Widow's Dozen. Marek Waldorf
days. Recognizing the con didn’t matter. “I’ll let you know,” she said, lying next to me later, “if I decide it’s real and not something I’m mind-fucking myself about. Now if you’ll let me get some sleep . . .”
Michael and the entity Michael. The next morning, we talked about her last or last real boyfriend, Mike, and the entity Michael, a bitter angel hovering over our planet of tears, according to the earth channelers. “Tall, dark, and oafish” was how she described the former: “what more could a girl want?” Even though he was a control freak, a sadist, and a retroactive greaser, she’d stayed with him for three years—longer than anybody else, or than she’d ever want to again, she said—because of the coincidence of names, or so she believed. Michael and the entity Michael. It was something you could say over and over. He’d taught her things about herself and about sex, and where the two coincided, that she didn’t want to remember, at least not with me.
8
The lightweight pounding of the California surf over the yellow sand, pulling in, pushed back, the rubbing of two not totally incompatible surfaces against one another. Basically it was the sunlight, the oddly paramount light all day. The sky rustling up a cloud only to throw it far out over the ocean. A smog-blue suit. Their neighborhood consisted of hobbity homes buried in mineral-green hills and low cypress canopies: cottages resembling driftwood, immaculate white bungalows and rowdier structures feistily painted. But, basically, something felt “off.” The climate for one thing: like it had stalled thirty miles from tropical paradise. The smog and clammy belching of the ocean made the air sit heavy. As in much of Southern California, smoking became a joyless habit, pure need. Perdidas Lagoon was separated from the inland flats of Orange County—as paved-over and packed with strip malls and freeways and rivetingly ugly homes as any suburb I’d seen, and I thought myself an expert—by a chain of pockmarked hills. The corniche north led through a brief deserted stretch of cliff-top dunes, then ran into thickly posted traffic, signals, retail clutter. To convey small-town atmosphere, the council had provided for a “greeter” who wandered the central limits dispensing hippie homilies, daisies, and Cheetohs. The wrongness seemed to seep out from within. And the inhabitants . . . bumpkins with the manners of gods.
While big enough, the sole bathroom in the bungalow lay smack between the kitchen and her parents’ bedroom (since the divorce, a study) and separated from each by a flimsy sliding balsam door. Brigid had mentioned listening to both her parents’ noisy farting while growing up. In fact, her mom’s flatulence was a regular theme. But the total lack of privacy didn’t register until we went down to visit. There was the kitchen counter where her father would spend hours chopping, dicing, and mixing for the evening meal. There were cupboards stocked with pastas, grains, and spices from Trader Joe’s. And then, behind that nothing wall, was the toilet where the three of them did their business. I had a hard enough time pissing with her father audible at the cutting board, on the opposite side. The idea of pulling down my pants . . . no, no, it couldn’t be done. Narrow though it was, the kitchen was the hub of activity, and more inviting than the living room cramped with antiques and knickknacks. The tall shrubbery in the garden kept the sun off most windows, but it also blocked the breezes. Relatively cool, but also a bit stifling. Her room felt particularly stuffy—the few windows in it high and slim, and the sliding glass door typically locked.
At least ten months had passed since my two nights at her father’s house before I decided to draw from memory a floor plan. There were a number of sliding doors in the place. The bedroom was two steps above the living room. Inside a stand-alone glass display case on the landing between rooms sat an intricately detailed model of an early-nineteenth-century clipper ship three feet in length, with raked masts. It wasn’t a room that accommodated outsiders. The majority of the oil paintings and charcoal sketches on the walls were by her father’s grandfather, Impressionism stiffening into Fauvism. Over time the pigments had darkened to a creosote-type finish, including on Brigid’s favorite—the most cheerful of the lot—a cockatoo with paradisiacal plumage. Of course, I took note of the bookshelf, which contained the California legal codes in thick blue volumes, and an assortment of travel- and law-related nonfiction. Given its own place of pride on a slanted lectern was Channels of the Earth, a massive tome. Next to the bookshelf hung a pair of Balinese shadow puppets.
Part of what made the room feel so uninviting was the antique furniture. It looked too delicate to sit on. As an outsider myself, I had to wonder what Brigid felt her place to be in that room, what pride she could take from the family tradition which her father—the stepfather who’d adopted her, as I was sometimes in danger of forgetting—so lovingly detailed and preserved. Her biological father had died of alcohol poisoning in Baltimore years after her mom divorced him.
One of the first things I noticed was the name Nodabendon burnt into a piece of driftwood above the pi-shaped Japanese gate into their yard. I asked her more about her stepfather’s beliefs, many of which she’d been forced to share or contemplate while growing up. She remembered very little of it, but that meant nothing, she was never good when it came to remembering things. Her enthusiasm on the subject was genuine: unforced, if a bit starry-eyed. What I already knew was that they’d shared the shower, on and off, until she was nine, and that her first vibrator came from him. She called herself a daddy’s girl, and it was true. Throughout much of our five-month relationship, she was barely on speaking terms with her mom.
A short walk down the hill to a Safeway, an L-shaped annex, the back-bar the supermarket, and, on the side, three or four small shops, one of them a pizza parlor. Teens out front, caps turned back, skateboards flipped up. Across the four-lane coastal road, waist-high hedges effectively hid the ocean. The bushes and the streetlamps deflected any sense that one was up against—literally, feet from—a serious body of water. Crossing the road and wading through those low hedges, one felt the rush when a curtain was swept aside. The purple depths foamed up at spiny cliff tails. We could see for what seemed miles—watching the misdirected spotlights from helicopters swoop the erratic line of the washed-against land . . .
9
Back in the Tenderloin she pulled out a high-school yearbook, and I looked over her shoulder as she flipped pages. She pointed out guys she had dated, kissed or made out with, at least one (always an upperclassman) per page. At thirteen she lost her virginity—a one-night stand about which there was some confusion—to a boy who left for Mexico the next day. “He was Mexican?” “No—listen, can’t you keep up? He was travelling there over summer break.”
The following year she joined the cheerleading squad. That was one photo she tried unsuccessfully to skip past. The year of her first real coup, a three-month relationship with the senior on campus, who she clipped because he was “too boring.” The eight or so jocks, water polo players, surfers who followed left scribbles in memory, the kind one might jot beneath their predictable faces: “dork,” “reject,” “sleazy.” She quit cheerleading after four months.
Came a time of all-night partying—beer parties, pot, ’shrooms— . . . at one she burned the inside of her wrist with the lighted end of a cigarette. A dare. I see you, see? You first. Something of that ilk.
* * *
In tenth grade the best friend of her boyfriend of two weeks committed suicide. The circumstances were bizarre: he’d been fighting with his dad and stormed out of the house. Later, when he returned, he found the old man dead. But what the neighbors discovered days after were two bodies, the boy’s stiff between the toilet and the tub. And no note. In the winter of 1991 she fell for a skater punk who’d have sex only in his closet. It was hard not to get confused by her tales. She had a habit of coming flat-out with the most telling details, leaving the rest for rough imagining. When pressed further, her memory would dry up. She did tell me that if she were to have any regrets, it would have to be him, Eric, if only because things ended on a sour note. The details deserted her. She knew I was writing all this down. It had to be an experiment. Up until then she’d had trouble keeping the novelty intact, and when the “rose-colored glasses” came off, the flaws stood out. A sentence she’d read past. Love, like all sentences, has its period: hence our little experiment. But she began to worry about getting a reputation. It would start with the other girls— she was sensitive to the way they