Prototype

“Show me, show me.” Sarah fell in step beside her, toward the enclosed stairway to the second floor. “I dressed for the state, do I look like I belong here?”

Sarah tramped up the stairs in jeans and soft leather moccasin boots, a heavy knit sweater, and a down vest. She looked as if she’d just stepped from an ad for a ski lodge.

“Everybody’s a chameleon,” Adrienne told her.

After seeing the condo, Sarah granted approval, adding only that as long as someone else was picking up the tab, why not have gone for someplace with a hot tub as well?

They put off unloading the car until it seemed indecent. Sarah could never travel as lightly as Adrienne; always something she might want, might miss, might long to hold to remind her of another place or time. She packed keepsakes the way alcoholics packed bottles, always in reserve if needed.

Flashbacks came while carrying boxes from the car, a pleasant deja vu of two years ago when the commitment had finally been made between them, the house in Tempe chosen, Adrienne acknowledging, This is no passing fling, I love her, this is serious. Friends had shown up that weekend to pitch in, those whom she had gotten to know and love through Sarah. Lesbian couples, mostly, who seemed to form their own extended family, and around whom Adrienne had at first been terribly insecure. Worrying, Will they even accept me? I’m a half-breed. They had, and it really came through that day. Everyone had toted crates and boxes and furniture, had made seats for themselves amid the half-finished jumble. Passing pizza and beer, they traded tales of old moves, horror stories of demolished possessions and runaway trucks and wrecked appliances and fires, those ruinous events that seem to grow more fondly hilarious the longer ago they happened. Adrienne found out that day why it is always wise to withhold the beer until the job is completed. It was the first day since leaving San Francisco that she had genuinely felt this new town to be her home, that her soul had taken root and found a sense of community.

Alone this time, just the two of them to share the burdens, though they were few, and she found herself missing the gathering of a tribe.

When they had everything in, Sarah ran for the door one last time. “Back in ten minutes, I swear,” then she dashed off. Adrienne heard the car gunning back onto the street.

She began unpacking, sorting by destination: bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, unknown. One box she opened was labeled, in slapdash marker, Thesis Books. Had Sarah at last decided on a subject she would stick with? Adrienne was on her knees, browsing titles, when Sarah rushed through the doorway with flushed cheeks.

“I couldn’t resist.” She held up a bottle of wine. “I spotted a package store a few blocks away on Colfax. You want glasses or are you feeling hardcore today?”

“From the bottle’s good,” Adrienne murmured, still sorting among the books. This was odd. Given the half dozen or so topics Sarah had been flirting with, none of these books seemed to apply.

“Oh,” Sarah said. “You found them.”

“I gather you finally committed to something… but what are these?” Adrienne then dug out Erich Fromm’s The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Carl Jung’s The Undiscovered Self. “There are some of mine in here.”

Sarah had the bottle uncorked and headed out of the kitchen, taking the first pull. “You don’t mind, do you?”

“Of course not,” accepting the bottle to make the christening of the temporary new home official. She handed it back and went randomly diving for more. “Apocalypse Culture… The Theory and Practice of Apathy… Tried as Adults… Generation X, even? What did you finally decide on?”

Sarah sank down to the floor, opposite Adrienne, over the box. “You won’t get mad, will you?”

“No…” Saying it automatically, hating that prefacing question; she always had. It was like waving a red flag: You’re going to hate this.

Why were you having an affair, Neal?

Well, you won’t get mad, will you?

“The idea started taking shape a week ago,” Sarah began, “right after you left with Clay. And then when we talked on Tuesday after you’d spent the night before with his friends, that only firmed it up more.”

Adrienne sat motionless, not liking the way this was heading. Clay, the friends he wouldn’t even refer to as friends… this was too close.

“Don’t look at me that way.” Sarah leaned forward, elbows propped on the spines of books. “I want to do my thesis on the social climate and milieu that Clay and the others come out of. That kind of doomsday subculture and malaise that are woven through the post-boomer generation. All those people who missed out on the banquet, and mostly got stuck with the leftovers and the bills. The ones who don’t have any hope or faith left, to the extent that they don’t even see the point of trying.”

Adrienne shook her head. “You’re doing it again.” Hoping to argue on the side of generalities rather than specifics. “Another idea rears it head, and you just can’t get enough of it. Do you know how many times I’ve listened to this same kind of pitch?”

“What, are you keeping score?”

“Six times, Sarah.”

“So I’ve finally committed myself to one. You knew it had to happen eventually. This is what I want to do. This is the one.”

“And I’ve heard that line, too.” She snatched the bottle away and belted down a swallow, flipped the silky blond hair up off her neck; it suddenly felt too hot. “And I suppose if you stumble across some lost tribe up in the Rockies, then that’ll be the one, the one, the big one.”

“Objection!” Sarah cut in. “Ludicrous example.” And Adrienne nodded, Oh, all right, so it is, I speak in principle but have it your way.

Sarah took the bottle from her and set it aside so she could hold her by both hands. “I told you I wanted to do something I could get really passionate about. And I think this matters very much. Besides,” she said, squeezing Adrienne’s hands, “my adviser liked it.”

She felt some of the starch flow from her shoulders. Well. Well. This did shed a light of validation on things, didn’t it?

“Cultural anthropology?” she said softly. “Fishbine thought this idea fit?”

Sarah nodded. “He’s actually pretty progressive.” She let go of Adrienne’s hands and implored with her own as she rocked up onto her haunches. “I think the next time the world yields up another lost tribe, that’ll be it. There won’t be any more. We’ve found them all and most of the time they’ve become a little more like us, and they’re never any better for it. And you know? That’s what intrigues me most, why we’re the ones so screwed up.

“There’s nothing I could do with a more primitive culture that wouldn’t be redundant. So why not look at my own the way it is right now? The whole field of anthropology, it’s been at a kind of pivotal point for the past several years. It’s still asking the same questions, but we have to ask them in a whole new context. So in a way, the whole field becomes fresh all over again.”

“Because the world’s changed so much,” Adrienne said.

“That’s right. It’s taking a new look at family structures, gender and race relations. Migration. Warfare. Law and order. All of those things are giving us fits right now and it’s because we mostly ignored them, except in the most superficial ways.” Sarah ran both hands back through her hair and it became a savage mane. “I just want to be part of that. It excites me.”

“I know,” said Adrienne. “I understand that. But…” And why such a prickly reception to this? She knew perfectly well that Sarah had not come up here to intellectually seduce Clay from her, but to be just as perfectly irrational, that was exactly how it felt. And she almost had to laugh. Fighting over a man? That was the last thing she’d ever expected to happen.

“But what?” asked Sarah.

Oh, out with it. “It feels like a tremendous conflict of interest brewing here. Almost to the point of it being unethical.”

“I thought about that. But you’re not in a clinical setting anymore. As soon as you brought him into your home — my home, too — and agreed to take him to his, you entered a new area. I’m not one of them, but some people would call that unethical. But it’s a weird case, so…” Sarah shook her head.