Louisa Meets Bear (27 page)

They didn't even know how to peel them
, he told her.
They'd bite right through the skin
.

*   *   *

“Andrew Stackhouse,” her sister, Sam, had said with a laugh when Marnie called to say that he'd moved back to New York and wanted to meet her.

“He didn't know a damn thing about living wills. How well, exactly,
do
you know him?”

“He's one of those people you've known forever but you never really get to know and as the years pass you keep thinking you must know them better than in fact you do. I told you, he's the son of that professor I worked for when I was at Berkeley, Hildie Willis.”

Sam laughed again, her nervous laugh, and suddenly Marnie could imagine it: her sister, with her beautiful teeth and her gorgeous boy's hips that no man Marnie has known has not wanted to grab.

“He's a year or two older than me, Alan's age.” Sam stopped, caught in one of the culs-de-sac that halt so many of their conversations.

“I know what you mean. The age Alan would be.”

“When we met, he was taking a year off from college, hanging out at his parents' house while he looked for a job. We went to a concert together.”

“You mean you slept together.”

“I can't remember. I know that's disgusting, but I honestly can't. It was a couple of months after I met him and he'd moved into the city and someone had given him tickets for one of those mega-concerts at the Fillmore West—I think it was Grace Slick with the Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service. All I clearly remember is that we smoked so much pot, I never made it back over the bridge to Berkeley.”

Marnie could hear foil crinkling as her sister pulled out a cigarette.

“Thank God there wasn't AIDS in those years,” Sam continued. “I bumped into him a couple of times after that, while I was still living out west. I think it was at a meeting for groups sending medical supplies to Nicaragua. Something like that. He'd just come back from Guatemala. Then, last year, when I was working with the Boston Clean Air Coalition, we decided to try to get some money from the local business community.”

The hilarity was draining from her sister's story, Marnie thought, in the way it does as people move from their twenties into their thirties.

“I was having a hell of a time, since conservatives like to make their charitable donations for genetic diseases—cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy—ailments where it's hard to see capitalism as the culprit. Those hideous telethons where they drag out a poor kid with braces on his arms and legs and everyone can feel good about giving for research to discover the defective gene because no one's going to turn around and say, like they can about a kid who falls down an elevator shaft, who's
responsible
for this?”

Marnie pictured her sister closing her eyes for the first long inhale.

“When I called him, it was awkward, awkward, awkward. He was embarrassed about having become this financial guy with all of these rationalizations about how he'd realized with the Guatemalan cooperative that he'd never be able to help them if he didn't understand how to work within the existing legal system and how he'd gone to law school with the idea of learning the law applying to cooperatives and private support of third world development, but after he got his degree there hadn't been any NGO jobs and then he'd had his student loans to pay, blah blah blah, all the time not getting it that I was psyched that he'd done what he had because I could hit him up for a whopper corporate donation.”

Not until Marnie had hung up with Sam and run a bath and put on a recording of Ella Fitzgerald her ex-husband had given her and then poured a glass of sparkling water to bring into the tub with a book she never opened did she admit to herself her curiosity about her sister's long-ago discarded lover.

*   *   *

Marnie is quite sure that Andrew's mother won't remember that they met years ago at the Berkeley Co-op. (Marnie hadn't recalled herself until after the dinner at the Afghan restaurant when Andrew had delivered his irony-inflected portrait of Hildie and George.) It was the summer before Marnie's junior year of college and Sam's last year at Berkeley (ahhh, Marnie thinks, Sam was with her old boyfriend Peter then, so she'd probably already slept with and discarded Andrew) when Marnie made her first trip to California to visit Sam. Sam and Peter had been at the apex of their harmony-with-the-earth phase. They'd given their leather shoes and belts to Goodwill, brushed their teeth with baking soda, and taken up a method of natural birth control that involved an instructor named Mahiana Devi who offered counseling sessions at the co-op and sold Sam a year's worth of charts for recording her basal body temperature, her dreams, the consistency of her vaginal mucus, and the cycles of the moon.

On the second day of Marnie's visit, she and Sam walked the half mile to the co-op with Sam's chart rolled in a tube. Mahiana sat behind a card table with an ashtray of burning frankincense in front of her. Despite her Arabian pants and embroidered Mexican blouse, Mahiana looked to Marnie like a girl from Short Hills who could have used some electrolysis. For half an hour she talked to Sam about the Karezza method of Tantric sex practiced by a nineteenth-century Oneida community and a Czechoslovakian psychiatrist's research on cosmic fertility.

Afterward, maneuvering their cart through the sawdust-covered aisles, they bumped into Hildie scooping brown rice into a paper bag. With everyone else in Birkenstocks and Indian shirts and Army Surplus pants, Hildie in her navy suit and black pumps with her thunderous calves and bright red lips looked like she was in drag. She kissed Sam on the cheek, held out a hand to Marnie—“Another Klein”—and then, hardly missing a beat, launched an account of the conference she'd attended that day at San Francisco State on third world women and feminism, how much more advanced the students there were than at Berkeley, how she was off the next day to give a paper at the University of Michigan but would Sam come by on Monday, she needed Sam to do some research for the talk she was giving next month at the International Women's Conference on Western responses to clitoridectomies—cultural centrism or anti-violence advocacy?

“You should see their house,” Sam whispered once Hildie headed to the checkout line. “It's in the hills overlooking the bay, handmade out of redwood, with a Spanish-tiled lap pool at the end of which there's a humongous Jacuzzi.”

“On a professor's salary?”

“About ten years ago, her husband, George, lost a finger in a chain saw accident. Her son told me they got a three-million-dollar settlement from the chain saw manufacturer and bought the house with cash.”

According to Andrew, since the accident, George has never left the Berkeley municipality; approaching the Oakland city line, he'll break into a sweat and scamper back to Telegraph Avenue. George's panic attacks, Andrew claims, are necessary for the survival of his parents' marriage, allowing them time apart while Hildie rides out the crest of her now nearly twenty-year academic stardom, the more elaborate trips to China and India subsidized by George's lost finger. When, in January, Marnie and Andrew had decided to get married, they'd let George save face by saying that it was silly for Hildie and him to fly so far for what would be, after all, a small wedding, when Andrew and Marnie were planning in any case to visit them in September.

Now Marnie feels nervous about meeting George, afraid of what his hand will look like. Or is it Hildie she's nervous about seeing, Hildie with her volumes to say about everything and enough personality, it seems from Andrew's accounts, for all of them? From what Marnie can piece together, as a child Andrew had thought of himself as a member of Hildie's audience. Unable to compete for the stage or even, at times, to make it backstage, he'd opted by fifteen for escape—a job as a bicycle messenger in the San Francisco financial district, where he'd earned enough money to launch his own life: girlfriends, marijuana bought in the Haight; by sixteen, a very used Peugeot and a beginning cache of his own stories. At times, listening to Andrew's adventures—the months in Guatemala, trekking in South America, a boat trip through Indonesia—she sees Hildie reincarnate in her son, Marnie cast now as the awestruck child.

Marnie places her hand over her belly and presses her nose to the window. Outside, it's pale and murky, like the fluid she imagines inside where her baby lies curled. For the past six weeks, since she told Andrew about the baby, they've slept without touching. Were she to ask him about it, he would, she feels certain, say that he hadn't noticed.

*   *   *

Andrew wakes when the pilot announces that they are beginning their descent into Dallas, where the temperature is ninety-three degrees. It's an hour-and-fifty-minute layover, Marnie's first time in Texas. Walking from the arrivals gate, they pass through the usual airport shopping mall augmented by Texas-themed goods intended to evoke the fantasy Texas: cowboy hats, string neckties, coffee mugs painted with cows—the Texas Marnie can see out the window looking indistinguishable from the runway at Kennedy where they'd taken off three hours ago.

Passing a raw bar with oysters and clams laid out on ice, Andrew suggests a drink. Marnie looks at her watch. It's noon, one o'clock New York time. Before they were married, she'd never thought about Andrew's drinking. Since she's been pregnant, though, she has been preoccupied with the subject—not worry that Andrew is an alcoholic but rather a nagging awareness that drinking is important to him in the same way it had been important to her father during the long evenings after Alan's suicide when Marnie would sit with him while he read his newspapers and work reports and refilled his gin and tonic three, maybe more, times in a night.

Andrew heads for a table to the right of the bar. For the most part, she's left morning sickness behind; now, though, the processed air and the perfumed candles bring on a wave of queasiness. She pulls out a small plastic bag of saltines from her purse and begins to nibble, dusting off the crumbs from her sweater.

A waitress with sea-green eyelids approaches, a pad of checks perched on her ample hips. Andrew orders a screwdriver and a plate of oysters. Marnie asks for an apple juice on ice.

The waitress squints at Marnie. “Expecting?”

Marnie is startled. She's abandoned clothing with waistbands, but has not thought she was showing yet.

“The saltines. With my first, I lived on crackers. Couldn't keep a darn thing else down. With my others, I ate like a horse starting day one.”

When the drinks come, Andrew downs half of his in one go.

“Are you nervous about introducing me to your parents?”

“No.”

“It's not like you to drink so early in the day.”

Andrew stiffens. “It's vacation. I'm unwinding.” Except for a long weekend in Miami, this is, in fact, their first vacation since they've been married. After Marnie learned she was pregnant, they'd canceled their delayed honeymoon, a safari in the Masai Mara—a disappointment for Andrew, Marnie knows (though he'd been careful not to grumble), the travel adventures his attempt to compensate for the sliver of the financial world to which he fixes his attention the other forty-eight weeks.

Marnie grasps for a way to redirect the conversation. “Have you been in Texas before?”

“Once, on my way to Guatemala. We crossed into Mexico at Nuevo Laredo.” Andrew angles his chair so he can stretch out his legs. He pauses, debating, Marnie imagines, whether to oblige her by letting go of her jab about his drinking, and then, as Marnie had gambled he would, continues. “The border station made Tijuana seem tame—a lot of guys with silver belt buckles and scars on their faces. It was the middle of the night when we got there and they were officially closed, but a truck driver told us you could get through if you greased enough palms.”

Marnie folds her hands over her belly, and leans back so her shoulder blades rest on the padded leather of the chair. It's too early to feel the baby moving, but it pleases her to have her hands only an inch away from her growing child. “Sounds dangerous,” she says.

“Not compared to what we encountered later. We used to joke that Laredo was the
GO
square you had to pass through to get to the real tamale.”

Andrew is vague about who the
we
is. Shortly after they met, he'd shown her a shoe box filled with packets of photos from the time he'd spent in Guatemala. Sorting through the pictures, he passed quickly over several of them. In a voice that sounded brittle even to her own ears and that reminded her that she had not yet asked if he and Sam had been lovers, she'd said, “You don't have to hide that you had a girlfriend there.” Reluctantly, Andrew stopped censoring the pictures. Many were of a girl with a thick blond braid and leather sandals, someone, he told Marnie, he'd met in Panajachel who'd then traveled with him for a while. In one picture, she was lying without a shirt on a rock overlooking Lake Atitlán, her large breasts lazy and pink, the lake an unreal blue like a photographer's backdrop.

Since then, Marnie has heard many of Andrew's Guatemala stories: how the villages had been like tiny nation-states; how for years the government had tried to break their tribal order but were, as Andrew put it, so goddamned brutal about it, they'd only succeeded in alienating the Indians further; how, looking back, he'd been in the eye of a storm in those highlands without realizing how soon the hurricane would hit. At times, Marnie has wanted to say,
Enough, you've told me enough
, but now, feeling remorseful about the drinking bait, she raises an eyebrow to encourage him to go on.

“A week before I got to Totonicapán, a Peace Corps worker was killed. That felt dangerous. Rumors were that an army officer had offed the guy, a hippie American kid. The police claimed he'd been shot by a student activist from Guatemala City, but the weavers told me no one believed it—that the charges had been trumped up to turn American politicians against the leftists.”