“It ain’t football, there ain’t no strategy,” had been his sensitive, rural response. “You have babies and raise ’em. Nobody plans it.”
“They do when they’re not ready,” Sarah had replied.
He said he was ready, and what their relationship needed was a “rally point.”
“I’m not ready,” Sarah had told him. “Not now. Not with you.”
That’s when Daryl smacked her. And Sarah forgot he had ever made her happy, that he possessed a good side, and that this violence was nothing other than learned behavior. His father wasn’t a redneck, somewhat outdoorsy, but he came from Palo Alto with a degree from Stanford in ecology. He was a gentle man. Daryl was a first-generation redneck, self-taught. He had learned it from Boonville, by choice.
“Tell me when you get your abortion,” Daryl had said, as Sarah held her jaw. “I’ll go to the Lodge and pass out cigars that say, ‘It’s dead.’”
She didn’t talk to Daryl for a year, except to curse in his general direction. Then the work of Susan B. Anthony, Virginia Woolf, and Mom’s whole generation of women’s libbers went out the window. Crime of crimes, Sarah kissed the man who had struck her. Even Lisa had a hard time swallowing that one. But nobody knew about their trysts these days. Lisa wouldn’t believe her predicament, especially since she had escorted Sarah to the clinic that day of the slap four years ago. Although Sarah had returned the favor previously, when Lisa’s boyfriend from Calistoga refused to take her to the hospital for her abortion.
“Ninety-nine percent effective when used correctly,” Lisa had lamented the entire trip to Ukiah, leaning against Sarah’s truck door, hoping it would accidentally open. “I don’t think we even fucked a hundred times.”
“It almost makes you rethink abstinence,” Sarah replied, patting Lisa’s knee. “Don’t worry, you’re making the right decision.”
To get to the clinic, they had to walk through the Burger Churchers and what seemed to be the entire religious right waving signs and blocking the sidewalk, screaming murderer, baby killer, slut, promising eternal damnation for them both. Sarah didn’t know which denomination the Burger Churchers belonged to, but their church was behind the Burger King just off the highway – The Church of Jesus Christ Crucified with a Side Order of Fries. One held a Ziploc baggie of blood and threatened to sully their path, thinking better of it when Sarah closed her fist. There were no volunteer escorts. Sarah had decided long ago “Ukiah” was the Pomo word for “wasteland.” Another Burger Churcher with a brood of mayonnaise-faced children, future panty sniffers and dentists, held posters of a mangled fetus with a caption that read, “Why are you killing me?”
The Romans had the right idea, Sarah thought, feed these assholes to the lions.
“Let’s talk,” a protester offered, holding out his hands to show there was nothing up his sleeve but the Scriptures. “If you don’t love your baby, we will.”
“How do you know I’m not just getting a checkup?” Sarah asked.
The protester looked from the two women to the rectangle building that seemed to be designed by an architect weaned on Legos, pondering what care the staff inside might be administering, tending to the ailments of the working class, gonorrhea, herpes, a yeast infection that untreated would lead to sterility. He only knew Sarah and Lisa were seeking medical attention probably for something caused by sex, and by the looks of them, out of wedlock!
“You’re going to burn,” the protester said, matter of factly.
Joyless pains-in-the-ass, Sarah thought. Instead of doing something productive, helping out underprivileged children or checking into the Kama Sutra for themselves, these fanatics were self-prophesying a hell on earth.
“Concubine!” one howled.
“Keep your cross out of my uterus,” Sarah responded. “Why don’t you go home and make Jell-O.”
“Harlot! Whore! Sinner!”
“Ohhh, talk dirty to me some more,” Sarah goaded.
“If God made you in His image,” Lisa jeered, as a parting shot, “then He must be one ugly son of a bitch!”
They ducked toward the clinic. But the door, painted a daunting shade of orange like it was the threshold of something scientifically unnatural, was locked. There was a note printed on computer paper directing them to an intercom that appeared to have been broken and fixed. Sarah pressed the buzzer.
“Who is it?” a disembodied voice asked.
“Sarah McKay,” she answered.
“How can I help you?” the voice said.
“We would like to see a doctor,” Sarah said, spotting a surveillance camera’s blinking red light.
“And what would this be regarding?” the voice asked.
“This would be regarding health and medicine,” Sarah said, not wanting to have this conversation within earshot of the protesters. “This is a clinic, isn’t it?”
“Do you have an appointment?” the voice said.
“Yes,” Sarah said, beginning to wonder about the volatility of the crowd, feeling their unspoken support for someone going too far, the rhythm of heartbeats inaudibly chanting for a single purpose. More importantly, she was worried about Lisa. This process was uncomfortable enough without reactionary mob hysterics or getting the fifth degree from a Radio Shack speaker. Sarah could tell Lisa was resolved in her decision, although her body seemed to be cringing, eyes filled with hangover sadness. She was no doubt wishing this experience would be over. But Sarah knew it would always be there, bringing weight to her future choices. Good decisions resonate throughout your life as pervasively as bad ones, and with just as much regret.
“Check under the name Lisa Johnson,” Sarah told the voice.
“Who are you?” the voice asked.
“I’m a friend,” Sarah said, reaching out to put an arm around Lisa’s shoulder.
Sarah was ready to leave, pay the extra money, and call a private practice, but the buzzer sounded and she pushed open the door, hearing the hermetic suck of a broken vacuum seal. They walked through a windowless hall to another formidable door where they again had to wait to be buzzed in, this time without further inquisition. The place was one gun turret shy of a fortress. When they finally entered the waiting area, Sarah was surprised the gauntlet hadn’t led them to a police station questioning room: one chair, a bright light, and a pack of cigs. On the contrary, the waiting room was cheery with plants and comfortable furniture. Along the far wall was a coffee table offering a selection of magazines including what had to be the only copy of The New Yorker in Ukiah, and ironically, Woman’s Day.
Sarah was about to give the receptionist a raft of shit for the way they had been treated outside, but saw her workstation was enclosed in bulletproof glass. Cut into the glass was a double-sealed slot for returning the forms clipped onto the clipboards stacked on the counter.
“Sorry about this,” the receptionist said. “We’ve had bomb threats.”
“That’s all right,” Sarah said, certain the secretary must endure harassment on a daily basis. Religious whackos were nothing if not organized, with plenty of gilt crucifixes and bake sales to prove it. They probably had a file on this woman full of information most people wouldn’t find the least bit significant or incriminating, lists of movies she had attended, photos of men who had spent the night at her house, suspect toiletries. For sure, the progressive forces out front knew her address, what make of car she drove, and the license plate number. That would be enough to scare Sarah. People who believed in Sodom and Gomorrah, Adam and Eve, and Jonah being swallowed by a whale were capable of anything. Except logical thought.
“Thanks for being here,” Sarah said, by way of her own apology.
Forms.
Still sprawled on the bathroom floor, Sarah remembered the paperwork patients had to complete on each visit to the clinic, requiring you to recall every sexual encounter and to linger on all the bad ones, if not actually call the formally consenting partner with the not-so-great news that you had a painful rash or cluster of warts. It
was no Cosmo quiz. When it had been her turn to fill out the questionnaire, Sarah checked off the methods of birth control she had used; sponge, foam, diaphragm, everything from condoms to “pull and pray.” Each scratch of ink recalled memories of awkward moments and broken promises. Sarah realized it was difficult, if not impossible, to kiss someone with your eyes and heart wide open.
One question read, “Has someone ever touched you in a way that hurt, frightened, or made you feel uncomfortable?”
Sarah wanted to know, “Are they asking me if I’ve ever been in love?”
She wondered if having someone turn out the lights when you wanted them on counted. What about probing fingers? Stalkers? Lying about your name after a one-night stand? Receiving the wrong number on a cocktail napkin? Saying “I love you” and getting a grunt in return? Faking orgasms? The occasional grab-on-the-ass, copped feel, insults from construction workers. The Poobah would definitely qualify as a “yes.” So would the Future Primitives, most of Mom’s boyfriends, as well as a number of the Waterfall’s rituals: drug fests, harvest parties, summer swims. But what about when the moon shone behind the Golden Gate Bridge in the early a.m. radio hours of the Marin Headlands after she had danced with the vaqueros and transvestites at Caesar’s Latin Palace in the Mission and some beautiful boy who had never called her again mouthed the lyrics to Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet” between bites on her neck and single malt-scented kisses that stung like paper cuts? All she thought was, “Please don’t put your disease inside me. Don’t love anyone but me.”
Sarah wiped her nose on her shirtsleeve and picked herself up off the floor. She decided if she was strong enough to have survived her past, she would make it through this calamity too. Endure, that’s what she did best. She would sell her dope, find an apartment in the Bay Area, check out Cal Arts, fill out the grant applications, and follow through. Finish something. She had a hollow feeling in her head and a heightened sense of her surroundings. She splashed water on her face and looked into the mirror to see Mom and Dad staring back, their overlapping image creating a new wrinkle.
Bummer days, Sarah thought, exasperated, reminding herself of Dad during a coke jag, Mom after a run with the reefer and Chablis; “Down on Me Days.” There was no need to intentionally repeat this unhappiness. She wanted to find Daryl right away, give him a final fuck-off while she still had the conviction. He’d say something stupid, and it would be easier to leave. She could pack and have her dope ready to go by morning, forgo Ukiah, and set up an appointment on Haight Street where they didn’t treat you like a criminal. A reservation at the St. Francis sounded nice for a couple of nights, hot baths and room service. Before departing, she would swing up Manchester Road to see Squirrel Boy and say goodbye, make sure he was in better spirits, not having paranoid visions. What a lightweight. But she should talk, she used to see things in the woods too, sober. Maybe she would invite Squirrel Boy to visit her in San Francisco and have a drink at Tosca. She could use someone to talk to, someone who at least pretended to listen. Sarah wondered what kind of father Squirrel Boy would be. Would it be different if she were carrying his child? She felt guilty for thinking about Squirrel Boy, thinking about anything other than the operation in her immediate future.
Sarah dried her face with the last of the clean towels, then spied the dipstick from the pregnancy test poking from the debris in the wastepaper basket. There was an unborn child curled inside her. She was too old for excuses. The doctor had told her that because of the scar tissue a third abortion would be dangerous if she wanted to have children in the future. She gathered the trash to take out to the garbage. Her decision had been made. Nothing in Sarah’s world had ever been pink.
“It’s the color of weakness and submission,” she said, defending herself from invisible forces. “There’s nothing feminine about it.”
She drove to the Double-Dumb and found Daryl in his carport underneath his car, a ’78 Camaro painted primer gray and held together by Bondo. If Daryl was home, he was either asleep, watching TV, or working on the Camaro. Same as it ever was. The car was more than a hobby, it was a way of life. Every year he bragged about entering it into the open-class race at the county fair, but when the entry date came the car was either up on blocks or out of commission from some “deer swerve,” an expression that meant he had an accident while driving drunk, but had been sober enough in the morning to file an insurance claim. The Camaro wasn’t a racing car to Sarah, despite the black stripe running the length of its dented body. She used to tell Daryl that instead of an oil company he should find a Scotch tape factory to sponsor him. Once they had made out in the front seat, but she couldn’t remember going for a drive. On the occasion when Daryl did get it running, he’d take his dumb-fuck friends to Ukiah with a cooler of beer. He would have another “deer swerve” on the ride back, which would mean six more months of carport. He used to say, “The difference between a Jehovah’s Witness and a foreign car is that you can shut the door on a Jehovah,” but it was his Japanese truck that got him around, the Camaro remaining as reliable and American as Daryl.
Speak of the devil, Sarah saw his head pop up from beneath the muscle car. After she had got the restraining order, Daryl bought the Double-Dumb, and, in an attempt at home improvement, dug a hole in the driveway in front of it so he could stand while he worked on his car instead of having to lie on his back. But it was just a hole. He hadn’t laid cement or put in a set of steps or beams to secure the sides or any amenities other than some planks stolen from a lumber site to stand on. And a shovel to bail sludge. There was no runoff and the hole was deep enough to create a pool of freestanding water in its bottom from rain and seepage. Frogs made comfortable homes. Daryl peed with them. The walls sporadically caved in and Sarah used to worry he would be buried alive. Sometimes she feared he would fill in the hole with her at the bottom of it, the next local to hit national headlines. Each month the hole grew bigger, inching closer to the front steps of the Double-Dumb. Sarah had never spent the night in the trailer even if they had sex until the rooster crowed. The Double-Dumb was not a place she wanted to wake up.
Daryl looked excited, the way he did when he thought he might get some. The grin on his face was wide enough to carve into three pumpkins, the same cross between silly and spooky. He wore a work shirt and held a screwdriver in one of his greasy hands, a beer in the other. There was a rash beneath his eyes, reminding Sarah that he had mixed it up outside the hotel with Squirrel Boy and Pensive Prairie Sunset. Sarah would have enjoyed watching him get stomped by Pensive. There was something untamed in that smile of his, a certain amount of pleasure to be exacted from someone else’s suffering that Sarah had always wanted to see knocked off his face. It was his half-smile that she had fallen in love with, the less assured boyish smirk.
Daryl finished his beer, tossing the empty to the back of the hole, pushing up his “T for Texas” baseball cap with the screwdriver, letting his head tilt to the left as if that side of his brain had gotten an idea and the weight of it had thrown off his equilibrium.
Go with your strengths, Sarah thought, even if they’re also your weaknesses.
She couldn’t help finding him sexy, his strong hands and transparent intentions. She hated to admit it, but men in holes trying to fix things turned her on. Not to mention Daryl’s sturdy arms and husky back, his pliability, their heated past, the way he wanted to protect her, his willingness to kill one or both of them in the name of love, and how easy it was to flood his senses by just showing up. She knew most of her affection for Daryl was based upon his need for her. Instead of working on herself, she could focus on maintaining him, her own shortcomings never coming into question. There was always something wrong with Daryl to tinker with, pound out, and polish. He was Sarah’s Camaro.
“They always come back,” Daryl said, as a greeting.
Sarah knew it, he’d open his mouth and the first thing he said would piss her off. Which they was he referring to? The long line of girlfriends that didn’t exi
st? And “always come back”? It was humiliating to think he had taken her visits as personal conquests.
Looking at him, Sarah realized how nice it was going to be to leave Boonville and not have an emotional investment in an ex-husband. The lyrics from an old country song came into mind and she dedicated them to the memory of Daryl, “I’ve been a long time leaving, but I’ll be a long time gone.”
“You want to crawl out of your hole?” Sarah asked, standing in the driveway, close to the front end of the Camaro. “So we can talk.”
“It ain’t a hole, Sarah,” Daryl corrected her. “It’s a work pit.”
The wind blew across the open field of the airport where planes seldom took off or landed. The windsock pointed directly at the Double-Dumb. Only affluent tourists and wine-industry heavies used the strip, with the exception of a couple of old-timers who flew in WWII and Dwight Duchamp who dive-bombed the high school, usually around graduation time, to protest his denial of a diploma from that esteemed institution forty years prior, once dipping too close and taking out the metal shop. Like most events in the valley, it was called an accident, even after Dwight walked away from his flaming craft without apology, saying, “That’s my present to the class of ’48!”
Daryl’s Double-Dumb had been tied down on a cheap plot behind a grove of pine trees planted to shelter a community of suburban-type homes from this very current and the bleak view of the airport. But his trailer was parked too far beyond the hopeful enclave and the prevailing westerlies hit it straight on, causing the screws of the Double-Dumb to rattle like a frightened man’s teeth, as if Dwight Duchamp might be flying in on this vindictive draft to claim his diploma.
“You want to go inside?” Daryl asked. “You look nervous.”
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