Blue Plate Special (26 page)

Across the country in Portland, I was busy being a writer and literary intellectual. I wore thrift-store dresses, cardigans,
and cowboy boots. I listened to the Talking Heads and Joan Armatrading and Elvis Costello. I didn’t drink much alcohol in college, but I loved a little bourbon every now and then. I liked ecstasy, too, which according to college legend had been invented in a Reed chem lab and was called MDA or MDMA back then, and also locally foraged psilocybin mushrooms, which were fun to take on the wild, rocky cliffs of the Oregon coast, where I lay on the spongy forest floor and laughed my head off at the hilarious gestures of the trees.

The Christmas of my junior year, my sisters came to visit me in Portland for winter break. Stephen and I lived together in a big drafty cheap old Victorian house with two other students, a ten-minute walk from campus. My sisters stayed in our housemates’ rooms while they were away. Emily had become rigidly fanatical about vegetarianism and just about everything else. She openly disapproved of me—I drank straight Jim Beam, smoked Camels, ate meat, listened to unacceptable music, and wasn’t spiritual or mellow in any way. I openly scoffed at what I thought of as her new-agey, fuzzy-headed crap, which naturally confirmed her view of me as uptight and unenlightened. The more we narrowed our eyes in reaction to each other, the more entrenched each of us became in our own views.

Susan, although she was of course far more aligned with Emily than she was with me in her spiritual leanings and dietary practices, managed to be neutral; she adopted the classic middle-child peacemaker role right along with Stephen, who was also a middle child. With the two of them trying to help us get along, Emily and I became increasingly polarized and hostile. One night when I was making dinner, without thinking, I took the wooden spoon out of the meat spaghetti sauce I was stirring and used it to stir the special vegetarian sauce I’d made for her. She saw me do it and refused to eat the sauce and ate plain spaghetti for dinner defiantly. I retaliated the next morning by frying an entire package of bacon
for breakfast, filling the house with the smell of pig fat, eating a few pieces lasciviously, saying “yum!” with didactic fervor. Emily retreated out onto the front porch and sat on the railing in the cold, wrapped in her Mexican handmade sweater and Guatemalan scarf, smoking her mullein. I went out in my leather coat and sat on the couch on the other side of the porch, not speaking to her, and lit up a Camel and very ostentatiously blew the smoke away from her.

We were so much alike, I always believed, underneath all our differences. Fighting with her made me sad; this was the same sister I’d raced home from first grade to read to and hug and haul around the backyard. And now she thought I was the devil, or something like it. And I thought she was self-righteous and full of herself.

That winter, my sisters and I rented a car and drove down to San Francisco together to look up our father. We hadn’t seen him since our trip to drop Susan off in San Francisco five years before. This time, Emily and I fought so vehemently during the entire trip, Susan had to stop the car in the middle of the street and threaten to put us both out onto the sidewalk if we didn’t cool it. We cooled it, just barely.

When we called our father and told him we were in town, he asked us to come to lunch at his place on Telegraph Hill. We drove there from the friend’s house where we were staying, parked, and climbed steep stairs to his front door. He opened the door and ushered us in. He was living like an ascetic Boy Scout in his bare-bones law office, sleeping on his desk. From a pot on a hot plate, he served us bowls of something he called Lebanese pea soup. He seemed proud of this concoction, but I think he might have opened some cans. Seeing him this time was as weird, intense, and charged as our lunch with him five years earlier had been, and just as unfulfilling. We all drove away subdued and shaken. Emily and I didn’t clash again for days; we were all deeply allied in our bewildered sadness
about this strange, compelling, complicated man who had fathered us.

Back in Portland, Susan and Emily and I performed at a Reed coffeehouse in the student union. We sang all the three-part songs we knew, among them “Star of the County Down,” “Moonshiner,” Emily’s arrangement of a Langston Hughes poem called “This House in Taos,” and a medieval drinking song I’d learned in France. We sang on and on until, I’m sure, the audience had had more than enough of us, and then Emily sang, solo, a Bengali folk song, accompanying herself on guitar. I sat with Susan at the side of the stage and watched the audience watch her. I thought then, not for the first time, that she would be famous someday soon.

I was wrong. At the end of that school year, in the spring of 1985, Emily got her A.A. degree from Simon’s Rock. Although she had applied to Wesleyan, she didn’t get in, probably because she hadn’t taken enough academic courses at Simon’s Rock; she had immersed herself in music to the exclusion of everything else except her spiritual pursuits. Without any plans for the future, she lived that summer in a hut in the woods near Simon’s Rock before she went to the Rainbow Gathering in Missouri. There, as she sat playing the piano in a field, a man approached her and put his hand on her shoulder and looked into her eyes. “God means us to be together,” he said. Emily, by now a born-again Christian, accepted this as her destiny and spent the next decade living with him on his remote farm in New Zealand. They got married in Fiji, sailing there and back as crew on a yacht, because Emily was underage and my mother wouldn’t give her consent.

His name was Claus. He was twelve years older than she was, the son of a former Nazi. He called her Flower; he had messianic delusions. Emily developed a German accent and became submissive and meek. They lived alone in the remote Bay of Islands, tending the livestock, working in the gardens,
and driving the produce to market in the farm truck to sell. Emily played music still, but only for God now, in the rustic local church, and the only songs she sang were Christian hymns.

During my senior year at Reed, I was almost too distraught and heartbroken over losing my sister to care much about school anymore. I wrote her long letters, begging her to come home. She wrote back with superior condescension, telling me I was blind and lost and sinful, and that she had found the true path. She capitalized words that had no business being capitalized. Her diction became Germanic and unfamiliar. I wrote back and tried to argue and reason with her, but she had finally won our battle: the fanatical, righteous believer always vanquishes the skeptic. And she had gone to the other side of the world.

I wrote a letter to Ralph just before Easter, finally expressing my anger at him for being such a negligent father, for abandoning us. “We would have been such good daughters for you,” I wrote, fury sparking off my pen. I mailed the letter, not expecting to hear back from him. But he wrote back right away, offering me a plane ticket to come and visit him in the Bay Area for Easter, saying he’d like to spend some time together. This was so unexpected, so out of the blue, I didn’t know how to respond. I felt shy, unable to imagine actually visiting my father, walking off the plane and seeing him there at the gate, staying in his law office with him and no doubt sleeping on the floor in a sleeping bag, talking to him over our makeshift breakfast on his desk. It all seemed impossible, too little, too late. I wrote back that I was too busy to leave Reed. I mailed the letter and felt nothing but relief.

During my senior year, I’d applied for permission to do a creative thesis, which was no small matter at an academic stronghold like Reed. For my thesis, I wrote a collection of four short stories called “In a Small City.”

Halfway through that year, I broke up with Stephen and moved out of the cozy, airy apartment we shared and into a depressing studio on SE Division Street. I had gone home for Christmas, to my mother and Ben’s house in Barrytown, near Bard College, and while I was there, I woke up in the middle of the night one night and realized I wasn’t in love with him anymore. We had almost completely stopped having sex. He was like a sibling, a twin. We were best friends, and we spent all our time together and never fought; meanwhile, I had begun a strange sort of dalliance with a weird, semidisturbed guy who skulked around campus in a leather jacket. I hadn’t slept with him yet, and I didn’t want to, and I had the feeling that if I stayed with Stephen, I would.

I came back to school in January, announced to Stephen that it was over and I was moving out, found an apartment, and moved. It all happened within three days, leaving Stephen totally shocked and heartbroken and all our friends confused. But I felt a deep relief, as if I were coming back to life again. My new apartment was in a run-down old building far from campus, but the place was warm, cheap, comfortable, and all
mine. Our friend Henry took my room in my old apartment, so Stephen wasn’t stuck with the whole rent, and he didn’t have to live alone. A few of our friends shunned me for a while, but I was too relieved to care. I worked on my thesis and rode my bike to and from campus and kept my head down for the rest of my senior year.

After graduation in May 1986, having no idea what I was going to do next, I spent the summer in Portland in my dump of an apartment. My friends Bronwen and Henry shared a place that summer; I spent a lot of time over there, listening to NPR and eating home-cooked meals. We all talked a lot about our plans for the future: we had none beyond staying in Portland for a while.

For my graduation present, my mother and stepfather gave me enough money so I could take the summer off and fly back east to go to Tuckernuck. In late August, I left the East Coast and flew back to Portland to find a job.

During the following winter, I quit my horrible job at Waldenbooks and took a job as a short-order cook at Roxy Hearts World Diner, a silver-chrome-and-red-Naughahyde, vintage-movie-poster-decorated little place on Burnside Street, in the Pearl District, the rough part of town where the bums lived, near the seedy gay bars, the seedy straight bars. My friend Henry and I worked the night shift, so we handled the rush when the bars closed between 3:00 and 4:00 in the morning and the entire male gay population of Portland showed up drunk, spangled, howling, cruising, and hungry for omelets, burgers, sandwiches, and French toast. Henry and I threw garnishes at each other midrush, singing operatically, laughing, cursing, punchy.

Henry was a willowy, dark-haired, blue-eyed, pale-skinned English boy by way of the San Fernando Valley, funny and sensitive, arch, with a charming mean streak. Back then, at twenty-one, he was just coming out. We were two lovelorn sensitive
plants nostalgic for Reed, wondering what to do next with our lives. We were both pining for hot, unavailable younger boys who were still in college: I had reignited my unaccountable attraction to Kip, the pot-smoking physics major from California. On our days off, Henry and I decked ourselves out and headed over to campus to cruise around the student union steps, the café, the library, and the Great Lawn, hoping to “run into” one or both of them. We had nothing better to do. Before I started working with Henry, I was struggling to pay my rent ($165 a month) working fifteen hours a week at the Waldenbooks in the mall downtown, augmenting my tiny minimum-wage paychecks with government cheese and food stamps and an occasional babysitting job for my former thesis adviser.

Compared to me, Henry made pretty good money cooking at Roxy Hearts. He also worked much harder, twelve-hour shifts, but he always had money to go out drinking, and he was generous with it. When the other night cook quit, or was fired, Henry recommended me to take his place, probably so I could afford to buy my own damn cocktails. By that point, I felt that if I had to unbox and shelve one more load of slippery, glitzy romance paperbacks or help one more smarmy yuppie find a self-help book, I very well might kill someone, probably myself. I was ecstatic to get the job at Roxy Hearts.

Only once did Henry and I miss a shift. On what was supposed to have been a day trip to the Oregon coast, on the way back to Portland for our shift, Henry’s van skidded and slid into the guardrail and he broke his hand, gripping the steering wheel so hard the bones were crushed. The van was towed by AAA to a local mechanic’s. There was no public transportation to Portland that late in the day, and we couldn’t rent a car, because I had no license and Henry was on painkillers and couldn’t drive with a broken hand.

With no way to get to Roxy Hearts that night, we had to call Keith, the gay, tough, black day cook, and get him to cover
for us. He was a clean-and-sober ex-alcoholic ex-junkie who later died of AIDS (as did our favorite waiter, the tiny, doe-eyed Joey, who batted his Bambi lashes at Henry and swanned around the place as if he were an heiress on a cruise ship instead of a waiter schlepping heavy plates of food). Keith had tattoos from when he was in the Navy, he was covered in scars, his nose had been broken in fights, he was a battered guy who’d seen it all, and here we were whining about a fucked-up transmission and a broken hand. Because of our ineptitude, he now had to work the kitchen all night alone after working there all day. He very understandably sighed and acted put-upon, but he didn’t fire us, and he didn’t get mad. He was a saint about it, and we felt like bratty little pussies.