San Francisco Noir

“Rachel? She was on the verge. She was becoming River or Rainbow or something in secret. Preparing for her first commune. After Jerry, a sleeping bag and a candle was a good time.”

Zoe remembers Clarissa’s mother. A woman sheathed in dark fabrics who sank into shadows, kept her back to the wall, found her own periphery, 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. Zoe envied her. All the neighbors had incomplete families. The brothers in juvenile detention. The sisters who disappeared. Soon, if Marvin stopped lingering, if he would just die, she could have a similar reduction. Perhaps she could escape the anomalous caste consigned to stucco tenements with torn mesh screen doors and vacant lots behind wires and no white picket fences. And the mothers and aunts who rode buses and worked as file clerks between nervous breakdowns. Even secondhand cars were an aberration. If she got placed in foster care, adoption might follow. She had straight As and then 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. A stay-at-home mother with a ruffled apron who baked cookies could call her Elizabeth or Margaret or Christine.

“Did you realize we were Jewish?” Zoe wonders.

“I was instructed to never to reveal this. The hillbillies thought we were Christ killers and owned all the banks,” Clarissa answers. “And Jerry said they’d deport us. Send us back to Poland.”

“I wanted a bat mitzvah,” Zoe suddenly remembers. “I don’t know how I even knew the word. 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 thirteen-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, indelible like a personal mutilation.

“Jerry said, I knew that guy in Warsaw. He’s 5'2”. He’s got a three-inch dick. He 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 moved away? You disappeared. The phone was disconnected. I couldn’t find you for a year.” Zoe tries to form a chronology.

“Brillstein says it wasn’t rape. It was an inevitable appropriation. Jerry thought a ditch with a turnip in it was a party. I was chattel. Rachel left and he just moved me into their bedroom. I came home from school and my clothes were hanging 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,” Zoe says. “She took you to a commune. You went to college. You got out.”

“You don’t get out, for Christ’s sake.” Clarissa is angry. “You chance to survive.”

Zoe examines the bay. There is less agitation, swells softer; a haze grazes what was amethyst. The diagnosis has come. The bay had its biopsy. This stretch of ocean is terminal.

“Didn’t Marvin break your wrist?” Clarissa suddenly asks. “You had bandages all summer. You had to stay on the pier, reading.”

“Mommy did it, actually. She was between mental hospitals that month. 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? I remember precisely. She said, You think you’re a neurosurgeon? You think you’re a symphony conductor? You’re not even human. Then she seized my hand. I had three fractured fingers and they took her in the ambulance.”

They are quiet. The bay, too, is still. Through haze, the sun is lemon-yellow on the heavy waters. There are floating orchards rooted in sand. Wave break and dog bark are a language. Accuracy is a necessary requirement 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. The way you are no longer blind, cold, bereft. Then the indelible vulgarity you finally have the vocabulary to name.

Zoe and Clarissa’s fingers entwine. Clarissa wears a platinum set Tiffany diamond of at least four carats. And a gold Rolex with the oyster diamond setting. She withdraws her hand.

“You know how it is,” Clarissa dismisses the implication. “When other women evaluate their black velvets and red silk jackets, I consider a cool set of razor blades.”

“So you transcend the genre?” Zoe is enraged.

“What genre would that be? Survivors of squalid adoles-cences? Best aberration in the most abhorred class?” Clarissa stares at her, hard. Her red lipstick with the embedded stars that are like tiny metallic studs or hooks-they help you shred flesh.

Zoe considers their shared childhood in the already faltering city without seasons. Their parents were Jews who had been disenfranchised for generations; pre-urban and unprepared in a remote town perched at the edge of the implausible Pacific. Plumbing and appliances amazed them. The garbage disposal must never be touched. What if it broke? The refrigerator must be strategically opened and immediately closed. What if it burned out? Then their offspring, who 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,” Zoe realizes.

“We were spillage,” Clarissa replies. “Don’t romanticize.”

They stand and 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 in a coma. It needs a respirator. Come on. Code blue. It needs CPR.

“But we have instincts.” Zoe is exhausted. Her arm with the 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,” Zoe laughs. She feels a complete lack of conviction and a sudden intense longing to get a manicure.

Silence. Palms sway, windswept and brazen. Sudden vertical shadows from fronds appear without warning, random spears. They are beyond known choreography. 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 schmattes prove you’re an artist? Listen, I brought some Prada that don’t fit right. They were sized wrong. I’d sue if I had time. They’re in my car.”

“That’s okay,” Zoe 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 seems tired. “This is a search-and-destroy in the triple-tier. But we must keep trying. And we must 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 five-mile runs in mud and climbing obstacle course ropes in rainstorms.

“I brought you a postcard you sent me from Fiji sixteen years ago.” Zoe produces it from her backpack. She reads it out loud. “On the beach under green cliffs, I feel God’s nude breath. I make my daughter smile. She laughs like an orchestra of bells and sea birds fed on fresh fruits. Her hair is moss against my lips. How pink the infant fingernails are. I wish you such sea pearls.” Zoe offers the postcard to Clarissa.