“Rachel? She was on the verge. She was morphing into River or Rainbow or something in secret. Preparing for her first commune. After Jerry, a sleeping bag and a candle was a good time.”
She remembers Clarissa’s mother as a woman sheathed in dark fabrics who sank into shadows, kept her back to the wall, found her own periphery, and rarely spoke. Jerry had pushed her out of a moving car. He kicked in her ribs and put her in a cast. Clarissa’s mother, a bruised woman in the process of metamorphosis. Yes, molting like the Hibiscus and Night Blooming Jasmine beside the alleys, sheathed in long skirts, shawls, and kimonos. She was younger than they are now.
Then Clarissa had a family of subtraction and she envied her. All the neighbors had incomplete families — the brothers in juvenile detention, the sisters who disappeared when they started to show. If Marvin stopped lingering, if he would just die, she could have a similar reduction. She could escape the stucco tenements with torn mesh screen doors and vacant lots behind cyclone fences. And the mothers and aunts who rode buses and worked as file clerks between nervous breakdowns. Even second-hand cars were an aberration. If she was placed in foster care, adoption might follow. She had straight A’s and she won the poetry and science competition. Maybe she could be given a new name with syllables that formed church steeples on your lips, like the women in books. She could be assigned a stay at home mother with a ruffled apron who baked cookies and called her Elizabeth, Margaret or Christine.
“Did you realize we were Jewish?” she suddenly wonders.
“I never revealed that. The hillbillies thought we were Christ killers and owned all the banks,” Clarissa tells her. “And Jerry said they’d deport us. Send us back to Poland.”
“I wanted a bat mitzvah,” she remembers. “Marvin said, ‘You mean a Jew thing? It costs a fortune to get into that club. They inspect you first. You have to shave your head and show them your penis.’”
“Speaking of Marvin’s penis, remember the Polanski scandal? When he sodomized a 13-year-old?” Clarissa asks.
It happened in California. It was front-page news in an era when newspapers were read and discussed. The details were graphic and comprehensive. They were indelible as a personal mutilation.
“Jerry said, ‘I knew that guy in Warsaw. He’s 5’2. He’s got a 3-inch dick.’ Jerry mimed the organ dimensions with his fingers.” Clarissa repeats the demonstration for her. “Then he said, ‘Why is this a headline? What kind of damage can you do with a dick that small?’” Clarissa turns back to the bay.
“Is that when it happened? When you disappeared? The phone was disconnected. I couldn’t find you for a year.” She tries to form a chronology.
“Brillstein says it wasn’t rape. It was an inevitable appropriation. I was chattel. Rachel left and Jerry just moved me into their bedroom. I came home from school and my clothes were in their closet. My pajamas were folded on their bed. Then he found us an apartment in Oakland. He let me pick out curtains,” Clarissa explains. “Hey, I was the first trophy wife on the block. It’s my mother I hate. She knew what would happen. I was expendable.”
“But she came back for you,” she says. “She took you to a commune. You went to college. You got out.”
“Nobody gets out, for Christ’s sake.” Clarissa is angry. “You chance to survive.”
She examines the bay. There’s less agitation, swells are softer and a haze grazes the amethyst surface. The diagnosis has come in. The bay had its biopsy. This stretch of ocean is terminal.
“Didn’t Marvin break your wrist?” Clarissa asks. “You had bandages all summer. You had to stay on the pier, reading.”
“Mommy did it. She was between mental hospitals. Maybe a weekend pass. Her contemptuous glare. It cut right through the chemo and antipsychotics. She ratted me out. She said, ‘Marvin, look, that kid’s talking with her fingers again. Don’t you know only Jews and Gypsies talk with their hands? You think you’re a neurosurgeon? A symphony conductor? You’re not even human.’ Then she seized my hand. I had three fractured fingers but they took her in the ambulance.”
They are quiet. Through haze, sun is lemon yellow on the heavy waters. Accuracy is a necessary component of civilization. Daddy knocked out your tooth. Mommy broke your fingers. There’s an elegant mathematics to this, to these coordinates and their relationship to one another. The accumulation of slights. The weight of insults. The random resurrection of coherence. And the way you are no longer blind, cold, and bereft. Then the indelible vulgarity you finally have the vocabulary to name.
Their fingers are entwined. She notices Clarissa is wearing a platinum set VHS-1 Tiffany diamond of at least 4 carats. And a gold Rolex with the perpetual oyster setting. She withdraws her hand.
“You know how it is,” Clarissa dismisses the implication. “When other women evaluate their black velvets, I consider a cool set of razor blades.”
“So you transcend the genre?” She is enraged.
“What genre would that be? Survivors of squalid adolescences? Best aberration in the most abhorred class?” Clarissa looks at her, hard. Her red lipstick with the embedded stars are like tiny metallic studs or hooks. They help you shred flesh.
She considers their shared childhood; their parents had been disenfranchised for generations. They were pre-urban and unprepared for a remote town perched at the edge of the implausible Pacific. Appliances overwhelmed them. The garbage disposal must never be touched. What if it broke? The refrigerator must be strategically opened and immediately shut. What if it burned out? And their offspring became mute with shock, there in the dirty secret city, deep within a colossus of yellow Hibiscus and magenta Bougainvillea, behind banks of startled red Geraniums and brittle Canna.
“We are what coalesced at the end of the trail. After the bandits, cactus and coyotes. We are the indigenous spawn of this saint. His bastards,” she realizes.
“We were spillage,” Clarissa replies. “Don’t romanticize.”
Everything is suspended. The bay is barely breathing. Perhaps it’s just been wheeled back from a fifth round of chemo. Maybe it’s hung-over. Or slipping into a coma. It needs a respirator. Come on. Code blue. It needs CPR.
“The immigrant experience, my ass,” Clarissa adds.
“But we have instincts.” She is exhausted. Her arm with its gauze-bandaged shoulder extends. She can talk with her limbs now. Marvin and her mother are dead. She gestures with her fingers, a motion that includes the bay, an outcropping that is Marin and Sonoma, and a suggestion of something beyond.
“We understand ambushes and unconventional warfare. We’re expert with camouflage,” Clarissa agrees, offering encouragement.
“They’ll never take us by surprise,” she responds. She feels a complete lack of conviction and a sudden intense longing to get a manicure.
Silence. Palms sway, windswept and brazen. Vertical shadows from fronds appear without warning, random spears. One must relentlessly improvise. Holden Caulfield would get knifed in the gut.
“I have to go now,” Clarissa abruptly announces. “But you look stunning. I’m impressed. Have you considered a wardrobe update? Do shmattes prove you’re an artist? Listen, I brought some Prada that were sized wrong. I’d sue if I had time. They’re in my car.”
“That’s OK,” she manages. This is emotional aerobics for the crippled, she thinks. Then, “I appreciate the gesture.”
“I don’t have a generous impulse in my repertoire.” Clarissa is tired. “This is a search and destroy in the triple-tier. But we must keep trying. Let’s end our reunion with a celebratory benediction.”
This is their ritual of conclusion. They exchange tokens of mutual acceptance. It’s how they prove their capacity to transcend themselves. It’s the equivalent of boot camp 5-mile runs in mud and climbing obstacle course ropes in rainstorms.