Peggy finds it difficult, nearly impossible to say “no,” and all its variations: no thank you, not interested, please another time, scram. Which made it no surprise to learn that in celebration of the millennium, she vowed to give a small contribution to anyone who asked for a handout.
Berkeley is a town filled with homeless people and any number of opportunities for Peggy to exercise her one-thousandth year resolution. On January 1, 2000, she set out, her pockets jangling with change. But no matter how many forlorn and desperate individuals she encountered, no one asked for anything.
For weeks, wherever she walked (library, grocery store, post-office), she stayed alert for beggars. She resorted to eye contact. She smiled. Still, no one asked.
In February, she made dinner plans with friends in San Francisco. It was a cold, tempestuous night, but she deliberately didn’t drive. The train, she reasoned, would drop her a few unsavory blocks from the restaurant. En route, she was bound to be accosted by hapless men, camped between Market and Van Ness.
She dressed warmly in boots, a heavy winter coat, lined gloves, and a large velvet hat shaped like a Renaissance envelope. She exited the train at Civic Center station, stumbling past huddles of shivering souls wrapped in ponchos and tarps. But instead of conducting their proper business of panhandling, they were enthralled by her hat.
“Love that hat!”
“Swell hat, missus!”
“Where’d you get that hat?”
Peggy’s dinner companions offered her a lift back to the train. One last time, her eyes swept the street for solicitors. The weather was stormy, the sidewalks empty, her expectations dashed. Not even an excursion into urban blight could initiate her millennium promise.
As she entered the station, a deformed bundle hobbled towards her. His runny eyes lighted on hers. Here was a potential candidate. He studied her head and raised his hands to approximate the size of her hat.
“Something got on your head?” he babbled, touching his filthy hair.
“A hat,” Peggy assured him.
“You got money?”
She nearly hugged him, reaching for her wallet, but instead of heaps of change and small bills, there was only a single hundred-dollar bill, the remainder of a paycheck meant to last a week.
“I guess not,” she said.
The man was not deterred. He followed Peggy on board the train. He burrowed into the seat next to her. “What about money?” he asked, addressing her hat.
She turned to a well-dressed passenger across the aisle.
“Could you possibly change a hundred?”
“That’s a beautiful hat,” he commented.
“Apparently,” she smiled.
“Next stop, I got to go,” the wretch complained.
The pink gentleman lifted a cumbersome box from his lap, unbuttoned his tweed overcoat, reached inside his breast pocket, and from a hefty wallet, counted out $89 in small bills. “How much did you intend to give him?”
“I can’t let you,” Peggy stuttered.
“What do you care?” the beggar argued.
“But I wanted to,” she stammered.
Ignoring her objections, the stranger handed ten dollars to the homeless man who scurried away as the subway doors closed.
I was not always a good swimmer. As a child, I went to the pool and paddled around the shallow water. As a teen, I lay on a recliner on the pool deck, lathered in a tanning concoction of Mercurochrome and baby oil, playing canasta with friends. Although I learned to execute the motions of swimming, a short length exhausted me. I suspected poor lungs (hereditary) and zero endurance (smoking since thirteen).
Twenty years later, I sat in a pool-side bleacher, watching my children learn to swim. Nearby, lap swimmers plowed up and down the lanes, moving as effortlessly through water as birds do in air. I longed to join them. After I signed up for adult swimming lessons, I learned my failure to cross the pool was unrelated to pulmonary function or genes. Rather, I suffered from the habit of holding my breath. Underwater, I held my breath. When my breath expired, so did I. No wonder it felt like dying.
Swimming taught me the importance of form: maximum efficiency with as little effort as possible. To breathe, the body rolls (the head should not crane, twist, or rise). On the downstroke of the arm, the elbows lift like wings, the hand snakes through the water in an S curve, and the thumb grazes the thigh. The kicking motion originates in the pelvis, not the thighs, knees, ankles, or feet. The legs extend straight but not locked like oars. Form was exact in contrast to the messiness of everything else.
When I swam, I wore cheap suits. Cheap or not, the chemicals demolished them within months. They lost their shape, the rear-end bagged, the bodice sagged. One hundred percent nylon suits faded but never wore out. They were so indestructible, the manufacturers stopped making them.
Through my checkered career in restaurants and offices, I swam for sanity and health. I swam in all weather, foul and fair. I developed a preference for swimming in winter in outdoor (heated) pools when the storms kept most everyone else away.
A boyfriend used to say the most exercise he got was listening to me talk about swimming.
Swimming got me accustomed to seeing people naked and nearly naked, all kinds of people, usually more attractive without clothes and hard to recognize on the street when they were dressed. A certain woman fascinated me. I couldn’t imagine how old she was. One day in the locker room, she passed around the gold medals she had won at a Masters competition in Japan.
“There aren’t many competitors left in my category,” she said.
That was my cue. “What category?”
“Eighty-five and over,” she said.
While I cherished the antisocial silence of swimming, eventually I met an attractive man who swam, too. Unlike me, Roy didn’t worship swimming. He wasn’t transported by horizontality and buoyancy. Nevertheless, we shared the habit of swimming. Wherever we traveled, we sought out places with pools.
The Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables is world famous for its lake-size pit, the largest free-form pool in the hemisphere. Sadly, our weekend there coincided with a rare Florida ice-storm. For two days, the temperature hovered at freezing. However, I wasn’t leaving until I swam in the Biltmore’s (unheated) pool. Astonished bystanders (dressed in down jackets) watched me dive in. After one breathless length, I emerged with uncontrollable shivers. Roy stood by with towels and a coat. When we reached our room, he debated whether to call a doctor. Instead, he put me in a hot bath, dosed me with pots of hot tea, and the deep chill resolved.
In Berkeley, there were many choices of pools: public (4), university (4), the fabulous tiled indoor pool in a solarium at the City Club (designed by Julia Morgan), YMCA (2), and private membership at the Claremont Hotel.
I swam in all of them, but my favorite was West Campus, an orphan public pool. Luxury and architectural detail could not compete with the marvels of this humble oasis. Credit went entirely to Yassir, lifeguard as well as imam at a Sufi mosque and master of oud. He transformed the decrepit surroundings into the Maghreb congeniality of the hammam. He played recordings of North African music. He introduced everyone by first name. He put swimmers in lanes with compatible partners. When he was absent (to visit his mother in Morocco), the place was entirely different.
“I am the servant of the pool,” he explained to me. “In Islam, to be a servant is the highest calling.”
After I recovered from Roy, I met a lovely man who didn’t swim. He admired swimming but couldn’t raise his legs to the surface of the water. He once tried to swim and almost drowned. He liked to accompany me to the pool where he sat and read.
By way of encouragement, I introduced him to Yassir. Yassir told him anyone could learn to swim. Yassir offered to teach him. He was surprised by Yassir’s generosity, but I explained what it meant to be “a servant of the pool.” He said I made swimming sound like a cult.
After a few months, he suggested I join a gym and start slimming my thighs. He complained about the chlorine smell on my skin and green tinge in my hair. He didn’t understand how I could stand the repetition.
“Over and over,” he shouted during our first fight.
“It’s thrilling,” I cried out passionately. To be liberated from gravity and move through water, propelled and relaxed at the same time.
When he accused me of polymorphic perversity, I confessed the disposition of my true nature. “I wish I could live naked like an animal by a river.”
“Like an animal?” It was clear he couldn’t imagine, and it proved too difficult to explain. He was content with the amenities of civilization: Italian leather, English wool, Egyptian cotton, Chinese silk. Au naturel held little allure, and strangely enough, even nude, his body felt clothed.
Before we arrived in Venice, Donald and I had been driving madly around Italy. We had been driving in a Fiat no bigger than a bread-box. Donald was a tall man and easily irritated. He barely fit into the car. He was forced to fold himself at the waist and again at the neck in order to slip into the driver’s seat. Once settled in, with the flimsy safety belt tucked around his waist, he fired the ignition and tore off in the little Fiat as if it were a Ferrari. It was hard to believe the car would go at all, but he drove it like a maniac, back and forth across the lanes of the autostrada. The Fiat, with Donald folded in two places, cursing and speeding as many men do, crossed the Piedmont and Po, and tumbled up and down the winding trails of Cinque Terre before we reached the outskirts of Venice.
During these mad dashes, first south, then west, then east, Donald and I were generally at odds. Questioning silently and aloud, aloud to each other or muttering alone to ourselves, what originally brought us together.
He so desperately wanted everything I was not. I couldn’t blame him. He wanted someone younger. That could not be helped. Someone with less of a past. Someone to start a fresh, uncomplicated family. I understood. They were simple, human, reasonable desires.
But Donald, like most people, was deeply ambivalent. As soon as these longings for someone else rose inside him, he reversed himself. Or resigned himself. And with a desperation equally confused, he avowed, at least theoretically, that I was the only woman in the world he wanted after all.
Despite my limitations and complications, my off-spring, my stature, breast size, and mother, I met many of his qualifications. I was sufficiently pretty to please him. I dressed and cooked well enough. I spoke French. His friends approved of me. And most important of all, I put up with him.
My fondness for him was less exact. His height, his academic credentials, his stylish clothes were negligible. Typically, I adored irregular, unschooled, sloppy men. What I treasured most about Donald was his reliability. He was a test case for my own maturity. With him, I would discover whether I had the capacity to love a man who bore a shred of responsibility towards me. For that alone, I tolerated his critiques of my children, my taste in movies, and my boiled-wool coat.
Donald and I were neither married nor engaged. However, two years of companionship lay behind us. Recently, in an act of gallantry, he had moved from San Francisco to live in my hillside cottage. Despite its many charms, its proximity to the university and the rose garden, its view of the Bay, the structure was too small for a tall, temperamental man.
He was a poor sleeper. He struggled through the night. Mornings were no less daunting. He often had to tiptoe past my small son whose bed was on the landing. Or pass through my daughter’s room to reach the toilet. Or sidle into the kitchen. It was not a house Donald would call commodious or charming at all.
One day unprovoked, he tossed the blender through the kitchen window. He tossed it in a fit. The heavy hillside fog jumped aside as the appliance, its chord trailing behind like a rat’s tail, rolled down a bank of soggy eucalyptus leaves. At my feet were the shards of glass scattered over the kitchen floor. Not only the blender, but the peace of morning, the reverie that precariously accompanies the few minutes between waking and breakfast, had been shattered.
The children looked on in horror. The initial horror, of course, was witnessing an adult behaving like a naughty child. That swiftly passed into anxious anticipation of what a man who turned small appliances into missiles would do next.
The penance for my careless past had ended. The test case was over. I took my children’s hands and looking wistfully through the broken window, I insisted he move out.
Donald departed immediately. But by day’s end, he had returned with a lease on a large house and a humble promise to behave. These were the tangible first steps towards a long-term commitment, but he fretted whether they were the wrong steps. He continued to question and doubt. He hoped, we both hoped, a trip to Italy would vanquish his indecision and our mutual misgivings.
On the terra firma side of Venice, Donald parked the Fiat. From there, we carried our bags to the station and boarded a vaporetto to take us down the Grand Canal. Barges with garbage and gladioli, crates of cabbages and hardware, gondolas with brides, businessmen, and tourists floated by. The watery horizon receded into more water.
Years before, I had visited Venice. What was clear to me then was still clear. I did not like the dreaminess of a sinking city. Or its overpopulation of cats. Or the extravagance of San Marco. It was a city in love with itself. A feminine bejeweled city, spoiled by its own hand.
We found our crumbling pensione on a quiet alley that stank of piss. We dumped the bags and set out to explore. The weather was nasty. Clouds and water boiled. Sidewalks buckled like the ribs of a boat. The bilious gloom soon turned to rain.
Overhead, Donald held up one pathetic umbrella. We struggled a few blocks until I was drenched. I came to a full stop, lifted my puddle face, and snapped, “I’m leaving on the next plane unless we get another umbrella.”
He thumbed through his Collins’ Italian-English pocket dictionary and frantically began to chant at every passing stranger, “Ombrello! ombrello? ombrello!”
A kind Venetian took notice and directed us to a nearby quarter of the city. Right, then left, then right again. It wasn’t far.
We entered the cozy premises. The oversized proprietress, an ombrello herself, welcomed us from behind the counter in several languages. We shook ourselves like dogs and began to rock in our rain-soaked shoes. The quantity of ombrelli around us was impressive. Stacked on shelves, rolled in corners, suspended from light fixtures, shoved in canisters, propped in windows, they were countless.
I, however, was on a strictly practical mission. Intent on the simplest solution, I pointed to a standard portable model: basic black in the customary travel style with a collapsible handle and collapsible dome that inverted like a reversible parachute and slipped into a cylindrical nylon sheath.
“Quello,” I said decisively.
The signora’s plump fingers swept the air, encompassing the marvels of Umbrelladom. Imports from China, France, America, Japan. Stripes, solids, florals, plaids. Piped, trimmed, ruffled, fringed. Some delicate and petite, others family size.
“Perché triste?” she inquired, plucking the sensible black umbrella from my hand.
Everything was triste all right, including Donald, the weather, and the Italian pensiones where every night I dreamt of other men.
“Perché non felice invece?” she asked flirtatiously.
Admittedly, it was the ontological question I had been asking since the trip began.
Balancing on the tips of her toes, the proprietress plucked down a polka-dot umbrella and placed it on the counter. Indeed, it was a sacrament of gaiety itself. Navy circles dotted the Kelly-green background like raindrops sprinkled over putting grass. In the hand, it balanced perfectly on a sturdy polished wooden handle. The mechanism was impeccable. I had to agree, it was ridiculously felice.
The signora goaded me with one eye and scolded my companion with the other. Insinuating that the American lady must be very unhappy to consider an undistinguished black umbrella suitable for bankers, undertakers, underwriters, brokers, travel agents, and managers. She sensed I was none of the above and challenged me to prove it.
Prove it, I did. The polka-dot umbrella was quickly mine. Donald and I left the shop, each armed against the storm. Our umbrellas bouncing lightly like two different flowers in opposing fields.