered, “Tomorrow, I’ll go there and check in.”
Jim had left a T-shirt behind, and Sheila had never washed it. She took it out of her largest suitcase and covered the pillow with it, then she switched off a lamp with a dusty, tasseled shade. Hours later, she fell asleep, pretending to rest on Jim’s chest, instead of that pillow, reeking of dirty hair. The rest of the country’s and her family’s problems and all of her own fled from her mind.
CHAPTER 17
Temporary Quarters
NEXT MORNING SHEILA HELD HER BREATH AND SCRUNCHED HER FACE UP AS SHE tiptoed toward the upstairs bathroom. I don’t want to go in there. While far from sanitary, surprisingly, it did work. The night before she had rapidly used it, not looking around. She’d flushed, and recalling Mr. Grey’s instructions, quickly turned the knob that shut the water off—just in case of an overflow. As she stared around the room, wide awake, one of the questions that circled in her mind was: Has his wife died? The next repeated thought was: How strange that my marriage probably died first.
Now, Sheila turned the toilet knob back on and gave a sigh of relief when its mechanisms worked. Despite her small success, she wondered again: Was coming here the biggest mistake of my life?
A full-to-the-brim wastebasket in the corner of the bathroom held dirty tissues and other mysterious deposits. Across the cracked linoleum piles of accumulated trash taunted her. She took a fast plain water shower in a dirt-streaked tub combination, trying not to picture rusty water. She air dried instead of using a mildewed-smelling, ratty towel tossed over the one rack. She threw on plain white underwear, a cotton skirt, blouse, and slipped into sandals, before hurrying down the empty hallway to the bedroom where she had spent the miserable night before.
Mary Beth, barefooted and in a man’s white dress shirt that came down to her knees, pushed the unlatched door and entered the room. “Can I come in?”
“You’re already in.” Why didn’t she warn me about this place?
Mary Beth’s skimpy hair was pulled back in her familiar ponytail. She wore a different expression from the day before. Insouciance had been replaced by something almost humble.
“Did you sleep all right?”
“I slept some.”
“Why are you still packed?”
“I may go to that hotel.” Sheila pointed out the window. The sign was off in daylight hours and the gray clapboard showed traces of old white paint. Broken windows had been mended with tape. It made this house seem not so bad.
“Why do that?” Mary Beth stared at the hotel. “That’s an awful place. Ready to be torn down.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I know that I don’t fit in here. These people are different from anyone I’ve ever met in my whole life.”
“They’re really nice.”
Really weird, Sheila stifled a groan. The last person she wanted to sound like was Jim, who used this word to describe anyone different from himself and his patriotic sailor friends. She continued to peer at the hotel. No way could she go back to Minneapolis. And Jane in Long Beach was expecting her to cajole Mary Beth into coming home.
“Please don’t leave,” Mary Beth’s little eyes, buried in her fleshy face, shone with tears. “I’ve been kind of lonesome. Once in a while. A little bit at least.”
“Why don’t you go back to your mom’s?”
“I can’t. Not yet. I have to make it on my own.”
Jane never drank alcohol and in spite of Mary Beth’s words to the contrary, interfered with her kids’ lives only in the smallest ways. Mary Beth had never been knocked around. She hadn’t lived in one cramped apartment after another. She had a lovely home that her mother purchased with an insurance settlement after her husband unexpectedly died. Lots of clean rooms in welcoming pastel colors and a garden full of roses made for a comforting, tranquil atmosphere.
“How are you making it? What do you do for money?”
“Lucas owns this place. He has enough to keep us—you know, food, stuff like that.”
“Is he rich?”
“He’s got plenty.”
“Has he always lived in San Francisco?”
“Dallas. His dad’s a bigwig at some company. Lucas says he needs to escape the capitalist system.”
“What’s his father say about this set-up?”
“Don’t know. Never met him.”
“What about the others—Monk and Magdela … Peace and …”
“Harmony.”
At least Sheila liked the musical name. “Are there any more?”
“That’s it. We get new people all the time though.” Mary Beth flopped onto the mattress where Sheila had slept.
“I need to get away and think for a while,” Sheila said. “Can I leave my things here?”
“They’ll be safe. No one steals. We’re here to give love to each other.”
“Sure. I’ll be back in an hour or two. Maybe longer. Don’t worry, I will come back. You have all my stuff.”
It was quiet on the street as Sheila rushed away from the faded orange house. She didn’t even bother to enter the hotel. Up close, it did look like it was ready to be torn down. Cyclone fences circled parts of the lot. Even though she had nowhere to go, Sheila suddenly felt free, without her suitcases and Mary Beth and all the peculiar people milling everywhere. She slowed. Pink bushes bloomed in several yards, perfuming the air. It was a quiet Sunday morning. Other than a few ordinary-looking folks walking dogs and pushing strollers, she was alone, and it felt better than she would have thought possible. After a few blocks, she passed a house freshly painted in white with green shutters. Some things seem normal.
She crossed a couple more streets and saw people heading into a church. It was almost 10:00 a.m. Hesitantly, she climbed the steps. She hadn’t been to church since the split-up with Jim. It wasn’t that she had quit praying. She prayed all the time, and hoped that God was listening. But the Church was just one more thing trying to control her. She’d never considered saying the same thing about Jim, but as she stood by the door, wondering if she should go in, she realized it was Jim who pushed her down every bit as much as her father and the Church. She almost turned and ran down the steps. Then, What will it hurt to light a candle? For her present predicament, for Jim living on base, for Tommy and his pregnant girlfriend, and for Mary Beth’s strange situation.
Making It Work Page 18