“I’m sorry,” the waitress said.
She wasn’t talking about using the last of the paper towels either, although she acted like that’s what she meant after she saw Sarah recoil and hustle toward the lone bathroom stall, which was occupied. Sarah rattled the door, freaking out the patron on the other side who yelled, “I’m hurrying! I’m hurrying!”
“I’ll be all right,” Sarah reassured the waitress.
“I hope so,” she said. “I’ll be out here if you need anything.”
Sarah didn’t want her sympathy; that wasn’t solidarity. Fuck sisterhood and fuck motherhood, you couldn’t rely on anyone but yourself. She was making the right decision. Her body was just switching on its defense mechanism of hormones and guilt, trying to have its voice heard. It would be quieted soon. And if the waitress understood, she would wipe that stupid merciful look off her face and get back to her tables. Someone must need their overpriced sprigs of salad identified.
When the waitress left, Sarah realized that she had to get out of the bathroom without the woman in the stall seeing her, otherwise she wouldn’t be able to sit through the meal knowing that the woman was somewhere in the restaurant watching her. Lisa would sense something was wrong. And Sarah didn’t plan on telling Lisa she was pregnant. They had pledged they wouldn’t go through this shit again, even if they had to raise a baby together. But Sarah didn’t want Lisa raising her child. It wasn’t a houseplant. Lisa was great, Sarah loved her dearly, but it was still Lisa, not a real father. They weren’t a lesbian couple who wanted to live an alternative lifestyle. They were friends who had told necessary lies in order to distance themselves from what had happened, trying to convince themselves it wouldn’t happen again and that they could take care of it together if it did. But here she was. The toilet flushed.
Sarah splashed some water onto her face and hurried from the restroom. She grabbed a napkin from the busing station and dried herself, then threw it into a bus tray. If Lisa asked any questions she would blame her mood on her period and the stress of moving, the redness of her eyes on allergies. She would call her in a couple weeks when it was over. They’d go shopping with harvest money and get sloppy on sidecars and eat foie gras, forget about the whole thing.
“You want me to come down with you?” was the first question Lisa asked.
She would have just offered to help move if she didn’t know, Sarah thought. “Coming down” implied emotional support. For what, unloading boxes? Sarah didn’t need help dumping Daryl. Leaving Mom at age twenty-six? Ordering rabbit probably put a weird vibe into the air, telling Lisa this wasn’t the only dead bunny Sarah was responsible for lately. Why did she think Lisa would be less perceptive than other women? She was her best friend. Sarah could say, “Remember that guy at that place that time?” And Lisa could fill in the blanks. They were linked at the subconscious.
“Is something wrong?” was Lisa’s second attempt to elicit a confession.
“No,” Sarah said.
The lie sat there between them, untouched, like an hors d’oeuvre neither wanted to taste but both knew had taken a long time to prepare. Lisa loved her too much to call coup. It wasn’t in the nature of their relationship. Lisa worshipped her, had followed her through years of trouble and bad fashion, would rob a liquor store in white pumps after Labor Day if Sarah gave the order. Since Sarah’s first day at the junior high, she was the older sister left in charge. But it wasn’t supposed to be acknowledged. With this lie, Sarah had told Lisa that despite all they’d been through there were things she didn’t trust her with. Didn’t trust anyone with.
From now on, Sarah told herself, looking at her closest friend, who seemed a million miles away, no man is going to enter me without protection. But that’s what she had said last time. Then came the heat of the moment, her defenses falling away as easily as her panties, believing she could create something miraculous from her fumbling limbs. It was becoming more difficult each day to maintain faith in the future. Sex was easy, the next day was hard.
Sarah spilled her wine. The waitress from the bathroom arrived to clean the mess though it wasn’t her table. Sarah didn’t apologize for the overturned glass, but tried to keep her eyes from the waitress. She took an inventory of the diners as a diversion, coast hipsters and tourists, dressed in a way that suggested that they spent their paychecks on patio furniture instead of clothes. Nothing revealed in their faces, the comfort of wine and anticipation of the meal. Nobody in the restaurant had noticed the spill except one woman who must have been in the bathroom stall Sarah had rattled. She was whispering to her husband, who nodded in a consoling manner, reaching across the table to pat her hand. The waitress didn’t bring a fresh tablecloth, but replaced their napkins and Sarah’s wine. Sarah wanted to leave. She felt like a fish in an aquarium, the one everyone suspects of eating the other fish.
To get back on track, she and Lisa talked about old times. Some things never changed, regardless of how hard you tried. You only had the available materials to build from. Sarah ate her dinner and thought about the blood spots she sometimes found on the embryos of eggs, because her rabbit tasted a lot like chicken.
On the trail to the main house the air still seemed rancid. Sarah took a deep breath and on the strength of it straightened herself. Harvest was over. She was reaping what she had sown, eighty grand and a belly full of Daryl’s love child. At the close of the sixties it wouldn’t have been so bad a proposition, but it was twenty years later and she had seen where that same deal had landed Mom. She was climbing to that very place.
She had been going to cut out without saying goodbye to Mom, but the Squirrel Boy had left her a note in the form of a poem, too good for him to have written, but appropriately confusing: “Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand: Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!” Whatever, Squirrel Boy, she had thought, what did you do, fix your lopsided porch? But then he had added, “Your mother hopes to see you before you leave. She has a present for you.” It was enough of a guilt trip to work. For Mom, not the Squirrel Boy. It was going to take more than a couple, copied verses of poetry for a man to get on her good side right now. Squirrel Boy was sweet, but in his own way as clueless as anyone else around Boonville. Sarah had packed her truck and was ready to vamanos, roll with the momentum that told her to run and don’t look back. After her dinner with Lisa, she didn’t want to face anyone. She had decided to skip Squirrel Boy and forgo the farewells to everyone but Mom. She would write. Or she wouldn’t. The whole town must know the dirt and that she was leaving by now anyway, for whatever that was worth, about a pound of catshit in her book. They could read about her someday in Art Digest, the ones who could read. The rest could look at the pictures.
She had told Lisa that she could stay in her cabin rent-free until she decided what she wanted to do with it. Sarah would rather not grow dope next season, though it was hard to pass on the easy money since the irrigation system was already in place and that was the difficult part of growing, aside from worrying. She would rather sell her portion of the commune, but who knew how much she could get for it? Without a good lawyer, nothing. When push came to shove, hippies were litigious; all those arrests in the sixties had gotten them used to going to court. And Communists knew the value of everything, never relinquishing any capital without bloodshed: “What’s yours is ours” was their underlying sentiment. A historical fact. The contracts were in Wesley’s and the Poobah’s names too, and they would try to screw her worse than Daryl. A clean break sounded better. They could fuck themselves, which she knew they did anyway, in twos, threes, and clusters. It would be a cold day in hell before she had another conversation with any Whitward or any Waterfall resident.
She tugged at her lucky red hat. She didn’t like to wear it unless she was doing something artistic, or harvesting, not wanting the magic to run out by using it in an unwarranted context. Lucky red hats didn’t grow on trees. And there was probably a specific kind of hat for leaving town or talking to your m
other, most likely a helmet, but she needed something extra to get her on the road. Sometimes the definition of creation was to keep something alive. Her survival would be an achievement in itself. Dad would understand. If he knew anything, it was the art of making an exit.
When Sarah reached the main house, after stopping twice more to heave on the way, she found Jeremy Roth lying on the deck looking like he would lick his balls if he could. She heaved again. Jeremy seemed amused. Sarah knew Mom was inside because when she had checked her cabin she found an empty video-store bag, the first sign of a Jill Clayburgh festival. Or something equally foreign. The main house had the VCR. So she had no questions for the Princeton Primitive who probably had one of his own questions answered when she puked. He was laughing at her as she climbed the steps. Sarah thought it was a breach of his grunting oath. Not wanting him to stray too far from his natural self, she kicked him as hard as she could.
“Hasta los huevos, butthole,” she said, putting all of her weight behind her foot.
Jeremy didn’t retaliate. None of the other Primitives were around and they didn’t get tough without the pack. She had only managed to kick him in the leg too, missing his vitals when he moved at the last second to cover himself. It probably hurt though, and there would be a bruise. He deserved worse. For years she couldn’t bring friends over to her house because of these assholes; either she was too ashamed of the freak show or her friends’ parents wouldn’t let them come. Rednecks may be stupid, but they had sense enough when it came to hippies. Lisa had been the first, only because her mom was dead and her dad was a drunk. It was a month before she came back, asking if the nude giant was going to be there before she accepted an invitation to dinner. There was a certain lure and fascination with human oddities, as long as you didn’t have to live with them. But from the first day, Sarah would have paid her quarter not to look.
She paused before going into the main house because it seemed Jeremy was ready to break his Primitive vow and speak, maybe even stand and attack. Sarah picked up a rusty antique iron lying on the deck seemingly for the purpose of smashing across this pervert’s skull, or maybe it was a door stop. Take your pick. Jeremy thought better of it and limped to a corner of the deck. He didn’t want a piece of her. Not the piece he was going to get anyway.
“What are you going to do with that?” Mom asked, when Sarah walked inside carrying the iron.
“I haven’t decided yet,” Sarah answered, seeing they were the only two in the main house. “Where is everybody?”
“I think they went to the waterfall,” Mom said. “Marty and Raven were watching the movie but they got bored.”
Sarah saw the video boxes on the coffee table next to a bowl of popcorn, a bag of carob-covered raisins, and a half-smoked doob. Mom had rented The Rose, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, and The Turning Point. She held a wine glass in her lap, hunkering down for a triple feature of depression. On the screen, Diane Keaton was also having a drink. Sarah identified the movie as Looking for Mr. Goodbar, far from a feel-good crowd-pleaser. Nobody but Mom had any desire to revisit these films. Watching the credits was enough to bum you out.
“I think you took me to see this in Ukiah when I was twelve,” Sarah said, putting down the iron.
“It’s a classic,” Mom said. “They don’t make films like this anymore.”
Thank God, Sarah thought. Maybe we are evolving as a species.
But she had the feeling that if she came back in twenty years, Mom would be doing the same thing, getting high, drinking wine, taking inventory of her anger, acting out her own version of An Unmarried Woman. Mom hardly went out to the movies anymore and rarely art films because she didn’t get down to San Francisco except to shop for clothes. Museums and galleries had been crossed off her list. She had the money to travel, but outside of flying to Bali in the winter, where she sat on the beach and read whatever paperback the Poobah recommended, she didn’t go anywhere. To Mendocino for dinner, that was it. Boonville, to the hotel. Ukiah, for self-help books. No bars, no men. She used to make the scene, cavort and carouse. Sarah didn’t know if Mom saw her friends outside of their healing circles anymore. This wasn’t menopause, this was a conscious decision to stop.
Mom turned from the television, glancing at Sarah’s lucky red hat, then at her stomach. If she didn’t believe the rumors before, Sarah thought, they had been confirmed now. She could tell Mom wasn’t taking it lightly. Her distress was coming from somewhere other than their last conversation at the waterfall or Sarah wearing the lucky red hat, which Mom hated because it had Dad’s name on the front and Sarah relied on it as a source of Higher Self, calling on some aspect of her father that Mom couldn’t tap into and failed to inspire in Sarah. It couldn’t be the coming abortion; Mom was pro-choice. She had made the same decision herself, before and after Sarah had been born. And she couldn’t have known about Sarah’s appointment at the clinic, not even intuitively. Nobody’s radar was that good. Sarah concluded that Mom’s problem was that she couldn’t stand the thought of anything else having Dad’s name on it. If Sarah were to have a baby without a father, it would bear the last name McKay. Another scotch-guzzling potato eater. Charming and unreliable. But there was no way she was going to raise a child in this X-rated carnival atmosphere. No absent fathers. No pot-smoking, alcoholic, hippie, agoraphobe grandmas influencing her children.
“I guess you heard I’m moving to San Francisco in about ten minutes,” Sarah said. “Squirrel Boy said you had something for me.”
“You know, hon, I don’t know when we stopped being friends,” Mom said, reaching for the remote and pausing the movie.
Sarah didn’t know when they ever had been friends. And was the point of having children to be their friends? Find someone else to tell your troubles to and borrow money from.
“I miss you,” Mom continued, Diane Keaton frozen behind her. “I used to think it was you and me against the world. I look at you now, and I see myself at your age. I don’t know where all the time went.”
Sarah didn’t care where all the time went so much as where all the time was going, the next few minutes in particular. Up the hill, down the hill. Listening to Mom lament. Same old shit. She was ready to establish her own clock and punch in overtime without Mom.
“It doesn’t seem fair. I’m not that old,” Mom said. “My life can’t be coming to a close. I’m not through with it yet.”
You’re not even 50, Sarah wanted to point out, but instead crossed her arms, trying to guess what Mom had swallowed recently other than a carob-covered raisin. She could hear the fear of a drug crash in her speech, the paranoid arc of too much speed coupled with the fatigue of being awake too long. But her voice wasn’t racing, her pupils weren’t dilated. It definitely wasn’t dope or wine, unless one or the other had been laced. Mom was riding something unknown to Sarah, something from the medicine chest cut with the stimulus of isolation, old videos, and her daughter’s imminent departure.
“I wish we could talk,” Mom said, and the heaviocity in her voice was gone, stripped to a tone Sarah remembered hearing as a girl in San Francisco when they ate peanut butter and jelly on crackers in the park and Mom pushed her on the merry-go-round, reciting her own made-up song that delighted them both no end, “Here we go round on the merry-go-round.” One line repeated until their sides split.
“I don’t know what happened,” Mom confessed.
Sarah looked at her, trying to find that woman in the park somewhere inside this middle-aged hippie lying on a $5,000 couch in a self-made funk of booze and bad vibes. Nothing was sadder than a dropout who had sold out and then been passed by.
“Here we go round on the merry-go-round,” Sarah said to herself.
But maybe Mom had swallowed a truth serum and was speaking from some distant place in her heart that was dormant but not yet dead, smothered by smoke and denial, choking on the remnants of pills and regret, but still fighting for a kind of release and sobriety. The Poobah could have mixed a batch of sodium pentothal in hi
s lab for kicks. Sarah knew residents of the Waterfall, Mom included, would take anything if they thought it would alter their state of consciousness.
“I really wish we could talk,” Mom repeated.
Sarah’s head seemed to be coming apart at her temples. She didn’t want to have this conversation. She thought this might be her nineteenth nervous breakdown. Hers, not Mom’s. Mom was well into the hundreds, severe depressions not included. Sarah could feel her body revolting against her mind. Mom knew how to manipulate her worse than a snake charmer working a cobra. Soon she would be dropping words like “home” and “family” and Sarah would become defenseless, seven years old again. The strain of standing in the same room with Mom was becoming too much. Sarah thought she might hurl, but didn’t know what she had left inside of her to come up. She knew anger was the way out. Focus on everything that had been fucked up. No forgiveness. But she wanted to believe Mom so badly, wanted to play the traditional roles of mother and daughter for even an hour to see how it felt, that whenever Mom threw down bread crumbs, Sarah followed the trail not knowing which one of them was more lost.
“I wish we could talk, too, Mom,” Sarah replied, wanting to know if having one parent who cared about you was asking too much. “But I’m on my way out of here.”
“Wait, I do have something for you,” Mom said, reaching for a small box on the coffee table. “A going-away present, I guess.”
It was a ring box with the name of a jeweler stamped on the felt exterior, gray with silver trim. Sarah had never seen it before and she had gone through all of Mom’s drawers at one time or another, including her metal strongbox in the back of her closet. The ring box reeked of yellowed letters and birth certificates. Sarah wondered if it had been purchased at a pawn shop or if the box held something other than its original contents. Neither of them wore jewelry, except for earrings and the occasional necklace. They were that rare breed of hippie that didn’t go in for beads and bracelets. Too gauche for Mom’s taste, who even in her hard-core days snuck peaks at Mademoiselle down at the market. The only ring Sarah had worn was her wedding band, which she still wore, but on her friendship finger. Mom’s fingers were bare as the day they headed north, when she had made a pit stop at China Beach – the same spot where Dad had proposed to her with the Golden Gate Bridge behind him – and Mom tossed her wedding ring into the waves, claiming she was as likely to find that ring again as she was another husband.
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