Onward Toward What We're Going Toward (5 page)

Lijy thought that maybe Chic could help her. Maybe he could talk to Buddy. She was about to come out with it, just get it out there, just ask him to talk to Buddy for her, when Chic came out with an idea of his own.

“So, ah, I was thinking, um, do you think I could get another one of those back rubs?”

She sat there staring at him.

“You'd be doing me a favor. I got this awful . . . ” He rolled his head this way and that to stretch his neck.

She got up and went to the record player. “Do you mind if we listen to the song again?”

“Actually, do you have ‘Move It on Over'? Or ‘Long Gone Lonesome Blues'? Or, hey, the Bside to ‘Long Gone is ‘My Son Calls Another Man Daddy.' I really like Hank Williams. I bet Buddy has some Hank records.”

“Maybe we don't need another song.”

Lijy got a chair from the dining room. Chic got up and quickly unbuttoned his shirt. He was wearing a tank top undershirt, and he tore that off, too. He sat down on the chair. Lijy started out on his shoulders, kneading his tenseness, using her thumbs to work into the muscles on either side of his neck.

“Can you whisper those words into my ear?”

“Whisper what into your ear?”

“Those words. Ansa-something. And something else. I don't know.”

“Ansa phalak.”

“Yeah that. Whisper that.”

Lijy moved her hands to the middle of his back. “This is your vrihati,” she whispered. “It's a bindu, a dot. It's mystical.” She pressed on it with her thumb. Chic let out a sigh and felt his shoulders unravel. She moved her hands up to his shoulder blades. “Your ansa phalak.”

“Keep whispering.”

“Ansa.” She held the
a
like she was letting out a long sigh.

Lijy had met Buddy at a restaurant on Grant Avenue in San Francisco's Chinatown. She'd come to San Francisco from Stockton, where her father worked as a day laborer for an asparagus farmer. Lijy had gotten on a bus without even telling anyone. She had aspirations. And then, in a restaurant in Chinatown, where she'd come in off the street to have a mug of tea, there was Buddy Waldbeeser leaning low over a bowl of pork noodles, trying to work the chopsticks, a napkin stuffed in the collar of his shirt. He was in town for a numismatic convention, and as soon as he spotted Lijy wearing her sari, he couldn't stop sneaking peeks. Whenever she caught him, he would avert his eyes and appear to be busy with his pork noodles. Eventually, she got up and approached him because that was the kind of woman she wanted to be. Buddy looked up at her and said, “You're not Chinese, are you?” He told her he was staying at the Mark Hopkins Hotel. He told her about the cocktail lounge, Top of the Mark, with a view of the San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. He was from Illinois, and in Illinois, he said, you had to get up on your roof to get any sort of view, and even then, there wasn't much to see but cornfields and other roofs, maybe an occasional bird flying by. He said he'd take her after he finished his bowl of pork noodles.

On their way to Geary Street, Buddy bought her a bouquet of roses from a flower stand. It was the first time a man had ever bought her flowers. Buddy insisted she cradle them like a baby, and she did. They caught the California Street Cable Car to Nob Hill. Lijy had never seen a place as gold and shiny as the Mark Hopkins. Neither had Buddy, but she didn't know that. They took the elevator to the nineteenth floor. At the bar, he ordered himself a Gibson while she walked over to the wall of windows. The view was something that hit her right in the middle of the stomach. The panorama, the vista, the buildings, the people, all of it in
motion and happening nineteen stories below her, just rolling the way it rolled forward, and she could do nothing except witness it. She felt her knees go slack. Buddy got her a seat and handed her a bowl of nuts, but she didn't want any nuts. He sat down beside her, pointed to a spot where two windows met, and told her that was the Weeper's Corner. When servicemen shipped out to the war, he explained, their wives and sweethearts would stand in that spot dabbing their eyes with hankies, watching as their lovers' ships slipped out of the bay. He put his hand on her leg. She told him she wasn't a weeper, and he told her he wasn't in the service.

Chic hadn't put his shirt back on yet, hadn't even stood up from the dining room chair. Lijy sat down on the sofa. Now that the back rub was done, she could talk. She complained about Buddy being gone all the time and told Chic that he had promised her a life in Middleville where it was quiet and she would be able to do, as he said, “her own thing.” It was true—Middleville was quiet, and she was doing her own thing. But she didn't like it, none of it, not even a tiny piece of it. She hated it, to be honest. She felt like she was in a dark room and the entire town was shining a flashlight on her. It was worse than Stockton, actually, where at least there were other Indians. Here, she couldn't even go to Stafford's without kids peeking around the corners of the aisles to watch her. And most people wouldn't talk to her and the ones who did talked very slowly, like she wasn't able to understand what they were saying. She hoped that Chic was getting all of this. (He just sat there smiling, every once in a while furrowing his brow.) She needed Chic to sound the alarm for her, to let Buddy know she was drowning. She thought she'd get him, really get him, if she came to Middleville. But she wasn't getting anything but a big, empty house and a lot of silence.

After Lijy was done, Chic went into the bathroom. He knew what it was like to be an outcast. He'd help her fit in; he'd help her become a real Middlevillian. That's more than Buddy was doing. He didn't care, not really; he was too busy doing whatever
he did with his damn gold coins. Chic cared, really, truly, and he was convinced that all he had to do was make the first move and she'd lead him to the bedroom and let him slowly take off her sari. Then, she would kiss him—not like Diane kissed, rough and aggressive, but gently—and the two of them would giggle shyly between kisses because both of them would be nervous, and since he'd be the more experienced one, he'd have to take the lead.

Lijy was at the stove, her back to him. The teakettle was on.

“Excuse me.”

She turned around.

Chic was wearing only his boxer shorts and black socks. His hips began moving back and forth, slowly, humping the air. He didn't even realize he was doing it.

“I could help you. Make it so people didn't stare at you.”

She looked like she was on the brink of something, a movement, a lunge toward him, and they'd grab each other's cheeks and mash into a passionate kiss. Behind her, the teakettle began to whistle.

“Chic, what are you doing?” she finally said and shut off the burner. “Will you quit moving your hips like that?”

“Sorry.”

“Chic, why are you in your underwear?”

“You rubbed my back.”

“You asked me to rub your back.”

“Not at the reception. You just grabbed my arm.”

“I'm sorry if you got the wrong idea. I love your brother. I do, but you looked so sad tonight. I thought I could help you. And I thought you could help me.”

“Sad?” The accusation dropped on him like a heavy weight. “I'm not sad.”

“I can feel it in your muscles. I can feel it in your brother's muscles too.”

“Feel what? What can you feel? What are you talking about? I'm not sad. Buddy's not sad.”

“It's okay, Chic. You have Diane now, and your brother has me. It's going to be okay.”

On the way home he stopped at Gene's Dairy Dream and bought Diane's favorite—a chocolate ice cream cone with sprinkles. He was determined to make this a good night: ice cream and
The Ruggles
or Ed Sullivan on the television and maybe he'd put his arm around his wife, like he should, like a husband should. Sad? He wasn't sad. He was the happiest man alive. He had a wife, and he was thinking about getting a dog and naming him Cody.

At home, he heard Diane sloshing in the tub. He tried the bathroom knob, but it was locked. “Honey.”

“I'll be out in a second.”

Then, he had an idea. “Unlock the door, honey.”

“I'm in the bath.”

“Open the door.”

He heard her stand up out of the water. Her wet foot thudded on the linoleum.

“I want to carry you upstairs and lay you out on the bed and kiss you on the belly and your legs and your neck and cheeks and ears.”

She unlocked the door. A towel was wrapped around her, above her breasts. Her hair was dripping. Behind her, the bathroom mirror was fogged with steam.

“You left the lamp by the couch on. I could see it when I pulled into the driveway.” He held out the ice cream cone to her. “I made a mistake.”

“What are you talking about, Chic?”

“I thought you were reckless, but now I see that you're not. I'm not sad. I'm really not.”

“Reckless?”

“Wild is more like it. I want to hold you. That's what I want. We'll snuggle under a blanket and just be together.”

She unwrapped her towel. She was about four months along,
and her stomach was beginning to bulge, a little rise like a hill in the middle of flat land.

His face turned white. “I . . . You're . . . ” He swallowed hard. He thought about his father sitting in the living room staring out the window. He'd backed the family car down the gravel drive every morning and, at night, carefully pulled it back into the drive. He thought of his mother sweeping the farmhouse's porch with so much force, the shushing of the broom's bristles sounded like screaming.

“Chic, are you OK?”

He clenched the ice cream cone. It crumbled, and ice cream dripped over his hand and onto the hallway carpet. He started to waver.

“Chic! Honey?”

His eyes rolled back into his head, and he groaned a low, animal half sigh, half moan.

Then, he passed out.

 

In 1972, Mary Norwood and her boyfriend, Lyle Crabtree (who went by Lyle Style because he wore butterfly collar shirts and skintight polyester pants he thought gave him a bulge), rented an apartment in San Jose, California, but spent most of their time in Lyle's '69 Ford LTD hustling up and down the West Coast so Mary could shoot pool in the West Coast Women's Pool League, a semiprofessional pool league. Lyle didn't work, but that didn't mean he didn't bring in an income. He had a triangle head like viper, and his tongue could snap with the best of them. Somehow he always had a belt buckle, a pair of dingo boots, a pool cue, a Zippo lighter, or whatever to sell. This was nickel-and-dime stuff, but Lyle could stretch a buck. It was nothing for him to kick the LTD's seats back and sleep behind a movie theater. Mary, on the other hand, had big, blossoming dreams that didn't include sleeping in a car. Every time she started talking about what she called a “normal life,” Lyle smiled through his mustache. “I'm with ya, babe. You think I like sleeping in my car?”

By the time Elvis died in August 1977, Mary was finishing in the top two of almost every tournament. Payouts were getting bigger—five hundred bucks here, seven hundred there—but she was still rubbing her neck and cursing the LTD's vinyl seats. Lyle didn't seem to mind sleeping in the car. He certainly didn't mind the increase in income. He bought himself new things, like a gold ring for his pinkie finger and a belt with his name stitched in back. He strutted around the pool halls striking a pose every few minutes—hip kicked out, cigarette dangling from his mouth.
During her matches, Mary often spotted him off in a corner talking to some girl, a look in his eyes like he was going to swallow the girl whole. She asked Lyle about the girls, and he told her he was just doing his job, working the crowd, trying to build up her image. Mary couldn't let herself believe he could be sneaking off with those girls. Even when she saw him one afternoon in Olympia, Washington, come back into the pool hall, a doe-eyed girl behind him carrying her high-heeled shoes, the girl's hair a tornado of mess, Mary told herself he was probably helping her fix a flat on her car.

All of this was about to change. Their—or rather Mary's—ship was about to come in.

In October 1978, after a tournament in Reno, Mary and Lyle were sitting at the bar having cocktails when they were approached by a slick-looking dude, his shirt unbuttoned showing gold necklaces. The guy had huge muttonchop sideburns that practically grew right into his mouth, and was built short and compact like a garbage can that fit under the kitchen sink. He introduced himself as Rod Alberhaskie, and he had a proposition. He talked to Lyle, looking at him directly, eyeball to eyeball like a high school principal. He and some folks were kicking off a professional women's pool league, WPPA, Women's Professional Pool Association. “Our league won't be a weekly event like this here. But the purses will be ten times as much.”