Bigfoot Dreams (15 page)

“Louise always had secondhand Saabs, not for the normal reasons—gas mileage, whatever—but because she said it was the only vehicle that sounded like its name. But now she led me to a rusty Ford station wagon. A bumper sticker said, End World Hunger, Think Food, and inside were maybe a dozen metal racks.

“‘For the bowls,’ Louise explained. ‘The salad.’

“As we headed onto the freeway, she told me her group supported itself making salad for Bay Area vegetarian restaurants. I kept thinking how much salad it must have taken to make Louise’s hands look so chapped. The idea of all that lettuce and oil and vinegar made me feel so…
lonely.
Then Louise began telling me about those months she hadn’t written or called.

“What happened was: she finally saw God. And guess what? He
was
the guy in the William Blake etching, the bearded one with the compass. Every night she dreamed of him drawing circles, and every night the circles grew smaller, excluding first the office, then her neighborhood, then everything except her and her bed where she’d lie, hearing voices—”

“Saying what?” asks Solomon.

“Telling her to go to dances. Square dances, parties, concerts, it didn’t matter. As soon as the dancing started, the voices would, too. ‘Look at the dancing skeletons!’ they’d say. ‘All that meat on the bone!’”

“Oh,” says Solomon. “
Those
voices.”

Vera looks at him, startled. One thing she likes—or tells herself she likes—about Solomon is that he so clearly doesn’t hear the kind of voices that torment Louise, that send Lowell off to UFO landing sites in the Yucatan. Solomon’s voices suggest he pick flowers for her by the roadside, buy presents for Rosie, pay attention to things that someone else might not notice: children selling lemonade, an old man’s furrowed feet.

“Well,” Vera says, “it got so the only time she couldn’t hear them was when she was chewing. That’s how she got so fat. And the only places she could go were the grocery and yoga class. Until one night in class she got twisted in some kind of cobra position and couldn’t get out. She just lay there crying and then her yoga teacher came over and held her and told her to take fifty deep breaths. The whole class counted along and when they stopped she’d stopped crying, and the voices had stopped too. And that’s when the Maha Devi people asked her to come live with them.

“I didn’t know what to say. We’d reached the ashram—this big, gaudy Victorian in Twin Peaks somewhere—before it occurred to Louise to ask how I was.” Vera stops. Here’s another part she’d rather skip over. She’s often suspected that the rest of the story turned on this interchange, that her subsequent actions weren’t as pure as she likes to pretend but rather, spurred by anger at Louise’s indifference. “I told her Lowell and I had split up, but she didn’t respond. She didn’t even ask how Rosie was. She patted my back and said personal relationships didn’t matter, people just
thought
they did. I asked her what did matter, and she said, ‘Breathing.’”

“Can’t argue with that,” says Solomon.

“Finally we went in. Nice wood floors, nice smell—that incense-cinnamon-apple health-food-store smell. Other than that, the ashram could have been a sensory deprivation tank. White and more white. Louise left me in the lobby a few minutes. I felt like a guest at some terrible party, checking out the bookshelves, the hostess’s art. Except that there weren’t any bookshelves, just a couple of pictures, scenes from the life of Guru Nanak done like illustrations from some freaked-out children’s Bible. A letter soliciting donations to help send brother Nawab Singh to the Tokyo Olympics. Well, it made sense that a religion based on breath control would produce good long-distance runners, though the turban might be a handicap, what with wind resistance—”

“All right,” says Solomon soothingly. “All right.”

“Sorry,” says Vera. “Louise reappeared and took me upstairs, down a corridor. Time travel back to the college dorm—the smell of shampoo, that sense of hushed things going on behind closed doors. At least Louise’s room was just like Louise’s room everywhere, a real mess: papers, books, her Persian miniatures and yarn paintings and Mexican cross. I was looking at them like old friends when a fire alarm went off. ‘Louise,’ I said, ‘let’s get out of here!’ ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Dinner.’

“Downstairs, the whole turbaned crew was already seated at long trestle tables, and when I walked in they started grinning to beat the band. Every one as white as Louise. The only spot of color was the head honcho’s orange turban. He also had the biggest beard, the biggest belly—maybe that’s how they picked him—the same weird, shiny, polyester dress, and suddenly it hit me: nurse’s uniforms! Then the honcho said grace and they brought out the food—”

“Don’t tell me,” says Solomon. “Salad.”

“Iceberg lettuce. With a couple of sprouts and pumpkin seeds and raisins. Dab of curried veggies on the side. All I could think of was how Louise always loved to eat. It was something we did together: cook and eat.” Vera’s remembering a week they spent in someone’s beach shack on Long Island. Mussels, swordfish, arugula, fresh tomatoes.

“But there you’d have thought they cooked for noise instead of for nourishment or taste. Feeding time at the rabbit hutch. Everyone crunching, you couldn’t hear yourself think. Not that anyone wanted to think; they didn’t even want to look at the stuff. They all had their eyes closed so they could concentrate on all that greenery going down.

“After the meal they stood when the honcho did and trooped out to work off the lettuce by breathing through their noses. And maybe I should have breathed with them, maybe it would have changed my life like Louise’s. But I couldn’t. I didn’t want their lettuce breath in my lungs.

“Well, that was pretty much the day. Somebody brought an extra futon into Louise’s room. She turned off the light and in the dark said she had something to tell me: she was engaged to be married to some guy named Bhani Singh.

“‘Bunny Sing?’ I said. ‘Louise, are you joking?’

“She wasn’t. The honcho had arranged the whole thing. They loved each other. This wasn’t like all those pointless love affairs; this was based on deep spiritual love and trust and guaranteed for life. They hadn’t even slept together yet, although at the betrothal rite they’d stared into each other’s eyes and breathed each other’s breath.

“The next day I met Bunny Sing and sure enough: pinky eyes, white eyelashes, little round twitchy nose…” Vera pauses. Here comes the worst part. There’s almost no way she can tell it without revealing herself as a thoroughly reprehensible human being. So she pleads friendship, desperation (“I
had
to do something!”) and bulls her way through the rest of it on selective editing and pure hell-bent narrative speed: How she stayed another two weeks, shredding lettuce, pretending to breathe, then one afternoon arranged to make a salad drop in Emoryville, just her and Bunny Sing, after which she talked Bunny into accompanying her into a bar. After three beers—his tolerance was, of course, pretty low—he told her he didn’t really want to marry Louise, whom he called Sat Mukanda Khalsa. She was ten years older and not exactly his idea of good-looking, but the honcho threatened to send him back to his Mom and Dad in Denver if he didn’t…Vera had heard enough. That same day she kissed Louise goodbye, flew home, and began writing “Among the Lettuce Lovers,” its first sentence: “Bhani Singh doesn’t want to marry Sat Mukanda Khalsa.” A magazine editor Vera knew published it soon after. Vera folded the printed article into a copy of
The Songs of Milarepa,
in case there were ashram censors, and in a month or so got a call from Louise’s mother telling her Louise was in Langley Porter mental hospital and thanking her for everything she’d done.

“Thanking you?” says Solomon. “Was she serious?”

“Absolutely,” says Vera. “You don’t know Louise’s mother. Her feeling was, lots of perfectly respectable people wind up in the nuthouse for a spell, but only real nuts put on turbans and eat lettuce and breathe through their noses.”

“Maybe she was right,” he says. “Maybe you did her a favor.”

Vera’s always wondered if that’s what Louise thought, if on some level she’d longed to be rescued. Why else would Louise have forgiven her so quickly? By the time she got out of the hospital, they were friends again. But what Vera says to Solomon is, “Louise was in Langley Porter a
year
. I think they gave her shock; she’s never said for sure. She’s still on God-knows-what antipsychotic drugs. Maybe I should have let her hop off into the sunset with Bunny Sing…” Vera takes a deep breath, and then is embarrassed for having exhaled through her nose. “Anyhow, that’s when I came to
This Week
. I figured it was the furthest I could get from the facts. And it’s true; I could have written
I WAS A LETTUCE LOVE-SLAVE
and sent it to Louise and it wouldn’t have made any difference. No one ever recognizes themselves in
This Week
.” Except the Greens, she thinks. No mistake likely there.

“Don’t blame yourself,” says Solomon. “It was better than pulling a pillowcase over her head and throwing her into a van. A whole lot less violent.”

“And sneakier,” says Vera. “The pillowcase might have been kinder.” She’s impatient with him for missing some point she’s not sure she gets either. What’s occurring to her now is that one reason she was so eager to tell this story was that she imagined some connection between what she did to Louise and whatever she’s done to the Greens, some conclusion she might come to about responsibility and intention, some chance that confessing her crimes against Louise might exonerate her for sinning against the Greens. Now she sees she was wrong: the two situations couldn’t be more dissimilar. One was intentional, and she got off scot free. The unintentional wrong is the one for which she’ll apparently have to pay.

“Anyhow,” Vera says, “who cares what I had in mind? It’s what happened that’s important.”

“Come on,” says Solomon. “Give yourself a break. For all you know, you saved your friend’s life. How long can someone survive on iceberg lettuce?”

Vera thinks: Lowell would never say “your friend.” Louise knew Lowell before Vera did. It makes Vera so miserable to hear Solomon call Louise that, she thinks she must be hungry. “Speaking of which,” she says, “let’s eat.”

Turning on the kitchen light makes the whole world seem brighter. Vera’s beginning to blame her bad mood on the vodka and grass and the dark. If they’d switched on some lamps an hour ago, she’d never have got so low. A fingerful of chicken salad—the perfect mating of sesame oil and curry—very nearly persuades her that everything’s for the best. These Greens could turn out to be soulmates! And what if they do have the fountain of youth in their backyard, flowing underground, unsuspected till Vera’s article brought it bubbling into light. What then!

Vera turns on the living-room light; and Solomon, though blinking a little, seems grateful. Vera serves out globs of chicken salad, then realizes she’s not hungry. Still, she eats as she used to when Rosie was small, as if showing Solomon how. Halfway through the first mouthful they know the worst: too much celery, and what there is is old and tough. Even before their first swallow, they’re sucking chicken through a net of soggy green string that they’re then obliged to spit out.

Vera should have caught it earlier. The celery did seem stringy when she was cutting it, but not extraordinarily so; anyway she wasn’t concentrating. And it’s something you wouldn’t notice taking small tastes; a whole mouthful’s needed for the full effect. What makes it more embarrassing is that she’s just spent an hour putting down lettuce eaters.

Solomon smiles and says, “Great stuff,” the very same words the drugstore clerk used about the diaphragm jelly. She thinks: Dog-meat eater. So. It’s worse than she thought, so bad they can’t even joke about it. There’s real discomfort here, even an edge of resentment, and suddenly—though neither could say just how—they both know they won’t become lovers again. How can you make love to someone you can’t even be honest with about dinner? Vera’s gums are aching; it’s painful to eat. At the same time they’re both reluctant for the meal to end. Solomon asks for seconds.

Finally their plates are empty except for maybe two dozen wads of celery string. Solomon looks at the mess and says, “This is the first meal I’ve ever had where you eat and floss at the same time.” Vera laughs, but it’s too late. If only he could have thought of that earlier.

From then on it’s simply dismal. Vera asks if Solomon wants coffee, and even that’s awkward. Like it or not, they can’t forget how they used to stay up and drink coffee in bed so they could stay up some more. Solomon says he guesses not, and Vera says, “Me neither.”

“Well, then, I guess I’ll let you get some rest,” he says. “Good luck Monday.”

“Okay,” says Vera, who’s in a kind of panic, dreading their goodbye. Once more she might as well be in high school, out on a date with some less-than-special guy, half-rigid all evening at the prospect of fending off one timid good-night kiss. It’s surely not like that with Solomon; she loves him. She doesn’t know what’s gone wrong. Finally they do kiss, and both seem relieved when it’s over.

When Solomon leaves, the apartment feels like a vacuum, as if his exit’s sucked out all the oxygen. It’s hard to breathe. Vera goes to the window for what passes in this neighborhood for air; Solomon’s crossing the street. She watches him as far as she can, then hides her face in her hands for the quiet and darkness and perfect privacy she already has more of than she could ever want or need.

V
ERA’S HITTING THE JACKPOT
for dreams. This morning she’s in a forest. Pine-needle floor, striped sunlight, a whooshing like wind in the trees. Something’s hiding in the pines, but Vera’s not scared. She knows that it’s Bigfoot and that he’s got something to give her. The bonging of a Japanese temple gong announces the moment…

But it’s just the phone ringing. Dave calls every Sunday, usually before nine. When Rosie was little, he’d used that as an excuse: people with babies can’t sleep late. Now Rosie’s not even here and he’s still calling. Vera’s come to see that calling’s his version of her waking newborn baby Rosalie to make sure she was all right. Dave’s making sure she’s survived the dangers of Saturday night. It’s annoying being woken, but how can she be angry at someone who’s never outgrown a state she remembers as awful: that fearful, compulsive tiptoeing toward the crib. Who knows what he imagines? He’s always so relieved when she’s there.