TOUCHED AS I WAS, there was nothing I wanted less than my mother’s journals. What’s the point of never talking about the past if you wrote it all down and you know where those pages are?
Mom’s journals were large, the size of sketch pads but thicker, and there were two of them, tied together with old green Christmas ribbon. I had to empty my suitcase and repack, sit on it to zip it closed again.
At some point, perhaps when I changed planes in Chicago, the suitcase waltzed off on its own adventures. I arrived in Sacramento, waited an hour at the luggage carousel, talked for another hour to a bunch of people with clear consciences and bad attitudes. I caught the last bus to Davis, empty-handed.
I felt guilty because I’d owned the journals less than a day and already lost them. I felt happy because just this once, the airlines had used their incompetence for good instead of evil and maybe, through no fault of my own beyond an excessive trust in everyone’s ability to do their job, I’d never see those notebooks again. I felt lucky not to have checked my textbooks.
Mostly I felt tired. The minute I stepped out of the elevator onto my floor, I could hear Joan Osborne’s “One of Us” and the music grew louder the closer I got to my own apartment. This surprised me, because I’d thought Todd (my roommate) wasn’t getting back until Sunday and I thought Todd was standing alone against the world in not liking “One of Us.”
I hoped he wouldn’t want to talk. Last time he’d gone to visit his father, they’d had a long conversation about everything they believed and wanted and were. It had all been so glorious that Todd had gone back downstairs after the good-nights to say how close to his father he now felt. From the doorway, he’d overheard Dad talking to the new wife. “Jeebus,” his dad was saying. “What an eejit. I’ve always wondered if he’s really mine.” If Todd had come home early, it was not for anything small.
I opened the door and Harlow was on my couch. She was wrapped in the crocheted shawl Grandma Fredericka had made for me when I had the measles, and she was drinking one of my diet sodas. She sprang up to turn the music down. Her dark hair was twisted onto her head and had a pencil stuck through it. I could see I gave her quite a start.
• • •
ONCE, at a parent-teacher conference, my kindergarten teacher had said that I had boundary issues. I must learn to keep my hands to myself, she’d said. I remember the mortification of being told this. I’d truly had no idea that other people weren’t to be touched; in fact, I’d thought quite the opposite. But I was always making mistakes like that.
So you’ll have to tell me what the normal reaction to coming home and finding someone you hardly know in your house would be. I was already tired and wired. My response was to gape silently, like a goldfish.
“You scared me!” Harlow said.
More dim-witted gaping.
She waited a moment. “God, I hope you don’t mind?” As if it had only just occurred to her I might. Notes of sincerity, contrition. She began talking faster. “Reg kicked me out because he thinks I have no money and nowhere to go. He thought I’d walk around for a couple of hours and then have to crawl home and beg him to let me back in. He pisses the hell out of me.” Sisterhood! “So I came here. I thought you wouldn’t be back until tomorrow.” Reason. Composure. “Look, I can see you’re tired.” Compassion. “I’ll get right out of your hair.” Commitment.
She was trying so hard to get a read on me, but there was nothing to read. All I felt was exhausted, to the marrow of my heavy bones, to the roots of my stolid hair.
Well, and maybe curious. Just the tiniest bit. “How did you know where I live?” I asked.
“I got it off your police report.”
“How did you get in?”
She pulled the pencil, and her hair dropped silkily to her shoulders. “I gave your apartment manager a pretty face and a sad story. I’m afraid he can’t really be trusted.” Her tone now was one of great concern.
• • •
I MUST HAVE gotten angry while I slept, because that’s how I woke up. The phone was ringing and it was the airline, saying they had my bag and would deliver it in the afternoon. They hoped I’d think of them the next time I flew.
I went to use the toilet and it overflowed. After several futile attempts to flush, I called the apartment manager, embarrassed to have him in my bathroom dealing so openly with my piss, but grateful it was nothing more.
Though he was eager. He came at a run, in a clean shirt rolled to show his upper arms, his plunger brandished like a rapier. He looked about for Harlow, but it was a tiny place, no way to miss her unless she was gone. “Where’s your friend?” he asked. His name was Ezra Metzger, a name of considerable poetry. Obviously, his parents had had hopes.
“Home with her boyfriend.” I was in no mood to soften this news. Besides, I’d been good to Ezra on other occasions. One time, two nondescript men had come to my door and asked questions about him. They said he’d applied for a job in the CIA, which struck me as a terrible idea no matter how you looked at it, and I still gave him the best recommendation I could make up on the spot. “I never see the guy,” I said, “unless he wants to be seen.”
“The boyfriend. She told me about him.” Ezra looked at me. He had a habit of sucking on his teeth so his mustache furled and unfurled. I expect he did that for a while. Then he said, “Bad news there. You shouldn’t have let her go back.”
“You shouldn’t have let her in. Without anyone here? Is that even legal?”
Ezra had told me once that he didn’t think of himself as the manager of the apartment house so much as its beating heart. Life was a jungle, Ezra said, and there were those who’d like to bring him down. A cabal on the third floor. He knew them, but they didn’t know him, didn’t know who the fuck they were dealing with. They’d find out. Ezra saw conspiracies. He lived his life camped out on the grassy knoll.
He also talked a lot about honor. Now I saw his mustache in full anguished quiver; if he could have committed seppuku with the plunger on the spot, he’d have done it. Mere moments later, he saw how he’d done nothing wrong. Anguish became outrage. “You know how many women are killed every year by their boyfriends?” he asked. “Pardon the shit out of me for trying to save your friend’s life.”
We settled on a wintry silence. Fifteen minutes passed before he reeled in a tampon. It wasn’t mine.
I tried to go back to bed, but there were long, dark hairs on my pillowcase and the smell of vanilla cologne on my sheets. I found Pixy Stix straws in the trash and fresh scratches in the gold-specked Formica where she’d cut something without a cutting board. Harlow was not a person who lived lightly on the land. The blueberry yogurt I’d planned for lunch was gone. Todd came slamming in, bad mood walking, made worse by the news that we’d been squatted on.
Todd had a third-generation Irish-American father and a second-generation Japanese-American mother, who hated each other. As a kid, he’d spent summers with his dad, coming home with itemized lists of unexpected expenses his mother was expected to cover. Replacement of ripped Star Wars T-shirt—$17.60. New shoelaces—$1.95. It must be so great, Todd used to tell me, having a normal family like you.
Once, he’d dreamed of experimental fusions, that he would be the one to merge folk harps with anime. Now he saw the incommensurability. In his own words: matter and antimatter. The end of the world.
Ever since the Great Eejit Incident, Todd had reached into his Japanese heritage when he needed an insult. Baka (idiot). O-baka-san (honorable idiot). Kisama (jackass). “What kind of kisama does something like that?” he asked now. “Do we have to change the locks? Do you know how fucking much that’s going to cost?” He went to his bedroom to count his CDs and then went out again. I would have left myself, gotten a coffee downtown, but I needed to be home for the suitcase.
No sign of it. At five of five, I called the airline number—800-FUCK-YOU—and was told I had to speak directly to lost luggage at the Sacramento Airport. No one answered in Sacramento, though my call was important to them.
About seven p.m., the phone rang, but it was my mother checking to see I’d gotten home all right. “I know I said I’d never mention it,” she told me. “But I feel so good about giving you those journals. Like a weight’s been lifted. There. That’s the last thing I’ll say about them.”
Todd came back around nine, with a pizza of apology from the Symposium Restaurant. His girlfriend, Kimmy Uchida, joined us and we all ate in front of Married . . . with Children and then the couch got a little busy, since it had been four whole days since Kimmy and Todd last saw each other. I went to my room and read for a while. I think I was reading The Mosquito Coast then. There seemed to be no end to the insane things fathers did to their families.