Evidence
1969
Jack picked me up hitchhiking, or rather he picked up Lisa, my roommate. I was selling tickets at the Rivoli Theatre and she was a cashier in an office parking lot. We would meet every night after work in front of the post office on Long Beach Boulevard to hitchhike home. Jack and his friend Charlie stopped for her. Their destroyer was dry-docked: they had just returned from a salvage mission off the coast of Vietnam. Jack told me they’d had to drop explosives off the ship, day and night, to prevent the Vietcong from swimming out and blowing them up. They were stoned on mescaline and listening to Jimi Hendrix. I slept with Jack right away and often.
“You’re still a virgin, right?” Lisa asked me one night. She was a virgin so I had to lie to her and say that I was one, too. That meant that Jack and I had to go across the street and dodge helicopters patrolling the beach if we wanted to be alone. I lied to Jack, as well. I told him that he was only the second guy I had ever slept with.
Jack was busted for marijuana that summer. He insisted to me it belonged to somebody else until he was in court and the judge asked him if the “contraband” was his. He said yes. He was sentenced to the Los Angeles County Jail in Newhall where a newly arrested Charles Manson was being held. I went to see Jack every weekend. When I hitchhiked there, I carried one of my grandmother’s kitchen knives, which I handed over each time the guards searched my purse.
We got married a year later. There was really no way out. Back home, all my high school friends were married. I was fast becoming an old maid. I was barely twenty years old.
Jack was jealous. He didn’t like me talking to his friends, attracting too much attention to myself. He found the journal I’d kept the first summer I arrived in California and tore it up in front of me, saying it made me sound like a whore. He asked me why I didn’t make him homemade soup for his lunch at work like this other guy’s wife. I said I wouldn’t have his children because his brother-in- law was a racist. His father called me long-distance and told me to start letting Jack make the decisions. I screamed at him during a fight, “You think you were number two? Well, you were number four!”
But Jack loved me. He made me spoon rings and, once, swiped some fire hose nozzles for me to use as candle sticks when we couldn’t afford the real ones at Cargo West. He made tortillas from scratch and played me special songs by Chicago and Seals and Crofts. His arms were smooth. His body was warm. He made sex normal. I learned how to steam pork chops.
Our marriage started coming apart some time after I bought Tapestry. I suppose I could blame Carole King for putting words to feelings not commonly spoken by women. I know I was a lot of work, especially for a guy who looked like George Harrison and just wanted to go home to Missouri. I burned my copies of Be Here Now, the Kama Sutra, Open Marriage, Cosmopolitan, The Art of Sensual Massage with its horrible illustrations, all my books about orgasms written by men, and the theatrical release of Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, starring Natalie Wood. I was tired of everybody telling me who I was supposed to be. I kept my three volumes of Carlos Castaneda.
1972
He was a guy from Illinois who was out on the coast for business. A woman I knew from work arranged the double date. She told him that I was divorced, took belly dancing lessons, and was liberated. I didn’t stand a chance. I showed up at the restaurant in bellbottom jeans, a flowered cropped top, and Janie’s rabbit jacket which I borrowed because I was feeling fat. I think I was wearing all of my silver bracelets. He was blond and pale and wore a white suit. He looked like a ghost.
All through dinner he stared at me, making stupid jokes about the tuna. (You say mahi mahi, I say ohno ohno). By the time I finished my first Tequila Sunrise, I realized that my coworker’s date was not her husband. She had big plans for herself that evening.
After dinner we drove back to my apartment. My coworker immediately took off her clothes and went into my bedroom with her boyfriend. And there on my living room floor, my date crushed me. I had the weight of his body on my back, my chest, my neck. I watched the flickering street light through a crack in my Venetian blinds.
He left at dawn in his wrinkled and ridiculous white suit to catch his plane. He’d had his California experience. I hurt for a week. I never spoke to my coworker again.
1974
I’d simply answered an office phone. Cindy Martinez was gone for the day.
The caller liked my voice. We laughed. I took a message: Mark called. The next day he tracked me down. Hundreds of people worked in my building and he found out who I was. We arranged to meet on Sunday night as, by then, I never wasted a perfectly good Friday or Saturday night on a blind date. He joked that he’d carry a carnation so I would know who he was. A day later as I sat at my desk, someone dropped a carnation into my Coke bottle. I looked up.
We ate lunch sitting on the curb after a visit to a hot dog stand. We didn’t wait for Sunday. We spent the rest of the week on the floor of my apartment. Joni Mitchell had released a new album. We left the arm up on the stereo so it would continue to play.
I knew very little about him. He had illustrated a poetry book and once he took me with him when he covered a boat race for some magazine. I think that was our only time in the daylight. I was happy to stay inside. The bad parts I ignored, like how he would disappear for days at a time, only to tell me that he had been with other girlfriends or one night stands. Sometimes I would get out of bed in the middle of the night and drive to his apartment in my Austin Healey Sprite and ring his buzzer until he let me in.
I was stunned to learn that I was pregnant. My friend Louise was very matter of fact. “You better call the doctor.” One night Mark came by to tell me that he was going up north for a while, maybe to Oregon. He didn’t know when he would be back. I had planned on telling him. I changed my mind.
A few weeks later Janie drove me to Kaiser Permanente for my abortion. The nurses complimented me on my tan as I was going under and on the way home Janie and I got McDonald’s. Mark called that night. All he said was, Unlock your door. I made love with him hours after having aborted his baby. He had asked if it would be all right. He said he’d pay for half. The next morning he left to get me some painkillers. He didn’t come back. Eventually I walked to Egyptian Pharmacy only to find him standing on the corner with someone he introduced as his girlfriend. He later said how impressed he was that I was so “cool” about it.
The last time I saw him he was walking away from my apartment. I stood at my screen door yelling fuck you fuck you. Years later, Mark ran into an old friend of mine and asked for my address. Jan told him she didn’t think I would want to see him. A lifetime has passed since then. I’ve searched for him on Facebook but he is nowhere to be found. I could drink a case of you and I would still be on my feet. I would still be on my feet. Some things just never go away.
1975
I met Jesse in Guatemala. I was living in Panajachel while getting rabies injections in my stomach. I had been bitten by a rabid dog while hiking around a volcano on Lake Atitlan. Jesse was from New Orleans and was on a two-week vacation. He fell hard for Sophie, an American who ran the local bar and was the matron of a hacienda full of gringos. She took me in when I got sick. As the war grew closer and we knew it was too dangerous to stay, we left with her children and her dog and a handful of Americans we dropped off along the way. We drove the entire coast of the Gulf of Mexico, from Panajachel to New Orleans and moved in with Jesse. I got a job on Bourbon Street and Jesse and Sophie carried on with their love affair.
It was so damn hot. At night I would sleep naked on a mat in the dining room covered lightly by a sheet, the fan at my feet turned on full blast. Jesse and Sophie would be in the bedroom. The air was heavy and damp. I could hear them. Some nights the sky would rumble for hours with thunder. Then the rain would pour. The electricity lit up my room and cast shadows outside the windows.
One night after we had all been out drinking beer and eating oysters, Sophie and Jesse walked in on me while I was taking a bath. They sat down and carried on a conversation with me as if it was the most natural thing, as if it was something we did every evening after supper. I pulled my knees up a bit when Jesse said to Sophie, “Isn’t she pretty?” Looking back, I guess Sophie wasn’t into it. Who could blame her? I think I had probably stopped shaving my legs at that point.
Sophie was the first to go. She left New Orleans for Miami, but later ended up in Toronto. I stayed for another couple of weeks, unsure of what to do next. Jesse and I didn’t talk much. Neither of us made a move. One morning I got up, hugged him, and left. When New Orleans flooded, I looked up our old address. It was gone.
1976
We had started telling our stories at work.
Carol was tall and thin and longed to be back with her ex-husband with whom she had a child. She was angry and hurt most of the time and refused to
let him into her apartment even though that’s where she wanted him to be. Linda was gentle and self-conscious. Every day she covered her Mama Cass body with a long dress and a different crocheted shawl. Together, Linda and Carol spent hours analyzing people, talking about their motivations. I sat in the backseat of the car while they discussed people I didn’t know, making it all seem so interesting. They finished their sentences with little question marks. I had never heard women talk like that before. I thought it made them sound smart.
One day Linda whispered to us that she’d found a box full of catalog cutouts under the bed she shared with her boyfriend. The pictures were from the lingerie section and all of the women’s heads had been removed and replaced with those of children. I wasn’t sure what it meant but I knew it couldn’t be good. Her face was so sad when she told us. If she left him, there would be no one else. We never spoke of it again. Eventually Linda moved out. Years later, I heard that Carol had gotten back with her husband.
Lana’s desk was next to mine. She was a Mormon and wore a special body covering under her fabulous outfits. She had perfect fingernails and perfect makeup. She was engaged and doing her best to remain a virgin until her wedding night. She confided to me how much she really wanted to have sex and how guilty she felt because she was giving her fiancé blow jobs in the car after work. Finally she convinced him to have intercourse and was sadly disappointed. He was disappointed in her, as she had not held out. She withdrew from me after that, embarrassed and ashamed of herself. I can’t remember if they went ahead and got married.
Donna had been raped. He came in through a window in the middle of the night. Her first thought was to protect her children. As she calmly led him into another room, she walked past her children’s bedroom and closed their door, locking it from the inside. He was never caught, despite being given a descriptive name in the newspapers, as was popular at the time: the Polite Rapist, the Friendly Rapist, the East Area Rapist, the Westside Rapist, the Car Key Rapist, the Pillow Case Rapist. Whoever our local rapist was, he returned to rape Donna again.
Tina had begun reading Herman Hesse and Laura Huxley. She confused me with her questions and she didn’t want to hang out as much. We didn’t know that she was saving up barbiturates prescribed by her doctor in exchange for him giving her one of his special examinations. I went to him once. I knew how he worked. When he told the nurse to leave the room and close the door, she looked at me as if to say run.
One afternoon, Tina took all of her pills while sitting cross-legged on the floor listening to Dark Side of the Moon. When she didn’t show up for work, her brother and his girlfriend went to her apartment. She refused to see me in the hospital while she was recovering. She had not wanted to be saved. She’d cut off circulation to her feet and walked with a slight limp after she was released.
1977
Someone gave me a copy of Marge Piercy’s book Small Changes. The characters were rebellious young women, running on instinct from bad marriages and low expectations. Current events. It was like turning lights on in a cave. We passed it around. Jan found this place in Laguna Beach called the Feminist Forge and bought a handmade silver women’s symbol which she wore on a chain around her neck. She was the first woman I knew to do this. I went and got one, too. The evidence was mounting. How were we to love now?