A Good Day for Seppuku

by Kate Braverman

  “I brought you a canteen with orange juice.” She recalls. “And a few joints. You were handcuffed. I fed you like a sick bird.”

  “How did you get a canteen?” Clarissa asks.

  “I took it from the hospital outpatient closet,” she says.

  Her head is throbbing. She stares at sea swells that are the process by which an autumn forest becomes water. If you understand the bay, it smells of slow burning cedar. Midnight currents are actually leaves brushing the ocean with russet and amber. Waves answer to the moon and immutable laws of spin and fall. They don’t get dinner on the table at the appointed hour. They don’t carpool or pick up the suits on time, or have the cufflinks and invitations ready.

  “Only you know,” Clarissa says. She looks like she may vomit again.

  She nods. Yes, only I was at ground zero when it happened. This is why we’ve tattooed ourselves. We alone comprehend adolescence in the margins of a hardscrabble town in the conceptual latitudes. The late 50s and their village was subdivided wood frame houses and stucco bungalows nailed in rows like the fruit trees above gashes of alley, oranges and lemons so bitter they burned your mouth.

  “We sat next to each other in home room,” she offers.

  It was 7th grade and they were learning the history of America, but they couldn’t find their geography or circumstances in literature. Nature was oaks and maples, not a riot of magenta Bougainvillea, not a blaze of red and yellow Canna bursting through bamboo fences sticky with pink Oleander. Families had two parents and pastel houses behind lawns with white picket fences where characters experienced angst rather than hunger and rage. They didn’t sift through trashcans in dusk alleys searching for glass soda bottles redeemable for 2 cents apiece. Gather enough glass and you had bus fare. On a fortunate hunt, you could trap enough coins for lunch.

  “Remember digging for bottles for food money?” she wonders.

  “I remember what you said.” Clarissa smiles. “You said Holden Caulfield would have taken a taxi.”

  She nods. “Remember our black berets? We were trying to meet Ginsberg and Kerouac. We wore those berets every day. We got lice.”

  Clarissa shrugs. “We looked for beatniks right here, on this pier. Boys with sketchbooks and guitars. We said we were French. We practiced our accents at recess.”

  Recess in the region of broken families, of divorces and single mothers, of stigma and words that could not be spoken out loud. Alcoholism. Cancer. Child abuse. Illegitimacy. Domestic violence. The special yellow smell of Sunday evenings when the mothers who worked as secretaries poured peroxide on their hair. The tiny implications of illumination from the one lamp you were allowed to turn on. Electricity was an extravagance. Their San Francisco was a medieval oasis — ocean at your face, mountains at your back. There were warlords at the utility companies with incomprehensible powers. Phones were instruments of terror. It cost money every time you touched them. Long distance calls were rationed, like chocolate during a war. The world as it was, before hotlines that could put your father in prison.

  “I still have nightmares about the apartment in Daly City,” Clarissa reveals. “At every St. Regis and Ritz, from Beijing to Buenos Aires, I wake up shaking. At the Bora Bora Lagoon Resort Hotel. At the Palazzo Sasso in Ravello, for Christ’s sake. The plot complications vary but somehow I’m back there.”

  “Remember the neighbors?” she asks. They lived next door, with a cement hall between them. She’s dizzy and her arm burns.

  “The wetbacks and hillbillies? The identical blonds with drawls?” Clarissa is unusually bright. “It was still the Depression. I had a friend once. Another friend, not like you. A hillbilly. Jerry found us listening to the radio. It was Elvis. Jerry started yelling, ‘Y∆159ou’re playing colored music? You’re putting colored music in my house?’ He threw the radio at my face. Took out my front tooth. That’s how I discovered caps.”

  “That was me,” she corrects, moderately annoyed. “It was Marvin, not Jerry. And he used the ‘n’ word.”

  “We had the same father, metamorphically. A barbarian with bad grammar who thought a yarmulke was a ticket to prison. A guy who could plaster and drywall. They were house painters. When they were employed. House painters.” Clarissa stares at the bay.

  “Like Hitler,” she points out. Then, “Had your mother run away yet?”

  “Rachel? She was on the verge. She was morphing into River or Rainbow or something in secret. Preparing for her first commune. After Jerry, a sleeping bag and a candle was a good time.”

  She remembers Clarissa’s mother as a woman sheathed in dark fabrics who sank into shadows, kept her back to the wall, found her own periphery, and rarely spoke. Jerry had pushed her out of a moving car. He kicked in her ribs and put her in a cast. Clarissa’s mother, a bruised woman in the process of metamorphosis. Yes, molting like the Hibiscus and Night Blooming Jasmine beside the alleys, sheathed in long skirts, shawls, and kimonos. She was younger than they are now.

  Then Clarissa had a family of subtraction and she envied her. All the neighbors had incomplete families — the brothers in juvenile detention, the sisters who disappeared when they started to show. If Marvin stopped lingering, if he would just die, she could have a similar reduction. She could escape the stucco tenements with torn mesh screen doors and vacant lots behind cyclone fences. And the mothers and aunts who rode buses and worked as file clerks between nervous breakdowns. Even second-hand cars were an aberration. If she was placed in foster care, adoption might follow. She had straight A’s and she won the poetry and science competition. Maybe she could be given a new name with syllables that formed church steeples on your lips, like the women in books. She could be assigned a stay at home mother with a ruffled apron who baked cookies and called her Elizabeth, Margaret or Christine.

  “Did you realize we were Jewish?” she suddenly wonders.

  “I never revealed that. The hillbillies thought we were Christ killers and owned all the banks,” Clarissa tells her. “And Jerry said they’d deport us. Send us back to Poland.”

  “I wanted a bat mitzvah,” she remembers. “Marvin said, ‘You mean a Jew thing? It costs a fortune to get into that club. They inspect you first. You have to shave your head and show them your penis.’”

  “Speaking of Marvin’s penis, remember the Polanski scandal? When he sodomized a 13-year-old?” Clarissa asks.

  It happened in California. It was front-page news in an era when newspapers were read and discussed. The details were graphic and comprehensive. They were indelible as a personal mutilation.

  “Jerry said, ‘I knew that guy in Warsaw. He’s 5'2. He’s got a 3-inch dick.’ Jerry mimed the organ dimensions with his fingers.” Clarissa repeats the demonstration for her. “Then he said, ‘Why is this a headline? What kind of damage can you do with a dick that small?’” Clarissa turns back to the bay.

  “Is that when it happened? When you disappeared? The phone was disconnected. I couldn’t find you for a year.” She tries to form a chronology.

  “Brillstein says it wasn’t rape. It was an inevitable appropriation. I was chattel. Rachel left and Jerry just moved me into their bedroom. I came home from school and my clothes were in their closet. My pajamas were folded on their bed. Then he found us an apartment in Oakland. He let me pick out curtains,” Clarissa explains. “Hey, I was the first trophy wife on the block. It’s my mother I hate. She knew what would happen. I was expendable.”

  “But she came back for you,” she says. “She took you to a commune. You went to college. You got out.”

  “Nobody gets out, for Christ’s sake.” Clarissa is angry. “You chance to survive.”

  She examines the bay. There’s less agitation, swells are softer and a haze grazes the amethyst surface. The diagnosis has come in. The bay had its biopsy. This stretch of ocean is terminal.

  “Didn’t Marvin break your wrist?” Clarissa asks. “You had bandages all summer. You had to stay on the pier, reading.”

  “Mommy did it. She was
between mental hospitals. Maybe a weekend pass. Her contemptuous glare. It cut right through the chemo and antipsychotics. She ratted me out. She said, ‘Marvin, look, that kid’s talking with her fingers again. Don’t you know only Jews and Gypsies talk with their hands? You think you’re a neurosurgeon? A symphony conductor? You’re not even human.’ Then she seized my hand. I had three fractured fingers but they took her in the ambulance.”

  They are quiet. Through haze, sun is lemon yellow on the heavy waters. Accuracy is a necessary component of civilization. Daddy knocked out your tooth. Mommy broke your fingers. There’s an elegant mathematics to this, to these coordinates and their relationship to one another. The accumulation of slights. The weight of insults. The random resurrection of coherence. And the way you are no longer blind, cold, and bereft. Then the indelible vulgarity you finally have the vocabulary to name.

  Their fingers are entwined. She notices Clarissa is wearing a platinum set VHS-1 Tiffany diamond of at least 4 carats. And a gold Rolex with the perpetual oyster setting. She withdraws her hand.

  “You know how it is,” Clarissa dismisses the implication. “When other women evaluate their black velvets, I consider a cool set of razor blades.”

  “So you transcend the genre?” She is enraged.

  “What genre would that be? Survivors of squalid adolescences? Best aberration in the most abhorred class?” Clarissa looks at her, hard. Her red lipstick with the embedded stars are like tiny metallic studs or hooks. They help you shred flesh.

  She considers their shared childhood; their parents had been disenfranchised for generations. They were pre-urban and unprepared for a remote town perched at the edge of the implausible Pacific. Appliances overwhelmed them. The garbage disposal must never be touched. What if it broke? The refrigerator must be strategically opened and immediately shut. What if it burned out? And their offspring became mute with shock, there in the dirty secret city, deep within a colossus of yellow Hibiscus and magenta Bougainvillea, behind banks of startled red Geraniums and brittle Canna.

  “We are what coalesced at the end of the trail. After the bandits, cactus and coyotes. We are the indigenous spawn of this saint. His bastards,” she realizes.

  “We were spillage,” Clarissa replies. “Don’t romanticize.”

  Everything is suspended. The bay is barely breathing. Perhaps it’s just been wheeled back from a fifth round of chemo. Maybe it’s hung-over. Or slipping into a coma. It needs a respirator. Come on. Code blue. It needs CPR.

  “The immigrant experience, my ass,” Clarissa adds.

  “But we have instincts.” She is exhausted. Her arm with its gauze-bandaged shoulder extends. She can talk with her limbs now. Marvin and her mother are dead. She gestures with her fingers, a motion that includes the bay, an outcropping that is Marin and Sonoma, and a suggestion of something beyond.

  “We understand ambushes and unconventional warfare. We’re expert with camouflage,” Clarissa agrees, offering encouragement.

  “They’ll never take us by surprise,” she responds. She feels a complete lack of conviction and a sudden intense longing to get a manicure.

  Silence. Palms sway, windswept and brazen. Vertical shadows from fronds appear without warning, random spears. One must relentlessly improvise. Holden Caulfield would get knifed in the gut.

  “I have to go now,” Clarissa abruptly announces. “But you look stunning. I’m impressed. Have you considered a wardrobe update? Do shmattes prove you’re an artist? Listen, I brought some Prada that were sized wrong. I’d sue if I had time. They’re in my car.”

  “That’s OK,” she manages. This is emotional aerobics for the crippled, she thinks. Then, “I appreciate the gesture.”

  “I don’t have a generous impulse in my repertoire.” Clarissa is tired. “This is a search and destroy in the triple-tier. But we must keep trying. Let’s end our reunion with a celebratory benediction.”

  This is their ritual of conclusion. They exchange tokens of mutual acceptance. It’s how they prove their capacity to transcend themselves. It’s the equivalent of boot camp 5-mile runs in mud and climbing obstacle course ropes in rainstorms.

  “I brought a postcard you sent me from Fiji 16 years ago.” She produces it from her backpack. She reads it out loud. “On the beach under green cliffs, I feel God’s breath. I make my daughter smile. She laughs like an orchestra of bells and sea birds fed on fresh fruits. Her hair is moss against my lips. How pink the infant fingernails are. I wish you such sea pearls.” She offers the postcard to Clarissa.

  “I forgot that completely.” Clarissa doesn’t take the postcard. “That was Anna. A guy with the name of a reptile, Snake or Scorpion, took her away on a Harley to Arizona. I sent you newspaper clippings.”

  “She testified against you,” she tries to remember. “In that divorce.”

  “I was accused of witness tampering. I almost lost my license,” Clarissa says, and stands up.

  She returns the postcard to her backpack. Their reunions are conceptually well intentioned. But leaches and bloodletting were once considered purifying and curative.

  There is a long pause during which she considers radium poisoning, Madam Curie and the extent of her fatigue. Then she asks, “You still doing the venture capital thing? Private jets? Yachts to beaches too chic to be on a map? Everybody loses but you?”

  “When the Israeli money dried up, I thought I was through. Then the Persians. No sensibility and billions, all liquid. An entire race with an innate passion for schlock. Payday.” Clarissa is more alert. “Then détente. Russian mafia money poured in. Cossacks with unlimited cash. Who would have thought?” Clarissa places the strip of photographs in her Chanel purse. And, as an afterthought asks, “What about you?”

  “I’m getting married,” she says. “I’m moving to Wood’s End, Pennsylvania.”

  “Jesus. The grand finale. OD in a barn with a woodstove? Twenty below without the wind chill? Your halfway house skirts in a broom closet? What now? Another alcoholic painter fighting his way back to the Whitney? Or a seething genius with a great novel and a small narcotics problem?” Clarissa extracts her cell phone.

  “Fuck you.” She is outraged.

  “I apologize. That was completely inappropriate,” Clarissa says immediately. “Forgive me, please. It’s separation anxiety. We have difficulty individuating. Partings are turbulent. The overlay and resonances are unspeakable. But Brillstein says we’re improving.”

  “You’re still with Brillstein? Jerry’s psychiatrist? The Freudian with the high colonics and weekend mud baths?” She stares at Clarissa. She’s so startled, she’s almost sober.

  “He’s eclectic, I know. But it’s like a family plan. I’m grandfathered in at the original price,” Clarissa says.

  The stylish phone opens; the keyboard glows like the panels on an airplane. It’s the millennium and we have cockpits on our wrists. Clarissa’s phone is voice activated. She says, “Driver.” Then, “Pier 39. Now.”

  “Does your arm hurt?” she wonders.

  “No pain, no gain. My dear cousin,” Clarissa smiles. “Keep your finger on the trigger. We must soldier on. Our cause is just.”

  She realizes Clarissa has already moved on. The conference is over. The documents will be studied. Further discussions to be scheduled. My people will calendar with yours. We’ll synchronize by palm pilot.

  Suddenly she feels she’s on a borderless layover. It’s last Christmas in India again. She began in a broken taxi 5 hours from Goa. Then a 6-hour delay in the airport and the run across the tarmac for the last and totally unscheduled miraculous flight to Bombay. A day room for 7 hours. The flight to Frankfurt and another day room and delay. Finally, the 14-hour flight to New York. 70 hours of continual travel and she was just finding her rhythm. She could continue for weeks or months, in a perpetual montage of stalled entrances and exits, corridors and steps, tunnels and lobbies all in vertigo, in free fall, where no time zones apply.

  They are no longer holding hands. A dist
ance of texture and intention forms between them. The geometry is calculated. Not even their shadows collide.

  “Another bittersweet reunion barely survived,” Clarissa says. “My beloved almost cousin.”

  “And you, my first and greatest love,” she replies. “Another high risk foray we deserve purple hearts for.”

  “We’ll get red hearts next time. Our next tattoo.” Clarissa produces a small false smile. Her lips are stiff beneath the lurid lacquer coating.

  They kiss on both cheeks. The glitter has departed from their eyes. They’ve slid into an interminable foreign film they have neither interest nor affection for. But she knows the name of Clarissa’s lipstick now. It’s called Khmer Rouge.

  There’s a certain pause just before sunset when the bay is veiled in azure. It’s the moment for redemption or drowning. Inland, cyclone fenced freeways carve cement scars beside bungalows with miniature balconies where parched Geraniums decay in air soiled from the fumes of manufacturing and human wounds. The bay is a muted defeated blue, subjugated and contained. At night, they pump the antidepressants in. Or maybe there’s enough Prozac and beer already in the sewage. Pollution turns the setting sun into strata of brandy and lurid claret, smears of curry and iodine. It looks like a massacre.

  “Listen. My car can take you where you’re going,” Clarissa offers.

  Clarissa’s driver has short hair, a thick neck, aviator sunglasses and an ear attachment like a Secret Service agent. Clarissa indicates the car door. It is open like a dark mouth with the teeth knocked out. And she’s waving the purple scarf like a banner. She refuses to admit that she doesn’t know where she’s going. She turns away and starts walking.

  “Look. The Prada coat that doesn’t fit right,” Clarissa calls, waving a patch of blue silk with both her hands.

  She turns away and starts walking. If those are words issuing from Clarissa’s mouth, which needs immediate surgical attention, she can’t hear them. There are shadows along the boardwalk and alleys bordering residential streets with ridiculous insipid seaside names. Bay Street. Marine Drive. North Peninsula View. Who do they think they’re kidding?