by Lucia Berlin
I always have Thanksgiving and Christmas at my house, and they include me in other holidays and picnics, surprise me with little presents. They call to say hello or to see if I need anything. I babysit, take books and toys to my grandchildren, who are very dear.
We are joined because we are family. I am the mother, the grandmother. Aside from that, our lives themselves are not connected. We are different generations, have different values and interests.
On the other hand, we all like each other. It’s not as if there were any problems. There aren’t any, really, except that I am not essential. I carry the titles of mother, grandmother, employee, but, in fact, I am an unnecessary person.
Jason tossed the pages onto the table. “This is a suicide note. Pure and simple.”
“No way. She was always writing things like this, just daydreaming on paper.”
“I can’t believe she felt this way. She must have been in real clinical depression. I’m telling you, Miles, she’s in the lake.”
“No way. You know how on birthdays, Christmas, she doesn’t just say ‘Happy Birthday,’ but writes eight pages about what a miracle it was the day you were born and how you were wise and witty when you were two minutes old? If she was killing herself, she would have written a long letter. Two long letters, one to each of us, about how great we are and how sorry she was she didn’t have anything to offer and had failed us. Right or not?”
Miles unbuttoned the collar of his uniform. He had just come off duty when Jason called from their mother’s apartment. He poured them both coffee. Jason, in an Armani suit, looked silly in the huge wicker chair, like Huey Newton reincarnated, holding his mother’s purple umbrella instead of a machine gun.
“So where is she? She’s been gone at least five days. She hasn’t shown up at work for three. Even if she were going to drown herself she would have called in sick. That’s how she was.” He found his eyes filling with tears, surprising himself and Miles.
“Hey, how come you’re saying was? All we know is that she’s gone. She could have been taking a walk, fallen down and got amnesia or something. Let’s search the place and be sure nothing’s missing. If she was just going out what would she have worn?”
“For starters, she would have taken this umbrella. It’s been raining for a week.”
The brothers looked through the house, in her drawers and closets. Nothing seemed to be gone. There were two dusty suitcases in the hall closet. Jason was looking through her desk when Miles came to the top of the stairs.
“Her leather purse is gone and that black coat. Jason, she’s been kidnapped. It must have been from the street since nothing is missing here.”
“Kidnapped? Well, maybe. Her checkbook is here, her credit cards and insurance card and driver’s license.”
“Even if she were going to drown herself she would have driven to the lake. Her car’s here.”
“If it was for ransom don’t you think we would have heard?”
“How should I know? You’re the cop. What do we do now? Put out an APB? Put her picture on a milk carton?”
“Ma’s picture on a milk carton? Remember when she was chopping onions and she waved that knife at me for drinking from the milk carton?” The brothers laughed.
“Yeah, put her picture and a message. ‘Millie Bradford, now missing, says Use a glass! Don’t drink from the carton!’” Jason stopped laughing abruptly. “Where could she be, man?”
“I don’t know. I just feel she’s OK. But we need to get the police in on this.”
“You know what this means, don’t you? Reporters and volunteers and fliers.”
“I can’t be on TV. Neither one of us can afford that kind of publicity. Too many nuts out there. We’ve got to think. I need a drink.”
Miles found some cognac. He poured two glasses. He had already figured out what was on Jason’s mind.
“You’re thinking that some psycho that I busted or that you put away has snatched her.”
“It’s a possibility. And if we get on TV some other asshole might say, ‘Right on, that’s the dude that did me. I’ll get me his wife, coupla kids.’”
“You’re being paranoid.”
“It has happened. It could happen. To our families.”
“Yeah. But we have to report it. We have to find her.”
“I’ll get the chief over here.”
The brothers called their wives and said they would be late. While they waited for the police chief, Miles made them bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches. They ate in silence. Chewing, Miles looked at his brother and his eyes smiled at him. It was the first time in over ten years that the two of them had sat together alone. They felt comfortable, at home. Jason smiled back at him. He and Miles would not have admitted that they felt good at this particular time.
You see it all the time, on “Unsolved Crimes” on TV, how people create whole new identities. So when two things happened at once they seemed to be an omen.
I began going through my papers and throwing everything out except things my boys might want. Letters, souvenirs. I came across Jennie Wilson’s birth certificate. Jennie died years ago, but years before that she had stayed with me while she got her passport and ticket for Europe. The birth certificate had stayed behind, forgotten in a drawer. The day I found it I went to the DMV and got a new driver’s license.
This actually may have been all I would have needed to do. In an instant I became Jennie Wilson. A person. Not a worker or a mother or a wife or a daughter, just a person, license number N24367. Simply holding the rectangle gave me a sense that I existed. I had become an individual. I was someone who had never lived before.
The feeling was so intense that I realized, I saw clearly, that all my life I had been playing roles created by myself or by others.
How could I stop doing this? What changes could I make in my behavior to keep this wonderful sense of uniqueness?
I called in sick the next day. I turned off the phone. I ate tacos for breakfast and watched daytime TV, never did get dressed. It wasn’t until that evening that I noticed that there was a message on my machine. It was a call from Boston, from someone I didn’t know, telling me that my childhood friend Elsa had died. She had left me some money, the person said, and a check would be coming to me.
I was surprised by the grief I felt. I had not seen Elsa for many years. As little girls we had been furiously loyal and close, as only seven-year-olds can be, and our friendship had continued all our lives. She had been my first friend. She was the last close friend I had that had been alive. My parents dead, my brothers and sister and all my relatives gone too. Elsa had stood in the way of my own death.
I went back to work the next day but I continued to feel very sad. The days dragged on and on; I had to get out of there. I did not have that much time left in this world. I couldn’t spend the remaining days doing Medi-Cal billing and CPT coding.
For several nights I didn’t sleep, torturing myself with having wasted all those years, with having nothing to fall back on, nothing to offer anyone. Nothing, in fact, to enjoy.
I forced myself to stop brooding, to try and figure out how I was going to change. One night I cried myself to sleep, change seemed so impossible.
I had forgotten about Elsa’s check when it finally arrived. Thirty thousand dollars. A cashier’s check. I sat in the kitchen, holding it, almost all night long. Maybe I went crazy that night, or caught Alzheimer’s. No, there is simply no explanation or excuse for what I did.
I didn’t go to work the next day. I slept late, showered and dressed and went to the bank. I didn’t have to deposit the check to have it changed to another cashier’s check made out to Jennie Wilson. I had left my wallet at home. All I had now was Jennie Wilson’s birth certificate and driver’s license, two hundred dollars and her check. I took BART to San Francisco. I opened a bank account in my new name. They asked for all kinds of references and information, but I just acted senile and bereaved, babbling and sniffling, so they didn’t pursue it.
I checked into the Continental Hotel downtown.
The first few hours I was so scared I stayed in my room, looking down at the street. I wanted to call Marla, but wisely realized that she was the last person to call. I just watched the people from my window. All kinds of people. The world had a miraculous multiplicity of types and races and classes and shapes and hairdos. Finally I just had to go get into it all, so when it got dark I went out and walked through the crowds. Block after block in ever widening circles, seeing the city, seeing each person’s face, as if I had never looked at anything before. I was exhilarated, alive, reborn.
Raworth, the police chief, was efficient and reassuring. Jason and Miles went home feeling that everything possible was being done. For the next few days all the hospitals and morgues would be checked, an APB was put out on both sides of the bay. There was no reason yet to have the media in on this. But if they didn’t find her in a few days they would have to go public, it was the only chance of finding her. Or, if she had been kidnapped, they would probably hear by then.
Jason and Alexis went over to Miles and Amanda’s for dinner. They didn’t talk about Millie in front of the children. It was interesting how differently the wives took it than did Millie’s sons. Well, of course, she was their mother and what they both felt was fear and worry, remorse. She probably should have been living with one of us, etc. The two women were simply worried for her, less willing to believe in foul play than the men were. They thought she was hurt, unconscious or unable to remember where she was.
If Millie had been very ill or dead, the four of them would have comforted and supported each other. But no one knew what had happened so there were floating feelings of anger and blame, guilt and fear. They were all defensive and edgy, snapped at each other, were short with the children. “Hush up, we’re trying to talk!”
After a few days it became clear that she was not in any local hospital or morgue. No one had communicated with them. Chief Raworth said the media had to be told, that they could help.
It was worse than any of them could have imagined. Marla and Millie’s boss and the grandchildren were all hurt and angry that no one had told them right away. Reporters and cameras were at both sons’ doors. Jason and Miles insisted that their wives and children be kept away from the camera, which only made things more mysterious. You kept seeing Alexis and Amanda running places with the children, hiding their faces like criminals.
Jason, tense and anxious, handled the interviews, usually on his front porch. More of a pillared entranceway than a porch. As predicted, the media liked the idea of a revenge plot. “Have either of you been threatened by any felons you have helped to imprison?” Extended coverage was given to the Drug Lords and Crime Bosses they had each had a part in convicting. “Were the Bradford Brothers Too Tough on Crime?” asked one headline.
They could not change their phones because Millie might call, so they had to hear the predictable calls from cranks who threatened their wives and children’s lives, from six different callers who claimed to have murdered Millie. Amanda and the twins came home crying from the grocery store. The checker had told the man in line in front of them that the brothers looked like the Menendez brothers, only older. “Yeah, they look guilty as heck to me,” the man said. “You see the old lady’s picture? What a battle-ax. They say the main suspect is always family.”
The children enjoyed the excitement, though. Their parents on TV, their own backs on TV. Grandma’s picture on telephone poles, in Walgreen’s. Their mothers resented not being able to let them walk to school alone or go to the mall or park. Since they didn’t know what had happened they weren’t really grieving. They desperately wanted to know, to get on with their lives. The women became closer. Both felt their husbands were over-reacting and ignoring them and the children. The husbands were hurt because their wives were so unfeeling and so careless about their children’s safety. But then they had protected them from the obscene reality of the phone threats. Three times in three days Jason and Miles were asked to identify unclaimed bodies. The bodies weren’t Millie, but someone had killed each of those women.
The second day I got my hair cut and permed and dyed mahogany red, had my almost white eyebrows dyed black. I also got acrylic fingernails, painted deep red. I absolutely did not recognize myself; so no one else would either. I realized that before I had been a “handsome” elderly woman. Grey hair in a bun, no makeup. Birkenstocks in summer, boots in winter. Wool and cotton. Comfortable, classic clothes. “Comfortable” means the same as “handsome.” Boring.
I bought bright red and green and blue jersey dresses, wedgie-heeled shoes, pant suits with waists and shoulder pads, gold buttons. Blusher and green eyeshadow. Passion and Opium perfumes. Back and forth I went from my hotel to the shops on Union Square. On the last trip home, the one with just a bag of makeup and perfume, I did something I had never done before. I went into a bar by myself.
It was four in the afternoon and there were only a few people in the Beachcomber.
“What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” the bartender asked and grinned at me. I grinned back and ordered a glass of white wine. He said his name was Hal, and he introduced me to Myron and Greg, two older men who were sitting together. Slightly seedy, in frayed polyester suits and Giants baseball hats, but they were respectful, friendly persons, both retired salesmen, both widowed. I said I was a widow too, a retired schoolteacher visiting from Montana, seeing if I wanted to move here.
At one point Greg went out to buy an Examiner and Myron went to the restroom. I asked the bartender Hal if these were nice gentlemen.
“Why yes, ma’am,” he said. “That’s the very reason I introduced them to you. I could tell you were a lady, and new in town, not no bar type. Figured they could keep an eye on you. We bartenders are pretty good judges of people, you know.”
I spent the next day visiting Chinatown and Fisherman’s Wharf. Back at the hotel I changed into the red jersey. I met my new friends at the Beachcomber Bar at four. We had an early dinner at the Hofbrau, where they ate every night. Then we went to see the movie Housesitting, with Goldie Hawn. All three of us just loved it.
They asked me to join them for a nightcap but after all that walking at the wharf I just wanted to hit the hay. I was too sleepy even to think about what I was going to do.
In the morning I had a nice breakfast at Sears. There was nothing about me in the paper. No one even noticed I was gone, I thought, and that was depressing. I tried to concentrate on my future. Should I get a job? An apartment? Should I write my sons? No, not yet. I wanted a little more time being Jennie Wilson. Not thinking about anything but where to go today. The Steinhart Aquarium and the Japanese tea garden. It was early spring, rhododendron and azalea time. I’d save the botanical gardens for a whole day of their own.
Amanda and Alexis had lunch together at Chez Panisse Cafe. This affair had brought the two of them much closer, as it had their husbands, but unfortunately had the women squaring off against the men.
“This is worse than spending too much money on a funeral or a wedding shower. A reward? Jason said it would ‘look bad’ to offer only ten thousand dollars. Give me a break. I’ll get a bloodhound and find her for five thousand dollars. Ten thousand is a lot of money. Don’t tell them, but I am sick about it, just sick. We have just barely begun to save any money.”
“Well, I feel bad because it’s all coming from you guys. We don’t have any, and no credit at all. But I can see they have to do it, couldn’t forgive themselves if they didn’t. I think they’re reasoning that whoever has her is going to ask for much more. Anyway, last I heard they were thinking twenty thousand dollars.”
“God! On the other hand, if I ever get kidnapped I’ll be pretty insulted if all Jason offers for me is twenty thousand dollars!”
They had a second glass of wine, ordered calzone and salads. They both were relaxed. They looked pretty, animated, with the camaraderie women have when they are trashing their husbands.
“I know, Miles too! He gets big old tears in his eyes and I’ll say, ‘You OK, hon?’ ‘Yeah, just thinking about my Mom.’”
“Well, maybe something horrible has happened, or maybe she’s dead somewhere. But we don’t know, so I can’t seem to get all that upset, and he thinks I’m unfeeling. Accuses me of never liking her.”
“Exactly what happens with me and Miles!”
“It’s because they never had a father. They always were responsible for her, so now they feel it’s their fault. I tried to talk about it but Jason got absolutely furious with me.”
“Oh, I know!” Amanda clasped Alexis’ hand in sympathy.
“Just imagine Miles when I suggested that maybe Millie wasn’t kidnapped. I said maybe she felt, ‘What the hell, time to hit the road, Jack,’ and took off. Just got on a train and headed for Tijuana. Why not? He was nearly hysterical about me suggesting such a thing, that she would abandon her grandchildren. Shall we share a dessert?”
“No, I can’t stand that custom. I want my own bread pudding.”
“Ten dollars for bread pudding! I know why you’re ordering it. Millie always made it!” Amanda laughed.
Alexis nodded, “You know that’s probably true. The bad part is that I do miss her. Oh, hell, I am worried.”
“So am I. I love her, don’t you?”
The two women clasped hands again and looked with compassion into each other’s eyes. They finished their puddings and cappuccinos in relative silence. The leather folder with the check inside was on the white cloth. A folded piece of paper was next to it.
Alexis put her Visa inside the folder and looked at the piece of paper, which was a page from an appointment book, from the middle of May. With a black magic marker someone had scrawled,