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’sgreen, 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, swallowing 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.
At the far end of the mall I wandered into an upscale pizzeria, sat in the back, and ordered a glass of white wine because they sold only that and beer. The lunch rush was over and just a few tables were taken up. The ceilings were low and the walls were covered with fake antiques: mirrors set in leather ox yokes, green-glass kerosene lamps, yellowed newsprint photos of strongmen, and wood carvings of Indians. It was quiet back here, dim and cool, no music, just the sound of the busboy still clearing the table. I smoked my cigarette, drank from my wine, and pretended to study the menu. When the waiter came for my order I smiled up at him, careful not to smile too hard, and tried to say very clearly, concentrating on not mumbling my words, “I don’t see anything I want. I’ll have another chardonnay, please.”
He took my order and menu without a word. I must’ve just sat there a little while because when he came back with my second glass of wine and a basket of sliced Italian bread I went to put out my last cigarette and saw it was a long ash on a filter between my fingers. I took a tight, ladylike sip of my new wine. I started to butter the bread I knew I wouldn’t eat. My head and face felt blended, one the other, this second evaporating into my skull and hair and today might as well be yesterday when I was a girl, nine or ten, and every Saturday my father would take me with him on his rounds to deliver linens to restaurants and butcher shops and nursing homes up and down old Route 1, me in the passenger seat of his brown van, him smoking a Garcia y Vega cigar, the radio tuned to a baseball game or to a station playing music from when he was younger, but to me he had always been old, a small quiet man with thick glasses and thin lips, his hands always busy, and mine too, the two of us pressing clean linens on the electric roller we had in the basement, me on a stool at the feed end of the rollers, Dad sitting at the catch end because he could fold faster and better than me and he’d taught me how to use the knee lever that would open the hot rollers so I could slide in the first tablecloth or apron or napkin, but after doing that he didn’t want me to use the lever again, didn’t want to have to slow down to set in each piece of linen, taught me instead to take the corners of the next piece and with my thumbs and forefingers hold it to the corners of the last piece being pulled slowly through so one rolled straight into the other and we worked “like Henry Ford,” and I kept burning my fingertips as I fed one piece of linen in after the next, but he seemed so content sitting on the other end of the roller from me, quiet but maybe proud he had such a useful daughter, that I never told him about my fingers because they seemed beside the point to me, and they always felt better when he’d buy me a cold Coke at one of the restaurants after and I’d put my fingers into the ice.
My wine was almost gone. My head and body were pulsing, and I lit a cigarette, held the lighted match close to my face, studied its flame, the blue and green sulfur colors at the base as it spread down the cardboard shaft. I watched it reach my fingertips, bumping up against flesh that wouldn’t burn, and I didn’t feel much and dropped it smoking onto the table, saw myself dropping one in the dry shrubs around my father’s house, the flames rising up to the windows. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. I saw my house burning to the ground, the flames eating everything inside, the Persian carpets and fancy furniture, the pictures of the bearded horsemen on the wall, the colonel and the Shah, even their family portrait, the fire so hot the glass would blacken and shatter and the beautiful daughter would curl up into a fine ash. But then I thought of Mrs. Bahroony, the weeping little Arab woman and her love of the Italian people, her ability to be at the same party as Sophia Loren; I didn’t want to hurt her,just everything she owned. I would have to find a way to get her out of the house before I burned it, the son too. A diversion maybe. A fire in the front yard. The bands in my stomach vibrated with this thought and I felt tickled by it, ready to laugh.
Soon, I was walking through all that bright noise into Sears, down the clean wide aisles past brand-new power tools and fishing gear, lawn mowers and lounge chairs, air filters and finally gasoline cans. I seemed to watch them from a distance, like I’d just been dropped off somewhere to run an errand for someone and I forgot what it was. There was a stack of them, five-gallon and made of tin, painted bright red with yellow stripes. They were beautiful in a way, and I thought how nice it must be for other people’s husbands to buy these, to fill them with gas for their lawn mowers on a Saturday morning. I thought of Lester’s house at Eureka Fields, the one I never found. Did he cut it himself? Was that part of his family life? Next to the gas cans were shelves of charcoal lighter and bags of charcoal. Should I buy some for the hibachi in the trunk? But after tonight, if even then, I knew the fish camp would be a memory, and so then what would I do? Spend months parking my car in rest areas, barbecuing my supper, looking for a safe place to sleep till Connie had settled the lawsuit with the county? Months? I picked up a gas can. It was light in my hand, only a reminder of what heavy could be.
The kid behind the counter asked if I needed a funnel.
“Nope,” I said, no longer caring if I sounded loaded or not. “Just a book of matches.”
And he smiled, this skinny-necked nineteen-year-old, like he knew firsthand the sort of problems solutions like this required, and out in the parking lot I carried my new gas can and saw the weather had changed to one of those West Coast fogs moving in from the beach, the sky gray, the air cooler, smelling like wet metal, though the cars were dry and the trunk lid of my Bonneville was still hot from sitting in the sun. I felt it against my palm as I steadied myself to unlock it, my gas can at my feet like a loyal dog, my face feeling strange, stuck in a smile that came from deep inside me. I was having a hard time sliding the key in. Cars were coming and going throughout the parking lot. I could hear the squeak of shopping-cart wheels over asphalt, somebody’s child crying far away. The trunk lock clicked, I stooped for the can, and there in my trunk next to Nick’s hibachi was Lester’s coiled black leather belt, the fine checks in the grip of his gun, the worn black of its holster, and it was like being eleven again, walking into my brother’s room for a pencil or pen, pulling open drawers and finding a color magazine of women sucking off men, when all the tiny currents open in you and they feel like evil and opportunity all at once, temptation and salvation, the cause and the cure, touch it, pick it up, take it away with you.