Shrug

by Lisa Braver Moss

  Hildy said, “Tomorrow, we can go up to Smoke and Records so you can see what it looks like all dark and boarded up!”

  After lunch, my father quietly drove. Now and then Shalimar would reach out for his hand and hold it for a while, until he let go to put it back on the steering wheel.

  Once we were in Oakland, we stopped at Cost Plus and picked up three narrow foldable futons and three decorative pillows to sleep on. I was going to ask about sheets and pillowcases, but decided not to, and I suddenly realized it was a relief not having to use those kinds of things anymore. Besides, when my father pulled a five dollar bill and some change out of one pocket and had to go digging for more money in the other, it stabbed at my heart, even though the other pocket turned out to have tens and twenties in it and my father peeled bills off as if everything were okay. Hildy and Drew didn’t seem concerned, but tears filled my eyes.

  “Can we do laundry?” Drew asked as we pulled out of the Cost Plus parking lot.

  Shalimar offered to get us started at Laundry Land on Telegraph while my father and Hildy went to Park & Shop for some groceries. Drew wanted to carry both of his bags of clothing, but Shalimar gently took the white bag from him, and as we walked into the crowded storefront, I tried to joke with Drew the way I would’ve joked with Stephanie and Brett about how pretentious the name “Laundry Land” was. “The Laaand of Laaaundry,” I intoned, “is ruled by King Klothing and Queen Quilt. And there’s a mean old hag who hides in the back. Letitia the Livid Laundress!” Willa the wantonly wicked wolverine. But Drew just held his bag close to his chest.

  Drew and I did laundry at home, but we didn’t know how to use coin-operated washing machines and dryers, or which soap to get or how much to use. We’d only been at the Laundromat when my father did his wash, and we’d spent our time gliding those cheerful baskets on wheels across the floor until he yelled at us to stop.

  I liked Laundry Land, with its cute little dollhouse-sized boxes of detergent and the reassuring smell of clean, warm clothing as it came out of the dryer. Today, though, the row of white washing machines seemed intimidating, as if daring us to be serious about laundry for once. The coin slots looked like some kind of orthodontic nightmare, their tubs holding weirdly small loads while inexplicably, the huge burnt-orange dryers looked like they could hold four loads. There were instructions on the wall about how to be considerate in a Laundromat, and there was information on the side of an empty little detergent box sitting on a counter, but there was no guidance on how to actually accomplish the task. Laundry Land was a place for people who already knew what they were doing.

  Drew wanted extra detergent. Shalimar handed me the bag and went to get the soap, and Drew and I found two available washers not far from each other. Drew emptied his bag into one of them and I started emptying out mine. A quarter, a nickel and two pennies rained down into the tub. So did a crushed Marlboro wrapper and an orange packet of Zig Zag papers. Drew’s clothing smelled like dirt, sweat, cigarettes, marijuana, and Vitalis.

  I had just fished the change, Zig Zag papers, and cigarette wrapper out of the tub and put it all into the pocket of my jeans when Shalimar returned with the soap. She seemed to know exactly what to do: double detergent, extra rinse cycle. It would take longer, she explained, but not as long as doing the same load twice, not as much running back and forth to Laundry Land, and not as expensive, either.

  Back at the apartment with my father and Hildy, I had no chance to tell Hildy about the rolling papers or the cigarette pack, or the smells of marijuana and Vitalis. We unloaded the groceries, putting even the dry stuff like crackers into the fridge because of the bugs.

  I teared up when I saw that every single item my father and Hildy had chosen was something we liked. London Broil steaks, Cheerios and a quart of whole milk, Nestle’s Quik powder, four bananas, sliced jack cheese and a roll of liverwurst, a loaf of sliced sourdough, Best Foods mayonnaise and a pound of butter, Oreos, Cracker Barrel cheddar cheese and a box of Triscuits, cottage cheese and a large bag of Fritos, two cans of Heinz beans, two Jiffy Pops, Svenhard’s bear claws for breakfast. Oh, and those pink-and-white-frosted Circus Animals made by Mother’s Cookies, as if nothing in the world could be more obvious than that a mother makes cookies for her kids. There was also a bottle of Wishbone salad dressing—the one thing my mother had always bought that I liked—and a head of iceberg lettuce.

  Iceberg: my mother said it had no food value. It was like eating water, she said.

  26

  creature comforts

  By this time of day, the conga drumming in lower Sproul Plaza was beginning to die down, but you could still hear the Hare Krishnas chanting up near the food carts. My father had to be at RAAD soon, and he was anxious to get going on rearranging the apartment. I hadn’t even thought about how to divide the space for the three of us, but my father had a plan. He had a dozen or more bookshelves that were two and a half feet wide by two feet tall, with a shelf dividing the bottom twelve inches from the top twelve inches—perfect for records. His idea was to stack the record shelves on top of each other and use them as partitions, with him and Drew on one side and me on the other (Hildy sleeping on my side when she came over). For once I was glad we had too many records.

  “But Dad, what if there’s an earthquake?” Hildy wanted to know.

  “We won’t stack ’em high,” my father answered. “Just two shelves tall. Here, I’ll show you.” He started pulling records off the shelves so the bookcases would be easier to move, and we took the albums out of his hands eight or ten at a time, piling them temporarily on the kitchen table next to a clock radio and a big glass jar that held change, nails, rubber bands, and a couple of Lindy ballpoint pens. Shalimar kicked off her white sandals. She worked better barefoot, she said.

  Soon my father had placed one bookshelf on top of another, in the middle of the floor, and Hildy and Shalimar and Drew started bringing the records back. My father didn’t seem to care what order the records were in.

  “But it’s only four feet high,” I pointed out. It wasn’t much privacy.

  “Simmer down, now,” my father said. “Only your head will show.”

  “But, Dad, it isn’t—”

  “I told you, settle down!” It was the first time he’d raised his voice in days. “I know you miss your creature comforts,” he accused.

  Tears pooled in my eyes. I didn’t know what a creature comfort was, just that I was hated for caring about the wrong things. Hildy looked like she thought I was being mean, and I didn’t want to do anything that might upset Drew, so I swallowed hard. “Dad, that’s not what I—”

  “You’re the problem here,” my father said. “You’re a paint-by-numbers person. The minute some creativity is required, some flexi-bility—you get uptight.”

  “Jules!” Shalimar said, laughing, as if my father had just come up with some hilarious witticism. Shrug. Shrug. I concentrated as hard as I could on not crying. Shalimar, Hildy, Drew—none of them found my father’s assessment of me to be in need of correction.

  I’d like to tell you I knew they were all full of crap. But I didn’t. I still don’t. Because—it’s not that easy to believe in yourself when you’re the only one in your family who does. So here’s what I figured: even an uptight, uncreative person with a stupid shrug has a right to do well in school and apply to college.

  Shalimar glanced at her watch. “Jules, do you want me to stay for a while and help the kids set up?”

  My father didn’t say no. “Make yourselves something for dinner,” he barked.

  “Dad, don’t you want to take a sandwich or something?” Hildy asked. “Your shift doesn’t end ’til eleven.”

  “Nah!” He waved his hand downward and turned to leave. He nearly tripped on Shalimar’s sandals on the way out, but instead of throwing a shit fit, he just kicked the shoes gently aside.

  “What are creature comforts?” Drew asked, after my father had gone.

  “It means comforts,” Hildy said.
<
br />   “But then why is the word creature in there?” I added, trying to act normal, and wanting to keep the conversation going, since it was the first one Drew had started all day.

  “Yeah, it makes no sense,” Drew agreed. “Martha isn’t a creature.”

  “Yes she is,” Hildy said. “Everyone is.”

  “Maybe ‘creature comforts’ is related to the idea of a ‘creature of habit,’” Shalimar suggested. “Like, you’re accustomed to certain comfy things.”

  “Martha,” Hildy said, “if this is gonna work, you need to stop taking Dad so seriously.”

  “Huh?” No matter how hard I tried, I never seemed to be able to figure out what I was doing wrong or how to change it. Stop taking Dad so seriously: it was as confusing as that line from my eighth-grade history textbook. The general determined that the most effective course of action was to cut through and subdue the rebellion.

  What I wanted was to have a nervous breakdown. In nervous breakdowns, people stopped caring about their Latin translations or college applications or even their little brothers; they stopped functioning altogether. They were found in the gutter, rocking back and forth, singing a tune from Guys and Dolls. How did they do it? How did they feel entitled?

  Shalimar patted Drew’s shoulder. “Wouldn’t you like a shower, sweetie?”

  “Ten thousand thundering typhoons!” Drew exclaimed, and headed for the bathroom.

  “Oh wait, the clothes!” Hildy remembered. “I’ll go down and move them to the dryer.” She went into the kitchen and started grabbing coins from the jar.

  With Drew in the shower, Shalimar and I were alone with the records and shelves. Her face brightened as she recognized one of the albums. “It’s more fun doing work when there’s music on, don’t you think?” She put on Any Day Now by Joan Baez, and “Love Minus Zero” came through the speakers. She cranked up the volume and sang along. It didn’t surprise me that she had a confident, pretty voice.

  “It’s hard getting used to a new place to live,” she said, after the song was over. “A new situation.”

  “Yeah.”

  She looked straight into my face as “North Country Blues” came on. It was a sad song. “You know your father loves you very much,” she said a little loudly, over the music.

  “Oh, I know,” said, my voice wavering. “He just doesn’t like me.” I grabbed a stack of records from the kitchen table.

  “Martha, that’s not true, not at all! He talks about you kids all the time. You’re all he cares about.”

  You kids. Not you, Martha. Did Shalimar think I didn’t notice?

  But Shalimar was so lovely and so nice, she had to be right. And that meant I was wrong. My father had fought for us. He wanted us to have yummy food. I really couldn’t see how he liked me, but then, I didn’t like him, either.

  Maybe part of the problem was that some of my mother had rubbed off on me. Maybe I had somehow gotten more of her personality than the others had. Maybe it was like those news stories about hungry toddlers in ghettoes who chew at the windows, and the windows have lead paint on them that poisons the children gradually, makes them lose the ability to learn, so that by the time they start school, they’re already behind.

  Shalimar and I managed to double the length of the partition. She turned the record over, and “Love is Just a Four-Letter Word” was playing when Drew came out of the bathroom, wrapped in a grayed-out white towel. I was just noticing the dirt still under his nails when Hildy got back.

  Hildy and Drew and I were hungry, and Shalimar wanted to keep working on the partition, so we went into the kitchen and dipped Fritos in cottage cheese until the cottage cheese was gone and soggy little yellow bits of corn chips sat at the bottom of the waxy container. Hildy and I shared a banana. Drew wanted his own. We didn’t bother to sit down.

  After the Joan Baez album was over, Shalimar put it away and turned the stereo off. “Do you guys like this album? I mean, do you want me to put it someplace where you’ll be able to find it?”

  “Wait!” I said. “We have those records we put aside, remember, Hildy?” I trotted over and retrieved the Beatles albums and the Simon and Garfunkel from the floor of the front closet, and we put them together with the Joan Baez record at the far right end of the partition so we’d know where they were. I had stashed a few of my own favorite records in the front closet, too, but left them there for now: Volume I of the Bach unaccompanied violin partitas and sonatas performed by Henryk Szeryng, Bach’s Italian concerto and other keyboard works, a record of Debussy piano works, Bach’s Magnificat, and the Prokofiev symphony I’d found before. “Look, Drew!” I showed him the pop records. “And we can use the stereo whenever we want. Dad said!” A little smile flickered across his face.

  We all worked until there were eight bookcases, four and four. We’d set the records up to face my father and Drew’s side of the partition, so Hildy’s and my side faced the backs of the shelves instead of the colorful album spines. We draped a paisley Indian cotton bedspread on top of the shelves to cover our side, holding it in place with a few stacks of dusty books. The wood showed for a few feet at the end of the partition, but it wasn’t bad.

  Shalimar was putting her sandals back on so she could get back to her apartment and her dissertation. She offered to walk me down to Laundry Land on the way. She chatted about how Amrita Sher-Gil’s mother had been Hungarian, how Amrita Sher-Gil had studied at École des Beaux-Arts, how Amrita Sher-Gil’s 1932 painting Young Girls had won a gold medal at the Grand Salon. When we got to Laundry Land, Shalimar turned to me and looked straight into my eyes. “Listen, Martha, I know you feel hurt by your mom,” she said.

  “Oh. Well, it’s—”

  “I just want to say that deep down, she loves you, Martha. Mothers always love their daughters. It’s a very special relationship, trust me.”

  I nodded, trying to act mature.

  “They say we choose our parents. Karmically, I mean. So we can learn the lessons we’re here to learn in this lifetime. It’s pointless to worry, because everything works out just as it’s supposed to.”

  I hadn’t chosen well, and it was my own goddamned fault. I hadn’t learned enough in my previous lifetimes. Shrug.

  I wanted to hate Shalimar, I really did. The problem was, she seemed like the kind of person who understood suffering. If she didn’t understand mine, couldn’t it be because my unhappiness wasn’t that deep or important? At least, not compared to real problems in the world, like in India, where that woman artist was from? Or compared to what Drew had just been through? You’re the problem, I told myself. You’re the person to hate.

  “Okay, well, see you soon, Martha!” Shalimar turned around and left.

  Hildy had told me she’d put both loads of laundry into one dryer. I got the clothes out and started folding. A lot of Drew’s socks were in bad shape, the white T-shirts were all grayish, and I couldn’t help noticing there were stains in his underwear, sealed into the fabric by the heat of the washer and dryer. Had Drew been so scared at Plowshares that he’d gotten diarrhea? I winced.

  We’d thrown Drew’s shopping bags away, because they were filthy, but someone had left a huge white plastic bag on one of the Formica countertops. It looked clean. I put Drew’s things in there and started walking back up Telegraph toward the apartment, the bundle slung over my shoulder vagabond-style. I was thinking of taking the Durant-to-Bancroft alleyway next to Kip’s so I wouldn’t have to pass by RAAD and feel like I should go in and say hi to my father. But it was getting dark, and the alley might be creepy, so I stayed on Telegraph. Luckily, at the moment I was passing by, my father was doing a crossword puzzle, and he didn’t look up.

  27

  brainwashed

  In the evenings, after his shift, my father liked to go for a ride in the Plymouth to “unlax”— his word for “relax” that I’d never heard anyone else use and that probably wasn’t a real word, just one more stupid thing about him. He’d drive to Hildy’s place in Oakland to pick he
r up, drive around with her for a while, and be back in time for the eleven o’clock news.

  “I mean, I’m right there, and he goes and gets Hildy,” I complained to Stephanie as we walked across the courtyard at Berkeley High on our way to Latin. “He doesn’t even pretend to want to spend time with me. If Hildy can’t go, he visits Shalimar instead of taking the drive.”

  “Wait, I thought he wasn’t supposed to have a girlfriend.”

  “I know, but Shalimar doesn’t come over to the apartment. And she needs help with her dissertation.”

  “That’s a funny word for her private parts,” Stephanie snorted.

  As we went up the steps to the “C” building, Stephanie said hi to two boys from her history class. I saw Clifton coming down the stairs and onto the courtyard, talking to Giselle, the cellist he’d started dating. Clifton and I waved at each other. I thought of shouting, “Isolating the spots!” but decided not to. Actually, I hate to admit this, but it pissed me off that Clifton had gotten a girlfriend about a minute and a half after finally having his growth spurt. A girlfriend who was my age. I kind of wished he’d stayed short so that no one else would notice what a great person he was.

  “Steph, you think I should call my mom?”

  “What? Why?” She held the door open for me.

  “I dunno, to say hi? Check if she’s okay?” It had been a week and a half since the custody hearing. No one at court had said they’d been in touch with my mother, but someone had to have contacted her to tell her that she’d lost. Now that I thought about it, of all the weird stuff I’d been through lately, maybe the weirdest was that such a huge thing had happened in our family, and I hadn’t heard my mother screaming and crying about it.

  “Well, she hasn’t called you,” Stephanie said as we started down the long hallway toward the language classrooms.

  “No, but Stephanie, she can’t.”

  “Why not?”