My Beautiful Hippie (6 page)

“Wanna dance?” asked Pete.

I did but had to consider who was asking. Pete was hilarious, always cracking jokes and pulling pranks. I had been laughed at enough for one day. “Buzz off.”

His face was flushed from the champagne he and my brother had been helping themselves to, but he still seemed steady on his feet. “No, really. I want to dance with you.”

“Why?” I asked suspiciously.

“Why? Because this song is far out!” He grinned, exposing the cute gap between his two front teeth. He had grown his blond hair out and swept it across his forehead, surfer boy style. His acne had cleared up, and he'd lost or grown into his baby fat. He actually looked pretty cool.

If I got up to dance with Pete, Rena would be left alone. She leaned into me and whispered, “Say you'll do it if Dan will dance with me.”

I relayed the message to Pete, and by the organ solo of “Light My Fire,” the four of us were doing some heavy-duty rocking out. Pete was a pretty good dancer, or at least he didn't look like he was spazzing out, like Dan. I closed my eyes and felt the music seeping into my brain, the beat pulsing deep in my bones, and the release of all the tension brought on by the wedding. The song changed to the Airplane's “Somebody to Love.” I kicked off my
high heels and spun around in stocking feet. My steps grew wider, and soon I was leaping across the dance floor.

Pete jogged after me, his face crumpled with frustration. “Don't be hopping all over the place, Joanne.”

I ignored his pleas, and he soon gave up on my galloping, sashaying, and weaving. I was alone in the music, flying high, Grace Slick wailing, “Don't you want somebody to love? Don't you need somebody to love?” Yeah, I did, and I thought of my beautiful hippie.

After that song, Rena and I flopped, sweaty and panting, at a table next to her parents.

“Your mom did a wonderful job on this wedding,” said Mrs. Thompson.

“Thanks. I'll tell her you said so.”

“And Denise was a beautiful, blushing bride. A girl's wedding day is the most important day of her life,” gushed Mrs. Thompson.

“Yeah, right,” said Mr. Thompson, “and a marriage certificate is a man's death warrant.”

Mrs. Thompson gave him a wide-eyed, wounded look as he stared blandly back. Her face shattered like glass, and she ran out of the room.

“That was really mean, Dad,” said Rena.

“Ah, hell. Come on, Rena. We're going.”

“It's early. I can walk home.”

He stood. “We're going,” he repeated, and headed for the door, not even bothering to turn around to see if Rena was following.

Rena raised a peace sign at me, more like a sign of surrender than a farewell.

Left alone, I reached for a handful of chocolate-covered mint patties; then, realizing I was too stuffed to eat another bite, I stashed them in my satin clutch purse for later. I would forget about them, they would melt into the lining, and after that, every time I opened that purse, I would smell mint and be transported back to Denise's wedding day.

Mom's friend Maxine Fulmer came over to talk to me. I knew she was there because I had seen her untouched sunflower
seed tofu loaf in its disposable aluminum baking pan, parked among all the polished silver serving dishes on the buffet table. She had brought a guest, a thin, pale man with a pageboy who looked quite a bit younger than her and reminded me of Chopin.

Mrs. Fulmer introduced him to me as Quentin Allen. He extended his hand across the table, and when I shook it, I noticed how good his long, pale fingers would be for piano playing. Whenever I didn't know what to say to somebody, I said something stupid to fill the silence. “I've never met anyone whose name starts with a ‘Q.' ”

“What's more unusual is someone whose name starts with ‘Q' but without a ‘u' following it. Now, that's impressive.”

“Is that even possible?”

“Qadir, Qamar, Qihael. Need I go on?” He smiled with one side of his mouth, which made him boyishly handsome. He extracted a gold cigarette case from his hunter-green velveteen jacket, snapped it open, and offered its contents to me. I declined but was flattered. I'd never been offered a cigarette before.

“I've been looking for you, Joanne,” said Mrs. Fulmer, her speech slightly slurred from the champagne she was sipping. “I just had to compliment your music at the ceremony. You play with such feeling. Such expression. Truly, it's a gift.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Fulmer.”

“Call me Maxine, dear. These titles alienate the generations, don't you think? Besides, I'm not even Mrs. Fulmer anymore.”

I asked Maxine a question I probably shouldn't. “Do weddings make you sad?”

“This one does. Denise is much too young. Too bad she and Jerry couldn't just live together for a while.”

I was shocked that a person of my parents' generation would suggest such a thing. “You know my mom wouldn't go for that.”

“It's becoming widely accepted,” Maxine insisted. “Denise will see it's not easy for a girl to return to college once she's left. She's been brainwashed into thinking getting married and having children will make her a happy, feminine, well-adjusted woman with a fulfilling sex life. Society says education for girls only dooms
them to unhappy, dead-end careers and celibate, frustrated lives without orgasm.” I was embarrassed by her anger and sex talk, especially in the presence of a man. I didn't know what “orgasm” meant. Everything I knew about sex I'd learned by secretly reading
Valley of the Dolls
while babysitting, and parts of it I didn't understand.

“Girls don't dare become interested in law and medicine,” Maxine ranted on. “It will only lead to the frustration of applying for positions filled by men. No, no. Teach them cooking and sewing and”—she clawed quotation marks in the air—“ ‘the role of woman in society.' I read in Betty Friedan's
The Feminine Mystique
that in the last decade, the IQs of teenage girls in America have actually gone
down
!”

I thought of Denise in junior high, reading one book after another—Dickens, Austen, J. D. Salinger, Joyce Carol Oates—and then in the summer before her freshman year, something happened to her. She grew boobs, big pointy ones, and all her dates and hair arranging put a limit on her reading.

“Keep 'em barefoot and pregnant,” Maxine muttered.

“Oh, no, not Jerry!” I said, defending my new brother-in-law, whom I liked so much. I leaned close to Maxine to whisper their secret. “Denise is on the Pill.”

“So she can support
him
,” Maxine almost snarled. “That's the other subject they teach you girls in high school, isn't it? Typing—so you can support a man attending a university for a real profession, so you can type
his
dissertation instead of writing your own. That's what those male chauvinist
pigs
want, and they always get what they want!” She stopped, nearly panting.

If Quentin was insulted by her talk, he didn't show it. He smoked his cigarette, putting a lot of wrist motion in it and following through with a sweep of his arm. He was the most stylish smoker I'd ever seen.

On Thursday nights my parents went out to dinner and on to their ballroom dance lessons. It used to be a treat for Denise, Dan, and me to eat TV dinners on trays in front of the boob tube watching
The Mod Squad
, but now, with Denise married and Dan off at his new pizza delivery job, Thursday nights were even better. I had the whole house to myself to practice the piano as loudly and long as I wanted. But that night was special. I was going to sneak off to Martin's with Rena.

My parents left the house at five-thirty, and I waited a full ten minutes before charging down to Walker Street to Rena's house.

When she opened the door, she seemed surprised to see me. “Oh, Jo! I forgot! I can't go!”

“Why not?”

“Look, I'll show you! It's fantastic!” She led me into her living room and opened the pink entertainment section of the
San Francisco Chronicle
. “The American Conservatory Theater is casting
The Crucible
, and they're having auditions tonight! It's about the Salem witch trials, and they need a bunch of teenage girls to spaz out and act like they're possessed by the devil. I've been rehearsing all afternoon. Watch!” Rena rolled her eyes and jerked her arms around, then dropped in a heap to the floor as if her skeleton had dissolved to Jell-O. She sat up with a grin. “Pretty convincing, huh?”

“Yeah, but you promised you'd come with me.”

“I know, Jo. I'm sorry. Can't you go alone?”

I hugged myself. “I'd be too scared without you.”

“We'll go tomorrow!” Rena said brightly.

But I was psyched up to go right then. I had selected the perfect outfit. I had rehearsed all the cool things I'd say to Martin. I started to trudge home, but when I got to Ashbury, I turned left toward Haight.

I passed a couple of scary-looking Hells Angels astride their Harley choppers. I was pretty certain the one with scraggly hair, a black beard, and a beer gut was the famous Chocolate George. He wore a denim shirt with the sleeves ripped out as a vest, dotted with peace buttons. My eyes slid away from him, and I walked a little faster. The Hells Angels had once held the entire town of Hollister hostage, and even more terrifying, they had been prosecuted for gang rape. Dozens of Hells Angels had rolled into the Haight and decided to hang around and drop acid. They seemed peaceful enough, but still they made me nervous.

I sat at the trolley stop, and when it arrived, I got on. Every fiber of my being told me not to do this. Every newspaper clipping about abduction, rape, and murder that my mother had ever read aloud to me rose in giant letters in my mind. Simply, I would be killed, and it served me right because when my parents went out, they trusted me to stay home with my TV dinner and piano.

When the trolley stopped at Beach Street, I got off. I walked across the street, through the gate, and up the steep, cracked walkway to Martin's house. A recording of the Purple Cockroach's “Evolution! Revolution!” blared from an open basement window. I knocked and waited, but no one answered. Maybe Martin was watching me from behind the curtains, not really wanting me to visit and waiting for me to leave. This thought caused me to dash down the walkway. Soon I'd be on the trolley rumbling home, safe and sound.

When I got to the street again, the music abruptly stopped in the middle of the tune. I realized that maybe my knock couldn't be heard and I should try again. But by the time I made it
through the gate and up the walkway a second time, the music had started at the second verse, as if the needle of the phonograph had been dropped in the middle of the record. This time I knocked more loudly.

The music halted, and out of the basement came a long string of obscenities in a booming male voice. It didn't sound like Martin, and whoever it was sounded really pissed off. I took off at a run.

Behind me, I heard the door swing open. “You!” boomed the angry voice. “What the fuck do you want?”

I turned. A man in a full beard, long hair, and rainbow suspenders was leaping off the porch toward me.

“Oh! It
is
you!” I cried, my hand flying to my mouth. Rena had been right! It was no recording I'd heard, but the real thing, the Purple Cockroach live, in rehearsal.

Gus Abbott was smiling at me now, flattered that he had been recognized. I must have looked like a scared, dumbfounded teenybopper. I
was
a scared, dumbfounded teenybopper. “How'd you find out we live here?” he asked.

“I . . . I didn't.”

“Then who are you looking for?”

I pointed behind him. Martin was loping down the porch steps. I looked from Gus to Martin and back again. Even with Gus's beard, I could see the family resemblance.

“Hi, Joni,” said Martin. He hugged me as Gus went back into the house.

“You're brothers? You and Gus Abbott?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You
live
with the Purple Cockroach?”

He rattled his finger around in his ear. “Gets kinda noisy sometimes.”

“But it's so far out! You get to hear them all the time!”

He rolled his eyes. “Too much. They're trying to get enough material together for an album.” He put his arm around my shoulder. “Come on in. I'll make us some dinner.”

He led me to a yellow kitchen with flowers painted all over
the walls and a dozen suncatchers hanging in the window over the sink. From one of the glass-paned cupboards, he removed a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter.

I laughed.

“What?” he said. “This is the perfect dinner! Chock-full of crunchy protein, and only forty-nine cents a jar.” He lifted the loaf of wheat bread. “A man can live a week on this and live well.”

“What about jelly?”

From the refrigerator he extracted strawberry jam, my favorite, and smeared one of the pieces of bread with it. “I prefer my peanut butter in the nude, but in celebration of a dinner guest, I'll add a little jam to my sandwich, too.” He wiped the knife clean on another piece of bread before dipping it into the peanut butter. He wrapped the sandwiches in waxed paper and stuck them in a backpack along with a canteen of water. “We can't eat such an elegant dinner in such humble surroundings. Let's go.”