Authors: Beth Gutcheon
290 / Beth Gutcheon
apricot-colored cocker spaniel-poodle mix whose owner had died of AIDS.
This morning, before the center opened, she had to take all her plastic pails of used needles back to her supplier for disposal and pick up the week’s supply of fresh needles and pails. Her being able to get there and back was a matter of uncertainty. Her car, a 1972
Dodge Dart, was showing signs of terminal illness. She had bought it at a police auction, one of those deals where you have to make a decision based on what the car looks like from the outside. Always a chance you’ll open the hood and find out there wasn’t any engine.
She called the car Patty Hearst, since she figured it had been kidnapped and forced into a life of crime before the police got it. An ex-con friend had kept it running for her, but Dona knew that Patty was on borrowed time.
“Don’t fail me now, baby,” Dona said as she shrugged the car into a parking spot a block from home. “This would not be the week for it.” She never knew when she switched off the ignition if she was ever going to hear the sound of that engine again.
She stopped at the bagel shop on the corner and bought a double latte and a bialy to go.
“How you doin’, D?” asked the counterman as he counted out her change.
“I’m sick to death of this rain,” she said.
“Tell me about it. I got water in the basement, I can’t go down there without hip boots.”
“I’ve got a leak in my roof, back in the back. But it could be worse; where it’s coming in is into the shower. The luck of the Irish,” she added, and they both laughed. Dona might have had some Irish blood, but if she did, it was not dominant.
There was a clean-cut guy waiting for her on the sidewalk when she got to her door. She was carrying her sack from the bagel shop and a big plastic bag of the needle pails. The needles themselves were locked in the trunk of Patty Hearst. She’d bring them in when she had somebody large and frightening with her to watch her back.
The clean guy was Chinese. They got some clients who came from
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the suburbs in limousines for the needles, so his fairly expensive clothes didn’t surprise her. She didn’t ask. She just handed him her bags to hold while she dug in her pockets for her keys. He followed her into the center. She didn’t bother to keep him in front of her. If she were going to be robbed and killed for a bialy and a latte, then fuck it. Enough was enough.
“Not officially open yet,” she said as she moved around the room turning on lights. “But you’re welcome to take a seat.”
She gathered up last night’s detritus, soda cans and candy wrap-pers and greasy waxed paper with cold husks of pizza slices sitting on desks and counters. She disappeared into the back to get some trash bags, then emptied all the wastebaskets.
Finally, she sat down at one of the desks and opened her brown bag.
“Can’t stand to eat lookin’ at a garbage dump,” she said. “I got a double coffee. You want some?”
“That would be nice,” said the man.
“Clean mugs on the wall.” She gestured to a row of wooden pegs from which hung mugs with all kinds of insignia, from “49ers” to Far Side cartoons. The man brought a mug to the desk; she poured half her coffee into it and gave it back to him.
“You using?” she asked him.
“No.”
She leaned around the desk and looked at his shoes.
“You’re not the police, are you?”
“No.”
“FBI?”
“No.”
“IRS?”
He finally smiled. “No.”
“Good. ’Cause if this country needs tax money from
me
, we’re in big trouble. I got to get to work in a minute. Is there something I can do for you?”
“Do you mind if I ask you a question or two?”
“Oh. You the press?”
292 / Beth Gutcheon
“No.”
“I’m running out of guesses, here.”
“Sorry.”
There was a brief silence.
“Well, go ahead. I guess I don’t need to know who you are to answer questions.”
“Why do you do this?”
She leaned back in her chair and looked at him.
Not
the press?
Then what?
“You want the ten-cent answer or the five-dollar answer?”
The Chinese man was thoughtful.
“Five-dollar, please.”
She took a breath. “Okay. When I was in jail, we used to have people come in and try to give us church services. Are you Christian?”
“No,” he said, “I’m Jewish.”
Surprised, she let out a belt of laughter.
“Funny, you don’t…never mind.”
The man smiled anyway, but offered no explanation.
“Well, I wasn’t Christian. I had been to church with my sister when I was a kid, but the only power I’d found up to then that was greater than me was delivered through a needle.”
The man nodded.
“In jail on Saturday mornings these people would show up in the dayroom, where half the sisters are watching
Soul Train
, and five of them are talking on the pay phones, and half a dozen are riding away, on these exercise bikes?” She lifted her feet and pretended to pedal. “Pumping away to nowhere, man, you know? The racket was awful. So in would come these people, and they couldn’t set up chairs ’cause we didn’t have chairs, we had benches attached to tables ’cause if you have chairs you can hit each other with them.
So these people have to get the sisters to stop reading comics and writing letters and get up, so they can make a circle with the tables and benches. I thought it was a scream.
“And every week the Catholics would join in, but most of them didn’t speak English, and a couple of my cell mates, meanest pair of
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bitches I ever met, one was a murderer, man, she always went because she liked to sing. ‘Amazing Grace,’ eleven verses, she sounded like Della Reese, but she was a
monster
. There we’d all be holding hands, and these terrified amateurs from one church or another would be trying to lead us in prayer?
“I started to go when the Episcopalians showed up, because when they do Communion, they do real wine. You with me? Then an interesting thing happened.
“Here’s what it was. We were standing in a circle holding hands, waiting for the wine. And the leader says, ‘We going to go in a circle and say a prayer, say whatever you want, and when you’re done, squeeze the hand of the person on your right.’
“So I think this will be good. ‘Please, God, help me make bail so I can get out of here and kill the motherfucker who gave me up,’
that kind of thing. But no. Every one of those women—every one—and this was a group of the sorriest, most fucked-up, forgotten, betrayed, ashamed, guilty bunch of cows you ever saw—everyone of them said, ‘Thank you. Thank you, God, for the love of my mother, thank you for the sister who’s taking care of my babies, thank you for forgiving me, lord, thank you for my health, my peace, my future, your love.’ And when the person beside me squeezed my hand I started to cry. It was as if all my life I’d been looking at people as if I could see them, you know? As if I could judge what they deserved. And all of a sudden I heard the voices of women who didn’t feel judged that way. They felt seen by someone who didn’t judge.
“And I thought ‘I am never going to get clean because some people think I’m a shit criminal. But someone look at me and not judge me…someone say to me, ‘It’s your life. You do the best you can with it. If this is the best you can do, I just want you to have the chance to go your whole journey, whatever that is.’ Person say that to me and maybe behind that, I can save my own life.
“So that’s the story. You asked for the dime answer, I’d have told you that eighty percent of new AIDS cases come from sharing needles, and no one deserves to die like that no matter what they’ve done.”
“Thank you.”
294 / Beth Gutcheon
“That what you came for? I’m afraid the paying guests are here.”
She waved her hand toward the window where at street level you could see a row of legs belonging to people lined up outside the door. Just then the door opened, and then closed again, and a handsome young man carrying a medical bag came in with a middle-aged woman. They were chatting in Spanish.
Dona got up and threw her coffee cup in the trash. She held out her hand for the Chinese man’s empty coffee mug.
He took an envelope from his pocket and said, “May I leave this for you?”
“Sure, thank you,” she said, and dropped it into a desk drawer.
She assumed it was some kind of tract, or possibly a misguided sales pitch. It was not until the next morning, when she was searching for rubber bands, that she opened the envelope and found a check made out to the center for $75,000.
A
s the campaign approached the Idaho primary, and their workdays grew longer and longer, Laurie’s team found it increasingly hard to wind down and go home at night. Often Amy and Walter would drift into Lynn Urbanski’s office at the end of the evening to smoke cigarettes and gossip. Lynn, a small barrel-shaped woman from Mississippi, kept a supply of red wine “for medicinal purposes”; Walter would touch Amy on the shoulder as he headed for Lynn’s office. “Time to visit the doctor.” When the door was closed, and Lynn unbuttoned her waistband and Walter put his feet on the desk, they talked about anything in the world that would make them laugh. Amy told stories about Noah’s self-importance she had never expected to tell anyone. Lynn did imitations of her dotty Bourbon-swilling parents, and Walter talked with gentle self-mockery about what he referred to as his tragic love life. “I don’t blame women for dumping me,” he’d say earnestly. “I’m impossible.” He would promise to call and never do it. He forgot their birthdays. One lady friend gave a surprise party for him when he turned forty; the guests kept being crowded into closets every time the doorbell rang, expecting to leap out and surprise him. He was working on the San Francisco mayoral campaign and never showed up. He also, of course, talked about his hilarious mother and about the Strouses. Amy was privately developing the most unseemly crush on Walter, so by the time the L.A. fund-raiser rolled around, she was greatly looking forward to actually meeting his step-sister, the famous Eloise.
295
296 / Beth Gutcheon
Amy paid off her taxi and stood on the Beverly Hills sidewalk for a minute, taking in the street of enormous houses and the April air, gorgeously soft on her skin after the long Idaho winter. She felt as if she’d arrived on a new planet. Housing in Boise was rarely merry, while here in the sunny south Eloise Strouse’s house sported a couple of turrets and a curving shingled roof like a Bavarian cottage. It looked as if it were designed for Donald Trump by Hansel and Gretel. As Amy started up the walkway, the front door was opened by a thin blonde with a slight overbite and a lot of gold jewelry clanking on her arms, as if she were usually shackled to some gilded wall.
“Amy?” Eloise said timidly.
“I’m so glad to finally meet you.” Amy shook the offered hand.
“What an amazing house. This will be perfect.” She had walked into the broad front hall.
Eloise was in a panic about the fund-raiser. For weeks she had been convinced that the fancy guests would sneer behind her back at her decorating scheme, eat her food, and exit laughing, having seen her for the frantic, empty, underemployed twerp she feared she was. She watched anxiously as Amy settled into the den, creating a command post.
Amy hadn’t been in town for more than an hour before Annelise Jones, the famous but very secretive L.A. party guru, appeared at Eloise’s doorstep and swept Amy into an embrace. Before another hour had passed, Amy and Annelise had finished the seating plan for the dinner, deftly avoiding such pitfalls as placing the head of Business Affairs at a major studio beside the Academy Award-winning film editor who was having a lesbian affair with his wife.
“He’s the only one in the whole town who doesn’t know about it, poor lamb. His wife ‘shared’ while she was at Betty Ford. No one wants to spoil his happiness; he thinks her depression has finally lifted because of the detox.” Eloise could think of about four people she couldn’t wait to tell.
“Where are we putting the wife?”
Annelise studied the seating chart and chose a spot.
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“Oh, here, no…no, you can’t put Joe Keller beside Mariko—Mariko’s husband did Joe’s eyes.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“He smoothed out all the wrinkles underneath, the fool, instead of just doing the lid tuck. You can’t do that with a man, they come out looking like hermaphrodites.”
“Really?”
“Wait till you see him. The rest of this looks pretty good. Oh, Georgette Reuther is coming? How did you pull that off?”
“She’s a big fan of Senator Lorenz.”
“She
must
be. Georgette never goes out at night.” Then Amy and Annelise toured the kitchen, talked through the menu and the wines, and discussed how to position Laurie and the senator for the after-dinner talk.
“The front salon, definitely. Bring those two big chairs from the front hall and put them in front of the piano. Put the guests in semicircles around them, and close the doors.
“But then the waiters won’t be able to serve liqueurs,” said Eloise.
“Nobody drinks liqueurs.”
“But you have to serve them.”
“There’s room for a portable bar there in the corner—get rid of that credenza thing. Closing the doors will make it feel intimate and secret.”
Amy had had an idea that Annelise thought was genius: the invitation had read “Come to an Off-the-Record Dinner—Senator Judith Lorenz, honored guest.” Instead of using the event to create media hoopla, they had defined it as off limits to the press. Since people who already live in safe neighborhoods and have enough to eat love being in on secrets with celebrities more than almost anything else, the party had sold out immediately.
Eloise was disappointed about the press, having hoped that her name would be in bold type in the society column, and miffed about the “credenza thing,” which she had chosen herself and bought at huge expense against the advice of her decorator. But she was having a good time. The more she followed Amy around, the more she wanted