Yesteryou Chapter 11

11.

            Molly told the men that she wanted to drive to Beth’s apartment in Phoenix alone to look for her, and both Richard and George weakly protested, because Molly was stubborn in a way that inspired respect in both of them; she insisted on taking the hardest tasks.  She wanted to be the one to find her mom because she was in one of her fed up moods in which the men’s lenience toward Beth’s lifelong string of mess-ups seemed solely predicated on a misunderstanding of Beth’s motivations, of her entire personality.  The men thought Beth couldn’t help herself.  Molly, when she wasn’t feeling sentimental of yielding, just thought Beth was dangerously lazy, a hurricane barreling through terrains careless and deadly, ruining everything, disappearing as quick as she’d appeared.  So Molly had driven to Beth’s apartment in Phoenix the day it finally seemed too spooky not to be able to reach her on the phone, the day they received Beth’s vague letter to Richard.

            It took a day to drive from the house she lived in with her dad to Beth’s apartment in Phoenix.  She ate beef jerky and drank coffee on the road, and went over and over the few scenes between herself and Beth that she’d been most stuck on lately.  When she heard her mom screaming in the doctor’s office, for instance.  Her and George were sitting in two orange plastic chairs which were cold to the touch, in a Kaiser Permanente waiting room with flickering fluorescent overhead lights that hummed a constant, ruthless dirge.  All of a sudden, the air was pierced with a scream so rich with terror, it struck Molly as a scream that belonged in a horror film, and even before she saw the men holding her firmly and walking, half-dragging her out of the doctor’s office, Molly had already known that the scream belonged to her mother.  “Oh dear,” was all George felt inclined to say (actually, his internal voice uttered “Oh fuck,” but Molly imagined him more naïve).  Did these scenes ever shock him, or was he unshockable? 

            “What’s wrong with her?” Molly demanded of him in a whisper.                  

“I think they’re trying to make her go into a treatment program.  I think this doctor she’s seeing has been threatening to do it against her will.  It’s okay, let’s just get her out of here.”  He bent down to pick up Beth’s purse where it sat at his feet, and took Beth over, the men who had been restraining her gladly giving up their charge.  On the car ride to Beth’s home (this was one of Molly’s weekends to spend with Beth, and she couldn’t go back to Richard because she knew he was getting away to Mexico for the weekend), Beth didn’t stop screaming.  “What should we do?” Molly wanted to know, but before he had time to answer (though, was he planning to answer?), she said, “Pull over right here, behind this truck.”  It was an ice cream truck she’d bought things from occasionally, and she liked it because it sold pretty little toys, cheap things with mermaid and star motifs.  She had a dollar in her pocket and she told the short Guatemalan man behind the shallow counter of the truck, “Give me the prettiest one of these,” gesturing with a nod of her head towards the water guns.  The command amused the man, who liked that she valued the beauty of the little knickknacks, which he painted by hand with nail polish and White-Out, and he stealthily handed her one that had a dragon with the breasts of a woman and a halo painted over its head.  She ran back to the car and shoved the item into her mom’s hands.  Beth quieted down immediately.  Maybe she’d felt embarrassed at the scene she’d made in the doctor’s office, and maybe she was just content to receive the toy; Molly would never know.  Beth remained silent for a couple hours.  The sun set, George sat with Molly for awhile on the cluttered and dusty couch before tentatively getting up to leave.  “See ya,” Molly said bravely.  Beth started to make dinner.  Then she came into the living room, examined the image of her daughter there on the couch, and she could have said, “Thank you for this little toy.  It’s really pretty.”  That would have made Molly happy.  But Beth just turned around and went back into the kitchen, stubbing her toe on the chair that stayed propped against the oven door to keep it closed.

            In Phoenix, she drove immediately to Beth’s apartment.  Beth’s neighbor was outside, cleaning out her car. 

            “Molly, right?” 

            “Yes.  Your name is Susan, right?  You’re her neighbor?” 

            “Sweetheart, I don’t know what to tell you.  I spend most of the day listening for some sound coming from her place, or keeping my eye on the window to see if she goes out, and I just don’t hear a peep from her.  I asked the cops to break down the door, but they had some law they told me about, some reason they can’t interfere.  I guess there has to be a missing person report filed.  Have you done that yet?” 

            “Uh, I’m not sure.  My dad might have, I don’t know.  She didn’t give you a spare key to her place, I guess?” 

            “No, I’m afraid not.”  

            “Okay,” Molly had a short attention span for conversations.  “I’m going to snoop around a little, okay?” 

            “Help yourself, sweetie,” Susan said, and when she turned back to emptying out the papers on the floor of her car, Molly saw that Susan’s thighs were marred with green and blue spider veins, even though she was fairly young, and it was one of those brief reminders of inevitable ugly mortality that depressed Molly even more than she already felt.

            For a half hour, Molly sat on Beth’s side of the porch (it was a duplex apartment building), exhausted and unsure what further to do; she’d tried peering into all the windows, knocked for several minutes on the front and back door, and called, her lips close to the peeled turquoise paint of the front door, “Mom, are you there?”  Finally, Susan sat down on her side of the porch.  “Do you mind if I ask you what happened?” she asked.

            “You mean about the car crash?  I don’t really know the details.”

            “I was just wondering, is it true that Beth ran someone over?”

            “Yeah, a guy on a little motorcycle that I guess wasn’t right for the freeway.”
            “And do you know why she’s disappeared?  I mean, is she wanted by the law, for manslaughter or something?”
            The question made Molly feel defensive, but Susan was obviously asking out of a curiosity untainted with judgment.  She said as much a moment later, after Molly told her that the crash was rightly judged an accident that had been the motorcyclist’s fault.

            “Sorry about the questioning, I wasn’t trying to make Beth sound guilty of murder.  I’m just confused.  One day she goes to court about the crash, then later that night I hear her coming back home, then not a peep from her since then, she just disappears.  I like her.  So, I guess I’m just bewildered by the whole situation.  It seems like if she’s not in trouble – ‘

More to herself than to Susan, Molly mumbled, “Fuck, she must feel so guilty.  I can’t even imagine.”

one of my favorite films

Yesteryou Chapter 10

10.

            Meanwhile, the friendship between George and Beth was an embarrassment to them both, at times, because of its intensity and breadth.  People assumed, even though the two would have made an odd couple, that they had been secretly physically intimate, or if not, that it was inevitable.  That may have been a natural assumption to make (though inarguably prurient), because it wan an obvious fact that George was in love with Beth.  George and Beth both knew it, but unrequited love was the most natural kind for the asexual George to give, as well as the most natural kind for Beth, arrested developmentally at the emotional age of 12, to receive.  But the truths is that they were friends.  When in his last days she would be comfortable enough with him dozing off and on throughout the day on her couch to walk around the apartment naked when she found it necessary, like when she'd been putting on her underwear in her bedroom for instance but then remembered she'd left the only bra she owned on the floor of the living room and she had to go get it -- George didn't feel a sexual charge seeing her bare breasts but instead, or at least mostly, gratefulness towards her for finally allowing him so completely into her private world.

            The day after he met her, he went back to the library to see her again, and brought her a copy of a book of poems about cats.  She already owned the book, but was pleased by the gift anyway, because she liked owning things.  "Where did you get this book from?" she'd asked him, "It's a first edition, isn't it?"

            "Mmm hmm, I bought it as part of an estate.  An old English fellow passed away last week in Pasadena, and his wife is a customer in my store; I own a used bookstore.  She let me have first pick at his book collection, which turned out to be amazing.  Really wonderful stuff. If you're interested, I could show you what I got from that estate.  Maybe there's something you want."  They would soon share routines, habits and traditions, especially once she divorced Richard.  Every Boxing Day, for instance, which is a holiday celebrated in England on the day after Christmas, they exchanged one wild-card gift each, a present that hadn't appeared on the meticulous wish list of gifts they traded each December 1st.  Every year for his birthday one of her gifts to him was a bag of assorted candy, but she put the bag together from several bags of candy, and he had to figure out the theme, like one year, an easy year, all the candy in the bag was red (red Jolly Ranchers, red Wax Lips, Red Hots), but one year it was more challenging, all the candies had the names of locations in them:  Boston Baked Beans and Charleston Chews.  They had annual two-person Oscars parties that always included a spread of Pub Cheese and frois grois:  the person with the least correct Oscar predictions had to do the dishes left over from all the snacks they ate that night.  Every Easter they went to the Griffith Park Observatory, which was one of the main locations in “Rebel Without a Cause,” simply because Christ reminded Beth of James Dean.  When Molly was still a child, and came to visit Beth on the weekends, there was the excuse of laying a groundwork of beautiful images in Molly's memory to add a flourish to everything the two grownups planned, and they developed traditions they would abandon later when Molly grew up, like going to the temporary carnival in downtown that was set up every year for Chinese New Year, or burying the small rodents one of Beth's cats always dragged back to the apartment with funerary rites and solemn ceremony. 

            Beth had been so proud of herself for catching the interest of a classy and handsome man like Richard, and through that pinhole of pride, some love escaped, made its way to Richard.  But only some.  She didn't fully accept the fact that he was a person, that he continued to walk and breathe when out of her sight.  And there was her endless amazement that she'd made Molly.  But these two people, huge as their impact was on her, made her uncomfortable to be around; she dropped more things than usual when Molly was in the kitchen, and her best hair days all occurred on days in which Richard didn't see her.  It was only George with whom she didn't stutter or say unduly obnoxious things she didn't mean.  And when she moved to Arizona, it was because, in the first blush of forty, Beth realized anew that she was young, pretty and doomed, and wanted a fresh start.

            On a hot summer day in 2007, Beth, who'd learned to drive in exchange for becoming less adept at all the other adult skills she'd once taken pains to learn, like a baby attempting language, was driving on the freeway.  At this point in her life, her nineteen-year-old daughter was mostly incommunicado.  She spoke on the phone to her best friend George almost everyday.  She hadn't been working a regular job for two years, because she'd suffered debilitating panic attacks at her last job, and now she was crazy enough to qualify for Social Security Insurance.  She craved sex, pills and popcorn, all the time.  Keeping pace alongside her fragile Datsun on the freeway, a young man was riding what looked like little more than a motorized bicycle.  That the boy should not have gotten on the freeway on this contraption was obvious, because it could hardly take his weight, it wobbled and sputtered noxious clouds of gas.  The rider was wearing those canvas high-top sneakers Molly used to love to wear when she called herself a punk-rocker, a pair of cut-off shorts and a t-shirt that had “Satan’s Little Angels” printed on it in red Old English lettering.  This shirt would become a heartbreaking detail to her because of the way it so flippantly alluded to the afterlife.  He wore his hair in a pompadour.  She could see the sweat on his face and even though it would sound later like an unbelievable exaggeration, she could see the areas of skin that stretch across his knuckles made pale from how tightly he grasped the handlebars.  It was rare, to have an opportunity like this to watch a handsome, weary, nearby man careen through various levels of fear.  She imagined this must have been his first time in a situation which necessitated taking this contraption, a Honda Rebel, on the freeway, and she wondered where he was headed, and if he wished he had worn tougher clothes in case the bike tipped over – there was nothing covering his legs or arms and it would hurt awfully if he took a spill.  Then without even looking behind or beside him, he sped in front of Beth’s car, and she killed him.  Poetic irony being the common fate of poets, which Beth was, the father of the young man had been killed in a freeway accident as well. 

            The young man, whose rock band had been called “Satan’s Little Angels,” had been living with his girlfriend, Lorena, when Beth ran him over, and the young woman briefly entertained the notion of suing Beth for vehicular manslaughter, but a therapist convinced her to try to move on from the accident, and Lorena tried her hardest.  Beth disappeared, first sending this letter to Richard:

            “Richard, please just let me explain myself someday.  In the meantime, please take over.”

And that was all it said.

that's entertainment

Yesteryou Chapter 9

9.

George loved to buy drinks for Beth, he loved to be around her when she drank, because when she drank, she became so relaxed and so much kinder, and she almost never lost control by becoming too drunk, at least not for the first several years.  She just became happy, when normally she was guarded and dour.

It was a dark and stormy night.  There was something they'd been talking about that George couldn't stop turning over in his mind as he sat in his car in the bar's parking lot, watching the neon light of the sign catch on the rain drops and turn them red on his windshield, while he waited for the car's engine to warm up. He'd told Beth about driving Molly to Josie's house, not worrying about betraying Molly's whereabouts on a school night, because it never occurred to Beth to worry about her daughter.

"Josie's probably having more problems with this man she used to see.  I overheard the two of them talking about it," -- and Beth explained that an older man who'd been involved with Josie was following her around now, or so it seemed.

Things should matter more.  Bad guys should be brought to justice.  Men who say disturbing things to women who don't want to speak with them should be humiliated, the woman should scream at the top of her lungs, or cry, instead of holding it in, until everyone turns around to look at them and then sees, knows that the man has been doing something wrong.  Normal people, who don't like novels and cats, who are outwardly aggressive, deserved to be made to feel embarrassed in turn when they embarrassed a weird person by responding to a question in an exasperated tone, or feigning superiority in any way.  Human frailties should be protected, not teased out and diminished through crass, unrelenting humor.  These things George believed.  Sometimes it was truly unbelievable to him, the way things didn't seem to matter enough to other people, and he was unsure whether this was bravery or desensitization on the part of these people.  For instance, when Beth had been telling him about the man who was after Josie (and by proxy, Molly), she was speaking of a grown man taking advantage of a young woman, but the words she used were so vague, she could have been talking about anything as benign as the girls being in trouble for shoplifting, and George had to remind himself:  this man had fucked the child Josie and now wouldn't leave her alone -- this act was evil. 

Now, as he backed out of the parking lot, lamenting Beth's parental negligence, he decided it was necessary to check up on Molly, or else something awful might happen, some new cruel or perverse incident that wouldn't register as unacceptable to anyone but himself.  So he drove to Josie's family's house, mentally replaying the best parts of the evening he'd just spent with Beth, surprised when, pulling up to the house, he saw a man dressed in a bulky black parka and black pants standing with his back to the street, the binoculars he held to his eyes trained on the house.  The man turned to face George as George got out of the car, slamming the door behind him.  So this evil man really did exist.

"Hey old man, what do you want?"

The best George could compose himself was to reply, “This isn’t your house.  What are you doing here?”

"How do you know I don't live here?  I know you don’t live here.”  The man was obviously enjoying the confrontation.  “My wife is inside fucking our neighbor right now, old man.  I'm just spying on her, just wracking up evidence for the divorce."

"That’s a lie.  I know the people who live here."

“So do I.”

The man didn't smell like alcohol or weed, but there was something definitely wrong with him.  He smelled like sweat.  Pugnacious a moment ago, he became almost shy now.

“Are you Josie’s grandpa?”

George answered, “Yes, I’m Josie’s grandfather.  What are you doing here?  It’s not proper to be standing outside like this, no one knowing you’re out here.”  But at the moment, he could not recall even what Josie looked like, he was thinking only of Molly, his smart, funny little friend, who he'd driven over here to save, because she’d intended, somehow, to protect Josie from this disgusting man who stood before him.  George had a stooped posture and a slow gait caused by deformed toes on both his feet, and a lazy eye.  He looked vulnerable and years older than he was, but goddammit, he thought to himself, goddammit, he was still a man, and his anger drove his basically fragile hand to Calvin's Adam's Apple, hard.  Quickly, he punched the man next in the balls, and before the man could get more than one punch in, the punch that broke George's nose so that from now on his face would look different than it had the first 48 years of his life, George grabbed the man's ponytail and used it to pull him down to the mud.  "I'll kill you," Calvin said, doubled over and rocking on the trash-speckled, muddy gravel that filled in the walkway in front of the gate.  “No you won’t,” George said.  He remembered what Josie looked like, all of sudden; she was like a foal walking unsteadily on legs that were too long, and when she spoke, it was so painfully evident that she was afraid the things she was saying were incorrect.  And Molly, Molly meanwhile was a feminist; she prided herself on having hairy legs and hairy armpits, and arguing with grown men in a loud quivering voice whenever she spotted an injustice.  But, just like Josie, she was a child.  They needed protecting.  Molly would live forever, George would make it so that Molly lived forever.

George kneeled on the gravel and watched the man writhing.  He punched him again in the balls.  "Goddamn it, she should have just called the cops on you,” he said out loud to himself through half-hysterical, soundless tears.  “Stay away from them.”

The main thing that plagued him as he drove, first scared of himself, then exhilarated, sensing a rare clarity of action, to his apartment, was the fear that he'd somehow accidentally attacked the wrong man, that the lurker had not been Calvin.  He would consider his soul irreparably doomed to hell if he'd made such a mistake.

So he called Molly, though he felt guilty calling so late.

            "He's a kind of big guy with long brown hair and big eyebrows.  I think he has a moustache sometimes.  He's totally ugly and scary-looking, like with Charles Manson eyes, like, this gross, creepy stare," she told him.  "Why, George?  Did you see him?" 

            "Oh thank goodness, thank goodness," George said, never having felt more relieved in his life -- he'd done something right.  "Molly, please don't get upset.  I just beat him up.  I drove by because I got really worried after your mom told me about Josie's problems with him.  I really lost control when I drove by and saw standing outside the house.  It's okay now though, he’ll leave you girls alone.  But I, you know, I pulverized him, I think; I’m not very strong, but I played dirty.  I – you know I don't believe in violence, but -- what do you make of all this, Molly?  Are you mad at me?  Maybe you should call the cops and say there’s a strange man knocked out in front of your friends’ house, and they’ll take him away.  I didn’t stay to see if he was going to try to stand up…” George trailed off, and then he began another string of worried non-sequiturs.  She knew she should interrupt him, and she grasped for some sentence to say out loud that would make sense of what he’d done, but she couldn’t think of what to say; she felt so full of gratitude it made her dizzy, like a wave of fever.

The next morning, she’d go to school, though the night before, she'd been planning on playing hooky with Josie.  She called Josie as soon as she got home, and when she asked how Josie’s day had been, Josie responded, “Really amazing actually, but I did something that might upset you.”

“What did you do?”

“Well, I – you know how I have caller ID, and how Calvin calls sometimes and I don’t pick up when I see his telephone number on the caller ID screen.”

“Of course.  You don’t want to talk to him.”

“Right.  But this morning the phone rang, and I saw that it was him calling, and I was planning on answering and just screaming at him to leave me alone, telling him I was going to call the police or that I have a stun gun I’m going to use on him if I ever see him again or something, but before I could say any of this, he begged me just to listen to him before I hang up.   He told me he only spies on me because he knows how vulnerable I am, and he wants to protect me.  When I brought up some of the gross things he did to me when we were dating, like by way of saying ‘How can you wanna protect me when you’ve done bad things to me yourself?,’ he started to cry, he begged me to forgive him, and promised he’d never bother me again.  He confessed to being outside the window last night, like we knew he was, and he said that he got beaten up really bad and mugged in front of the house.  I actually feel bad for him, his voice sounded awful, like all raggedy and weak, like he’d been choked.  I told him I forgive him, Molly, and I don’t think he’s going to stalk me anymore, I think he meant what he said.  But I feel bad, because I know I have you all riled up to hate him on my behalf, and I really don’t hate him anymore.  Are you mad at me?”

She would never tell her so, but Molly was mad at Josie; it seemed unforgivably wishy-washy of Josie to forgive Calvin, and she also felt foolish for having gotten so swept up in a melodrama that she’d thought had been a matter of life or death. 

Now, why would Josie want to forgive Calvin?  This, Molly couldn’t understand.  She’d been molested by a babysitter’s teenaged son when she was three, and now she believed in there being bad guys, bad guys like in movies, like the irredeemably evil Lex Luther, like the Joker in Batman.  She didn’t respect people who could maintain a position of ambivalence.  Ambivalence was borne of an acceptance of most people’s moral ambiguity. 

            Not that Molly was ever very normal, but she became that much more uncommon the day after the rainy night on which George beat up a bad guy for her benefit.  Vomit rising to her throat from a visceral sickness caused by what felt like Josie's betrayal, Josie who at different times had loved her maternally, sisterly and romantically, Molly ached to sink back into the comfort of her adults, her George and her Richard. 

            “Uh, I don’t really know what to say right now, Josie.  I feel like you’re letting him trick you, you know?  Or, I feel, like, bummed.  I don’t know.  Can I call you back later?”  She never did.

The Women of my Blood