Elinor saw him first.
I think that’s your—friend, she said.
We were standing in an aisle of the Safeway north of Market Street, arms full of frozen pizza and some other junk. She inclined her head toward the end of the aisle, where Karl stood looking up at the long wire rack full of chips. He had a habit, he’d told me, of eating through a family-size bag and chasing it with a few cans of Coke Zero after particularly harrowing therapy sessions, and I wondered if that’s where he’d been.
As he reached for a bag I set the food in my arms down on the floor and walked toward him. I did not know what I was going to do or say. When I was about a foot away from him he turned. I must not have looked very happy. He did not look scared, but his face showed apprehension and concern. His eyes said Don’t and What took you so long?
Jesus! he said as I punched him in the stomach and he doubled over, one arm clutching his gut, his opposite hand reaching for the wire rack. But he still looked to be in control of himself as he stared at the floor, and I still recognized him, he was still so beautiful to me, so piercing, so clear, so I accessed my core, like they’d taught us in Pilates, tensed my arm, reared it back a little, told it to do what it should have done the first time, and punched him again. He buckled and grabbed at me and I lost my balance; it sent us to the floor in a pile of elbows and knees and shooting pain. Shit, he said, through gritted teeth, it sounded like, as he rolled onto his side. The word he liked to say when I gave him what he wanted and he couldn’t take how good it felt, couldn’t believe it, couldn’t bear it. Shit, he said again, into his hands. Fuck you, I said, and pounded my fists down onto his right shoulder and right arm. Fuck you, I said, and started to cry, as the scent of detergent rose up from his clothes and reminded me of all the times I buried my face in his shirts, his sweaters, his bare chest. My friend.
Knock it off! Karl shouted, and curled into a ball to get away from my reach, but I scrambled closer to him and kept at it and at a certain point I forgot he was Karl and thought he was Dr. K and that I was there to avenge Heloise, and Dr. L, and Elinor, and any other woman who’d learned the hard way that no matter how much a man’s desire for us undid them or how cool we tried to play it, anyone who had a home they couldn’t bring themselves to leave had all the power here, so it was Rose I was fighting with, too, although it was unfair to drag Rose into this when she might have wanted my help to leave, just as it was unfair to Karl to think he needed to know exactly how much it hurt, the love he said he had for me, but rage and despair tend not to give a shit about exactitude, and later I would see that it wasn’t the men I was angriest with, it was with Rose and myself for deep down being nothing more than good girls, and really the person I was angriest with was myself, because I was on my knees on the linoleum floor of a supermarket crying over what I could no longer afford just like Mark’s mother, on my knees seeing no other way to say no but through a raised hand just like Elinor’s mother, which meant that I was the daughter of an incomplete revolution, and if I hadn’t helped to push it any further then I didn’t deserve my freedom and I couldn’t tell Elinor what to do with hers.
She pulled me away from Karl and I fell back on my seat, then onto my side. I sensed Karl dragging himself upright and sitting back against the rack a few feet away from me. A manager stood over us, hands on his hips.
Is this the kind of thing where I have to call somebody? said the manager, clearly sick of having to say those words to people. He looked like every manager of every restaurant I’d ever worked in—dough-faced, short-sleeved, hair too neatly combed. Necktied and deficiently humored.
They’re okay, Elinor told him. They’re my parents. We’re so sorry. I’ll get them out of here.
If they’re not out of here in five minutes, I’m calling somebody, he said, and left.
Elinor walked over to Karl and crouched down beside him.
Are you okay? she said.
Just take her home, I heard him say, as he got to his feet.
I thought you were going to teach me how to not become my mother, said Elinor, in the parking lot, as I put the key in the ignition. Or she was the one putting the key in the ignition. I was having trouble understanding where I stood in relation to the person I thought I’d been all my life. What an idiot, she said, and I could not tell which one of us she was referring to.
When we entered the apartment, she headed straight for the bathroom, slamming the door behind her, and when she came out, picked a book up off the couch and went out to sit on the back steps. I stayed in my bedroom, door shut, trying to read, trying to pray for forgiveness to anyone who would listen, until around 8:30, when everything that had happened that day had started to seem very funny. I went out to the living room to tell her I was sorry, but her suitcase was gone. I did not need to search the rooms to know that she’d left and was on her way to a plane back home.