I sat on the green velvet couch and stared at the elevator doors. This was like when you dream about someone in your office and then the next day you’re at the copy machine and that person is standing next to you asking you how long you’re going to be, when just last night the two of you were rubbing the insides of each other’s thighs and sucking on one another’s ears.
It was the late ”90s, the dot-com era, and I was working as a secretary for a computer company, and sometimes when I rode the bus from work up to Haight Street, I shut my eyes and saw glimpses of Charlie—him pumping up my bike tire, him helping me with the grocery bags and insisting on the heavy ones with the laundry detergent and the milk while I carried the chips and the t.p. But, when I opened my eyes, I remembered that a year earlier, I had said goodbye to Charlie on a rooftop in Baltimore. After our first kiss months before at a party, there was another party, and another upon our college graduation. Charlie and I sat for long hours on the benches outside the soccer house and talked, but when I rationalized it all, we were just a fling, an end-of-the-year romance. Besides, I had already made other plans to move out west. I had people waiting on me. I didn’t stop thinking about him, though, not on the road trip out here, not when I dated a sleazy bike mechanic with an Asian fetish, and not when he called and left a message on my machine telling me he was in San Francisco for a convention.
All week long San Francisco had been so hot—so hot that when you walked outside, old men on the sidewalk with brooms actually said, “Hot enough for you?” and still expected you to laugh, but you couldn’t because you were so damn hot. After I first moved there, I learned to carry a sweater around, even in the summer, because despite San Francisco’s California image, days there could be chilly, downright cold in July. But that week, bike messengers rode without shirts on. Businessmen fried in their suits. When I came back from my lunch break on Tuesday, Alex, the moody overweight IT guy in my office, a person I would never dream about, stood outside the lobby smoking a Camel. “You know what this is, don’t you? It’s earthquake weather. Yeah, I’ve seen this before,” he said, his big chest inflating as he inhaled. Sometimes Alex could really be an idiot, and so often I tried to ignore him. But when I looked up to the sky, it looked green. Green where there should be blue.
After graduation, I packed up the car and moved there for the same reason a lot of people move to San Francisco—because it is far from home and because it is so mysterious. It was far from the east coast, where everyone seemed so obsessed with what kinds of high-powered jobs we would be getting with our degrees and when we were going to finally find a mate to marry. As soon as some friends and I rolled over the Bay Bridge, it seemed like no one was asking us those questions anymore. Instead, we sat in colorful apartments and talked about how wonderful the city was, how everyone was so nice. How the air smelled healthy. How when you woke in the morning and looked out the bay window of your tiny studio apartment, you felt full of possibility. I understood the feeling, but I didn’t know what was possible yet.
I had planned to leave right after graduation. But when I told my parents of the plan, they made their positions clear: “no!” My mother said it, repeatedly and quickly while shaking her head, “NONONONONONO,” so as not to put any room between the “no"s for me to interrupt. My father, on the other hand, said it once, clearly with both his hands and his eyes, before turning around and walking out of the room.
So instead of going straight to San Francisco right after graduation, I waited. I moved back into my parents” house and all summer long I stomped around the house, talking back, whining, acting like a child, because that’s how they were treating me after all, right?
By August, my mother was so sick of my complaining, she yelled, “Okay, fine. Go!”
But don’t think her dismissal came without her transferring her own paranoia into me. As she folded my laundry and pushed the sweaters into my overstuffed suitcase, she said, “Lock your door, anak, because people will open your door and suffocate you with your pillow in your sleep and steal all your things. Don’t wear short skirts when you have to walk up the stairs, because men will look at you from below. Don’t go anywhere at night. Just stay home. You know what people do. If you have a drink, they will slip a pill in your drink, and they will rape you. It’s true. So keep your drink covered with your hand, like this . . . that way, no one can slip things in there. Don’t tell anyone your phone number. They can track you down like that; they will know where you live.”
And even though I knew that her fears came directly from the mouths of Diane Sawyer and John Stossel, her words still stuck with me, and made me think twice about everything, about living on my own, about if I could do this. My mother scared the shit out of me. But by the time our first rent check was due, I was stern with my landlord on the phone when he tried to stick us with a plumbing bill. At night, I walked around the city, and I knew how to take the well-lit streets. I gave tourists directions. At bars, I drank from beer bottles with skinny openings, but sometimes I set them on the bar while I reached for some cigarettes. I slept soundly in my apartment. Then one night . . .
WHAM!
My bedroom window smacked against its own frame. The wall moved closer to the couch I was sitting on.
It wasn’t at all like I had imagined it would be, not at all like the earthquake simulation ride at Universal Studios. Nothing like this. It was more like a slap across the face, or a fender-bender. It was over before I realized what happened.
My roommates and I, all east-coast girls, didn’t know what to do or how the shoddy walls of our apartment were going to hold up. We had to get out! I remember my friend giving directions as we walked out the door. “Walk on the side of the street where there are no buildings,” she said, words that seemed so wise then. Yes, I thought, so things don’t fall on us. So that’s what we did, me and my roommates, practically crawling out of our apartment and up the sidewalk of a nearby park, far from the sidewalk and windows. The three of us stood in the grass in Alamo Square, trembling with fear, tears streaming from our faces. We waited for aftershocks.
When I looked up, the streetlights were still lit all along Hayes Street. The orange bus pulled along its cables and made small, electrical crackling noises as it made a usual stop on Divisadero and kept rolling on. People in restaurant windows were sipping soup from soup spoons. It was as if nothing happened. And the three of us, three girls from east of the Mississippi, sat alone atop Alamo Square and laughed into one another’s shoulders.
When I got on the bus for work the next day, I clenched my body each time we jumped a pothole, or anytime the cable wires snagged and jolted out of place. We rode up and down the hills of San Francisco, but it felt like at any moment the earth below would split open and deep crevasses would swallow the bus whole. I hugged a pillow over my head at night, and went over an escape plan to myself: grab the walls for balance, slide down the stairs, and run out into the side of the street where there are no buildings. I didn’t tell my mother about the earthquakes, lest she realize that this was an everyday danger and force me to come home. It felt like I was flailing in the city, scared of the next fault line to awaken.
I tried to hide any sense of anxiety I had when I went out with my friend Danielle, while we were out looking for boys to date. But once, when we sat in a bar and the ceiling thudded from the dance floor upstairs, the lights above the bar flickered, and I grabbed Danielle’s hand as she drank her beer.
“No. You’re fine,” she said. She was the only native San Franciscan I would ever meet my whole time there. She told me to do something she learned in grade school as soon as I felt an earthquake coming: stand under the door.
The gold elevator doors finally opened, and Charlie walked out into the lobby.
As soon as he saw me, he demonstrated his wingspan and he shouted, “It’s the Incomparable Moonface!”
The bellboy and some guests looked over, but Charlie kept his bright blue eyes straight on me. He looked freshly showered, his
curly hair shorter and darker than I remembered. When he leaned down to wrap his arms around me, his neck smelled like soap.
As we walked out the revolving doors and into the city, Charlie said, “San Francisco is hot!” He said the convention was boring. After school, he had started working for a trade show company that sent him to different cities to register the presenters and attendees. He said that the entire expo center was filled with booths of people talking about concrete and asphalt and construction supplies. He talked and talked, and I watched his lips move, his hands gesture; once, I touched his sleeve to feel the fabric of his blue button-down shirt. Good old cotton. Thick and reliable.
“God, I can’t believe I haven’t seen you since graduation,” he said, “when you had that butterfly pinned to your cap, remember?”
“You remember that?” I said.
Columbus Avenue was thronged with people, but we twisted our way up the sidewalk, the fading sun on our backs, and walked into a bar and headed straight upstairs to the balcony. From our small cocktail table, we could see straight down into a sea of drinkers waiting for the bartender’s attention, bills in hand and waving. There was a deranged, dirty guy with a patchy brown beard yelling about the war and our boys in Vietnam. I tried to ignore the smell of urine, but I couldn’t.
What came after this? How do you continue where you had left off? In my imagination, Charlie had come all this way to tell me he was thinking about me, that he couldn’t stop thinking about me, that San Francisco kept pulling him and pulling him. But after the small talk was over, and after we ordered our drinks from a strung-out waitress with fidgety hands, we became quiet, the distance between us vast.
After the drinks came, after the old man stopped his tirade about Nixon, after several bar orders were called out down below, Charlie leaned in close, and in a deep, slow, serious voice said, “Can you name the countries of Central America?”
“What?” I said.
“There are seven. Can you name them?” Charlie put his beer down and looked at me directly. He came two thousand miles to ask me about geography. He was waiting.
“Um, Honduras,” I said.
“One,” he held up his index finger.
“Uh, El Salvador? Guatemala?”
“Yeah . . .”
“Belize . . . Nicaragua ...” I was trying to picture the oilcloth map in my memory, the one Ms. Wesner had pulled down from the top of the blackboard. “Costa Rica . . . How many is that?”
“Six.”
What am I missing? I whispered to myself. I looked at the ceiling. The wood in the old bar was cracking. I suddenly became worried about how seismically safe the structure of the building was.
“The last one?” Charlie said, leaning in closer now, expecting brilliance.
“Not Uruguay, not Paraguay . . . Okay, tell me.”
“Pana—”
“Right! Panama! Was this a test?”
“No. I just know these facts. I just know them. All these things that I know, I have to figure out a way to use them. You did good. What things do you know?”
“I don’t know anything.”
“So what kinds of things do you think about when you walk down the street?”
“Yesterday, I walked down the street singing a song I had just written.”
“Really? Well, sing it.”
“You wouldn’t like it.”
“No, tell me.” He slumped his shoulders a little, and slanted his head to one side. “It’s stupid.”
He looked at me. His invitation was irresistible. Quietly, I sang, “Parking Meter, Parking Meter, glad to meet ya, Parking Meter, hate to feed ya, Parking Meter, love to beat ya, Parking Meter.”
Blank face. Dead eyes.
“I know; see? You asked.”
“No, I like it.”
“I was walking to work, and I was looking up at the top of a building, and slammed right into a parking meter. Clocked my chin. It’s got a faster tempo than that. Very staccato.”
“I love it,” he said.
“I’ve got another one.”
This time I sing with slightly more vibrato. This actually has a good melody. Think show tunes: “I like you / in an inner tube / strategically placed / right below your waist. Get it?” I jump out of my chair and stand in front of him, motioning around my hips with my hands like I have a spare tire around me. “It’s a love song.”
“Is there more to it?” Charlie said.
“I don’t think so.”
“How ’bout: I like you / with a popsicle stick / cherry red / the kind I like to lick.”
“Naughty!” I said. “I love it. And we could have models come out while we sing, dressed up like popsicles.”
“You’re funny, Moonface,” he said, lifting his glass to his smiling lips.
The drunk downstairs was saying something about bombs. “Bombs!” he yelled.
That week, the heat burned off the fog that normally hovers over the city. You could see Sausalito clearly from Crissy Field; you could walk on the Golden Gate and see clear down to the water. From Twin Peaks, you could take in the entire city, white and clean, a landscape with the houses staggering on top of each other, a pincushion full of pins. But the sky still seemed green. It seemed to even tint the bay.
Charlie and I spent nights in his hotel. We lay close and tight, and in the morning, Charlie put on a suit and tie and walked to the convention center. I went to work and thought about Charlie all day. On the bus, I was having that familiar feeling again—as I stood and hung onto a rail, I couldn’t place my feet. They seemed to move without me, jumping off my legs every time the bus skipped or hopped.
We walked all around the city. After Charlie talked on and on about how wonderful the city was, how boring Baltimore could be, I got the nerve to say, “You should just move here. There are tons of jobs,” as nonchalantly as I could, looking into a store window as I said it.
“Hmm,” he said.
We walked to North Beach and had dinner in a romantic restaurant with a purple neon sign in the window. He ate spinach ravioli and I had tiny meatballs covered in sauce. And we talked until the burgundy puddles at the bottom of our wine glasses drained and faded.
The next morning, in his hotel room, he packed up his things, rolling up his neckties and squeezing them into the side pockets of his backpack. I was about to leave for work, going in with the same clothes I had worn the day before, and planning not to be apologetic about it. I sat on the bed pouting. I wasn’t going to be apologetic about that, either.
“You shouldn’t leave,” I said.
“I don’t want to leave. I want to see you again,” he said, sitting on the bed now, close to me. “I want to see you all the time. I would like to kiss you in the morning and in the night,” he said. And I knew something was happening now, something. And I knew that as we stood at the door to his room, and he offered to walk me all the way to the lobby, but I told him, no, no, right here. He gave me a long, slow kiss, his hands on my hips, squeezing tightly, all ten fingers, as we stood in the doorjamb, my feet pigeon-toed and between his. I squeezed him, too, hanging on tight, and I swear I felt the earth moving.
Chapter Five
A Splendid Combination of Physical and Spiritual Renewal Set in the Low And High Lands Of Iowa
Charlie and I once drove a rented blue and orange moving truck halfway across the country. It was a rattling tin can of a thing that threatened to snap in half at every pothole. The greasy-haired man at the truck rental office in Pittsburgh had handed us an awkwardly oversized atlas and said, “Iowa, eh? I don’t even know where that is.”
“Me neither,” I’d said.
As we rode along on the sticky vinyl seats, I opened up the atlas to see the United States sprawled across the centerfold. And there was Iowa, smack dab in the crease of the page. A lavender rectangle underneath a loosely hanging staple. It connected six other states with its dotted border.
“Iowa. The place where things come together and fall apart,” I sa
id as I ripped the staple out.
“See, now that’s beautiful. You should be writing this stuff down,” Charlie said with a finger in the air and his eyes steadfast on the road.
But I wasn’t trying to be poetic. I was trying to figure out how we got here. Ever since Charlie moved with me to San Francisco, we’d been hopping around from one city to another taking any small jobs we could find. We ended up in Pittsburgh in an attic apartment of a whitewashed brick house. I was doing temp work, shuffling around papers and answering phones at the headquarters of a bank. Charlie worked at an after-school program, helping at-risk kids with their homework and teaching them how to shoot penalty kicks. He wasn’t exactly sure what they were at risk of, because for him they were enthusiastic and polite and laughed at every single one of his knock-knock jokes. He didn’t mind the work, even though the government technically classified it as “volunteering” and his salary was a few measly paychecks and monthly food stamps. We used my paycheck to stock the house with milk, bread, pasta, and paper towels, and we used the food stamps to buy prosciutto di Parma and imported olive oil from the international markets downtown, because, as Charlie said, even if we were poor, we didn’t have to lose our sense of taste. I agreed, but as I stood in line in the market holding a block of pecorino romano cheese behind a mother who was holding her two-year-old and a nine-can pack of tuna, also paying with food stamps, I thought, “We’ve got to get ourselves some real jobs.”
“We’re like vagabonds,” Charlie’d said. “We just need to find our niche.” He started thinking up ideas, and every once in a while he’d spit one out. Like once, when we were watching a PBS documentary on Peru. We spent an hour looking at those chiseled mountains and green landscapes before Charlie said, “We should be alpaca farmers!”
“It can’t be that easy,” I said. “PBS is pulling the wool over your eyes!”
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