Make Me Work (18 page)

She looked down at the front of herself and tossed her springy hair. “Actually, the Goodwill in Berkeley is very good. I've been there. Not for this particular dress, which just happens to be my very best dress that I wore especially for you. But I started this, right?”

“You started it. I do what I do for a living and it's fine.” He sipped his coffee and glanced at a man by the window who was, in turn, glancing at Raymond and Mary from behind a yellow paperback of
Realism in Our Time
.

“O.K., you gave up the saxophone. But you didn't give up trying to follow girls to California. And now one of them has taken you up on it. I should have grabbed you when I had the chance, huh?”

“No, you were smart. I was a bad bet. Probably still am.”

“You don't mention her in your letters. I ask all these questions and you don't answer. This makes me suspicious. You can't possibly think you're supposed to spare my feelings or something. I mean, I left you, right? So what's the story? Are you in love here, Raymond, or just involved?”

“How do you tell the difference?”

“Oh, come on. You were in love with me, for instance.”

“Was I?”

“Yeah, you were.”

“O.K., that'll be my reference. Am I in love? It must get harder to tell, the older you are. Christine's great. I like her a lot. It's lower-key than it was with you. She doesn't harangue me about overthrowing the government.”

“She just harangues you about doing the dishes.”

“Nope.”

“Business school, huh?”

“Yes, business school, and I know what you're thinking. I see the image you've got, and she's not like that at all. The whole world is business, kiddo. It's just what people do all the time. There's no such thing as life without business. Going to business school doesn't automatically make you Lucifer's servant, the way we used to think it did.”

“You're sure about that?”

“I think I'd know if Christine was Lucifer's servant.”

“Her head would spin around or something.”

“Right. Or she'd like spicy food.”

Mary's pub glass thumped on the table. “She doesn't like spicy food?”

“No, not particularly.”

“Oh, my God! Raymond, Raymond. How can you possibly live with someone who doesn't like spicy food?”

“Easy. Hot sauce on the side.”

They walked along the streets, Mary showing Raymond the things she loved about Berkeley. It was her favorite place in the world, she said, except maybe for New York, but they didn't need any more revolutionary nurses in New York. Plus, it snowed there. And you could see the whole world in Berkeley, anyway. Not to mention eat it. She was taking him to a Mongolian place for lunch.

On the way, Raymond saw a music store and took Mary in to buy her a gift—John Coltrane's
Crescent
, one of her old favorites that she didn't have for her new CD machine. In Boston, Coltrane had been Raymond's great inspiration, and it was possible that he and Mary had become lovers because she loved Coltrane, too. He wasn't sure anymore, but he used to learn Coltrane solos note for note and play them for her, he remembered that. These days, he hardly listened to jazz anymore at all. He listened to loud electric pop that entered his blood like sugar and kept him revved up all the time.

Mary, however, still listened to Coltrane, who sounded new every time she heard him, as though he were alive and playing that moment. She made cassette tapes of Coltrane for Charles, her husband, and he listened to them in prison on a little headphone machine. Sometimes the music got him through the bad days. But every day's a bad day in prison, one after another out to the vanishing point, and if a person's going to stay sane in a situation like that, he needs real evidence of what's waiting for him at the end. And so Mary had decided not to wait until Charles got out to marry him.

She'd met him three years before, after his attempted escape. He smashed his leg jumping from the prison wall, and they brought him to the locked police ward in San Francisco General, where Mary worked as a nurse. The surgeons had to put a lot of screws in his leg in two operations that kept him in the hospital a month. By the time he went back to jail he and Mary were friends. She visited him every week. She brought him cigarettes and books to read—fiction and poetry and political thought. When Charles was finally paroled, he moved in with Mary to start a new life.

Raymond heard the first installment of the Charles story in a letter from Mary, and he'd been full of admiration for the never-ending adventure of her life. He'd also been appalled. The man was a lifelong needle user and Mary, the battle-zone nurse, wasn't even mentioning AIDS. In her next letter she read Raymond's mind and volunteered that Charles was HIV negative, and if he weren't she'd know how to deal with that. Her letters were happy for a while, and then they weren't. A year ago she wrote that when a junkie gets out of jail, all the old friends come around, wanting him to get high again. Charles had promised to stay straight, but it was like promising to hold back a train. The only free life he knew was out on the street. He was shooting dope again, breaking and entering, the whole nightmare. While Mary was at work one night, the cops showed up with a warrant and turned the place upside down—her place, all her own things—and took Charles away again. He was forty and he'd been in Sing Sing, off and on, for almost half his days on earth. They put him in Folsom this time. That's where Mary'd been married four months ago—Folsom.

“I talk to him twice a week on the phone,” she told Raymond now, over a Mongolian hot-pot into which one dunked noodles and onions and strips of meat. “But I haven't seen him since our wedding. The prison's having a lock-down, which means no visitors, no privileges, no leaving the cell. Usually you have a lock-down if there's been trouble, if they're worried about a riot or something. There hasn't been any trouble. They're just doing it to lean on people. It's a long drive, and I could only go once a week, no matter what. Every week I call on my one day off, and every week they say still locked down.”

She laughed. “After six months in prison, if you're married to somebody, you're supposed to get conjugal visits. In our case they're going to count from the wedding, not from the time he went in, just so we know what they think of white girls who marry black junkies in their jail. That makes four more months before I can finally lie down next to my husband. Assuming I ever see him again at all. Incredible, right? But what do they care? They're free, it's not their life.”

Raymond spooned more peanut-chili paste into his bowl and thought, as he had thought many times before, that he could never have foreseen Mary's present life. Then he recalled that he had failed to foresee his own. He knew that if Martians landed tomorrow they'd say, “Hey, look, they put all the black and brown ones in jail,” but Mary was describing a life so bizarre it was hard to believe it really existed. He couldn't imagine being in prison, or being married to someone who was. “Do you want me to help you bust him out?” he said. “We could do it tonight, unless there's a moon.”

“That's the spirit,” Mary said. “It's all a bad joke anyway. And then we can hide out at your place in San Jose, right? Christine won't mind.” She lifted some noodles from the steaming broth. “He was supposed to come up for parole this January. They always said if his behavior was good they'd forget the attempted escape. Now, for no reason, they're not going to forget. Just like that, an extra year out of his life.” She pointed her chopsticks at Raymond. “This is why white men
need
black men to be junkie slaves. You realize that, right? So they can have somebody to do this to. I'm only telling you this as an illustration of the way the world works. For your education. It's not a plea for pity. They can't break me down. I can wait. And Charles can wait, too. God knows he's had plenty of practice.”

“And then, after this particular practice session, Charles gets out—again—and comes back home to you, again—”

“Totally different, Raymond. Totally. We're married now. He never had anything as good as a wife to lose before. He's learned his lesson.”

They finished lunch and walked up Telegraph till they were back where they started. They visited Shakespeare & Co., and when they came out Mary took Raymond by the arm and turned him onto a side street up the hill. After a couple of blocks, at the beginning of a residential neighborhood, she stopped beside a large vacant lot. It was about an acre of land with a patch of dirt for every patch of crabgrass. A few old garbage barrels were scattered around, a few winos lying on the benches.

“I'm only giving you one guess,” Mary said, “because it's so easy.”

“One guess,” Raymond said.

“About what this is.”

“It's a vacant lot.”

“Come on. No ideas? Nothing at all?”

“No.”

“This,” Mary said, “is People's Park.”

Raymond stared at it for a minute. “Not
the
People's Park.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “The very one. Remember? You were young, your generation was going to change the world forever. An amazing peaceful revolution was just automatically going to happen because you wanted it to.”

“Right,” he said. “I remember. But I can't believe this is it.
People's Park
. I heard so much about this.”

Mary laughed. “If you put your ear to the ground you can still hear The Grateful Dead.” Some dandelions were growing at the edge of the sidewalk. She bent down to pick one. “Flower Power,” she said, putting the dandelion in Raymond's jacket lapel. “I
know
you remember Flower Power.”

They got Raymond's car and drove to the Co-op supermarket where Mary was a stockholding member. At the Co-op, the shoppers were the owners.

“Why don't they have these in Boston?” Raymond said. “This is great. Boston's not hip enough for a Co-op supermarket?”

“They'll have them someday,” Mary said. “California's the future of everything.”

He wheeled the shopping cart through the aisles while she picked out the things she wanted. She was conceiving a fantastic homemade Mexican dinner, with all the things she'd always made for him in Boston—nachos with guacamole, chiles rellenos, chicken enchiladas with sour cream, rice and beans. The shopping cart made Raymond feel glad, all the good food piled in it. In the beer section, he added two six-packs of Dos Equis, the amber kind.

“Two
six-packs?” Mary said.

“In case you make the food really hot.”

“A wishful-thinking sensualist. You're gonna fit in just fine out here.”

In grains and legumes, she picked out the rice while Raymond hefted the various brands of pinto beans. They all seemed about the same, but one brand distinguished itself with a message printed on its plastic bag.

Raymond read it aloud.
“Please note. This is a natural product of the earth. Even with diligent processing using the most modern equipment available, we suggest you examine the contents carefully, sort out any foreign substances (small stones, particles of soil, metal, etc.), rinse with drinkable water before cooking to assure maximum wholesomeness.
” He tossed the bag into the shopping cart. “No apologies for lowly origins. I admire that in a bean.”

“I like the part about the pieces of metal,” Mary said. “Metal, for God's sake. Where did the metal come from?”

“From the Iron Age,” Raymond said. “Iron man would mix metal with his beans. They needed that back then, because they had an iron-poor diet. But now, with the better nutrition the hip people have here in Berkeley, most folks don't need metal in their beans anymore, so they tell you right on the package you can take it out if you want to. I like this company. Let's get two.” He tossed another one into the cart. “How can you go wrong? Forty-nine cents.”

“That's why Mexicans eat rice and beans, my friend. Because they're poor people. They live in the dirt. But do the Mexicans need our pity? They do not. Meanwhile, rich white man is living off the top of the food chain, eating all these cows, torturing poor geese so he can have pâté de fois gras. Pretty soon, all the cows and geese are dead. Rich white man doesn't know what to do. He has to take over somebody else's country so he can get something to eat. But he's soft and weak, he's had it too easy. Poor brown man eats a big helping of rice and beans, beats back the pasty white conqueror, assumes his rightful place in the world.”

“That's how it's gonna happen, huh?”

“It
is
happening, Raymond. And you'd better watch out, Silicon Valley capitalist.”

“I'm just a guy who shows people how to use their computers.”

“Oh, I see. Power to the people,” said a twinkling Mary.

“That's right,” Raymond said.

He drove the car into the Berkeley hills while Mary gave him directions. The roads became steep and narrow, twisting around on themselves and snaking through dark groves of tall, straight-trunked eucalyptus trees with strips of bark peeling down their sides like loosened bandages. He could smell the strong, minty fumes in the air. Spectacular redwood-and-glass houses jutted straight out of cliffsides high above the road.

Mary had her passenger seat tilted back like a lounge chair, reclining in it with one foot on the dashboard and her arm stuck straight out the window. She smiled at Raymond from behind her shades. “Nice up here, huh?” she said, amused by his wide eyes.

“These people are fearless,” he said, pointing to a sleek, glassy mansion hanging in the air above them. If it fell that moment, it would drop a hundred feet straight down on top of their car.

“Not fearless,” Mary said. “Learning disabled. People in the California hills are proof that money makes you dumb. Every three years or so, the big storms come and wash some of these places right down into the valley. I'm telling you, whole houses have sailed across this road in mud slides. And every time it happens, the rich folks grab the insurance and do it all over again. They don't get it.”