Summer of Love, a Time Travel

by Lisa Mason

  Ruby pulls herself up all her nearly six feet. “What does that mean: ‘grave impairment of mental health’?”

  The law clerk fumbles with the clipboard. He doesn’t like Susan or Ruby. Susan isn’t intimidating like Ruby, just pathetic. He doesn’t want to think about any of this. He would much rather try to beat a drug bust. “Impairment of mental health means the infliction of mental illness to the extent that the woman is dangerous to herself or the person or property of others or is in need of supervision or restraint. As a result of the pregnancy. The um would-be pregnancy. You know what I mean.”

  “Dangerous to property?” Ruby says.

  “That’s what the statute says.”

  The Gypsy Jokers clatter out of the hip lawyer’s office into the waiting room.

  “We’ll shove this up their ass, no sweat,” the hip lawyer says.

  “How come you don’t know more about this law and how we can get the kid a safe and legal abortion?” Ruby says.

  “The statute just passed,” the law clerk says. “California has one of the most progressive therapeutic abortion laws in the United States, ma’am.”

  “No, I’ll tell you why,” Ruby says. “You don’t want to go up against the committee, either.”

  “You want my advice, you should get parental consent,” the law clerk says to Susan. “Can’t you get parental consent?”

  “I couldn’t get parental consent to talk to my best friend on the phone,” Susan says.

  “We’ll plead illegal search and seizure,” the hip lawyer tells the Gypsy Jokers.

  “We was holdin’ five thousand hits,” a Joker admits.

  “Piece of cake,” the hip lawyer says.

  The Gypsy Jokers slap hands with the lawyer. Two of them stick out and lick each other’s tongues. “I’m having a seizure!” says the third, rolling his pupils back in his eye sockets and making claws of his hands. He seizes Susan, plunging his mouth on her mouth.

  Susan goes limp. Don’t struggle with a biker’s kiss, flower child. She’s learned that on the street. You struggle, he may haul off and break your nose. The Gypsy Joker tastes of beer and bile and pot smoke.

  Ruby waits until he’s through. Then she seizes Susan’s elbow. “Let’s get out of here, kid.”

  *

  “Are you sure?” Ruby asks her for the hundredth time as they walk back to Clayton Street.

  “I’m sure,” Susan says for the hundredth time. The chilly morning air refreshes her after the horrid hip lawyer’s office.

  “You don’t want to tell Stan?”

  “No way.”

  “Tell me true, Starbright,” Ruby says, furrowing her brow. “You can’t be more than sixteen. Right, am I right?”

  Susan nods. How did Chi put it? She’s not lying, she’s implying.

  Sometimes Susan imagines having the baby. A little girl with big brown eyes like hers. She’d name her Jessica. Jessica would be beautiful and brilliant, of course. Susan understands—she will never forget—what it’s like to be a child. She knows so many things she could teach Jessica. Important things, like love and sex and death, happiness and sadness. Finding your true self in life. Finding meaning. She’d be a good mom. She’d be fifteen when Jessica is born.

  Mostly, though, Susan has the nightmare, and her fantasies about Jessica vanish. In the nightmare, the baby grows and grows, pushing past Susan’s bowels, sliding around her stomach. The baby reaches up through her throat. Its tiny wrist wiggles out of her mouth like a serpent. Its hand slaps against her tongue, making her gag. The baby’s hand seizes her teeth. Its fingers are surprisingly strong.

  Then she wakes, heaving for breath. Her teeth are always sore, and she is always sick to her stomach. Sick to her heart. What would Mom and Daddy do? They’d banish her from her lavender bedroom in Shaker Heights, that’s what. They’d send her away to live in shame in one of those shabby boarding houses for unwed mothers. She’d have to drop out of high school, never have a chance to go to college.

  Susan cannot have this baby. She doesn’t have a husband or even a man who loves her. She’s desperate to finish high school. She was hoping to finish college before she had a baby. She needs to figure out what she wants to do with her life. She was hoping to have some time to enjoy the world, too. Travel, see new places, meet new people. She has only begun to taste the excitement of life.

  She wishes it hadn’t happened like this. She wishes Stan the Man loved her, that he was someone else and she was someone else, in another space and time. In another lifetime. Everyone talks about it in the Haight-Ashbury: other lifetimes, other worlds. In another world, she is ten years older, in love with the father of her child, and pregnant on purpose.

  But she is not in that world now.

  She’s sorry she had sex with Stan. Ah, forget it. She’s not sorry she had sex with him. She’s sorry she’s pregnant.

  “You really really sure?” Ruby asks her for the thousandth time.

  “I’m really really sure,” she tells Ruby for the thousandth time.

  “Absolutely positively?”

  “Absolutely positively.”

  “Because you don’t have to do this. It’s a human life we’re talking about. Your dentist daddy won’t turn his back on you.”

  “You don’t know Daddy.”

  Ruby sighs. “Don’t you come crying to me later.”

  “I won’t come crying.”

  “Don’t you tell me you regret it, and why didn’t I warn you. You remember I’m telling you this.”

  “I’ll remember, Ruby,” Susan says.

  Ruby quietly backs out the Mercedes, and Susan closes the garage doors. She glances up at the apartment. Chi is probably still conked out on the couch. He often sleeps until noon. He says he’s got a touch of tachyonic lag, something like jet lag. Chi says all kinds of strange things.

  Ruby whisks the Mercedes across the Golden Gate Bridge. Fog cascades over the scarlet towers, thick and eerie. Ruby flicks on the dims. She’s a superb driver, but Susan is edgy. Ruby’s face is as grim as granite.

  Ruby is not an easy person to live with. Not that she’s mean. Susan just hasn’t figured out exactly what Ruby believes in, though she’s constantly proclaiming about all kinds of things. She flies into a rage if you wonder whether a tincture of hemlock could actually cure cancer, but she laughs at spaghetti sauce spilled on a carpet—an offense that would have Susan’s mother shitting bricks. Ruby calls television the devil box. She never watches it, even though she owns one. But when Susan asked if she could draw a mural of the goddess Isis on a wall of the Mystic Eye, Ruby just said, “Put the ankh in her left hand and the sistrum in her right, you hear me?” With a squirmy memory of her baby hands slapped beet-red after she’d doodled on Mom’s dining room wall with a crayon, Susan drew a six-foot-tall goddess in pastels right on Ruby’s whitewashed plaster. And Ruby pronounced it good.

  After Susan’s time at the Double Barrel house, what’s really weird is that Ruby permits no grass or acid in her house. No dope, period. As far as Susan can tell, Chi abides by the house rules. Susan tries to abide, too, but it’s hard after the neverending party. She doesn’t miss grass or acid, but dexies are hard to give up. That wide-awake clarity, plus she lost weight without even trying. One night, when Professor Zoom was really wasted, he laid a whole bottle of Dexedrine on Susan. Now she’s gone through half of it. Sometimes she’s tempted to score more, but she doesn’t want Ruby to kick her out, and she has to be careful with her dwindling cash. How is she ever going to get her hundred dollars back from Stan?

  “I’ll tell you this, kid,” Ruby said one night, pouring herself a glass of wine. “Drugs is drugs, and that’s that. I had a cousin. He was beautiful, and I loved him dearly. But Roi became a junkie. He was a handsome young man in the prime of his life.”

  “Everyone in the Haight-Ashbury is against junk, Ruby.”

  “Are they? I’m not so sure. I see a lot folks taking that speed crap, and speed is just as bad as junk. Maybe worse.”


  Susan cringed. But Ruby meant crystal meth, stuff freaks shot up. Not her little green-and-white dexies.

  “I know about drugs, kid,” Ruby said. “I’ve known about drugs since you were knee-high to a grasshopper. I drank peyote-button tea when you were still peeing your pants. Made me sick as a dog.”

  “I never peed my pants.”

  God! Ruby loves to mess with Susan’s head. Susan is often left with more questions than answers.

  When things get bad, though—like at the hip lawyer’s office—Ruby is a rock. She is… . Susan struggles for what to call it. Well, she’s like Nance, only she’s practically as old as Susan’s mother. Ruby is… .a friend. She stands up for Susan against the whole world. Susan can’t remember the last time Mom and Daddy stood up for her against the whole world. No, her mother and father always seem to stand against her. Two against one. Her parents, Susan realizes, do not act like friends.

  *

  “This is it, kid.” Ruby pulls into the landscaped parking lot of a medical building in San Rafael. “You ready?”

  “I’m ready.”

  But as Susan walks into the general practitioner’s sunny office, she shivers with fear, though she’s boiling hot in the sweater she wore to ward off San Francisco’s chill.

  Church bells toll. Midmorning worship services are commencing in the suburban hills of Marin County. Neighborhoods a lot like hers in Shaker Heights, only with palm trees amid the oaks and the maples.

  The general practitioner gazes at a framed photograph on his desk. The photograph shows three children seated in an opulent rose garden. The children hold pets in their laps, kittens and puppies. The youngest, a brown-haired toddler, cuddles a white rabbit nearly as big as she is.

  “Yes, I’m still a rose gardener,” he says to Ruby. “I’ve been pruning roses since 1953.”

  Susan senses tension between them, some kind of double meaning to his words. After living with Mom and Daddy, she’s got antennae for covert emotions, like a termite seeking wood rot. She looks at Ruby for help, but Ruby is remote.

  “A public service, that’s how you think of your work, Doc Clyde,” Ruby says. “Right, am I right? For which you get very well paid.”

  “My technique has improved. But you must know that, or you wouldn’t have brought this girl.”

  “Uh-huh. Haven’t killed anyone lately?”

  “I never killed anyone, Ruby. You know that. Well. Except for the rosebuds.”

  “Glad to hear it because Starbright is depending on you this morning.”

  Doc Clyde glances at Susan. “You’ve had the HCG test?” He checks her out in two seconds, then looks away. She’s got the clear impression she’s keeping him from something. He’s a lot like Daddy—she’s always keeping him from something more important. Doc Clyde looks a little older than her father, a bland squashy man with salt-and-pepper hair combed straight back, probably covering up a bald spot beneath the Brylcreem. A prosperous potbelly swells out of his modest frame.

  Susan’s shiver of fear deepens. She looks at Ruby. HCG?

  Ruby snaps, “The Planned Parenthood test. Of course she got it.”

  “You still keeping cats?” he says to Ruby.

  Huh? Susan thinks. She glances, puzzled, at Ruby.

  “Yeah, I’ve got five,” Ruby says warily.

  “Ah, five cats. My kids love cats.” Doc Clyde says to Susan, “How about you, miss? You like little animals?”

  “Oh, I love animals!” Susan says. “Animals are high spiritual beings. I celebrate the infinite holiness of life.”

  “Is that so, is that so?” he murmurs. “Then what do you suppose is growing inside you, miss? A crystal? A flower? A vegetable?”

  Susan blushes fiercely. His condescending smile and his fancy sunny office and his family photographs infuriate her. “I know what it is, doctor. It’s a fertilized egg. Like what you buy at the grocery store and fry up for your big fat breakfast.”

  “It’s a baby, miss,” he says.

  “You’re a fine one to lecture her, Doc Clyde,” Ruby says. For the first time this morning, her eyes connect with Susan’s, and Susan sees a coiled-up darkness inside Ruby.

  “I’m merely making sure she knows what she’s doing,” he replies mildly.

  “Uh-huh. Dig it: she’s decided the circumstances aren’t right for her to have this child. Isn’t that all you need to know?”

  “That’s all I need to know.” He gazes at the photograph, wipes a speck of dust from the toddler’s face. “HCG means human chorionic gonadotropin, miss. It’s a hormone essential for enriching the endometrium so that the fetus is nourished from the mother. Production of HCG begins right after implantation of the egg. When they do the HCG test, they take your urine sample and inject it into the abdomens of laboratory animals. Female rabbits, to be exact. They kill the rabbits after two days and examine their ovaries. If HCG is present in your urine, the rabbits’ ovaries will have hemorrhaged. They take each rabbit by her ears and twist her little neck. Snap! Rabbits don’t have very strong necks, you know. They killed three rabbits just for you and your pregnancy test. Do you have any idea, miss, how many female rabbits are killed for pregnancy tests? Pregnancies that are terminated?”

  Susan swallows a Tums. Tears spill her eyes.

  “What’s your price, Doc Clyde?” Ruby says in her sweet-as-poison voice.

  “Five hundred bucks for a D and C.”

  “After that bedtime story, make it two hundred.”

  “Three.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Two fifty.”

  Ruby explodes. “Go to hell, you bastard! I hope you crawl with guilt. I hope you can’t sleep at night and lose all your hair and get raging ulcers. You owe me, man.”

  Susan stares, horrified. What on earth is Ruby talking about?

  “What do you want, Ruby?” Doc Clyde says.

  “I don’t need anything from you, not anymore, but this girl does, and her fate is in your hands. So this one is gonna be on you. And you better do the job right this time.”

  Ruby storms out of the sunny office. Susan sees her through the picture window, stalking around the parking lot, pulling leaves off trees, kicking at the gravel.

  Church bells toll.

  Doc Clyde pulls out a fresh file folder. “Okay. So. You’re not pregnant, are you, miss? No, don’t answer that. We both know you’re not pregnant, you’ve just got a menstrual problem. You’re over twenty-one? No, don’t answer that. Don’t tell me your name. I don’t want to know anything about you.”

  “My daddy is a dentist,” Susan whispers. She isn’t sure why she blurts that out but, when she dares to glance at him again, she knows exactly why.

  His face is purple, stricken with compunction. “Are you allergic to penicillin?” he asks gruffly. “Good. Go in there, take off your clothes. Put on the hospital gown. I’m just a rose gardener, miss. I’ve been pruning roses since 1953.”

  *

  Because the pregnancy is so early, Susan only has to have a menstrual extraction. A sipping of her uterus without cervical dilation or anesthesia. A slipping-out of the uterine lining and the troublesome egg.

  It hurts when Doc Clyde withdraws the suction from the syringe. A short, sharp pain, but not a whole lot worse than a bad cramp. Afterward, she doesn’t bleed much. She gets up on her feet. Doc Clyde tells her to come back in three weeks for a checkup.

  Susan has no intention of coming back in three weeks. She never wants to see Doc Clyde again.

  As Ruby drives them back over the bridge, a tear slides from Susan’s eye.

  “You okay, kid?” Ruby is brusque. It’s amazing what she’s just done for Susan. They’ve known each other for maybe a week. “He did the job, and no funny stuff?”

  “I’m sorry.” Another tear.

  Ruby guns the Mercedes between two VW vans spattered with flowers and peace signs. “Damn it, Starbright, you told me you were sure.”

  “I’m sorry,” Susan says, “about the fem
ale rabbits. And the egg.”

  *

  It’s past noon by the time Susan and Ruby return to the Mystic Eye. Haight Street is just beginning to stir. After another groovy Saturday night, the Sunday crowd wakes late.

  Ruby’s cats saunter into the kitchen to greet them, tiny lions and lionesses hungry for their lunch. Ruby spoils them shamelessly. She feeds them roast turkey and roast lamb, cottage cheese and cheddar cheese, brown rice and sweet corn seasoned with alfalfa.

  The Summer of Love is like that, Susan observes. Topsy-turvy. A fellow who calls himself Red walks an Irish setter named Man. A Beat friend of Ruby’s named Feather carries Penelope P. Parrot on her shoulder. A tattooed girl known only as Tangerine wraps a python she calls Sir Galahad around her neck. And a boy who looks too young for the street even to Susan sits shivering, shirtless, next to a fat piebald guinea pig known to everyone as God. God reclines in a laundry basket lined with threadbare towels. The boy nibbles on the tips of carrots God leaves behind.

  Ruby fusses over her cats so much, sometimes Susan gets jealous. When did Mom and Daddy fuss over her like that? And when did Mom and Daddy realize she’s gone for good? Have they reconstructed their memory of Nance’s postcard from the ashes and concluded she’s fled to San Francisco? Will they hire someone to come looking for her? That would be like Daddy.

  Susan is always looking over her shoulder. Looking for the Man, for the girl with her face, for anyone following her. It’s her very own personal paranoia, added to the paranoia infecting the Haight-Ashbury, shrouding the Summer of Love like the fog.

  Ruby dishes out homemade cat food. She seems more wound up after the ordeal with Doc Clyde than Susan. Ruby takes a Sonoma sherry from her pantry and bangs the bottle down on her kitchen counter.

  Susan aches deep inside, but she feels dreamy. No more Section 25951. No more law clerks. No more nightmares. No more Stan the Man. She’s free. She drifts to the kitchen window overlooking Ruby’s backyard.

  And spies Chi. He’s bending over the garden he’s digging for Ruby. He says dirt is clean, unlike doorknobs and bongs passed around. He says a lot of strange things, the five-hundred-year-old man from Mars. Oh, excuse me. He’s really only twenty-one. Susan likes to shuck him. “So what town on Mars are you from?” she asks. “Are you living forward or backward in time?” He hates that. He sulks.