Susan was silent.
Mike negotiated with the cab dispatcher. The two women walked into the front room and sat on the cushions. Elizabeth took her hand.
“Oh, Susan, I wish we had more time. To ourselves.”
Mike walked out, brushing his hands and trying not to laugh at the chaos. Susan stared at the corners of his involuntary smile, tempted herself to dissolve the whole evening in hilarity. However, she could not laugh. She could not cry. And she would not throw up.
“We both love you,” Elizabeth said, holding Mike by one hand and Susan by the other.
Mike reached over and separated the drapes. The cab’s headlights shot in like a flash bulb.
Susan kissed them each good-bye.
Mrs. Delaney’s
Dollar
“Quiet. The nice, quiet oriental waitress.” That’s how they ask for me. I do a good job, distinguishing between french fries and hashbrowns. Remembering the ketchup. Holding the mayonnaise.
“China doll,” Mr. Pearson calls me, although I came from Kyoto at age twelve and my name on the peppermint plastic badge is three syllables too long for Chinese.
I try to ignore Mr. Pearson and wait on the silent man by the window. I’ve never seen this one before and am filled with relief. Maybe I’ll never see him again. A drifter. You can tell by the way he slipped into the booth before I cleared the table, before I had a chance to pick up the dollar that Mrs. Delaney left me for her Golden Gate Breakfast, the eggs sunny side up. More sun than we’ll see in San Francisco for a month.
Good girl. I am Mrs. Delaney’s good girl even though she cannot be more than five years older. Even though she is an inch shorter than I, leprechauns being as tiny as China dolls.
So this silent man is in a hurry. Good, no chatter. The more people at my station, the more tips. One. Two. Three less days until retirement.
“Coffee,” he murmurs, almost shyly, so that I like him. “And scrambled eggs with toast.”
“Yes,” I nod, giving him one of my few morning smiles. After noon, my mouth gets looser and I find it easier to smile. More tips then. I have practiced smiling in the morning, but it comes off as crooked and spoils my digestion so is not worth the gratuities. Speaking of which, where is Mrs. Delaney’s dollar? Some days she is forgetful and returns to the café to deliver it straight into my hands, clucking about her “good girl,” her “quiet one.” Today I did see her leave it on the table before shuffling out the door. The silent man is trying not to notice me as I move the ashtray and the creamer in search of my money. He looks like he wishes he had brought a newspaper to read. Instead, he stares out at Market Street, peering through the rain for cosmic answers. He does not smell of meths or alcohol.
“My dollar,” I say, to be precise about the amount and the ownership. “Have you seen my dollar?”
Stunned, he looks. Numb. He should try for Hollywood this man. Maybe he is surprised I speak English. I already know that he does. “Coffee.” He has betrayed his fluency. “Scrambled eggs.”
“My tip,” I say louder, loud enough to embarrass him in front of the other customers. But what does he care? A drifter. That’s the trouble with drifters. Quick, easy turnover. But because they are swift, they are often invisible in their coming and going and taking.
“Have you seen my money?” I ask simply.
“No,” he answers.
I have made it too simple.
Doris is eyeing me from the cash register. Get a move on, she is thinking, can’t you see I have a line waiting here. Where’s your engine, girl? I like Doris. No nonsense.
So I file the orders with the chef and tell the girls who are waiting for their plates what has happened. Hannah and Ethel look over at Mr. Drifter and nod. Marlene says, “the bastard.”
Marlene follows me back to the table. His scrambled eggs are just cool enough to be unpleasant. He will suffer in silence. Drifters aren’t complainers. Not Mr. Quiet Guys who meditate on the rain. Thieves maybe. But never complainers.
“So you say it was a dollar, honey,” asks Marlene in her loud Detroit voice. Twangy. She is proud of that twang. She never says “Detroit.” She says “Motown.”
“Yes,” I say, setting the watery eggs on the table, instead of in his lap where I would prefer to put them. “Mrs. Delaney’s usual tip.”
“Well, it’s got to be here somewhere, honey,” says Marlene, louder than I have heard her talk even when she was hailing the 38 Geary bus across two lanes of traffic.
“‘Scuse me,” she says to the drifter. “But you didn’t happen to see a dollar belonging to my friend here?”
“No,” he says quietly into the soggy eggs, picking up a knife to butter the cold toast.
“Anybody around here seen a dollar?” Marlene asks. “Anybody seen Kimiko’s tip?”
Startled faces. Shaking heads. A few appropriately critical glances to the man slowly eating his cold eggs.
Other work to do. You don’t wait around all morning for a dollar even if you can’t spare a smile until noon.
I am delivering three orders of Blueberry Mountain Pancakes when I notice Hannah and Ethel running the carpet sweeper. What are they doing? We never sweep ’till after closing. Even then, it’s not the waitresses. The union would never stand for it. Whatever they’re doing, I hope Doris, who is the union steward, doesn’t catch them. I’ve had enough bad feelings today.
“Sir, could you move your feet?” says Hannah.
“Must be around here somewhere,” says Ethel. “Haven’t seen a dollar, have you?”
He is beginning the last quarter of toast. Without removing his mouth from the slice, he shakes his head. Suddenly I notice how tired he looks, lost.
“Hey, China doll,” calls Mr. Pearson. “How about a little more coffee, quiet one.”
I pour the coffee and move quickly from Mr. Pearson before he can touch me. Quiet one! I think of the silent screams of Hiroshima every time they say “quiet one.” I’m so eager to escape that I find myself going to fill the thief’s cup. He regards me through astonished, bloodshot eyes and says, “Thank you.”
The blueberry pancakes need more butter and Mr. Pearson thinks he’ll have a second donut after all.
By the time I turn around, Mr. Drifter has vanished. Julio has cleaned the table. In the ashtray is Mrs. Delaney’s dollar. And beneath it, a shiny silver dollar. And beneath that, a note. “How lucky I was to get the quiet one.”
XI
Side/Stroke
Her head was still swimming from the wine and her race to the station as the train pulled through shadows of Toronto rowhouses. Susan sat back in her compartment, watching the moon flood Lake Ontario. She was filled with tears. In mourning. She was leaving herself behind and going home. Leaving friends in England and Canada to see if she were still an American. Crazy really, after six years away. Only one more year was needed. All the cells in your body change every seven years.
She tried to concentrate on the book. Horrible scene about a dog-cat. Terrible book, Memoirs of a Survivor. Cheap fantasia. Why hadn’t she stopped with The Summer Before The Dark? Susan never thought this would happen; she had run out of Lessing to read. She took a long drink of wine.
Another glass of red wine. Thick, black Ontario sky with silver spurs. Pretzels.
Susan was in the bar car now with a dozen other midnight travellers. The couple to one side was playing pinochle.
“I’m not mourning Canada or England,” she heard herself saying, “so much as I’m mourning the woman I was six years ago.” Susan was talking to an older woman—probably fifty or fifty-five—and a man in his thirties. The man ordered a bottle of burgundy.
“I miss that idealism,” Susan said, “that basic morality.” Why was she rambling on to these strangers. Maybe what you said when travelling didn’t count. Promises, confessions, secrets—they would all disappear at the time of arrival.
“In the days when I left the States,” she continued, “I was young enough to take risks.”
“Well, you had faith,” said the older woman.
“People don’t use words like ‘faith’ nowadays,” smiled Susan.
He laughed. “Or words like ‘nowadays.’ You two sound like frontier moralists. Makes me feel ancient.”
“Sometimes I like feeling ancient,” reflected Susan.
She poured herself another glass of wine. She was looking forward to California and the good, cheap wine. She never drank much when she lived there. Maybe that’s one of the reasons she had had to leave.
The next morning they all met in the breakfast car at the edge of the Prairies. Funny how you set yourself up when you travel, thought Susan. You check out people for politics, education, style, like choosing partners across a dance floor. The talk came easily after the coffee was poured.
Susan remembered now: Adam was a lawyer going to a consumer rights conference in Vancouver. He was very like Guy in some ways, except for the blond hair. A nice man, actually. The woman was immediately sympathetic. Sara Gold: Jewish mother: a professor of English in Victoria. Her fingers were heavily ringed in turquoise, silver and ivory. No wedding band. Susan always wondered how women of that generation had survived without wedding bands.
“You can go back and reread the other Lessing books,” Sara suggested. Susan acknowledged that she often returned to The Golden Notebook for solace. Adam said he liked Briefing For A Descent Into Hell the best.
“My wife was really into Lessing just before the divorce,” he said. “I read her to see what was happening between us.”
“And did you find out?” asked Sara.
“I found out that it wasn’t Lessing that was between us,” he smiled.
Susan nodded kindly. She liked him. She was glad she no longer felt responsibility as a feminist for every divorce in town.
They talked into the late morning, until the land was so flat that you could see everywhere and nowhere at once. They would stop in Winnipeg for an hour-and-a-half. Sara suggested that they all get off the train and eat lunch at the Prince George.
Susan was disappointed. She liked eating on the train. It reassured her that travelling was a normal way of life. But she also liked Adam and Sara. They had relieved her of those usual travelling jitters—of shyness, boredom, anger at being stuck in inane conversations about West End London shows or about how we really watch too much TV or about World War II in St. Louis. She was enjoying their company.
In fact, she liked him a lot. An affair would be safe. After two nights, they would split for opposite ends of the coast. He was bright, too much of a fuzzy liberal, but funny. Did Sara disapprove of her flirting? Maybe Susan just imagined it.
Winnipeg was clear and warm. “There are always three or four crystal days like this in the fall,” according to Sara. “But I look forward to winter, to the security of warmth under the snow.”
After lunch, they returned to their separate compartments. Susan returned to her journal. “What a year to come back,” she wrote. “Bicentennial year. Good god. I have no class.” She had read Burr to put an ironic lease on things, but the book had just made her angrier. Vidal’s aristocratic distance outraged her. She really wished she were more dispassionate, or at least that she could see things from the sidelines once in a while. That’s what living abroad had meant to her. Being on the sidelines. Life didn’t seem to count as much in Canada or England. As an expatriate, she could make mistakes and not fail; she could fail and not sink.
But of course that’s why she decided to come back. Nothing seemed quite real while she was away. Like the abortion march from Charing Cross to Hyde Park. She had watched her flatmates up there in doctors’ uniforms and Pia running around with her camera and Carol leading the “Free Abortion on Demand” chants. The demonstration was important. She was with her friends. But somehow, it seemed more real to her that women couldn’t get abortions in New Jersey. She had had the same problem when she lived in Canada. As an ardent Canadian nationalist, she continued to subscribe to The Nation and wanted the books she wrote to be available in Cody’s on Telegraph Avenue. American was the only skin that seemed to fit. You have to go home again.
“At least for a visit,” she was telling Adam later that afternoon.
“How come you haven’t gone back before now?”
“Because of the war.”
“But you weren’t a draft dodger,” he laughed nervously, running his hand through that blond hair.
“There were more of us than you think,” she answered. “Anyway, I didn’t feel it was fair to go back until Guy, my husband, was ‘pardoned.’”
“Do you feel absolved?” he asked.
“Absolved by Guy, in a small way.”
Time for a game of pinochle before the second sitting of dinner. Susan rested on the countryside, occasionally turning to watch Sara and Adam play. Sara’s ringed hands, strong and competent versus Adam’s freckled fingers, quick and keen. He would be good in bed. Outside there was more bush now. She felt easier, escaping the Prairies, approaching the West where trees and mountains and beaches were large enough, scaled to life. Now, if she could only slip below the border without drowning.
The funny Australian with the Motorcycle Maintenance magazine had sat down across from them at dinner.
“Rhyming slang,” he prattled. “Ain’t you never heard of it? I say ‘china plate,’ and I mean ‘mate.’ It’s Aussie rhyming slang.”
He proceeded to entertain them with tales of the travels he was making on a legacy from his grandfather. Susan tried talking with him about Britain, which he didn’t like because it was too old. Now he was headed for Tierra del Fuego.
“It’s cold down there,” said Sara.
“Yeah, the end of the earth. You been?”
“Yes,” said Sara mysteriously, “but not on a motorcycle.”
Susan didn’t catch any more. Adam was asking why she left England.
“Because of the cold.” She told him about writing in her flat, listening to a friend’s abandoned California Dreaming album, scared that she was going to be asphixiated by the faulty gas heater. Waiting forty minutes for the Northern Line in the sooty draught of tube stations. Working at the Cooperative Press where wind seeped through the plexiglass. After a while, her romance had turned to self-pity. The tea kettle in her flat stopped whistling; she could never quite get it up to boiling again. The inflated pound was falling into the Common Market. She was too guilty to feel uncomfortable. Then she became too sick to feel anything at all. When Susan left England, she willed the Feliciano album to her friend Pia who stayed behind.
Adam looked at her like she was Margaret Sanger. Susan found a familiar pleasure in this admiration. Sara, who had been listening silently, smiled over everyone and suggested they order another bottle of Cabernet to keep them warm. Was Sara pushing her together with Adam or was Susan imagining it? Adam talked about Margaret Atwood’s sense of the Canadian aesthetic in Survival. An interesting discussion, Susan thought, so why did Sara turn back to the Australian?
Everyone was a bit tipsy as they climbed the stairs to the Vista Dome. There were no booths for four—only two small tables at opposite ends of the car. Susan wanted to talk more with Sara, realized that they had been apart all day, since lunch. But it seemed natural for them to split into dinner partners. She and Adam here; Sara and the Australian at the far end of the car.
Clearly, Adam liked her. He talked avidly about his last visit to the States. He told her he liked her. He held her hand. Gently, she retrieved it to sip her Kahlua Alphonse.
Susan could hear her laughter from the other end of the car. Sara’s head was flung back so far that you could just see the tip of her chin. That’s what Susan wanted—simply to have a good time, to relax, to get out of herself. Fucking was too complicated. The Kahlua was getting to her. It was either alcohol or the damn sugar. Susan was neither a romantic nor a prude, but sometimes these mating rituals got so gross. Goodnight, she said, rather surprising both of them.
The next morning, she
woke to mountains. This was like being in a pup tent with a window, only better because you were moving. She remembered how much she had drank the the previous evening and waited for the hang-over, but it did not come. She lay with her head in the trees, daydreaming of snow. Maybe she would skip breakfast. Who would notice? The friendship had been broken last night. And she wasn’t very hungry.
Sara sat across the table from Adam. The Australian was nowhere around.
“I don’t know what happened to him,” said Sara. “He was on his ninth Guinness when I tottered off to bed.”
“He and I stayed up to 3:00 a.m. making rhymes,” Adam grinned. “See, you women can’t hold your liquor.”
Maybe he wasn’t too angry, Susan thought. Maybe they would make love tonight.
“So what will you do when you get to California?” asked Sara.
“Find out if I’m an American,” answered Susan. “I’m not sure what it means anymore.”
“Sounds grand,” said Adam.
“It is grand,” said Sara.
Sara told them that she came home to British Columbia every year after a month’s holiday in Quebec. Life wouldn’t be worth living without Quebec, but she would have nothing to live on there. Drawn to the melancholy in Sara’s voice, Susan was disappointed that she and Adam had consumed so much conversation with their inexperience. Sara told them now about nursing in China during the Long March, about bringing a Quebec amputee back to Montreal and marrying him. They had become young Reds in the fifties. They met the RCMP on Mont Royal. And Sara was faced with an unrenewed contract at the university, a divorce, no place to go but home to British Columbia. B.C. needed professors and they never heard about things as far away as Quebec demonstrations. She had settled into a grey clapboard house by the ocean with a woman friend for a while, and now alone.
While Adam played solitaire, Susan and Sara sipped tea in the Vista Dome, floating together under the sequoias and swapping other journeys.
Susan, all by herself at fourteen, took the Union Pacific from San Francisco to Seattle to visit her girlfriends.
Movement Page 15