Some days she took BART into San Francisco and hiked the windy streets there, panting at the top of each steep block and tasting the salt in the air. There wasn’t much to see. It was more the bracing sense of hurry she liked to feel, the wealth and coldness, knowing she would only be feeling it for a little while. Street life in the big city was much less ironic than in Berkeley. Once near the Haight she came face to face with a group of girls, her age or younger, runaways with a hard, self-reliant glint. Their experience was not that far removed from hers, she realized; but the notion that she had anything in common with them, not an altogether welcome notion to begin with, was killed by the glare they gave her when they decided she had been looking at them too long.
Thanksgiving came; two of the housemates went home for the five-day school break, but that left seven of them, with a faded thrift-shop tablecloth thrown over the same table they ate at every night. None of them really knew how to cook but they threw themselves into it with a slightly hysterical glee, cooking a turkey in the oven whose thermometer was always broken, trying to re-create from a kind of sense memory various side dishes they remembered from their childhoods — creamed onions, candied yams, Roquefort string beans — with no access to any recipe and no reasonable prospect of calling their former homes for the secret. Molly made a Yorkshire pudding which failed to rise in the temperamental oven but tasted all right anyway with enough gravy. They screamed like children as they cooked, and even with a few dishes which turned out so badly they had to go straight into the garbage uneaten, there was still twice as much food as they needed. It seemed like a perfect opportunity to demonstrate for each other the reality of their own constitution as a family. Richard said grace, and it went on for almost three minutes, with plenty of murmured “amens” from the others; Molly, head down, eyes closed, holding Sally’s hand on one side and her brother’s on the other, didn’t mind it at all this time.
Christmas was going to be harder to manage. The house and the city would empty out to a much greater degree, and her sense of her own marginality would be heightened.
Molly had lost fifteen pounds in her months there, without intending to. It wasn’t a matter of poverty. Living away from home simply meant a different relationship to food; meals came not according to relentless schedule but only when you felt hungry enough to get up and do something about it.
She stood up from her table at the Soup Kitchen, late one morning in December, and fainted on to the floor. She came to after a few seconds with a cook wearing a filthy apron and a hairnet gingerly lifting her arms over her head. The waitress put a paper napkin to Molly’s brow and when she pulled it back Molly saw it was saturated with blood.
“You need to get this looked at,” the waitress said. “What happened to you? Did you just stand up too fast or something?” She was probably a student herself, Molly thought, working her way through college, toward whatever was on the other side of college, her hair in a clean ponytail. Molly wanted to go home with her.
“I guess that’s it,” Molly said, though that wasn’t it; she didn’t want to let on that she was at the point of tears herself.
“Do you think you can get to UHS?”
University Health Services.
“I’m not a student,” Molly said, taking the handful of balled-up napkins the cook held out to her, apologetically handing him the old, blood-soaked ones. Her head was throbbing.
She started to feel dizzy again. The cook and the waitress exchanged a look.
The cook, who was almost off his shift anyway, wound up driving her to the free clinic in Oakland, about twenty minutes away. She did her best to keep her blood off the upholstery of his battered car. This was her first impulse, to gather up any evidence that anything had happened to her at all. He offered halfheartedly to wait with her; she thanked him profusely for the ride and he drove away.
Inside the waiting room, where she would spend the next two hours, Molly got a clear picture of her situation, a picture made clearer — the ways dreams are sometimes startlingly clear — by the feverish wooziness that came over her in waves even after she was certain the bleeding had stopped. Twenty-one people waited ahead of her, or approximately one for each of the turquoise molded-plastic chairs ranged in immovable rows before the receptionist’s empty window. They were people for whom waiting was obviously a condition of life; apart from two children who noisily passed a Cabbage Patch doll back and forth across their mother’s motionless lap, the place was deathly silent. Even the two men who were clearly deranged did little to disturb the atmosphere of timelessness, mumbling quietly, directing their animated gestures to the air. And the smelclass="underline" alcohol and disinfectant and some other familiar smell like wet wool weaving in and out through the frank human stench. Each person’s complaint was invisible to the disinterested; Molly was the only one there actually bleeding. No one took any special notice of her, though, and she waited for her turn.
The doctor was Malaysian, and he was the unfriendliest medical professional Molly had ever encountered: not simply brusque or overtired but outright hostile, seemingly adrenalized by sarcasm. He sewed five stitches into her head and told her that she was seriously anemic. She needed to eat more, he said, and on top of that to take some sort of iron supplement, at least for a month. He said these things in a spirit of self-justification; it was clear he didn’t expect his instructions to be followed, nor did he care if they were. The stitches were the dissolving kind, he said; no need for him to see her again.
Molly was all the way out to the parking lot before it occurred to her that she had no way to get back to Berkeley. She wasn’t even really sure where she was. She didn’t have enough money for a cab; the only thing to do was to call the house and have someone come over in the van, but even if someone was home, and the van happened to be there, how could she provide directions so that she could be found? In her pocket she found change for a phone call; the coins, somehow, had blood on them. She caught sight of a phone booth on the sidewalk a few hundred yards away, but when she reached it she saw it had been stripped, down to the colored wires. No other phones in sight. Molly walked back to the clinic, stuck her head through the window and asked if she could use their phone to call for a ride. The receptionist banged the phone down in front of her without a word.
No one was home.
It was cold and sunny, the sky a cloudless icy blue. Molly went back out to the parking lot, sat on the rear fender of a nice car that must have belonged to one of the doctors, and cried. She cried forcefully, looking at the pavement, her head pounding, for fifteen minutes or so. Then she stood and returned to the clinic waiting room and asked the broad woman with the two children for directions to a bus stop. The first bus she got on took her in the wrong direction, but the driver told her where the transfer point was for a bus back to Berkeley. She got off at Shattuck Avenue, and by the time she made it back to the house on foot it was well after dark.
Everyone fussed over her when she came in, standing up from their chairs, bursting out of their rooms, helping Molly on to the couch, and she let them do it. Richard even led them in a prayer. Molly took four aspirin and went to bed early. She wasn’t sure how late it was when Sally came into their room, undressed quietly, and got into Molly’s bed, folding her knees behind Molly’s and lightly draping one arm around her stomach, just above the curve of her hip. Molly was amazed but still too exhausted to let it keep her awake for long. Nothing happened; they lay there like an old married couple. In the morning when Molly woke Sally was gone.