Chapter Twelve

In his bedroom, Andy had a pin-up on the closet door, not of Brigit Bardot or Jane Fonda, someone you’d expect. It was an X-ray of a woman’s torso he had taken from a hospital garbage bin after his wrists were bandaged. “They were throwing it away,” he said, stepping back from his closet so I could admire it. “Can you imagine?”

The round outlines of her breasts floated over her ribs like milky-white clouds, and just the tops of her pelvic bones showed. A tease, he said. He didn’t know who she was; that was part of her charm, he told me. Then he pulled the X-ray down, folded it, and placed it carefully in the trash container beside his desk. Before Big Sur, Andy had been celibate ever since he’d tried to kill himself, but when he threw away that X-ray, I felt like I’d saved him from something almost worse than death. I would kiss the white indentations on his wrists, feeling the blood pulsing beneath the scars like an affirmation that death didn’t always have to win.

In the middle of the semester, I started spending more time at Andy’s house than in the dorm room with Lisa. The house stood on a narrow, shady street that ran up into the foothills. As soon as you walked in, the smell of incense and banana bread would hit your nostrils. His roommate, Peter Hoskins, loved to bake bread, and the whole house smelled of it. When I first came over to Andy’s house, there was Peter, playing air guitar to Jimi Hendrix, full-blast. When he stopped, he grinned and said, “Oh, it’s Jubilee. Andy’s girl from Mississippi.”

He wore his hair either in a brown ponytail, or wildly loose with a headband to hold it, and he and his earlier housemates had painted the old Queen Anne in psychedelic purple and orange. He seemed old, already twenty-two, and he helped organize marches and rallies on campus. “A politico,” Andy called him, but then what do you expect when you answer an ad for a housemate in Berkeley?

The first night I slept over, Andy got up and slid outside the bedroom window at sunrise. I woke to see his toes lightly planted on the sill, then his thin legs disappearing. From there, he climbed on the roof to chant his mantra as the sky lightened. Like a rooster, I thought, putting the pillow over my head. The more time I spent with him, the more I learned to sleep through the resonating “Ommms”. Sometimes, the sound seeped into my dreams, and I saw the blue tiles of Indian temples in my sleep or Oriental tapestries with deepening mandalas that pulled me inside.

You should treat the world with reverence, Andy said, and he folded our laundry or washed the dishes as if the chore might be a meditation on all of life. He took pleasure in turning everyday things into prayers, though when Peter’s yellow cat, Che, jumped onto the kitchen table, he tossed the poor thing toward the door and hurriedly washed his hands. But with the food, he was reverent. He gently wiped off fresh mushrooms for a curried vegetable dish he made. The flavor was stronger that way, he said, than if you washed them. It was the way he touched the mushrooms with the dish towel—lovingly, as if they might have been plump babies fresh from a bath—that made me grit my teeth and want to slap them from his hands. Sometimes, I felt like shaking him, telling him to wake up, get in the world. For the first time, I began to miss Rob. Rob had probably never even tasted fresh mushrooms, and I wanted to sauté a big batch in butter just for him, offer him something from the world outside Biloxi.

Behind Andy’s back, Peter called him “Andynanda,” after some Indian guru.

“How can you stand it?” Lisa asked, over coffee back in the dorm room one morning. Andy’s chanting had awakened me at six, and she’d been hearing me complain. “You can do better than that. Is he really great in bed or something?”

“He has good qualities. Except for the cat, he’s gentle,” I said, as Lisa poured more coffee into my mug. Andy’s cooking was the main reason Peter put up with him. Peter paid for the groceries, and Andy cooked, vegetarian meals with strange things I’d never heard of, like tofu and couscous. Then Lisa started dropping by with groceries at dinnertime, and she and Andy would concoct enchiladas or tabouli, delicacies I’d never eaten before. She was there, I knew, to see Peter, laughing at his jokes and nodding at his jabs at Nixon.

On Friday night after midnight, a classic blues show was on the campus station. Peter turned on the radio, listening to Fred MacDowell, Robert Johnson, John Hurt. One night, when Lisa was there, he started singing along with the radio, looking straight at Lisa. “Make me a pallet on your floor.” It was Mississippi John Hurt’s words, and soon he and Lisa disappeared into his bedroom. Their laughter came through the walls until it dissolved into more romantic sounds that kept me awake while Andy snored beside me, a circle of saliva deepening on his pillow. I was jealous. I lay there wondering how Rob was doing in Mississippi, wondering if he thought about me. I missed the way he cared about the prisoners in the band at Parchman Farm, the way he cared how I felt about Mama.

But Mississippi seemed like another planet.

Charlene wrote, saying she was praying for me, hoping I didn’t love Berkeley so much that I wouldn’t come back home. She sent me five dollars, asking me to buy some dope, a “nickel bag” for Ernie Crenshaw. Ernie! She wanted to do something nice for the soldiers, she wrote, and since the weed grew out of the earth, it couldn’t really be a sin to use it. Charlene could always justify what she wanted to. Ernie had written her from Vietnam, asking how she was doing at the Home, and telling her how terrible the fighting was. He was smoking dope in Vietnam, she said, and since he was turning nineteen soon, she wanted to surprise him by sending him some joints. She felt sorry for the jerk. He might be in Vietnam, but he still wasn’t brave enough to admit that he’d fathered a baby.

But what was a nickel bag?

I found her letter late one Sunday evening. Peter and Andy were both home when I got back from the library. My new sandals had rubbed blisters on my heels and across my toes, despite the thick wool socks Andy had lent me to wear with them that morning. “Your toes’ll get cold,” he said. He was like Marilyn that way, always meaning well. But Peter cheered me up while Andy cooked a batch of vegetarian chili, so involved with his seasonings he barely said hello. I’d invited Lisa over for dinner, so Peter wanted Andy to make it extra special.

Peter and I sat at the table in what we called the “Marakesh Café,” where we’d tacked one of Andy’s paisley bedspreads from the four corners of the kitchen ceiling for a canopy-like effect. It gave it the feel, we hoped, of Morocco, exotic smells and all. We were talking about the history test we both had the next day when I saw a stack of mail on top of the refrigerator. It was yesterday’s, and Charlene’s familiar handwriting was at the top of the pile. I’d given my family Andy’s address a couple of weeks before, telling Daddy I’d made some true friends off-campus, away from those weirdos who lived in the dorm. I tore open Charlene’s letter, and stood reading it, rubbing the sole of my sore foot against the other ankle.

“Who’s it from?” Peter looked over my shoulder.

“My sister,” I said. I read the first paragraph, then asked Peter if he knew what a nickel bag was.

Andy sighed and tapped the spoon on the edge of the pot. “You can alter your consciousness in better ways.” He handed the spoon to Peter. “Hey, keep on an eye on this, will you? Don’t taste it yet, it’s not done.” He left and soon the sound of chanting came from the roof.

Peter looked at me funny while he dipped the spoon into Andy’s pot of chili and licked it. “Listen to any Delta bluesman,” he said, sticking the spoon in for another taste. “Don’t you know your own roots? Man, you’re going to fail that history test tomorrow.” He chuckled.

“Are you kidding?” I said. “My mother sang the blues.”

“It’s not the same thing for a white woman.”

He may as well have hit me with lightning. “My mother didn’t just sing the blues, she had the blues. Bad,” I said, fighting back fury.

“You don’t even know the terms.” He pulled a bay leaf from Andy’s chili and sucked it. “Look, a nickel bag’s a Southern term for five bucks worth of grass. Less than a lid. Haven’t you listened to John Hurt? Or Robert Johnson?” He glanced up from the spoon of chili and saw my face. “What’s wrong? Did I hurt your feelings?”

I folded up Charlene’s letter and went to Andy’s room, feeling a ball of tears behind my eyes. How could Peter know me so little and why didn’t I know more about my own culture? I flopped on Andy’s mattress on the floor and read the rest of Charlene’s letter while the chants outside rose and fell like a tide. Marijuana was only one of the strange things Charlene was thinking about. She must have been bored, eighteen years old and stuck at the Mobile Home for Unwed Mothers, taking correspondence courses by mail. But good things were happening. The baby was kicking like crazy, she said, and she could feel what she thought was a knee jutting beneath her skin. And Art Johnson was coming to see her every weekend, driving all the way from Mississippi State in Starkville.

On the next page, filled with Charlene’s angular, even handwriting, the bombshell dropped. Art had asked her to marry him. She wasn’t sure if she would, but she knew she’d keep the baby. No way, she wrote, was somebody else going to raise a baby who could dance in her belly like this one. And she had forgiven Ernie Crenshaw. He was paying for his sins in Vietnam. Tears blurred the words and I had to stop. Charlene was inventing her life without me there to listen. My sister would certainly be a stranger to the way I’d re-invented my own. I sat on the bed and stared at the Indian rug Andy had laid on the bare floor, thinking about all I’d missed back home.

There was no place to go, no home for me anywhere, not where I’d grown up, and certainly not here, where even the real friends I’d finally made, like Lisa and Peter and Andy, didn’t seem to understand me. The tornado doll stared at me from her perch on a shelf, still wearing crepe paper, and I took her down and slowly unwrapped the makeshift clothing from her plastic body. The scotch tape had rotted and made powder in my hands, but the tornado hadn’t left a scratch on her. I stroked the plastic ripples that sufficed for hair on her head, and a sob choked in my throat. It was all those kids in Mississippi whose biggest Christmas present might have been a doll like this.

Then I was crying for Charlene, being pregnant in Mobile and still wanting to buy marijuana for that awful Ernie Crenshaw, for Marilyn with her game shows and soap operas, for Pearl’s daughter, Mary, and how she hated me without even knowing me. I cried for Mama and her Sunday School class, and the confused, earnest women who brought over banana cream pies after the funeral, not saying a word about Levi Litvak, though they had a carload of other pies to take to his house for his relatives. I thought about Loretta Holliday, and the ham and cheese casserole she’d baked for him. What had the rabbi thought? Those women had pitched right in, without thinking of anything but their own customs. Levi Litvak had a regular funeral, and Charlene made an ugly joke about how he’d already been cremated, from the way the newspapers described the body. So I cried for the way it had satisfied me to imagine his dark pompadour burned to a gray frizz on his forehead.

I cried for Deanna, trying to get into a Lutheran college in Jackson so she could teach elementary school, and for the way she’d abandoned me after Mama died, as if my grief might be contagious. That night in Berkeley, I couldn’t stop my tears. I cried because Daddy tried to get happiness from such small things now, for the way Marilyn told me he bragged about my grades to the Shriners. Then I cried about how I was ashamed for anyone at Berkeley to know my father was a Shriner. In my mind’s eye, I could see the red line across Daddy’s forehead that the red cap would leave when he took it off, like either a halo or a brand.

I cried for how sad everybody’s lives were, for how locked within themselves people were. On my calf was the thin line I’d once made with Daddy’s razor, and I knew now that I would never again be so numb that I’d need to force myself to feel.

On the desk was a copy of The Tibetan Book of the Dead that Andy had given me, to help me understand my mother’s death, he said. I opened it randomly, hoping for help. “This is the time when perseverance and pure thought are needed,” it said, but my thoughts were so jumbled I couldn’t make sense of anything. Now I even cried that my purest thought at that moment was that I resented Andy and all his earnest good-will.

Go with the magic, he would tell me, and I’d get mad. Magic was what disrupted the world, created its own mysterious rules. I wanted something more predictable.

Sometimes, I never wanted to go back to Biloxi. At first, I imagined marrying Andy, having a baby. But when he wiped the mushrooms, I saw how he’d take over a baby, and that nothing I’d do would please him.

It surely wasn’t because I wanted to spend my life with Andy, but to make a bridge between two different worlds: one that I created for Daddy in my telephone calls and letters, and the other that I lived. Daddy would write me happy letters about what a wonderful experience I must be having and how much he and Charlene, “and Marilyn, too,” missed me. I cried for how disappointed Daddy would be if he could have seen me picking up hitchhikers in Mama’s truck, driving all over the Bay Area to deliver them where they wanted to go, or how he’d feel if he knew Andy and I shared the same bed, and that sometimes Peter and I shared the same joint of “marriage-wanna.” Then I cried even harder for Rob, for the friend he’d been when I needed someone so badly, and how I’d taken him for granted. I couldn’t remember ever having told him I loved him. I’d write him soon, I promised myself. When my nose stopped running and my tears dried, I started writing a poem to Daddy.

When the first glaciers melted and

the flood washed away the seas, Daddy,

you were there with your Bible,

reading your First Corinthians,

lips silently moving as you turned

the wafer-thin pages.

Your eyes were clear holes of water

where I swam, unknowing,

until the fire:

The Baptist preacher would scream

from his Sunday pulpit, pointing

and pounding salvation,

his face red as the Indians in my schoolbook,

dancing half-naked around a fire.

(Daddy I wanna go home

eat roast beef and green peas

and watch TV)

Berkeley nights are foggy and cold

and I have a lover

who once threw bricks at cop cars

but makes love through the afternoon.

We never talk of marriage, or children:

There are certain taboos,

like the scars on his inner wrists.

We walk midnight streets on psychedelics

measuring time by the fading of colors.

and he cooks our supper: in the morning

tofu and beans on a two-burner stove.

The curtains stick to the steamy kitchen windows

and we peel them away from the pane

to watch the sun rise.

But I call you, Daddy,

from pay phones at proper hours,

across two time zones to the Bible Belt,

and never wake you,

never catch you at dinner.

Mostly we are still:

me in a glass booth on Telegraph Avenue,

one hand pressed against the free ear

to shut out traffic and friends

while you let the Sunday dishes soak.

After I studied the lines, I folded the paper up and put it in my backpack, along with Charlene’s letter, knowing I’d never send it. Then I hunted down Peter in the backyard where he was padding about in the grass, mulching the plot we called our organic vegetable garden. My tears were gone and now I was furious.

Andy’s chants were still vibrating through the air, and he was sitting with his eyes closed, cross-legged, on the flat roof above the porch. I didn’t feel any of his peace.

“Hey, Hoskins,” I said. “Don’t go telling me I don’t know my roots. I know all the words to every Baptist invitational in the hymnal, all the plots of the movies that played at the Biloxi Paramount for five years, and I can do sword drills with the best of them. I can win sword drills most of the time. I played the best trumpet version of Dixie you ever heard in a marching band. So …” by now I was jabbing my finger in his face, “just because I don’t pretend to have hung around on sharecroppers’ porches singing the blues, don’t tell me I don’t know my own roots. My Mama sang me to sleep on the blues. You’re a cultural imperialist, that’s what you are, thinking you know all about a place you’ve never even been, just because you listen to the blues on the radio. Hah!” I spun around, victorious, ready to march inside and leave him straddling the stakes where the tomato plants had been, the bag of mulch dangling from his hand.

“If my roots were playing Dixie in a Mississippi marching band, I’d have myself transplanted.”

I wheeled around. A sheepish look now replaced his usual defiance, and he looked as if he hoped I’d laugh.

I didn’t. “If my roots were in L.A., at Beverly Hills High, I’d probably have grown as little as you have.”

He looked mortified. I’d known that would hurt him. Lisa had told me he was ashamed of his family’s wealth, how it was something they had in common. He tried to say something, but I went on. “You think it’s easy to transplant yourself to a place where nobody appreciates your roots? Or even knows them, even if they pretend they do, especially when they’re from L.A. like you and don’t even have roots of their own?” Peter started to protest, but the words wouldn’t stop. “You know what? My mother didn’t die in a car crash, like you think. She was murdered. You know who killed her? A guy who was her lover. You know what that did to my father? He married a woman just to have company, and my sister was so desperate to leave that now she’s pregnant. You know what she was going to do with the baby? Give it up. You know what that did to my father? My dad’s the kind of guy who cries when he thinks no one’s around. You know how many times I’ve heard my dad cry? Hey, here’s something worse, at least in your little hip book. Did you know my father’s a Shriner?” I was shouting, flailing my arms, ready to throw a punch right in his gut. “He’s got the hat and everything. Yeah, it’s real far out, man. You should see him on his little bicycle in parades …”

“Hey, hey, hey.” Peter grabbed my elbow and turned me around. “Your eyes are all red. You been crying?”

I slugged his shoulder. “Let go of my arm. Right now.”

“What’s going on down there?” It was Andy, awakened from his reverie, glaring at Peter. “Who’s watching the chili?”

“What can I say, Jubilee?” asked Peter. “I’m sorry. Your mom was murdered? Really? How come you never told us?”

“I don’t know.” I couldn’t say any more about it. My bones felt tired, but something heavy seemed gone, and I felt an odd happiness.

Andy appeared beside me. “Supper’s ready. No thanks to anyone around here.”

“She’s been crying,” said Peter, with a disgusted look at Andy. “You might have noticed if you weren’t up there chanting.”

Andy looked at me, surprised, and saw the red swelling around my eyes. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m all right. Just getting my period.” It was too much to explain, and the sound of his chants drowning out my sobs had been another wedge between us.

When Lisa came over for supper, Andy was ladling chili into pottery bowls he’d set on the table. “Jubilee played the trumpet in high school,” Peter told her.

Andy’s head jerked up. “She still does,” he said. “Best damn music I ever heard.” He smiled at me, trying to cheer me up.

“How come I never heard you?” asked Lisa. “Where have you been hiding this trumpet?”

“I’m the only one she plays for,” said Andy. He was proud, glad to trump Peter and Lisa.

Lisa looked at me, a hurt look in her eyes.

I shrugged. “It sounds better on the beach. I usually keep it in the closet or in my truck.”

“Just ask her, she can play anything. Go on,” Andy turned to me. “Get your trumpet.”

“The Byrds,” said Peter. “‘To Everything There Is A Season’.” There were more interesting tunes, but I pulled my trumpet from Andy’s closet and blasted out a jazzy version that made each note twist around the next, weaving a complicated net of loops.

“Wow,” said Lisa when I laid the trumpet back in its case. She was looking at me as if I were someone different.

We settled ourselves at the kitchen table, the chili barely steaming now. “You could make a lot of money, if you wanted, playing on Telegraph Avenue,” said Andy. “Lots of people do it, and they’re not as good as you.”

Peter plucked at a hole in the knee of his jeans and gave me a worried glance. “What about your mother? How was she killed?”

Lisa darted a look at him, then at me. “She died in a car accident, right?”

“Not really,” I said. Andy started to interrupt, but I stopped him. “No, I’ll tell them.”

After I finished the story, Lisa said, “Oh, Jubilee, that’s horrible. You don’t know who killed her?”

“Levi Litvak,” said Andy.

“He was in love with her,” I said. “Sometimes I dream about him, that he’s alive, that he’ll be found.”

“My god, I’m supposed to be your friend and you don’t tell me anything.” Lisa looked like she might cry.

Peter put his napkin on the table. “I was being mean this afternoon. She wouldn’t have told me if I hadn’t made her so mad.” He turned to me. “How’s your sister?”

“What about her?” asked Lisa.

“She’s pregnant,” I said. “At first she wanted an abortion or to give it up, but she’s keeping the baby now.”

Lisa got up and put her arms around me. “Why did you keep all this from me? This is heavy stuff. You never said a word.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. It just felt good to pretend everything was normal, I guess.”

It was a relief to release my secrets. But I was still worried about Charlene. How well did she even know Art Johnson? She’d be all right, I told myself. But I sure wasn’t going to make her life worse by sending her a nickel bag for Ernie Crenshaw. That Home probably opened all its packages, and the worst thing I could imagine was a baby born in Parchman Prison.

After Charlene’s baby was born in November, Daddy sent a roll of pictures of a red-faced, squinty-eyed boy with a cap on his head. In most of them, Charlene was holding him, her face bloated but grinning. I couldn’t see much of Charlene in his face, but I wanted to hold that little guy, get him to open those eyes and look at his Aunt Jubilee. She’d named him Lonnie, after one of Mama’s favorite blues singer, Lonnie Johnson. The last name would be no trouble: her wedding to Art Johnson was scheduled for June, when the semester ended at State.

Charlene wrote to tell me how beautiful Lonnie was, and what a good baby he was. “Wait till you hold him. It’ll be the best Christmas ever,” she wrote. “It seems like you’ve been gone forever.”