When the Loma Prieta quake struck, I was in the BART tunnel, underneath San Francisco Bay. The train stopped. The lights went out. I was alone in the dark with strangers. No one knew what to do. Nobody came.
Time passed. We decided to walk out. We didn't even know whether we were closer to Oakland or San Francisco. The only illumination was from emergency lights spaced so far apart that I had to walk into deep shadow from one before I reached the light of the next.
I can never ride the BART again. I feel that Mother Earth personally betrayed me.
âAnonymous, a very shy woman who suffers extreme claustrophobia, who, three days after the earthquake, found the courage to unburden her soul to a roomful of strangers
“GET IT OFF! GET IT OFF! GET IT OFF!” I SOBBED.
“Hold still, damn it!” Faye commanded. “A little soap will do it, but you have to quit thrashing!”
We were standing over the sink in the bathroom of her master bedroom suite, she holding my finger, the one with Ray's constrictive ring on it, under running water, and Iâwell, I was flailing. Out of control. Losing it.
I fought to hold my hand still while she soaped it. It took everything I had.
Gradually, Faye worked her fancy facial soap under the ring,
into the swelling that was causing the pain. She turned the ring, working the stone back to a position where it wasn't going to gouge my flesh as she worked the offending circlet of metal off my hand. “How'd he get it on there in the first place?” she asked, grunting slightly with the effort. “I mean, this must have been a humdinger of a struggle to get on.”
“It was cold out, and I hadn't worn my mittens,” I explained. “So my fingers had kind of shrunk. It went on easily enough, but then Iâwell, I had my hands balled up into fists trying to ⦠ah, deal with Ray, and then when I finally got out and, you know, made my excusesâshit, Faye, the guy had just asked me to marry him again! I couldn't just run away. I got into Jack's car and tried to get it off, but it wouldn't come. I started yanking at it, and ⦠the damned knuckle swelled up.”
“Well, what else do you need to know? I've never seen such a perfect metaphor for ambivalence when it comes to marriage.”
I started to cry again. “There's no way in
hell
I'm going to marry that guy!”
“That much is clear. But some little bitty part of you seems to be a-hangin' on, darlin'.” She regarded the ring. “Hmm. I could cut it.”
“Oh, that would go over nicely. I can just hear myself. âHere, Ray; here's your ring back. Sorry about the nicks I put in the diamond while I was breaking your symbolic circle with my trusty hacksaw.'”
Faye pursed her lips in appraisal. “I was thinking of tin snips. Hacksaw might take your hand with it. Hey! That's perfect! You can give him your hand in marriage, and keep the rest of you for you!”
I started to growl.
Faye looked me in the eye. “Now you're talking. That's wolf for âBack off.' It gets the message across nicely and gets that âscared woolly lamb' look out of your eyes. Let me get some ice.” She disappeared down the hall to the kitchen.
That left me staring at myself in the mirror, checking out the new, predatory Em Hansen. The effect seemed more lunatic than canid to me, but then, wolves have always been fond of howling at the moon.
The image of wolves in the high mountains in winter formed in my mind. Snow. Cold. Hunger. Resolve crumbled as I felt the frightened lamb underneath, saw her fear looking out through my eyes in the mirror.
I looked at the ring. Was Ray the hunter and I the hunted? How had he found me in the frozen landscape of my life?
As I asked the question, I saw its answer. He had followed the trail of my longing. My longing for stability, for family. For that elusive sense of fitting in and being part of what seemed normal. He had followed me as easily as a predator follows the blood of a wounded animal through the snow.
But was fitting in truly normal, or simply what most people do? Was I most people? Or was I born to a separate path, a life beyond the obvious?
Yes.
My challenge lay off that map, on a territory dimly lighted, and it was my job to break the darkness as best I could. Perhaps that would stop my bleeding.
Certainly it was time to quit whimpering and take the leap out of known territory.
In the mirror, I saw a new Em, a traveler in a land where anything was possible, even bliss.
Jack poked his nose around the corner. “Having trouble?” he inquired.
I smiled. “Got a ring stuck. They teach that in paramedic school?”
“Sit down on the floor. No, better yet, lie down. Now hold your arm up. Fingers straight.” He stepped around me, sat down on the toilet lid, and grasped my wrist, holding my arm at full stretch. “Relax,” he said. “Jack-o gonna make you a free woman again.”
“You were listening,” I said.
“It's my job,” he replied, his attention politely centered on my swollen digit. “Occupational hazard when it hurts peoples' feelings. Hmm, baby, you really done it to this one. I was wunnering what you was up to in the car. Looked like you was tryin' to open a bottle of champagne, only you didn't have no bottle.” He leaned forward and rubbed my hand up against his cheek.
I laughed hesitantly, choking on all the goo that was still sliding down the back of my throat from crying. With my right hand, I took a swipe at my nose.
“Use your sleeve,” Jack said. “It's much more absorbent.”
I began to see why Tom Latimer felt he could trust this guy with his life. He was like a sentinel at the gate, with a no-guff, nonchalant attitude.
Faye came back with a package of blue ice and began to pack it around my hand, which Jack had moved away from his face the moment he heard her coming.
A few minutes later, Jack had the ring off my finger, and I stood up and rinsed my hands. Faye cleaned the soap off the ring and took it out into her bedroom, where she found a velvet box to put it in so I could return it in style. She produced a jeweler's loupe from a drawer in her bureau. This, she put to the rejected bit of jewelry, taking its measure. “Good-enough quality,” she declared. “Modern cut, no family heirloom here, but at least Ray's no cheapskate. Waitâhold the phone.” She had turned the band, read the inside. “Oh, great. This has another woman's name in it. âLisa, love for eternity, Ray.' So he's into wash-and-wear engagement rings, is that it?”
I covered my face in embarrassment.
“You got any beers in your fridge?” Jack asked Faye, beating a well-timed retreat.
“You know the way,” she replied.
When he was out of earshot, I told Faye, “Lisa was his first wife. She died.” The words seeming to stick to my tongue like
lumps of dry plaster. “They're practical, these Mormons.”
“I wonder what Lisa was like,” Faye mused.
“Pretty,” I said. “I've seen pictures at Ava's house. Average height, brown hair, a little heavy through the thighs.”
“Like you.”
I turned away. “Let's talk about something else.”
“Like how you're going to give this back to him?”
“Parcel post,” I suggested, the image of the wolf reassembling in my mind. “Seems I can't communicate with this guy worth beans, so why make another scene? He'll just tell me I'm nuts and push it back on me.”
“He's that scared.”
“Scared?”
“Yeah, without you, how's he supposed to deal with that family of his?”
“No. No, you're not going to lay that on me. I am not Ray's savior. I was not put on this earth toâ”
“Seems like you've been doing a damned good job of it, though. He asks you to marry him the first time, and what do you do? You move here, set yourself up in an apartment, dodge his family when you can, take any number of knocks from them when you can't, and keep on bouncing back for more like one of those inflatable clowns with sand in the bottom. Then he gets to say to his mother, âAn heir? You want an heir? Hey, I got me a girlfriend right here, and just soon's she's ready, we's gonna cook y'all any number of heirs.'”
“That's crazy,” I said, but even as I said it, I saw that she was right. I was the impossible girlfriend. He could laugh with Jenna, whoop it up, have a fine old time, and risk nothing. I was the holdout, his safety gasket. By committing himself to me, he committed himself to nothing. “Perhaps he'd had too much put on him too early. I mean, his dad died when he was still a teenager, and
wham,
he was the man of the family. Then he marries Lisa when he's nineteen. And, well, I always had the impression he
liked her and everything, but that she was more like a pal. It was Ava who told them to get married.”
“Now you're making excuses for him,” Faye said.
I didn't reply. I was too busy trying to remember the new land I had glimpsed, the one where no blood left a trail through the snow.
“Come on, Em, time to cut the cord.”
Just then, we heard a car pull into the driveway. Faye stiffened. It was Tom.
I looked at her. “And what about you? What's
really
keeping you from marrying Tom?”
Faye's face went blank. Her mouth opened. Numbly, she said, “The minute I marry, my trust fund ends.”
“Matures?”
“No, ends. Kaput. End of cash flow. No more poor little rich girl.”
“But Tom has money! And you could get a real job.”
Faye's eyes were wide with fear. “IâIâit's not as simple as you think! Iâit's always been there. My grandfather set it up. Sexist bastard. The idea is I'm supposed marry rich. Someone like âus.' Discourage gold diggers. It's like a curse ⦠glue ⦠but I can't let go.”
“You could just live together!”
Faye began to claw at her face. “No! Not Tom! Haven't you noticed? He won't take a key to the house. He doesn't even keep a toothbrush here! He won't even put his fucking car into my garage, Em!”
I considered pointing out that he
had
put his fucking something into her something else, but figured that it wasn't the moment to help Faye get down on Tom. She was clearly terrified, and needed just the right kind of snap to send her flying beyond the gulf of fear that separated her from her lover.
We heard the sound of the doorbell, then footsteps as Jack crossed to the front door from the kitchen and opened it.
I said, “What does the money represent, Faye?”
“What do you mean?” she whimpered.
“It's not granddaddy that you're having trouble letting go of. Is it the security, or do you have that money confused with who you are?”
“I'm
scared,
Em! I don't want to go home, but neither can I throw away the key.”
I suddenly saw a Faye I had never met before. A little girl Faye, a ghost Faye, an angry little girl playing with the dolls at her grandparents' estate. She looked out at me through my friend's eyes and said,
This is the only place I'm happy, and I will not leave!
In that moment, I came to know the splintering of the soul that can happen when a family constrains a child from finding her true self. Faye couldn't let go of that trust because her family had buried her in it; a precious part of her had gotten caught in its amber. She had confused it with their love.
Speaking gently to that child, I said, “Perhaps if you give up this thing you can't live without, you'll find that it's precisely what's been keeping you from getting what you truly need.”
Faye's face crumpled into tears. “Maybe you should listen to yourself”
Tom appeared in the doorway, still wearing his heavy winter coat. He had an odd kind of smile on his faceâshy, hopeful, a little bit mischievous. He looked only at Faye. “Hi, love,” he said softly. “How you feeling?”
“Good enough,” she replied, quickly pulling herself as much together as she could get.
“Go for a walk?” he inquired.
Faye looked at me, then back at Tom. She raised her shoulders slightly and dropped them. In a tiny voice, she said, “Okay.”
He put a gloved hand on her elbow and led her down the hallway to the door. Faye put on her ski parka, gloves, and a fuzzy hat. As the two were heading out the door, Tom asked,
without even turning around to look at me, “Em, how far do I have to go to get past that debris flow?”
“Go uphill about a hundred yards, then contour across the slope until you run out of big rocks,” I said. “It's a conical thing, feeding out of that chute straight uphill from the house. But don't worry, it's not likely to move today. Ground's frozen. You're safe unless we get a big quake while you're up there.”