I started to blow-dry my hair, which had grown out past my shoulders the way it hadn’t been since I was nineteen and married to Donnie, my first cokestorm, my period late, and we both told ourselves we weren’t ready and he drove me to the clinic in Brookline and the whole family found out. Dad had never really looked right at me anyway, but then he stopped doing it at all, would only give me his quiet profile, usually in his recliner in front of the TV. And Ma started giving me that look, her eyes locking in on me dark and flat, like I was something from her bad dreams that kept showing up in her day life, in her home, and just who did I think I was?
I went through my suitcase for the least wrinkled clothes there, which was a new pair of jeans and a white blouse with horizontal pleats in the front. Just before I left I thumbed some blush onto my cheeks that were pale from no sleep. My eyes looked sunken and I brought them out with black eyeliner.
The Legal Aid office was in the Mission District in San Francisco. I had to drive around the block a few times before I saw the window sign on the second floor of a building on 16th and Valencia. It was above one of those New Age coffee shops this city is full of, the Café Amaro. It was a half hour before lunch and all the small tables were full of west coast men and women eating food like tabouleh salads and miso spread on sesame crackers, the men skinny and clean-shaven, a lot of them with ponytails, but I was really seeing only the women as I went by, their unmade-up look, their long thick hair tied up in back with more hair, their colorful T-shirts, their breasts small, or else hanging long and heavy underneath the cotton they probably only bought from catalogs. They had handmade jewelry hanging off their ears, around their necks and on their wrists. They wore shorts or homemade skirts or loose jeans and there wasn’t a painted finger or eyelash or lip on any of them. Some of the women glanced up at me, then looked back down again, not really interested after all, and I was back in high school walking down a hallway crowded with the girls in clubs and organized activities I wasn’t interested in but felt left out anyway, my face a doughy mask.
The receptionist upstairs had the same soft voice as the man I talked to on the phone. He wore jeans and a bright aqua silk shirt. He was my age, thirty-five or-six, and when he stood to greet me he smiled and said his name was Gary, then handed me a clipboard with a form to fill out. There was no one else in the waiting room. On the walls were posters of women’s movement marches, announcements for lesbian poetry readings, boycotts of fruit and vegetable farms in the state.
After I filled out the personal information sheet, including my income and how I made it, the receptionist led me to a corner conference room that was small but full of daylight from all the tall windows that faced the street below. He offered me bottled water, herbal tea, or coffee. I told him I’d take as much coffee as he had, and I laughed, but I wasn’t feeling funny; really, I felt like an old magazine somebody finds wedged under a chair cushion, and I knew that’s where I wanted to be, under a huge cushion somewhere, curled up cool and private, to sleep a long time.
AFTER LEGAL AID, I made the mistake of taking a nap at the motel. When I woke up the room was dark and there was talking and laughing coming from nearby. The air smelled like cigarette smoke, and I didn’t know where I was. Then an eighteen-wheeler started up outside, its driver revving it until something metal began to rattle. I switched on the bedside lamp and read my watch: almost nine. I lay back down and took a deep breath that made me shudder, but I refused to cry. I concentrated on a brown water stain on the ceiling, and listened to the early drinking crowd at the truck-stop bar next door, and remembered the spring before last, when both our families gave us a going-away party at my brother’s house in East Boston. Frank had taken the afternoon off from his car dealership in Revere, and he was still dressed in a gray double-breasted suit with a loud silk tie. He was big and handsome, his black hair moussed back. There were forty or fifty people there, just relatives and in-laws, and they filled all three floors of my brother’s house. It was a party with no cocktails or beer—my mother-in-law, mother, and aunts made sure of that—not even red wine to go with the veal and sausages and spaghetti. Most of the older women stayed in the kitchen, where they warmed the food and kept telling each other the right way to cook. All the little kids were on the first floor, where the Ping-Pong table and dartboard were, and because it was a Saturday in March, most of the uncles and guy cousins sat in the family room watching basketball on Frank’s wide-screen TV. One or two were out on the second-floor deck with Nick, wanting to hear about the new job. I was standing in the doorway of the kitchen with Jeannie, sipping a coffee before dinner, my eyes on Nick out on the deck. I could see the huge Mystic Bridge behind him, the gray clouds, the skyscrapers of Boston. We were a few days from spring and it was warm enough that I didn’t wear a coat. My new husband was standing there in a bright yellow cashmere sweater and black jeans, smoking a cigarette and flicking the ash into his Coke can. He was nodding his head at something one of his cousins was saying, and I felt so much love for him right then my eyes filled up and Jeannie put her hand on my arm and asked what’s wrong, K? What’s the matter?
Later, Frank led everyone out of the house to the driveway and the shiny red Bonneville. There was a wide white ribbon running from the front bumper over the roof and into the trunk. And somebody had taped to the driver’s window a huge card both families had signed, though I knew the car was from Frank, a low-mileage sales bonus he usually took for himself but this year gave to us. One of the uncles videotaped us climbing inside, then backing out for a test drive. We didn’t want a big American car, though; we were planning to buy something small. But on the drive west we kept it on cruise control the whole way and steered with two fingers. When we weren’t talking, we stretched out and played cassettes till one of us needed to crawl into the backseat and lie on the maroon upholstery with a pillow and blanket and go to sleep.
I got up off the motel bed and washed my face with cold water and soap in the bathroom. I had cried more in the last eight months than in the rest of my life and I had to stop it because it seemed like the more I cried the less I did to change things, or to even avoid the shit coming at me. My new lawyer couldn’t quite understand that, why I threw away all that mail from the county tax office without opening it. I liked her right away, I think because she wasn’t wearing any shoes, just round glasses, a white blouse, and gray slacks over bare feet. She poured herself a cup of coffee, then sat down a chair away from me with her legal pad and pencil. She asked me to tell her everything, which I did, including that I already went to the county tax office in Redwood City and signed a statement saying we’d never run a business from our house, so why the five-hundred-thirty-dollar business tax?
“Five hundred dollars? They evicted you from your house for that?”
“You got it.” I lit a cigarette, enjoying my lawyer’s shock at this. She asked where my husband and I were staying, and I looked down at the table, at a worm of a cigarette burn. “He’s not in the picture anymore.” I reached for a seashell ashtray. “I’m booked in a motel in San Bruno.”
She paused a second and made a straight line with her lips like she was sorry to hear that. Then she asked me a bunch of questions about my inherited ownership. Was there a devise in my father’s will? Was it completely paid for? Who was the bank? Do you have a copy of your signed statement to the county tax office? That’s what she wanted more than anything, and I said I could get one to her, though I had no idea where it was. After all her questions she stood and took off her glasses and smiled. “First thing we have to do is keep them from selling your home. Then we get it back. And they can pay your motel bill, too.” She checked the form I’d filled out to make sure she had my room number, then she shook my hand and said not to worry, call her tomorrow late afternoon.