"My liver is not your problem! Get a goddamn job and then we'll talk about my issues!"
At eight years old, we were already trained to recognize the kind of night-time discussions Mom and Dad had that would fizzle into silence and the kind that would end up with the sharp hollow cracking of a window breaking and the high angry skid of a car pulling out of the driveway. That night the sounds from above were the latter. Without a word, Paul and I slipped off the bunk beds into our corduroy pants and shoes like firemen sliding into their overalls and boots at the sound of the alarm.
In the moonlight I could see our hotrod tracks on the stained yellow carpet. A daddy longlegs crawled across one track. The perpetually damp and moldy room attracted spiders. The first time we saw one, we cried for help from Dad. He promptly took down our pants and whipped our bare asses with an orange plastic racetrack in punishment for staying up after we were told to go to bed, so we quickly got over being scared of crawling things in the night.
Paul and I slipped out the window into the moonlight of the park. Crickets. Tall silhouettes of trees. The strong scent of damp bark. Cool moist air. A thin haze of fog translucent in the moonlight. An owl called in low encouraging hoots high above us in the eucalyptus trees. Berkeley Tilden Park was still. We could make our way to the Indian Caves and spend the night on the leafy bed. But on the other hand …
A single light was on in a shadowed house across the valley. This was the house of an older woman we knew as Sally. Sally knitted a lot, always toting a carpetbag full of brightly colored balls of string and long metal and wooden needles. Paul and I would see her at the bus stop knitting furiously, furrowing her brow beneath her glasses, a whirlwind of thoughts being contemplated. Like the Beached Whale, Sally was a large girl. In fact, Paul and I used to think of her when we watched Disney's Fantasia and the hippos in the tutus appeared. Sally walked delicately and preciously, doing her best not to cause ripples in the world. Cheerful, but shy. Friendly, but never presumptuous enough to expect friendliness in return.
We only knew Sally's name because when I was first learning to ride my black and silver Huffy dirt bike, I had reached a speed that caused me to freeze, unable to brake or steer. That's how I ended up with my face in a pile of bricks in front of Sally's house. Because my parents were in no condition to drive me to the hospital due to a bottle of rum they'd received from Dad's buddy Hank, Sally took me to get my forehead stitched. I was in such a bloody mess I didn't remember too much more about Sally, except that weeks later she gave me a heavy three-foot long red metal fire engine when she came by to see how I was healing. I had been pulling out confusing new blue and yellow stitches I'd discovered in my forehead. In her perky, upbeat high-pitched voice, Sally explained that all of us were made of blue and yellow thread like that throughout our bodies. If I pulled my threads out, nothing would hold my body together and I'd fall onto the floor in puddle of Jell-O. She smiled to let me know she was joshing me, and I giggled. I also stopped pulling out the stitches from my forehead.
Sally lived alone. As we approached her lit window in the dark, we saw that it was open, with gauzy white curtains parted slightly and undulating slowly in the light breeze. With the glee that we always got when we felt we were getting away with being naughty, we approached the window. We heard Johnny Carson and the laughter of a studio audience and saw the flickering of the television's cold blue light. This was disheartening. Spying on television watchers was as boring as watching a rock harden. But this did not deter us.
Juniper bushes were a mixed blessing. On one hand, they provided incredible covered passageways for us to get from one side of a yard to the other; on the other hand, they scratched and stung our skin a lot. Fifteen feet from the window under the branches of the bushes, we stopped as we heard the television get turned off. The light from a table lamp near the window filtered through the bushes like rays through lace. We cocked our ears, listening. We could hear the scraping of wood on wood, like a piece of furniture sliding on the floor, but that was all.
The black moist soil darkened our knees as we neared. Ten feet. Eight feet. Our hearts always beat delightfully fast as we neared a victim. We silenced our breathing as best we could. Even when a sharp protruding juniper root gouged into our thighs or forearms, drawing blood, we made no noise. Five feet. Two feet.
Crouched below the window, we slowly inched our way up the brown-shingled wall until we could peep through the window. The curtain swayed before our noses. Then we saw her.
Sally was standing on a pink crochet cushion atop a wooden chair beneath the beam that traversed the vaulted roof. Hanging from the beam was a colorful thick knitted rope fastened into a noose. We recognized the rope. We'd seen Sally knitting it for the last four weeks at the bus stop at the corner of Wild Cat Canyon Road and Woodhaven Road. We thought it was a thick scarf. Obviously we were wrong, for Sally was now inserting her head into a loop of the intricately detailed noose.
Paul then did something he never did. He betrayed us with a single utterance:
"Don't."
Not a scream. Not an exclamation. Just a soft mumble as if his inner-monologue had cautiously peeked its head out from the earth just to see if the coast was clear and then withdrew in a flash to safety.
"Don't."
Sally heard.
She turned her head toward the window, but not with any alarm or any hint of distress. Because the light was positioned between her and us, she couldn't see into the darkness where Paul and I crouched. Yet to this day I believe she knew-or sensed-exactly who was on other side of her windowsill. She'd probably known for years that Paul and I habitually spied on her, and she allowed us to believe we were always too clever to be noticed.
As she withdrew her head from the maroon, lime, and cobalt blue knitted noose, the expression on her face remained as calm as if all she'd chosen was raspberry jam over orange preserves. Sally stepped down from the chair and scraped it back under the dining room table, which housed her collection of empty, jewel-red, glass decanters. She took five dainty steps to the quilt-covered couch and exhaled slowly and fully, sinking deeply into the cushions. She turned the television on with the remote control. Johnny Carson. Studio audience laughter. Except for that one time on the chair, Sally never looked toward the window at all.
Wordlessly, Paul and I felt each other's desire to pull away from Sally's privacy. We walked along the side of the house rather than face the barbs of the juniper again, stealthily avoiding making any noise in the pebbled petunia garden. Sally's gauzy window light grew fainter and fainter. When we reached our side of the valley, the fog had grown thicker. We looked back across the distance and saw the faint dot of window light from Sally's house. The light flicked off.
Goodnight Sally.
It had gotten colder and damper. We snuck through the window to our basement bedroom. No sound came from Mom and Dad's room. I guess we were mistaken about the direction that night's discussion would take. Both cars were parked in front, no skid marks, no shattered bottles, no fuming mutterings. Two daddy longlegs traversed our orange hotrod track. I guess one had found a friend and invited it to come out and play. We crawled into the lower bunk together and watched the spiders dance until we finally fell asleep.
Would I have tried to save Sally as Paul did? I wasn't the one who uttered "Don't." I wasn't the one who saved her. But given another chance, would I? Or would I have preferred to witness the horrifying once-in-a-lifetime spectacle of the tutu hippo stretching the colorful knitted noose taut in a heavy, slow swing?
The Beached Whale's head collapsed on the pillow in sleep, and her bowl of popcorn slid off the couch and dropped to the floor, spilling yellow.
No, Johanna did not know this lady as I did.
But so what.
Johanna's point was she did not want to become the kind of New Yorker who fattened up on popcorn on a futon watching life through pixels, no matter what past experiences substantiated that kind of life. No matter where we'd been, we had choices to make now, and Johanna refused to allow herself to select the Beached Whale existence. She refused to allow me to select it either. How does one argue with that?
I could ignore all of Johanna's shortcomings and adjust to her evolution as a New York chick in the pursuit of what she called "having it all." I could authentically become a we for the first time since Paul and I wordlessly slipped out of each other's lives. I could have a beautiful woman to share the day's shit with as I donned the silk pajamas she would inevitably give me one Christmas day. I could clink a Pottery Barn porcelain plate of quiche Lorraine onto our marble kitchen island for her on Sunday morning as our own Perfect Little Hunter and Perfect Little Felicity ran around us in happy mindless frolic.