Moonface (4 page)

Three weeks after the transplant, everyone was finally able to rest. My daily blood tests read that my brother's kidney was working, that my body wasn't rejecting it. I thought about how, before long, I would have to go back to Baltimore for school.

Friends and family called to ask how I felt. I didn't know how to tell them without jumping out of my seat. I felt the blood pumping in my veins and the breath in my lungs. I thought,
today I could run a hundred miles without stopping
. The scar over my abdomen was healing, and I wanted to eat all my favorite, salty foods that I was forced to avoid when my kidneys didn't work. I was someone else now. Someone better.

People came to see my brother and me and told us that even our parents were looking better, how the wrinkles on their brows had finally smoothed out. They were laughing again and the secretary in my dad's office confessed to me that she had finally seen my dad's big smile for the first time that summer. Not only was the transplant successful, but we had been living under the same roof for the past few weeks, and that made it easier for my parents to watch over us.

It just kept getting better after that. Three weeks after the transplant, I was restless and eager to use my energy. I needed a project. I didn't want to just sit around. The owners of the house before us had covered the entire second floor with cheap, ugly carpet. Underneath lay shiny, flawless parquet. My mother had been saying for years how she wanted to rip up that carpet, but she never did it. One day they came home, and I had rolled up half the carpet so that a big lump sat in the middle of the room.

“What do you think you're doing?!” they yelled.

“I was bored. It's not as hard as it looked. It wasn't bolted in there or anything.” I had ignored my surgeon's orders to rest, and my father made me check my incision to make sure nothing had popped. I had the energy of a horse. That was what the new kidney did for me.

In the room across the hall, things were quiet. My brother was back in his childhood bed. His boxes from moving out of his place in Boston were piled up around him. Sometimes he came down to watch TV, whizzing through the channels impatiently. He was cranky because of the pain of his incision, a cut that extended from the front of his torso, around the side of his body, and all the way to the middle of his back. The surgeons warned us that the surgery would be more difficult for him, and I don't know if he ever believed that. If he didn't before, he did now.

“Do you want to go to the mall?” I asked him.

He stared back at me for a few minutes before I remembered that I wasn't allowed to drive for two months, he for three. We were stuck in that house until our parents got home.

I hadn't heard his laughter in a long time, despite how much I tried to egg it on. “Look,” I pointed to the TV, “botched-up plastic surgery stories on channel 4.” But instead of paying attention, he put on his earphones and tuned out.

He had lost touch with his friends in Boston and decided he would not return after he got better.

“Why not?” I asked. All I could think about was moving into my dorm in a few weeks and being surrounded by friends.

He responded with just a shrug and then went upstairs again to hide in his room. When my parents came home, I called him down for dinner, but he didn't respond and stayed up there for the rest of the night.

In the weeks before school, I should have been exhausted from my days of jumping around the house energetically and my newfound hobby as a carpet remover, from packing my boxes and planning my schedule. And while I was a little tired, I had trouble sleeping. After the transplant, I lay in bed trying to close my eyes and doze off, but I couldn't. I stayed up all night rolling from one side of the bed to the other, sitting up in the dark, and pacing the floor, trying to make out the millions of thoughts clouding my head, but the only words that came through were
forgive me, forgive me, forgive me
.

Chapter Four
Direct from San Francisco: Two Dancers Balance One-Footed on the Moving Earth

I
tell Charlie I was a real drag before he came along, I and he says to me, “Nah, Moonface. You just needed someone to find that spark in you.” He says he was intent on lighting that spark from the first moment he laid his baby blues on me.

But I was skeptical. After spending the summer watching my brother slowly heal, I went back to school trying to pick up where I left off. I drank at the bars with my friends, but stopped after they were all too drunk to realize that I was nursing my drink and being more conscious about what I was taking in. I was keenly aware now that something had changed, that things did not go my way. Even when Charlie came along, I didn't believe him. The last thing I needed was to deal with a guy who thought he was the incarnation of Elvis. I was even reluctant about making a big move to San Francisco, but before I knew it, I was there, and I was waiting to meet Charlie.

I stood in that lobby in San Francisco waiting. Any minute now, Charlie would come walking out of that elevator. Then what? Shallow hug? Fidgety handshake? The flowers in the hotel lobby were fake and gray with dust. A bellman wearing gold tassels on his shoulders stood by the door and seemed embarrassed. Any minute now.

I sat on the green velvet couch and stared at the elevator doors. This was like when you dream about someone in your office and then the next day you're at the copy machine and that person is standing next to you asking you how long you're going to be, when just last night the two of you were rubbing the insides of each other's thighs and sucking on one another's ears.

It was the late ”90s, the dot-com era, and I was working as a secretary for a computer company, and sometimes when I rode the bus from work up to Haight Street, I shut my eyes and saw glimpses of Charlie—him pumping up my bike tire, him helping me with the grocery bags and insisting on the heavy ones with the laundry detergent and the milk while I carried the chips and the t.p. But, when I opened my eyes, I remembered that a year earlier, I had said goodbye to Charlie on a rooftop in Baltimore. After our first kiss months before at a party, there was another party, and another upon our college graduation. Charlie and I sat for long hours on the benches outside the soccer house and talked, but when I rationalized it all, we were just a fling, an end-of-the-year romance. Besides, I had already made other plans to move out west. I had people waiting on me. I didn't stop thinking about him, though, not on the road trip out here, not when I dated a sleazy bike mechanic with an Asian fetish, and not when he called and left a message on my machine telling me he was in San Francisco for a convention.

All week long San Francisco had been so hot—so hot that when you walked outside, old men on the sidewalk with brooms actually said, “Hot enough for you?” and still expected you to laugh, but you couldn't because you were so damn hot. After I first moved there, I learned to carry a sweater around, even in the summer, because despite San Francisco's California image, days there could be chilly, downright cold in July. But that week, bike messengers rode without shirts on. Businessmen fried in their suits. When I came back from my lunch break on Tuesday, Alex, the moody overweight IT guy in my office, a person I would never dream about, stood outside the lobby smoking a Camel. “You know what this is, don't you? It's earthquake weather. Yeah, I've seen this before,” he said, his big chest inflating as he inhaled. Sometimes Alex could really be an idiot, and so often I tried to ignore him. But when I looked up to the sky, it looked green. Green where there should be blue.

After graduation, I packed up the car and moved there for the same reason a lot of people move to San Francisco—because it is far from home and because it is so mysterious. It was far from the east coast, where everyone seemed so obsessed with what kinds of high-powered jobs we would be getting with our degrees and when we were going to finally find a mate to marry. As soon as some friends and I rolled over the Bay Bridge, it seemed like no one was asking us those questions anymore. Instead, we sat in colorful apartments and talked about how wonderful the city was, how everyone was so nice. How the air smelled healthy. How when you woke in the morning and looked out the bay window of your tiny studio apartment, you felt full of possibility. I understood the feeling, but I didn't know what was possible yet.

I had planned to leave right after graduation. But when I told my parents of the plan, they made their positions clear: “no!” My mother said it, repeatedly and quickly while shaking her head, “NONONONONONO,” so as not to put any room between the “no"s for me to interrupt. My father, on the other hand, said it once, clearly with both his hands and his eyes, before turning around and walking out of the room.

So instead of going straight to San Francisco right after graduation, I waited. I moved back into my parents” house and all summer long I stomped around the house, talking back, whining, acting like a child, because that's how they were treating me after all, right?

By August, my mother was so sick of my complaining, she yelled, “Okay, fine. Go!”

But don't think her dismissal came without her transferring her own paranoia into me. As she folded my laundry and pushed the sweaters into my overstuffed suitcase, she said, “Lock your door,
anak
, because people will open your door and suffocate you with your pillow in your sleep and steal all your things. Don't wear short skirts when you have to walk up the stairs, because men will look at you from below. Don't go anywhere at night. Just stay home. You know what people do. If you have a drink, they will slip a pill in your drink, and they will rape you. It's true. So keep your drink covered with your hand, like this . . . that way, no one can slip things in there. Don't tell anyone your phone number. They can track you down like that; they will know where you live.”

And even though I knew that her fears came directly from the mouths of Diane Sawyer and John Stossel, her words still stuck with me, and made me think twice about everything, about living on my own, about if I could do this. My mother scared the shit out of me. But by the time our first rent check was due, I was stern with my landlord on the phone when he tried to stick us with a plumbing bill. At night, I walked around the city, and I knew how to take the well-lit streets. I gave tourists directions. At bars, I drank from beer bottles with skinny openings, but sometimes I set them on the bar while I reached for some cigarettes. I slept soundly in my apartment. Then one night . . .

WHAM!

My bedroom window smacked against its own frame. The wall moved closer to the couch I was sitting on.

It wasn't at all like I had imagined it would be, not at all like the earthquake simulation ride at Universal Studios. Nothing like this. It was more like a slap across the face, or a fender-bender. It was over before I realized what happened.

My roommates and I, all east-coast girls, didn't know what to do or how the shoddy walls of our apartment were going to hold up. We had to get out! I remember my friend giving directions as we walked out the door. “Walk on the side of the street where there are no buildings,” she said, words that seemed so wise then. Yes, I thought,
so things don't fall on us
. So that's what we did, me and my roommates, practically crawling out of our apartment and up the sidewalk of a nearby park, far from the sidewalk and windows. The three of us stood in the grass in Alamo Square, trembling with fear, tears streaming from our faces. We waited for aftershocks.

When I looked up, the streetlights were still lit all along Hayes Street. The orange bus pulled along its cables and made small, electrical crackling noises as it made a usual stop on Divisadero and kept rolling on. People in restaurant windows were sipping soup from soup spoons. It was as if nothing happened. And the three of us, three girls from east of the Mississippi, sat alone atop Alamo Square and laughed into one another's shoulders.

When I got on the bus for work the next day, I clenched my body each time we jumped a pothole, or anytime the cable wires snagged and jolted out of place. We rode up and down the hills of San Francisco, but it felt like at any moment the earth below would split open and deep crevasses would swallow the bus whole. I hugged a pillow over my head at night, and went over an escape plan to myself: grab the walls for balance, slide down the stairs, and run out into the side of the street where there are no buildings. I didn't tell my mother about the earthquakes, lest she realize that this was an everyday danger and force me to come home. It felt like I was flailing in the city, scared of the next fault line to awaken.

I tried to hide any sense of anxiety I had when I went out with my friend Danielle, while we were out looking for boys to date. But once, when we sat in a bar and the ceiling thudded from the dance floor upstairs, the lights above the bar flickered, and I grabbed Danielle's hand as she drank her beer.

“No. You're fine,” she said. She was the only native San Franciscan I would ever meet my whole time there. She told me to do something she learned in grade school as soon as I felt an earthquake coming:
stand under the door
.

The gold elevator doors finally opened, and Charlie walked out into the lobby.

As soon as he saw me, he demonstrated his wingspan and he shouted, “It's the Incomparable Moonface!”

The bellboy and some guests looked over, but Charlie kept his bright blue eyes straight on me. He looked freshly showered, his curly hair shorter and darker than I remembered. When he leaned down to wrap his arms around me, his neck smelled like soap.

As we walked out the revolving doors and into the city, Charlie said, “San Francisco is hot!” He said the convention was boring. After school, he had started working for a trade show company that sent him to different cities to register the presenters and attendees. He said that the entire expo center was filled with booths of people talking about concrete and asphalt and construction supplies. He talked and talked, and I watched his lips move, his hands gesture; once, I touched his sleeve to feel the fabric of his blue button-down shirt. Good old cotton. Thick and reliable.

“God, I can't believe I haven't seen you since graduation,” he said, “when you had that butterfly pinned to your cap, remember?”

“You remember that?” I said.

Columbus Avenue was thronged with people, but we twisted our way up the sidewalk, the fading sun on our backs, and walked into a bar and headed straight upstairs to the balcony. From our small cocktail table, we could see straight down into a sea of drinkers waiting for the bartender's attention, bills in hand and waving. There was a deranged, dirty guy with a patchy brown beard yelling about the war and our boys in Vietnam. I tried to ignore the smell of urine, but I couldn't.

What came after this? How do you continue where you had left off? In my imagination, Charlie had come all this way to tell me he was thinking about me, that he couldn't stop thinking about me, that San Francisco kept pulling him and pulling him. But after the small talk was over, and after we ordered our drinks from a strung-out waitress with fidgety hands, we became quiet, the distance between us vast.

After the drinks came, after the old man stopped his tirade about Nixon, after several bar orders were called out down below, Charlie leaned in close, and in a deep, slow, serious voice said, “Can you name the countries of Central America?”

“What?” I said.

“There are seven. Can you name them?” Charlie put his beer down and looked at me directly. He came two thousand miles to ask me about geography. He was waiting.

“Um, Honduras,” I said.

“One,” he held up his index finger.

“Uh, El Salvador? Guatemala?”

“Yeah . . .”

“Belize . . . Nicaragua ...” I was trying to picture the oilcloth map in my memory, the one Ms. Wesner had pulled down from the top of the blackboard. “Costa Rica . . . How many is that?”

“Six.”

What am I missing?
I whispered to myself. I looked at the ceiling. The wood in the old bar was cracking. I suddenly became worried about how seismically safe the structure of the building was.

“The last one?” Charlie said, leaning in closer now, expecting brilliance.

“Not Uruguay, not Paraguay . . . Okay, tell me.”

“Pana—”

“Right! Panama! Was this a test?”

“No. I just know these facts. I just know them. All these things that I know, I have to figure out a way to use them. You did good. What things do you know?”

“I don't know anything.”

“So what kinds of things do you think about when you walk down the street?”

“Yesterday, I walked down the street singing a song I had just written.”

“Really? Well, sing it.”

“You wouldn't like it.”

“No, tell me.” He slumped his shoulders a little, and slanted his head to one side. “It's stupid.”

He looked at me. His invitation was irresistible. Quietly, I sang, “
Parking Meter, Parking Meter, glad to meet ya, Parking Meter, hate to feed ya, Parking Meter, love to beat ya, Parking Meter
.”

Blank face. Dead eyes.

“I know; see? You asked.”

“No, I like it.”

“I was walking to work, and I was looking up at the top of a building, and slammed right into a parking meter. Clocked my chin. It's got a faster tempo than that. Very staccato.”

“I love it,” he said.

“I've got another one.”

This time I sing with slightly more vibrato. This actually has a good melody. Think show tunes: “
I like you / in an inner tube / strategically placed / right below your waist
. Get it?” I jump out of my chair and stand in front of him, motioning around my hips with my hands like I have a spare tire around me. “It's a love song.”

“Is there more to it?” Charlie said.

“I don't think so.”

“How 'bout:
I like you / with a popsicle stick / cherry red / the kind I like to lick
.”