Bridge To Happiness (27 page)

I ate grapefruit for breakfast and more lettuce and cottage cheese than anyone without long ears and a cottontail should. I snacked on frozen grapes, and if I ate any more fish, especially tuna, I would eventually have so much mercury in my system I’d be as mad as a hatter and run through the streets yanking out my hair. Then I remembered I didn’t have much hair left to yank out.

The whole idea of hiring a trainer didn’t appeal to me. The word trainer brought to mind the image of a man with a whip. But my goal was set: no
Spanx
. So I took up power walking through the streets of San Francisco . . . mornings or afternoons, and I even bought a bathroom scale and set it to match the weight on
Harrie’s
vile professional scale, which I still think was wrong.

After the first few days of exercising, I made good friends with eight hundred milligram ibuprofen. By the second week, I found I enjoyed walking all over the city, as long as I stayed off congested streets where you could smell the exhaust, and I stayed away from the cable car line because of the temptation to hop onboard.

I was sleeping better. Soon, my cleaning service actually had some work to do when they came. As I slowly powered and lifted and starved away the pounds, my mood changed and I started to laugh more.

Mike only appeared twice more, once in the kitchen and again in our bedroom, and both times I put on my athletic shoes and walked away. When I came home and flopped on the bed, sweaty and exhausted, I was more concerned about a long shower than my fear of what I might see when I came out.

By Mickey’s graduation, I could wear the black dress without the body girdle, and the family made it through the event with only a few tears.

Publicly, the
Cantrells
stood together, and the pride we had for Mickey and his valedictorian speech superseded anything else. That day, I came home thinking that we had each taken on the role of standing in for Mike instead of mourning his absence. Both Scott and Phillip had done overtime trying to make up for Mike’s absence and by the end of the day, their jokes were a little harsher than normal and I thought Scott was annoyed with Phillip’s mouth.

It did seem that we were changing how we dealt with life, and for the first time I wondered if we could ever truly heal.

Summer came in and Mickey was working at the company five days a week. I dropped by in spite of the fact that Scott thought I needed protecting, and I began to have our Sunday dinners again. But now I seldom served lasagna, because I had lost the extra weight and was almost hooked on exercise.

One sunny afternoon I was out for a long power walk, and I took the route past the old apartment. I hadn’t driven past it for a couple of weeks. I had just picked up my pace and was trying to get my heart rate up, when I rounded the corner.

Across the street, a large area was sectioned off with construction tape and big yellow barricades. Behind them were a group of giant orange construction machines. A couple of workers in hardhats were smoking on the corner.

“Hey guys,” I said, waving away the smoke. “What’s going on here?”

“That old brick warehouse is coming down.”

My stomach was instantly somewhere around my ankles. I didn’t say anything, but could feel something inside of me just snap, and I turned back around.

A crane was shifting position and I could read the side.
Golden State Demolition Co, Inc
.

Before me, covered in graffiti, was the beginning of my life with Mike. Somehow, in my mind over the years, this building had stood for us, where we’d been and from where we’d come. That it was still there, unchanged, fooled me into making it a symbol of us. Had this happened before Mike died, I might have only been disappointed. But now I wanted to scream hysterically.

Instead, I casually made my way around the barricades, went under the construction tape, and power walked straight toward our old apartment.

Jail was a new experience for me. Somehow I expected it to look different in real life from all those television cop shows, but I was wrong. It looked the same: all gray; cement and metal, along with extremely questionable janitorial services.

The biggest difference between television jail and real-life jail was sensory. Sight and sound were the only senses you used to watch TV. Smell was not part of the equation. As long as I live, I will never forget the smell of jail. It is uniquely vile.

Pine-Sol and Clorox would have done wonders for San Francisco’s slammer, which I was told was only a holding cell, a large square, barred, fifteen by fifteen foot windowless box, where I sat incarcerated with an interesting collection of other female misdemeanants. If I hadn’t attacked the poor police officer who tried to pull me off the building, I would have only been ticketed for misdemeanor and let go. Various officers told me this at least seven different times.

There were six of us in the cell. However I was the only one with an embroidered designer logo on my sports clothes. When they first locked me away and I turned around and faced the others, I was a little nervous. That was the only moment when I honestly might have regretted my actions. (Well, biting the cop wasn’t good either because when they first took me in, hand-cuffed, I had to get a blood test. It hadn’t been much of a bite. They didn’t think I was very funny when I told them I’d had my rabies shot.)

From the corner of my eye, I caught one of my cellmates eyeing my navy jacket with the gold charms on the zippers and matching striped track pants. Her name was
Suki
, and she wasn’t young, in her forties, and had long wavy hair shot with gray that hung down halfway her back.

She wore a 1980’s multi-colored Michael Jackson jacket with big padded shoulders, and when we talked she explained she could wear two or three cashmere sweaters under it and no one at Saks or Neiman’s could tell she was stealing.
Suki
was a professional shoplifter. And an eBay Power Seller. She was also a single mom of three.

The cell’s youngest occupant was
Danica
, a law student overloaded with student loans and who was arrested on a warrant for twenty seven unpaid parking tickets. She was facing three days in jail and fines she couldn’t pay.

Cherry and Lola were streetwalkers; neither looked like Julia Roberts, though they both could snap their chewing gum like champions. My children would have considered that as my punishment, since listening to someone pop their gum was one of my pet peeves.

Willow was the saddest specimen among us. Willow was her adopted name, one she’d taken to using in 1963. She was born Agnes
Willamenia
Gunther, and she was a drunk and a street person, beaten and abused over a lifetime, a woman who started off protesting the war and did too many drugs in the sixties.

With her wild and dirty gray hair and skin like Genoa sausage, she was the kind of crazy old woman who stood on a corner and shouted, or slowly pushed a grocery cart with all her worldly belongings up the city’s streets. She reeked of unwashed skin and cheap liquor, but she talked constantly, slurring her words and asking questions with a lisp, because one bad man years back had knocked her front teeth out.

She told us stories that were probably not even near the truth. If she wrote a book about her life, she could go on Oprah.

When she heard why I was there, she stood up and banged on the bars and chanted over and over, “Death to the Establishment! Save that building!” I had a feeling she had said those same words decades back, perhaps when she had barely begun her downhill journey to the bleak place she was now.

I didn’t know how long I’d been locked up, because when I first arrived the officers took my watch, jewelry and keys. But we were all sitting around the cell, playing three truths and a lie, when a female officer came to let me out.

As I walked out of the cell, all the women gathered at the bars, looking at me like children on the
Kindertransport
.

“’Bye, March!

“Remember! Sunflower Boutique on eBay!”

Pop!
“Hang in there, girl.”

“You tell those kids of yours Cherry says to back off!”

“Don’t you get
your
th
elf
thrown in here again,
mi
th
y
,” Willow said.

The door closed on their collective voices and I walked down the barren hallway where another somber guard let us out.

Scott, Philip and Molly stood across a large room with dull green paint and dirty windows, waiting, my judges and jurists. It looked to me as if they had already decided the verdict.

Molly was holding my Chanel tote to her chest, so she must have gone by the house and picked it up for me. When I was walking, I didn’t take anything with me but a few bills and my keys.

“Hey, Mom.” Phillip slipped his arm around me and gave me hug.

“Are you all right?” Scott asked and he sounded just like his dad, concerned, not critical.

“I’m fine,” I said more sharply than I meant to. I expected them to assume I was a mess and I was defensive.

At a small counter I picked up a manila envelope with my personal items. I put on my watch, but not my gold hoops.

“I stopped and picked up your purse and the spare car keys,” Molly said more kindly than she had spoken to me in a long time.

With mixed emotions I took my purse. “Thanks.”

My kids turned and started to walk away, assuming I would follow behind.

“Wait a second would you?” I dumped the contents of my purse on the counter and picked up my wallet and checkbook.

“What are you doing?” Molly asked.

“None of your business,” I said calmly, looking through my wallet. “Please wait over there.”

Since I hadn’t bitten or punched or kicked the cop behind the window, he was willing to give me some of those large envelopes, and I left a gift for each woman, scribbling their name on the outside of an envelope before I sealed it. For Willow, a grocery card for a hundred dollars that I’d won at the checkout a few weeks back. I was afraid to give her money and hoped maybe she would get some food with it instead of booze. What I really wanted to give her was a lifetime of baths.

My gold hoops went to Cherry, and my makeup bag filled with Chanel makeup for Lola. I wrote a check to
Danica
for her twenty-seven hundred dollar fine, and I checked my purse to make certain the black Chanel authenticity card was in the zipper pocket, handed my tote to the officer and told him it was to go to
Suki
Collins. I would watch for it on the Internet under the eBay listing of Sunflower Boutique, and maybe bid on it.

Some new fire was lit inside of me, something I hadn’t felt in months. I owed those women for my short time in that cell. My struggles, my pain were something I could overcome. Mired in my great grief, I was all tied up in my head and my heart, and I let all that stay there, held it close to me and refused to let it go, and it made me into someone I didn’t like. In their shoes, what would I have done? Perhaps made the same bad choices they had made?

I crammed the rest of my stuff in my pockets and walked right over to my kids. “Let’s go.” Once outside, I asked, “Who’s taking me home?”

Molly said, “Scott.”

And at the same time Scott said, “Me.”

“Great. Here’s the deal. I made a mistake. We’re going to drop this whole thing. Right now. It might take me some time, but I will be fine. I loved your father and I will always love your father, but now I have to love me.” I stopped and faced them. “Got it?”

They nodded like obedient children, or those little plastic standing dachshunds people line up on their Impala dashboards.

“Good. I need you to stop by the pharmacy on the way home, Scott. I have a prescription to fill.”

And, I thought, a life to figure out.