by Don Lee
She still didn’t know what to make of the other night at the Memory Den, the way Franklin’s hand had lingered on top of hers. They hadn’t said anything more after that moment. They had left the bar, and they didn’t kiss or hug good night in the parking lot. “Thanks for listening,” was all Franklin had said to her. But his hand on hers—had he been making a pass at Jeanette? Was he signaling his attraction for her? It was confusing. He was distraught over Caroline, and ostensibly he had sought out Jeanette to glean if Yadin might be sleeping with his wife. But maybe there had been something else going on. He had been flirting with her—she was sure she hadn’t been imagining it. He had said that what he would miss most was being with her. Perhaps, all along, he’d been aware that she had a crush on him. Perhaps he felt himself being drawn to Jeanette, and a part of him yearned to venture beyond banter with her. She hadn’t considered any of these possibilities until that night, but she had to admit that their emergence provoked her. Whatever the case, she knew that the stakes for her long-standing infatuation with Franklin had been dramatically altered. Now nothing could be called innocent.
Joe was trying to brush some lint off his pants leg.
“Glove box,” Jeanette told him.
He opened the glove compartment, where she kept a lint roller.
“You ever thought of getting a dog?” she asked her father.
“What?”
“A dog. Dogs are great companions.”
“I don’t need a companion,” Joe said.
“Don’t you ever get lonely? Or depressed?”
“I am never depressed. Being depressed is a hobby only rich people can afford.”
“There’s a woman at church,” Jeanette said, “Stephanie Weiler—you know her? She used to work in the inspections department.”
“No.”
“She used to have a dog.”
“So?” Joe asked.
“She’s a widow. I was thinking yesterday, you guys might like each other.”
“What the hell,” he said. “You trying to set me up?”
“Why not?” As far as Jeanette knew, her father had not dated anyone in the last fifteen years. She wondered if, sometime in that duration, he’d had a secret lady friend, or if he had not had sex at all since Jo died.
“Forget it,” Joe said.
“What could it hurt? It wouldn’t have to be like a blind date. You could come to a church event, maybe the annual picnic. You could meet her and see how you feel.”
“You are deranged. Now you want me to go to your church? Fuck that.”
“Chew on it for a while,” Jeanette said.
“I will not.”
“Now that I think about it, there’s another woman at church who’s single, our pianist, Siobhan Kelly. She’s a police sergeant.”
“I know her. She gave me a goddamn speeding ticket once.”
“She’s kind of cute, don’t you think?”
“I am not having this conversation.”
Jeanette took the ramp north onto Interstate 280, and they didn’t speak again until they entered the Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno. As they drove down the Avenue of Flags, they passed underneath a banner that read SERVING GOD AND COUNTRY: A MEMORIAL DAY SALUTE TO OUR HEROES.
“Thanks for coming today,” Joe told her. “I know it represents everything you hate.”
It’d represented everything Jeanette’s mother had hated, too. Jo had protested against every American military conflict in her adult life, from the Vietnam War to the Gulf War.
“You used to be such a little hippie,” Joe said to Jeanette. “I kind of miss that hippie.”
“You do not.”
“Okay, maybe not.”
In high school, she had embraced a certain style: gypsy skirts with tiered ruffles, peasant blouses and embroidered tunics, thick belts with large buckles riding low on her hips, lots of bracelets and rings and multi-stranded, beaded necklaces. The vintage bohemian clothes—some of them remnants from Jo’s youth—had reflected Jeanette’s burgeoning activism, inspired by her mother and her eleventh-grade ethics teacher, Mr. Rojas.
She walked with her father to the base of the big hill—topped by a huge flagpole flying at half-mast—in the middle of the cemetery, where Joe’s brother had saved seats for them for the observance ceremony. Mike, four years Joe’s junior, was in his old Army uniform, which must have required prodigious alterations to fit, many more than his older brother’s black suit. He had served two tours in Vietnam, enlisting immediately upon his high school graduation. Joe had drawn a high draft number and was never called.
Mike’s wife, Patsy, was of course at the cemetery with him, as was their daughter, Amyra, and her husband and two kids, Maggie and Meg, nineteen and eighteen, and their husbands, and Maggie’s newborn. Incredibly, Mike and Patsy, in their early sixties, had become great-grandparents last month.
Growing up, Jeanette never spent much time with that side of the family. They were evangelical Christians, members of a megachurch in Modesto, and at family gatherings, Jo (and, in time, Jeanette) had gotten into horrific arguments with them over politics and religion. Mike and Patsy believed in the Second Coming, and distorted news headlines as signs that the Great Tribulation, the Rapture, was near at hand. They were creationists, and condemned the theory of evolution and its adoption in textbooks. They were, of course, for school prayer and against sex education. They backed the Moral Majority, and lobbied against the ERA. Most vehemently, they denounced homosexuality and abortion. There was not a single barbecue or holiday dinner that Jo did not leave apoplectic.
The observance ceremony began with a musical prelude by a brass band, then a bagpiper played “Amazing Grace.” There were speeches from the cemetery director and a retired general, interleaved with an invocation and benediction from a chaplain, the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance by a former POW, songs from two vocalists, the laying of the Gold Star Wreath, the reading of a poem, a rifle salute, and a bugler playing taps while the color guard marched. A pair of Coast Guard jets did a flyover, then the vocalists sang “God Bless America” to close the proceedings. It felt interminable to Jeanette, the ceremony, but when she looked at her watch, she saw that it had clocked in at almost precisely one hour.
“Well, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” Joe said to her.
They got back in her car, and Jeanette drove them to Atticus’s plot. Each of the cemetery’s 112,700 graves had a small American flag in front of the headstone, planted in advance, Joe told her, by three thousand Boy and Girl Scouts.
Ahead of them, Atticus’s family was parking along a curb. Jeanette stopped behind the line of cars, and she and Joe took out two folding chairs and his mini-cooler from her trunk. With the others, they walked to Atticus’s grave, and they helped set up a picnic underneath a stand of trees while Mike and Patsy cleaned the marble headstone.
Jeanette watched them from afar. They were doing it all wrong. They had simply mixed some Spic and Span with water in a bucket and were using the scrub side of a kitchen sponge to soap up the headstone. Household cleaners were corrosive and deposited salt. They should have been washing the marble with a non-ionic, biocidal cleaning solution.
After Mike and Patsy put away their cleaning supplies, they called to the others, saying they were ready. Everyone placed flowers at the foot of Atticus’s headstone, and they formed a semicircle and joined hands.
“Let’s begin with Psalm 23,” Mike said, and he and his family started reciting, “The Lord is my shepherd.” Neither Jeanette nor Joe partook. She doubted her father knew any prayers. His parents had not been religious. Mike had found Jesus after leaving home, through Patsy.
The headstone had a cross in a circle on it, and was engraved: ATTICUS NATHANIEL MATSUDA, PVT, US ARMY, PERSIAN GULF, APRIL 29 1972, FEB 26 1991, DESERT STORM, PATRIOT, WARRIOR, LOVING SON, PURPLE HEART. A tome, especially compared to what was on Jo’s gravestone—just her name and the years of her birth and death. Jeanette and her father had agreed,
when deciding what to put on the bronze marker, that there was dignity in simplicity. Together, they visited the grave in Rosarita Bay’s Capistrano Cemetery on Jo’s birthday, the anniversary of her death, and Christmas. Jeanette didn’t know how often her father dropped by the cemetery on his own these days. The first few years, he had gone weekly.
It was a bright, crisp day, and Jeanette gazed at the rows of identical white headstones glimmering in the sun. For a moment, she thought about Étienne. He was buried somewhere in Canada—she didn’t know exactly where, and it’d always bothered her that she didn’t know.
Mike took out a piece of paper and read a long tribute he had handwritten to his son. Patsy, in turn, gave a prayer, then Amyra and the rest of the family each offered testimony, invoking Almighty God and the heavenly kingdom and the faithful departed and the gateway to a more glorious life, pleading for Atticus’s soul to be bound up with theirs forever through their Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. By the end, they were all crying.
“Where’s my cooler?” Joe asked Jeanette as they made their way toward the picnic table. “I need a beer.”
Under the trees, after loading up a paper plate with food, he took a seat at the end of a folding table with his brother and tipped a bottle of Anchor Steam. No one else was imbibing. Mike and his family didn’t drink. Joe had put his sunglasses back on, and he was sweating, fat beads on his forehead after standing in the sun. He and Mike had matching buzz cuts, though Joe’s was looking a little ragged.
“How are you doing, Jeanette? It’s been so long,” Patsy said.
She had aged badly—gotten fat and gray and wrinkled with deep grooves and puckers.
“I heard you now belong to a church?” she asked. “Is that right? And you’re one of the elders?”
“I’m on the board. There are no elders,” Jeanette said.
“I’ll tell you the truth. I could hardly believe it when I heard.”
Jeanette wanted to say, “Will wonders never cease,” but didn’t, because often she could hardly believe it herself.
“Although can it really be considered a religion?” Patsy asked. “Unitarian Universalism?”
“According to the IRS, yes.”
“As if the IRS can be the judge of such matters. Well, irregardless, I’m glad you found a flock of your own,” Patsy said, with too much satisfaction.
When Jeanette had been in her teens, Patsy had tried to persuade her that, as a young woman, her sole objective was to prepare for a future husband, learn to cook and clean and sew and keep house, that she should pray for a man to select her and take care of her and lead her to fulfill her purpose as a dutiful Christian wife and mother—which naturally had led to heated fights. “I’m going to see the world. I’m not going to depend on a man for anything,” Jeanette would jab at her aunt. “You have too much pride. It’ll be your ruin,” Patsy would jab back.
What would Patsy say now, Jeanette wondered, if she knew everything that had happened to her in Watsonville? Would she have any sympathy for her, or would she simply conclude that Jeanette had gotten what she deserved?
Her high school ethics teacher, Mr. Rojas, had been from Watsonville. For generations, his family had worked as piscadores, strawberry pickers, and he’d related stories to the class about the piscadores’ working conditions there, and about the farmworkers’ movement led by César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and Maria Elena Serna. After the Loma Prieta earthquake on October 17, 1989, Mr. Rojas organized a caravan of students to go down to the city with him to assist in the disaster relief efforts. Jeanette, seventeen at the time, was among the first to sign up.
The city was decimated. The epicenter had been less than ten miles away. More than thirty percent of downtown and one in eight houses were in ruins. The destruction was incredible to witness—façades of historical buildings disintegrated, the steeple to the main Catholic church toppled, piles of crumbled brick and splintered wooden beams on sidewalks, glass broken in jaggy panes and shattered fragments, branches and bark sheared off trees, streets and pavement cracked and buckled, telephone poles tilting sideways, cables and power lines strewn in crazy serpentines, detritus and pieces of paper fluttering everywhere, houses pancaked with collapsed roofs and knocked off their foundations, red tags taped to front doors. There was no electricity or running water. Roads were impassable. Part of Highway 1 had caved in. Traffic lights, gas pumps, and ATMs did not work.
The situation in Callaghan Park, where Jeanette and her classmates were stationed, was a mess. Residents were living in jerry-built tents, and they would not move to the shelters that the Red Cross had set up at the convention hall and the National Guard armory, afraid of going inside any buildings, spooked by the continuing aftershocks. They rebuffed, too, the outdoor aid centers that had been erected at Ramsay Park and the Santa Cruz Fairgrounds. A number of them were in the country illegally, spoke only Spanish, and were fearful of government workers. They also didn’t want to relinquish their possessions. Inside and around their tents, they had mounds of clothes and personal belongings in trash bags. Some had lugged their sofas, bicycles, and TVs to the park. They were cooking meals on charcoal barbecues and keeping warm with fires in rusty fifty-five-gallon drums. The conditions were growing squalid. There were real safety, sanitation, and health concerns for those who remained. Plus, the weather was miserable. It was pouring rain.
There was one volunteer in the park who was able to break through the refugees’ mistrust. He looked to be in his early twenties, and he was bilingual (actually, quadrilingual, Jeanette would learn later), and he had an easy charm. As he went from tent to tent, people readily smiled and laughed, talking to him. It didn’t hurt that he was so good-looking. He was slim, lanky. He moved with loose limbs, arms flaring out at the elbows, and a jouncy stride, unencumbered by any stiffness, doubts, or worries. His skin was suet-smooth, his face a whittling of sharp, angled planes. He had a widow’s peak on his forehead, his hair straight and jet-black and finger-swept.
Someone told Jeanette his name was Étienne Lau—a first-year law student at Boalt Hall in Berkeley. She watched him for days. During breaks from handing out supplies, she took photographs, and every once in a while she furtively snapped a few shots of Étienne.
He caught her in the act one afternoon, and walked over to her. “Hey, shutterbug,” he said.
She was paused by his mellifluous voice. He had a British accent.
“Are you the one who took that picture, the one syndicated by the AP?” he asked.
The appearance of the photo in the Santa Cruz Sentinel had happened by chance, through one of Mr. Rojas’s connections; Jeanette hadn’t expected anything to transpire when she’d handed over her canisters of film to him. The one chosen had been of a long line of people waiting to get water from a truck, toting any containers they could find. At the front of the line was a boy, maybe seven or eight, clutching an empty gin bottle.
“Yeah,” she said to Étienne. “How did you know?”
“I asked around about you,” he said, and she flushed—flattered. “Photos like that,” he told her, “photos that good, have more impact in the court of public opinion than any amicus brief ever could. So kudos to you.”
“Thanks.”
They grinned at each other.
“I love your clothes. You carry that vintage look well,” he said. “How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Oof,” he said. “Young.”
She asked what had brought him down to Watsonville, and he told her one of his professors had been involved in the landmark federal case Gomez v. City of Watsonville, which had argued that the system of at-large elections in Watsonville violated the Voting Rights Act. Étienne had been driving down to the city periodically to help with voter registration for the upcoming election, which would be the first under the new district-based system.
“It’s history-making, what’s happening here,” he said. “Or what’s going to happen. Not sure they’ll hold the election on sched
ule now. Might be postponed a few weeks. But when they do, it’ll be a watershed moment, a revolution. They’ll finally get equal and fair representation. I think that’s partly why these people won’t leave the park. They see it as an act of civil disobedience. They don’t want to be shuttled away, out of sight, out of mind. They want everyone to see how they’ve been marginalized and deprived. You have to admire them, don’t you? ¡El pueblo unido, jamás será vencido! The people united will never be defeated!”
Jeanette was dazzled. They talked more that day during breaks, and she pieced together his background. His father was British, his mother Canadian (he held two passports). They were both economists and had started out in academia, but then decided to roam the globe as expats. They hired themselves out as international economic policy analysts, working stints for the IMF, the World Bank, and the UN and getting fellowships at think tanks and institutes. Étienne and his older sister grew up in London, Geneva, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Luxembourg, Frankfurt, Buenos Aires, and Vancouver. He had gotten his undergraduate degree in philosophy at McGill University in Montreal. Before coming to Berkeley, he had never lived in the United States. Jeanette had never met anyone who’d had such a glamorous life.
The election in Watsonville, as Étienne predicted, was postponed until December, and when the ballots were counted, the results were disappointing. Nothing much changed in the makeup of the city council. Jeanette wrote a letter to Étienne, commiserating about the outcome. She mailed it to him care of Boalt Hall’s general address. He had asked for her telephone number and address, but hadn’t given his in kind.
Almost two months passed, and she thought that the letter had been lost or, more likely, that he wasn’t interested in corresponding with her. After all, he was twenty-two, a Berkeley law student, a globetrotter; she was a puppy-eyed high school student in Rosarita Bay who’d never been out of the country.