“This is not the global village I envisioned,” Zoë says.
“That’s politically incorrect enough to get me disbarred,” Clarissa whispers. She places two fingers against her red lacquered lips in a gesture of mock fright.
The automatic photographic booth is on the far side of the arcade. Four shots. They have been taking pictures here since they rode buses and walked from Daly City in seventh grade. Zoë remembers when it cost a quarter. Now it takes dollars. This photographic session is a ritual element in each of their meetings. It’s their sacrament. When they leave the booth, they cut the strip in half. Zoë saves her photographs in a shoebox where she keeps her passport and birth certifi-cate. She assumes Clarissa saves hers in her jewelry vault. Or perhaps she just throws them away.
The photographs are a necessary component of their liturgy. Zoë knows they can only see one another by laminated representations. It would be too disturbing and intrusive if they could actually perceive one another without artificial mediation. They communicate by email, fax, and newspaper clippings. The telephone is unbearable. They only use it to arrange an imminent unplanned meeting.
“Marvin’s jowls are definitely gone.” Clarissa studies the thin strip of four facial shots. “You have cheekbones. Are those implants? Jesus. You’re gorgeous. You never looked this good, not at sixteen, even. Cosmetic surgery already.”
“We’re breathing on forty,” Zoë says, bewildered. Certainly Clarissa comprehends the necessity of proactive facial procedures. This is San Francisco and Clarissa is an entertainment business attorney with a penthouse office above a Chinese bank. Is Clarissa in denial? Are her medications interfering with her functioning on so obvious and rudimentary a level?
“I thought you had to wait as long as possible.” Clarissa’s words are slurred.
“After you psychologically remove the slap across the face, and its more damaging verbal resonances-” Zoë begins.
“And that takes decades and costs what? A quarter of a million?” Clarissa is still staring at the strip of photographs.
“Then the next step is actual surgical removal. It’s a natural progression. It’s how to treat emotional cancer. Keep them,” Zoë says. “Get some reference points.”
They sit on a bench on the south side of the pier, sun tamed and restrained. The water is becoming agitated. White caps like mouths opening, baring teeth. The bay reminds Zoe of women in autumn in a medical imaging office. First the locker, the paper bathrobe, the chatty blonde with the clipboard who walks you into the room containing the mammogram machines. Then the stasis before the X-rays are read. Yes, the bay is waiting for its results. Poppies encrusted with resins or blood float like prayer offerings in the dangerous toxic waters.
“We used to walk here. What were we? Eleven, twelve?” Clarissa asks. Her mood is also shifting. They’re both still drunk.
Zoë and Clarissa, gauze and bandages on their shoulders, hold hands. Zoë’s childhood is sequences of yellows composed of trailer park kitchen cabinets and the invisible poisons leaking from the pores of fathers undergoing chemotherapy. Take a breath of rancid lemon. You’ve seen the Pacific, reached the end of the trail and don’t linger at the edges of death too long. They had a final punctuation for that. It was called the iron lung.
“They hadn’t invented a vocabulary for us yet,” Clarissa says to the waves. “Dysfunctional families. Latchkey children. Remember when I lost my key? What my father did? Jerry tied me up in the carport in pajamas for a week.”
“I brought you a canteen with orange juice. A bottle of vitamins,” Zoë recalls. “And a few joints. I cut up a cantaloupe in tiny pieces. You were handcuffed. I fed you like a sick bird.”
“How did you get a canteen?” Clarissa asks.
“I took it from the hospital outpatient closet,” Zoë says. Her head is throbbing.
She stares at sea swells that are the process by which autumn becomes water. If you understand the bay, it smells of slow-burning cedar. Midnight currents are actually leaves brushing the ocean with russet and amber. Only adepts recognize this. Waves answer to the moon and immutable laws of spin and fall. They don’t get dinner on the table at the appointed hour. They don’t carpool or pick up the suits on time, have the cuff links and invitations ready.
“Only you know,” Clarissa says. She looks like she may vomit again.
Zoë nods. Yes, only I was at ground zero when it happened. This is why we tattooed ourselves. Who else could comprehend adolescence in the margins of a hardscrabble town in the conceptual latitudes? The late ’50s and their village was subdivided wood frame houses and stucco bungalows nailed in rows like the fruit trees above gashes of alley, oranges and lemons so bitter they burned your mouth.
“We sat next to each other in homeroom,” Zoë says.
It was seventh grade and they were learning about cities. Their names were Sherry and Judy then but they do not ever mention this.
“We rode buses, trying to find the city,” Clarissa remembers. “We had library cards.”
True, Zoë thinks, but they could not find their geography or circumstances in literature. Nature was oaks and maples, not a riot of magenta bougainvillea, not a blaze of red and yellow canna bursting through bamboo fences sticky with pink oleander. Families had two parents and pastel houses behind lawns with white picket fences where characters experienced angst rather than hunger and rage. Such children did not sift through trashcans in dusk alleys searching for glass soda bottles redeemable for two cents apiece. Gather enough glass and you had bus fare. On a fortunate hunt, you could trap enough coins for lunch.
“Remember digging for bottles for food money?” Zoë asks.
“I remember what you said,” Clarissa smiles. “You said Holden Caulfield would have taken a taxi.”
Zoë laughs. “Remember our black berets? We were trying to meet Ginsberg and Kerouac. We wore those berets every day. We got lice.”
Clarissa shrugs. “We looked for beatniks right here, on this pier. Boys with sketchbooks and guitars. We said we were French. We practiced our accents at recess.”
Recess in the region of broken families, of divorcées and single mothers, of stigma and words that could not be spoken out loud. Alcoholism. Cancer. Child abuse. Illegitimacy. Domestic violence. The special yellow smell of Sunday evenings when the mothers who worked as secretaries poured peroxide on their hair. The tiny implications of illumination from the one lamp you were allowed to turn on. Electricity was an extravagance. Their San Francisco was a medieval oasis, ocean at your face, desert at your back. There were warlords at the utility companies with incomprehensible capabilities and powers. Phones were instruments of terror. It cost money every time you touched them. Long distance calls were rationed, like chocolate during a war. The world as it was, before hotlines that could put your father in prison.
“I still have nightmares about the apartment in Daly City,” Clarissa reveals. “At every St. Regis and Ritz, from Beijing to Buenos Aires, I wake up shaking. At the Bora Bora Lagoon Resort Hotel. At the Palazzo Sasso in Ravello, for Christ’s sake. The plot complications vary but somehow I’m back there.”
“Remember the neighbors?” Zoë asks. They lived next door, with a cement hall between them. She is dizzy. Her arm burns.
“The wetbacks and hillbillies? The identical blondes with drawls?” Clarissa is unusually bright. “It was still the Depression. I had a friend once. Another friend, not like you, Zoë. A hillbilly. Jerry found us listening to the radio. It was Elvis. Jerry started yelling, You’re playing colored music? You’re putting colored music in my house? He threw the radio at my face. Took out my front tooth. That’s how I discovered caps.”