The Next(15)

"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.