At the checkout there was a wrinkled woman in a green smock manipulating an ancient cash register. Her hair had the pink glow of a home-brewed dye job. Her eyes peered through bifocals at John's pile of groceries.
“Having a party?” she asked.
“No,” John answered, riding the consumer high. “It's all for me.”
“Lotta food there,” the woman observed, bagging the supplies.
“I get hungry,” John replied. “Three times a day, at least.”
“You ain't the Squirrel Lady's grandson, are ya?” the woman squinted over the top of her glasses.
“Yes, I am,” John admitted.
“Ain't that somethin'?” the woman said, like someone had told her that with a good pot of beans, you never added bacon. “Even the devil's got relatives, I suppose.”
“That's right,” John said, trying to be agreeable, but wondering what the people here had expected. He was Edna Gibson's grandson, not Josef Mengele's clone.
Before he could give the matter more thought, he was outside stuffing his groceries into the Datsun. He heard a car horn and an orange Pacer approached the market looking like something conceived by minds in Michigan overwhelmed by Japanese efficiency. In an effort to cover up their mistake, bumper stickers had been plastered on bumper stickers; “One nuclear bomb could ruin your whole day,” “Greenpeace,” “Skateboarding is not a crime,” “Mondale/Ferraro 84,” “Carter 76,” “Have a nice day,” “Honk if you're Jesus!” The car gave the impression that if someone were to scrape off the bumper stickers, there would be nothing left but a giant fishbowl. It rolled to a stop in front of John. He heard a grunt of physical effort. The driver's side door opened and the car's frame lifted another foot from the ground. Out stepped Pensive Prairie Sunset.
John had seen fatter women before, lying on hotel beaches, cellulite craters digesting sand, naked or with a bathing suit in there somewhere. But they all seemed to have been old. Pensive Prairie Sunset was young. He guessed late thirties as she waddled from the car, flesh rolling against flesh, breasts hanging to her beltline, calves like loaves of head cheese. Her dress defied any specific pattern or culture. It was a freak-show tent, catastrophic paisleys and mongoloid camels drowning in a purple ocean. Was it Indian? Hawaiian? French? He stopped counting chins when he ran out of fingers. She held out her arms for a hug.
John felt his cappuccino rising.
“I'm Pensive Prairie Sunset,” she said, as if it were a
reasonable enough excuse to embrace a stranger.
“I'm John Gibson,” he said, taking a step back.
“I figured,” she said, understanding, not forcing the hug. “Your energy resembles Edna's, but not as released. You also have the same nose. You must be an Aries.”
“I guess it runs in the family,” John said, unsure which statement he was commenting on.
“Not always,” she said. “Spirits circulate, kundalini rises and flows depending on your ability to breathe.”
Kundalini? John thought. Kumbaya.
“Edna and I spent six years together at the Radical Petunia Arts Community,” Pensive continued. “You've heard of Margaret Washington, haven't you? They made a fabulous movie of her book
Cecilia
. The Radical Petunia Arts Community is an extension of her creativity and her understanding of women's needs.”
“That sounds great,” John lied. “I'd like to go to a meeting some time.”
“You can't attend seminars, they're for women only,” Pensive said, adding, “I do abstract pottery.”
“I'm sorry,” John said, wondering if the ceramics he had trashed had been her work. “I had a long flight and I didn't sleep too well. I don't want to be rude, but could you please give me the keys to my grandmother's cabin?”
“Hey, I hear you,” Pensive said. “I know where you're coming from. You don't have to bombard me with half-truths. Be honest, it sets a good vibe. I know you were out last night and that's O.K., men are like that. But could you get past your needs for a moment? I have an inflamed sixth disc and I have to get some bulgur and mung beans down at the Boontberry, and I did come here with Edna's keys, so it would be nice if you could help me carry my groceries.”
John's head was throbbing, his car was blocked, the caffeine was gone, and the appropriate response of “fuck you” hadn't come fast enough. He found himself walking at Pensive's side, passing the Lodge with his head down.
Luckily, the Boontberry Health Food Store wasn't far. With the ringing of bells strapped to the door by strips of leather, they entered a shed loaded with wicker baskets containing a strange assortment of kiwis and gooseberries, string beans and red bananas, avocados and cucumbers. There was another room connected to
the main store, housing an old-fashioned glass-doored refrigerator, which held cheese, yogurt, tofu, brown eggs, and other perishables. A few hippies milled about barefoot. Pensive filled her hands with an array of edibles and ordered a burrito from the deli. The purchasing counter overflowed as she added to her booty, a mountain of health, on top of which she threw a loaf of Oat Bran Bruce Bread.
Stepping from the front door to the counter in two strides was a giant standing almost seven feet tall. He had a beard clumped into tufts by rubber bands and bushy eyebrows connected at an Arab's nose. His eyes were as dark and watchful as a raven's. John saw his hair had been braided into a ponytail that reached his butt, whose half-smile could be seen grinning from beneath the tie-dyed sarong slung over his shoulder. Holding a key tied to a plunger, he confronted an effeminate man who was minding the store.
“Here's the key to the bathroom, Garrett,” the giant said, with a trace of an Eastern European accent. “Tell your gerbil-jamming friends the gel works for extraction and with each dozen, I'll throw in a Grand Inquisitor.”
“Let's talk about that later,” Garrett said, eyes darting to see who was listening.
“I've got nothing to hide,” the giant replied. “This is business. I'd throw God off the Bay Bridge if he fucked with me on this one.”
“Let's just talk later,” Garrett urged.
“Remember how good that crystal meth was?” the giant demanded. “This is better. This is flesh and blood, something that can sink its teeth into you.”
“I'll come up and take a look,” Garrett promised, giving John an uncomfortable smile. “Now I have to help the customers.”
“I'm helping customers help themselves!” the giant yelled. “My system's so clean if you rubbed watermelon on my head, I could taste it.”
John was afraid the giant might try to prove it. He looked to Pensive who was holding a family pack of whole wheat fig bars. She didn't seem alarmed. The other hippies in the store didn't seem worried about the behemoth either, continuing to finger jicama roots and carob clusters. John pretended to be interested in the wheat germ bin, casually moving to the other side of Pensive.
“I'm like this,” the giant said, jumping back from the counter,
jerking his neck and writhing his body like a break-dancer. “I've been anointed as a seer. And you, Gay-rat, have a front row seat to the end of the world!”
The giant plunged his hand into Pensive's loaf of Bruce Bread, popping the plastic bag and squeezing the ten grain into a ball of dough. He held it above his head, almost touching the ceiling. Crumbs cascaded to the floor. Garrett flinched, ready to be assaulted. But the giant dropped the bread harmlessly. He looked at it on the ground for a moment as if he were reading tea leaves, then leaped a step and a half across the store, out the door. A bleary-eyed hippie poked his head from the dairy room, but seeing nothing, continued to shop. The others noticed nothing.
“How are we today, Pensive?” Garrett said, stepping around the counter, picking up the mess and selecting another loaf of bread for Pensive's pile.
“I'm fine,” she replied, John staying behind her, one eye on the door. “But it looks like Aslan's self-medicating again. I hope it's not a solstice-long experiment.”
“I try not to be judgmental,” Garrett said, returning to the register. He tabulated her foodstuffs, then asked, “Will that be all?”
Pensive said it was, producing a blank check from a pocket of her dress or maybe it came from a wrinkle in her flesh. John wasn't sure which.
“That will be $64.58, Pensive,” Garrett said.
But there was nowhere for her to fill out the check. The counter was covered by her bags. Without hesitating, Pensive took a pen from a plastic cup near the register, leaned back like she was looking into a telescope set up too close to her face, and wrote out the check using her right breast as a desk. She handed the check to Garrett who was as unimpressed with her ingenuity as he had been with the giant's outburst. Pensive scooped up the smallest sack, commanded John to take the others, and they were outside tramping back toward the Pacer. Not a giant in sight.
All right, John told himself, enough is enough. It's time to go home and stay there for a while, regroup, detox, sleep. I'll call Christina and make contact with Sarah sometime when I'm more myself.
But with a burst of doors, two men stumbled from the Lodge, one pursuing the other. At first, John thought one was the giant, but he could see they were regular-sized men, although one
was much huskier than the other.
“Shit, I was just jokin',” the smaller man said.
“Shut up!” the other told him.
“Sarah ain't even your wife no more,” the smaller man argued.
Wham! Crack of knuckles, spray of blood.
“You broke my nose!” the smaller man cried. “My fuckin' nose is broken!”
Wham! Head snapped back, animal grunt.
“My eye! Damn, Daryl, I can't see out of my eye!”
“Get the hell outta here before there ain't nothin' left of you to see,” Daryl warned.
The smaller man ran to his truck. Pensive kept walking, uninterested. John had stopped in his tracks. Daryl looked around the parking lot, mad-dog crazy. His eyes met John's.
“What are you lookin' at, yuppie?”
John was unable to move or look away. A grocery bag fell from his hands, a container of hummus rolling to Daryl's feet.
“Wait a minute!” Daryl's voice slammed John's head like a hand against a cigarette machine. “Don't move!”
John was stiff from fright.
“I know who you are!”
Please God, John thought, let it be quick.
“You're the Squirrel Boy!”
“B
usted flat in Baton Rouge⦔ Music radiated from the main house of the Waterfall commune, bending sound waves, shaking tree branches, scaring animals, sparking acid flashbacks, stirring bad blood, and waking Sarah, who was sleeping in her cabin on the other side of the woods, a quarter of a mile away.
Sarah pulled a pillow over her head, temples drumming beneath the grog and stink of dope and Jack Daniels. She knew Mom was blaring this shit. Nobody else at the commune was into Janis Joplin, not anymore. Too negative. Without a telephone this was Mom's way of reaching out and touching her, person-to-person.
No way, Sarah told herself, feeling half-alive and fully irritable, I'm not trudging up to the main house to listen to Mom in one of her dead feminist moods.
She flipped the pillow over, tugging it tightly to her ears and creating an air vent in the linen so she didn't smother. It occurred to her that mother was smother minus the
s
.
“I swear to God,” she grumbled, as the music continued, “if I have to get up, everybody in the main house is going to die.”
The main house was the karmic center of the Waterfall commune, where residents connected with their comrades or just vegged out and shuffled the tarot. It was where the community stored its harvested dope and the Bang and Olufsen, a stereo so sound-sensitive and powerful that you could rock out to “Woodstock” and, adjusting treble and bass, isolate the voice of the one guy who booed Hendrix. The other houses, hoagies, lean-tos, yurts, and teepees on the commune weren't wired for sound and didn't have trash bags of Mendo Mellow in their closets, ready
to shake and bake. Consequently, they were regarded as places of personal space. The main house was a place to “be.” Over the years, Sarah had observed that her comrades chose to “be” self-absorbed assholes. And Mom was obviously up there right now among the brethren, letting it all hang out.
Sarah had gone through enough of these scenarios to know the score. Mom was coming down from a binge of booze and pills, spiraling toward bottom, and she wanted Sarah to commiserate, reassure her that being a horrible mother and completely egocentric was O.K.; choosing this alternative lifestyle and including Sarah in it was the best reality any daughter could hope for. After all, life was unduly harsh and everybody knew Mom was trying her best. There was no reason to feel bad about anything. Sarah loved her, the past was the past, and tomorrow would work itself out. Every day was a rebirth. Mom needed validation. But there was certain music Sarah couldn't listen to anymore, not without reliving the memories, reopening sores linked to a time she still didn't understand. It was the music Mom always played too, Janis screaming, “Down on meeeeeee!”
Janis was a familiar reveille since before Sarah and her mother had moved to the Waterfall. Before they stopped believing in running water, flush toilets, voting, eating meat, table grapes, cooked food, and still went to church on Christmas Eve and Easter Sunday. Back when they were mainstream, living in a Victorian in San Francisco, and Sarah wore a plaid skirt to school each day. The last time she had felt like everybody else. Back when their karma was bad and she couldn't have told you what EST stood for. Before Mom became liberated. Before Dad split.
Sarah was born before the first ripple of the “no-fault divorce” wave that swelled in California and rolled into every state but Utah, spraying alimony settlements and a mist of visitation rights, leaving behind a foam of single-parent homes and cesspools of Saturday mornings waiting for Dad. And when he didn't come, Mom called that “irresponsible bastard” and told him, “Stop fucking that teenager and pick up your daughter!” Sarah was born June 11, 1964, the day Liz Taylor divorced Eddie Fisher and then ten days later married Richard Burton. For the first time.
Slamming the phone into its cradle after one of her verbal assaults on Dad, Mom would go for the records. No explanation, only records turned up two decibels past the point of distortion
on the lo-fi; Janis Joplin, Carole King, Carly Simon, Aretha Franklin, Pheobe Snow, Maria Muldaur, Rita Coolidge, Joan Baez. “The pseudo-feminists,” Dad called them. But at least the “pseudo-feminists” gave Sarah an idea how Mom was feeling, and, more importantly, how she was expected to react. “You've Got a Friend” meant give Mom a hug; “Think,” do a soul dance; “Mockingbird,” be funny, cheer Mom up; “Poetry Man,” be quiet, Mom was lamenting; “Midnight at the Oasis,” cry with her, Mom needed company. And “Down on Me” meant anything was possible, murder, suicide, spontaneous combustion. Sarah hated those “Down on Me Days,” feeling like she had to hold her breath and keep perfectly still or else the world was going to explode.
“Down on Me Days” could sneak up on you. They started normal enough, a bowl of granola, English muffins with organic peanut butter, a couple of well-stashed Pop-Tarts, and then into the living room to watch cartoons. On her way to the tube, Sarah would stop at the thermostat and fire it way up, ninety degrees, so she could sit on the air vent and get hothouse warm while her nightgown ballooned around her with each dusty blast of the furnace. Central heating. It was almost as good as one of Mom's hugs, except it turned the ferns brown in their macramé holders and really brought out that dirty shag carpeting smell. In between breakfast, cartoons, and the air vent, there was a jigsaw puzzle: 2,000 interlocking pieces of boats in Venice. She liked the boats, but hated doing the sky. Around 8:30, the narcotic glow of TV and search for edge would be interrupted. Whoever it was that had spent the night with Mom would be sneaking out, zipping up his pants. Sarah thought they all looked like John Davidson. Whenever they saw her, they felt obligated to take a seat on the sofa and watch about five minutes of “Banana Splits.”
“When I was your age, we didn't have all these cartoons and health foods,” they would say, inevitably. “I used to watch Howdy Doody and eat Cream of Wheat.”
“What's your point?” Sarah would ask, looking for an elusive piece of the docks.
“Nothing major,” they responded. “Things have changed since I was a kid.”
“Not men,” Sarah would say, finding the piece. “Not their attitude toward women. Not their macho bullshit.”
“Easy does it, huh?” J.D. would say. “How old are you anyway?”
“Old enough to know you're a butthole,” Sarah would reply. “And fucking my mother.”
That would end the whole getting-to-know-Greta's-kid thing. Even if this week's John Davidson could have rattled off a few advancements in man's recent evolution, they never did. Sarah thought they were too afraid she might cite them and their relationship with Mom as example number one in a lecture on “How Men Are Still Pricks.” There would be silence those next minutes, except for Hanna-Barbera's sound effects, which seemed appropriate for both the cartoons and the punch she had landed to John Davidson's pride.
During an advertisement for the Baby Thataway doll Sarah had wanted last year for her birthday, but never got, John Boy would rise from the sofa, saying, “Take care of your mama for me, until I get back.”
“Why don't you just not leave?” she would ask.
That stopped them in their Dingos.
For a moment, she almost expected an answer. Maybe they did too. At least a poster catchphrase, “Hang in there, baby,” or “Life's a bummer!” But then the door hinge squeaked, the screen door rattled, and John Davidson climbed into a sports car that never started on the first try.
“Butthole,” Sarah would say, not watching them leave.
She didn't need anyone telling her to take care of her mother. She knew she would have to do it, maybe for the rest of her life. But she got a break every other weekend, which included this one, because those were Dad's days. Sarah would be gathered up by her father, and for two days Dad became her responsibility. Which was fine, except it was a common catalyst for a “Down on Me Day.”
Dad liked to come at nine because he knew Mom would be asleep. Anything after ten was pushing it. Nine was best. That way they could avoid a scene until Dad dropped her off on Sunday, but a scene on Sunday was inevitable. Mom and her friends would be waiting, drinking carafes of Chablis, listening to Janis Joplin, and working themselves into a frenzy like high school boys in a Friday night parking lot.
“If they're so liberated,” Dad would mumble, pulling into the driveway, “why do they travel in packs?”
The weekends with Dad should have been great, Slurpees and museums. If Sarah could have vanished and materialized, used the
transport system they had on “Star Trek,” said, “Beam me home, Dad,” then everything would have been all right. Of course, she knew life didn't work that way. As a result, her stress level was high in the a.m. hours of the weekend, the pre-stereophonic prelude to a “Down on Me Day.” More often than not, Dad was late, oversleeping with girlfriends, picking up dry-cleaning, forgetting it was his weekend. Lame excuses. The exchange was rarely made without unpleasantries, crying jags, or tossed knickknacks. And Dad would ruin Sunday by doing a play-by-play of his inevitable fight with Mom. Like Sarah needed to go through the whole thing twice.
“You crazy bitch!” Dad would scream.
“You selfish bastard!” Mom would yell.
The argument wouldn't go anywhere. How could it? They were debating two separate points. It was becoming clear to Sarah that both of them were right too, Mom was a “crazy bitch” and Dad was a “selfish bastard.” But it didn't make the weekends any easier. The worst part of the fiasco was that it revolved around her. Sunday night at the fights began when Sarah tried to answer the unanswerable question Mom asked when Dad dropped her off. It was the bell that sounded the start of the main event: Pops the Punisher vs. the Maternal Masher. Fifteen rounds, no holds barred.
“Sarah, did you have a good time with your father?”
Ding ding.
If Sarah said yes, Mom freaked out. In her eyes, Sarah had sided with Dad. After everything Mom had sacrificed for her, Sarah had sold out. It was more important to have fun with her father than to remain vigilantly depressed on Mom's behalf. Right in front of her friends too.
“Why don't you go live with the son of a bitch then? I'll sweep in every blue moon to have fun. That's easy, anybody can do that. It's the rest of the job that's hard!”
And if Sarah said no, Mom would throw a shit fit. You had sided with
her
, giving her a license to lay into Dad on your behalf.
“I know you're a bastard, but I can't believe you can't show your own daughter a good time twice a month. All I've been hearing is âDad and me are gonna do this. Dad and me are gonna do that.' I didn't have the heart to tell her everything you've ever said was a lie. I kept it inside. I've been hurting inside. But I'm not letting you hurt my baby, you bastard! Not anymore! Not my baby!”
“We're behind you, Greta,” one of Mom's friends would say. “You're beautiful, woman. Let that silver-tongued devil know!”
Now Mom would let Dad have it for Sarah and herself, for her friends and all divorcees. For all women. And for the Movement.
That scene would happen soon enough, Sarah could wait. There would be another one occurring in a few minutes if Dad didn't arrive soon. She could hear Mom's waterbed sloshing. The clock shaped like a half-eaten cheeseburger sitting on the television said 11:15. Defcon four. Sarah could smell the melt-down, the husky-musky scent of Charlie and Tab cola. Mom appeared in the living room wearing only an Angela Davis-inspired Afro matted down on one side and puffed out on the other. Vagina proud. She held a pink can of soda in her hand with a cigarette between her fingers. The sight of Mom's breasts made Sarah uncomfortable. Before the liberation, she always wore a robe.
“So, that sonofabitch hasn't got around to picking you up yet?” Mom would ask.
The answer seemed obvious; Sarah was still there watching cartoons. If Dad had collected her, they would be at the Zoo eating pink popcorn or looking at the buffalo in Golden Gate Park. Sarah didn't say anything. She didn't think Mom wanted an answer. Lately, Mom asked a lot of questions she wasn't expected to answer.
“You gonna wait all day for that irresponsible bastard?” Mom said.
There was another one.
“Hon, let me tell you something,” she'd say, after taking a drag of her cigarette and depositing the butt in her Tab can. “Your father's never been there for you and he never will be. Let's face it, he divorced both of us. Look around, do you see him?”
That made three.
“He thinks he can send us a shitty check once a month and that's enough? Who buys your clothes? Who takes you to the emergency room when your ankle is broken? Who pays the bills? Cooks dinner? Cleans? Sweats blood and shows up to your school's open house when she's having a monster period and could have gone to the premiere of
Claudine
with a personal friend of Billy Graham's? Who? Huh?”
They were coming pretty fast.
“Not that good-for-nothing, womanizing, shit-fuck, lousy-lay of a man. Did I ever tell you I went two years without oral sex because I had a recurring yeast infection and he refused to go down on me. Like it was my fault! That bastard!”
On cue, Dad. His presence preceded him. Sarah didn't need to look through the window, hearing the sound of his car, motor purring like a cat stalking a bird and then fluttering as if that same bird were flying away. Sarah knew instinctively, working a strong sixth sense. But Mom did too.
“Here comes that rat-fuck now,” Mom would say, like that was the answer that filled in the blanks to all her previous questions.
Sarah had never thought of her father as a “rat-fuck,” although everything from shrink bills to broken refrigerator doors were routinely blamed on him and his absence. Dad was more a compilation of smells, Old Spice, the San Francisco Bay, sweaty jogging shoes. Charisma. The fast food they ate together not because they liked it, but because it wasn't allowed with Mom.