Nadi begins screaming at my back, screaming in Farsi that I am a beast, leave her alone, velashkon! But my wife’s yelling is no louder than the blood in my head. I order the whore to ignite her engine and never return. “And you tell to your friend his superior officers know everything. You tell to him that.” I grasp the whore’s chin and force her to view me directly. There is fear in the moisture of her eyes, and Nadi begins to hit my back with her small fists but they are no more than the flap of a bird’s wings. “You tell to him that. This is our home. Our home.”
The gendeh pulls her head away, engages the gearshift, and speeds her auto to the top of the hill. She maneuvers around, and I push Nadi back as the woman passes closely by. She is looking directly ahead, both hands upon the steering wheel, a strand of her long hair sticking upon her face. My wife has become quiet. I hear only her breathing, and mine as well.
MY UPPER ARMS WERE BRUISED, THE BACK OF MY HEAD STUNG, AND I was so angry I started to cry, and I kept on in ragged spurts all the way through San Francisco and across the Golden Gate Bridge, through Sausalito and Marin City, past signs for Mill Valley, Corte Madera, and Larkspur. At Route 580, up in the hills, I could see the sandstone walls of San Quentin prison, just the beginning of a guard tower, and I cut east onto the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge. San Pablo Bay lay stretched out under me in the sun. There were dozens of white sails, and the glare hurt my eyes. I wiped the stolen eyeliner off my cheeks, avoided looking in the mirror, and the bridge seemed to go on for miles.
In El Cerrito I stopped at a 7-Eleven to buy a box of tissues. I wanted bottled water too but didn’t see any with the soft drinks, and I didn’t want to ask, so I bought an ice cream sandwich. I knew I looked bad, but the Asian woman behind the counter was nice enough not to keep her eyes on my face. On the way back to the Bonneville I passed a pay phone bolted into the side of the building and before I knew it I was calling my brother Frank collect at his car dealership in Revere. It was almost one here, four o’clock there. Frank’s partner Rudy Capolupo answered, his voice always low and wheezy, like he was being forced to talk with someone stepping on his throat. He asked the operator to repeat my name twice, then he paused and accepted the charges.
“Sorry to call collect, Rudy.”
“Don’t worry about it, I’ll take it out of Frank’s wallet at lunch. Hey, how’s sunny California anyways? I might retire out there, you know. Marina Del Rey. You been down there yet?” Without waiting for my answer, he said: “Hold on, sweets, your brother will want to talk to you.”
It took a while for Frank to come to the phone. My hands shook as I opened the ice cream sandwich and took a bite. But I could hardly taste it and when it got to my empty stomach it was too cold and almost hurt. A bright purple jacked-up Chevy Malibu pulled up to the 7-Eleven. Three Chicano boys were inside. The driver went into the store, but the other two, both in flannel shirts buttoned up to their necks, one in a tight hair net, gave me the look from head to toe. I wanted to ask them what they thought they were staring at. Did they want their teeth kicked down their throat? But then Frank’s voice came on the line, and I turned my back to the boys and slouched over the phone.
“K? Is that you?” He sounded so much like himself, his voice deep and peppy, the Saugus accent stronger than ever, that I started crying even before I could talk. I dropped my ice cream, covered my mouth, and twisted the receiver away from my face.
“Kath?”
“Wait.” I pulled out a tissue and blew my nose, then got a fresh one, wiped under my eyes, and took a deep, shaky breath. “It’s me, Franky. I’m sorry.”
He said it was okay, no problem, but his voice wasn’t peppy anymore.
“What’s wrong, K? Is everything all right? Nick all right?”
I ran my finger over a number scratched into the phone. I began to turn from side to side.
“Kath?”
“Nick’s gone, Frank.”
“What do you mean, ‘gone’?”
“He left.”
My brother was quiet a second. I pictured him standing in his office in a monogrammed dress shirt, Hugo Boss pants, Johnston & Murphy shoes, a bright pastel tie, his hand on his hip.
“When, K?” Now his voice sounded testy, and I heard everything in it: my whole life, his opinion of it, his opinion of my marriage, which he really thought was doomed from the beginning. And now I knew Nick hadn’t gone back home either, or else Frank would’ve heard.
“A while ago.”
“Did he take the Pontiac?”
“No he didn’t take the Pontiac. Christ, is that all you care about, Frank? The fucking car you gave us?”
“Hey, calm down, it was just a question.” My brother blew his breath out into the phone. I could picture him shaking his head and I wished I hadn’t called.
He was quiet a few seconds, then said: “Is this why you haven’t been calling Ma, K?”
His tone was gentle now, but why did he have to ask me this? “Yeah, that’s why. Frank, listen. I just—” The tears came with no warning. I saw again the colonel’s raging face as he pushed me across the yard, his breath bad, like meat left out in the sun, his eyes wide and brown, the whites yellowed as he spit his words at me and pushed me farther and farther away from my house, mine and Frank’s. “Frank?”
“K?”
“Yeah?”
“You still, you know, dope-free?”
“Please don’t talk to me like this, Frank.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m a fuckup.”
“I didn’t mean it that way. Lookit, just come home. The hell with Lazaro. Come back East, K.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?
“I have a business.”
“Cleaning?”
“Yeah.” I blew my nose. He was quiet again, just long enough for me to imagine him rolling his eyes to himself.
“You can do that anywhere, K. Listen, Ma and the aunts are flying out there Labor Day weekend. They want to stay at the house anyway, so why don’t you let ’em help you pack? If you want, I’ll even fly out with them and drive back with you. Jeannie won’t mind. How’s that sound? You and me driving coast-to-coast together? By the time we get back to Mass., you’ll be ready to start out with a brand-new sheet.” He was about to say more, but then I heard Rudy grunt from a few feet away that Frank was going to blow a sale if he didn’t get back out on the floor. “Kath, I gotta go. Think about it. I’ll call you later.”
I wasn’t even mad anymore; I didn’t feel anything really, just dried up and hollow, like I’d run out of something important. “Frank?”
“Yeah?”
I was past telling him about the house, past asking for any real help from him, but I could ask him this: “You can’t call me, I’m going on a trip. I planned it a long time ago and I’m having some friends watch the house while I’m gone. Could you tell Ma that? Apologize for me? Tell her if I’d known earlier, I—”
“Okay, Kath, anything to help. Look, I gotta go. Chin up, hon. Call me.”
I held on to the receiver until the dial tone came and listened to it awhile before I hung up. That old dark feeling started to open up inside me, like I was in the basement of a house I couldn’t escape. I knew my brother would tell Jeannie about me and Nick, that she would tell my mother and then everyone would know the truth, that Kathy Nicolo hasn’t changed; two steps forward and four steps back, and I knew as soon as I heard my brother’s voice I couldn’t tell him about Dad’s house anyway. Not Frank, always looking out for himself first, keeping his clothes clean and his hair parted straight, only at his best when your problems don’t have anything to do with him at all, when he can sit back in his expensive clothes at the lunch he’s buying you and give cool, practical advice, show how much he believes in you by giving you and your new husband a brand-new Bonneville to drive west.
As I walked around to my car door, the purple Malibu was backing away from the curb. One of the Chicano boys leaned his face out the window, lo
oked at my crotch, and slowly licked his upper lip. I acted like I didn’t see him, but when I got inside the Bonneville I locked the door, started the engine, and waited for them to drive on to San Pablo. Then I lit a cigarette and drove south. The day had gotten brighter, but cooler, and I could smell rusted freighter. On the Eastshore Freeway I passed the huge parking lot of the Golden Gate Fields Race Track, and there was the long span of Oakland Bay Bridge a few miles ahead, the hazy green of Yerba Buena Island at its halfway point, a gray ship there, a place Nick and I had pointed out to each other on maps when we first got here. I thought about driving south to Millbrae, just cruise around the housing complex near the mall till I found Lester’s car parked in front of his family’s house. But then what? Sit there and wait for his kids to come home from school? Watch Les and his wife step outside to greet them? I remembered what the colonel had said about Les, that his superior officers know everything. I wondered if I should try and contact him, warn him, but I didn’t know how I could do that without somehow making things worse, having his wife answer the phone or the door if I ever found his house in the first place.
I had the slow-blood sick feeling you get with a hangover that plans to last all day, that, and hunger pains, my stomach all tight with everything. I drove to the Mission District, parked on a street lined with palm trees, and walked two blocks in the sunshine past adobe apartment buildings to the Café Amaro and Connie Walsh’s office above. Gary stood behind his desk on the phone. He was wearing a black-and-white Les Misérables T-shirt tucked into his jeans, his belly hanging slightly over his braided belt. The conference-room door was open, and there was no one else in the waiting area. I had a feeling Connie Walsh wasn’t in either. Her receptionist hung up and put his hands on his hips. “Well look who the kitty dragged in.”
I didn’t know if I wanted to kick a hole in the wall or curl up in a ball in my chair. I asked if Connie was here and he said no, she wasn’t, she’s at court. “But she’s tried to get ahold of you at your motel. She needs to know if she should begin proceedings against the county for you. My God, what happened to your arms?”
I lifted my elbow and looked at my right upper arm, then my left. They were already darkening to a light shade of purple. I looked back up at Gary, at his warm green eyes, the real caring in his face. “Look, I’m not at a motel, I can’t afford a motel, and I don’t want to sue the county, all right? I just want my fucking house back.” I moved to his desk, took a pencil from a coffee mug, and started writing my PO box number on one of the pink memo pads next to his phone. “If Connie can come up with something new she can write to me. Otherwise, there’s nothing else to talk about.”
I walked back down the dark stairwell to the café, and I should’ve felt guilty about talking like that to my lawyer’s secretary, but it had felt good to let go at someone, anyone. I stood in the café, not knowing if I wanted to eat something or not, but on the sound system was that meditative New Age music, this very steady rising and falling of computerized notes that had all the rhythm of the respirator beside my father’s hospital bed just before he died.
In Millbrae, I took the exit off the Camino Real and bypassed the mall’s parking lot, all those cars baking in the sun, and I cruised through the housing developments with names like Hunter’s Arch, Palomino Meadows, and Eureka Fields as slowly as a cop or a child molester, hating California houses, so flat and one-story, stucco and wood, so many pink or peach. Most of them had a short driveway leading to a carport, a basketball hoop nailed just under its green fiberglass roof. Inside on the smooth-looking concrete were beach balls, and plastic bats, and dog-chewed Frisbees. As I continued driving slowly by, I tried to remember the ages of Lester’s kids, but I couldn’t. Some of the houses were shaded by eucalyptus trees, their thin gray bark peeling like a molting insect’s. Other homes were completely exposed with small flower gardens on each side of their front doors. I passed one stucco house the color of a banana and saw a tanned blond woman in shorts and a tank top lying out in the sun in a lawn chair. Her legs glistened with baby oil and her nails were painted bright pink. There was a Toyota in the driveway, heat flashing through my stomach, but I could see it wasn’t Lester’s, and I kept driving, wondering more than ever now what his wife looked like, what they were saying to each other right now. Were they making love one last time, the way people sometimes did at the end? And was it the end? I wasn’t so sure, and I was surprised at how resentful I felt. I wondered again if I should try and warn him he might be in trouble at work, but that’s not why I’d be calling him, and I knew it.
I lit a cigarette and continued driving slowly down one quiet winding street to the next, looking out at all this family life from behind Nicky Lazaro’s aviator sunglasses, my stomach as tight and hot as stretched rubber about to break.
I GUESS I’D planned to get through the rest of the afternoon with a double feature at the Cineplex, but once I got inside the terra-cotta-tiled mall, standing in line with other people who could afford to see a movie in the middle of a weekday—kids out of school for the summer, retired old ladies straining to read the marquee—I stepped away, shaking my head like a crazy woman, the kind you see in the city talking to the air, feeding invisible birds.
My stomach hurt. In front of the theater was a granite wishing fountain and a pool full of pocket change. On the other side was a Mexican restaurant from a chain you only see on the West Coast, and I went in and sat at a blue-tiled table at the window, heard myself order a guacamole salad and a drink, a strawberry margarita. I could’ve asked for a virgin, but I didn’t.
My order came right away, but the sight of the avocado cream spooned over lettuce made me feel queasy and I pushed it away and drank from the margarita, which was cold and sweet. Over the restaurant’s stereo speakers came a fast salsa beat behind six or seven guitars. I could already feel the tequila in the blood of my face. I ordered another, my sluggishness from last night’s beer replaced by a liquid lightness, and I smoked a cigarette and sipped my cool strawberry heat. I watched people go by in the main corridor of the mall, but I wasn’t really seeing them, just their movement, their endless stroll to buy things. A man caught my eye, thin and blond, holding his little girl’s hand while a baby slept in a sling across his chest. They walked right by the window, the girl trailing her fingers across the glass, her young father smiling at something she was saying. But they didn’t look in and I drew deep on my cigarette and put it out before all the smoke had even filled me with what I knew, that Lester would not leave his family, he would stay with his wife, stay in his own desperation to spare his kids any. This was suddenly so clear to me I wondered if I’d really known it all along; Les wasn’t the kind to turn his back on what was expected of him just because he was unhappy. Every two or three years he might have a week-long fling with someone like me, a street woman he’d meet through his job, but that was as close as he’d get to chucking the whole thing. I knew this. He might not yet. But I did. He might come back tonight, but if he did, he’d be full of family pain and resolve. He’d take me out for a memorable dinner date, or maybe cook me something, then make love to me like a man taking in oxygen before he goes on a long underwater trip. He’d pack his car and in the morning be gone, only to find out at work that his time with me would cost him even more than he thought.
My waitress came, asked if my salad was all right, and I said, no, it wasn’t: “It’s too green.” She was young, short and chunky with shoulder-length blond hair. And she looked like she was about to explain to me that guacamole has avocados in it which are green, but I cut her off and asked for another drink, thinking as she left with my salad that she’s green, she’s new to the world and it’s going to eat her. It eats everyone. I thought I was going to cry. I refused to. With my third margarita, she brought the check, a sign, I knew, for me not to bother ordering another one. I didn’t like getting the message like that. I sipped my drink, as iced and fruity as the first two, licking the rim, turning the glass till all the salt was gone, sw
allowing it, telling myself I wouldn’t be at the fish camp when he did come. The music stopped. I could hear the tink of someone’s silverware, the opening of the kitchen door. My face felt as soft as a clay doll’s. I wanted one more drink, but I knew it was no use to try and get another, that mall restaurants have three-drink ceilings for their customers because they think drunk people shoplift more or don’t shop enough or scare away real customers. Knowing this didn’t take away what I felt as I left my child waitress a good tip and stepped out into the main mall, looking for another restaurant, feeling watched, monitored.
The place was loud with voices, the ring of cash registers, different kinds of music coming from each shop—like it’s all a test to see how much you can take—teenage girls talking and giggling in twos and threes, their hair high, their nails flashing. I passed some in front of a CD shop and one of them glanced at me, then turned back to the huddle of her friends.
I stopped and stood still, my face warm. Other shoppers walked around me as I watched these girls, waited for any of them to look at me again, try and say something cute or even make a face. They were all copies of each other: they wore jeans three sizes too big, pastel Gap T-shirts tucked in loose or tight—to either show off their breasts or hide them—tacky leather pocketbooks over one shoulder, loose bracelets jangling on their wrists, their makeup too heavy. They all chewed gum, talking at once, oblivious to the thirty-six-year-old woman watching them, wanting, for a day anyway—no, for just this minute—to be them again, though I never had been in the first place. Not really. Not a girl with girlfriends. Now, twenty years later, I could be their mother. But I wasn’t anyone’s mother, or wife. I wasn’t a real girlfriend to anybody, or a friend; I was barely a sister, and whenever I thought of myself as a daughter my body felt too small and filthy to live in.