Summer of Love, a Time Travel (22 page)

“Ah,
five cats. My kids love cats.” Doc Clyde says to Susan, “How about you, miss?
You like little animals?”

“Oh,
I love animals!” Susan says. “Animals are high spiritual beings. I celebrate
the infinite holiness of life.”

“Is
that so, is that so?” he murmurs. “Then what do you suppose is growing inside
you, miss? A crystal? A flower? A vegetable?”

Susan
blushes fiercely. His condescending smile and his fancy sunny office and his
family photographs infuriate her. “I know what it is, doctor. It’s a fertilized
egg. Like what you buy at the grocery store and fry up for your big fat breakfast.”

“It’s
a baby, miss,” he says.

“You’re
a fine one to lecture her, Doc Clyde,” Ruby says. For the first time this
morning, her eyes connect with Susan’s, and Susan sees a coiled-up darkness
inside Ruby.

“I’m
merely making sure she knows what she’s doing,” he replies mildly.

“Uh-huh.
Dig it: she’s decided the circumstances aren’t right for her to have this child.
Isn’t that all you need to know?”

“That’s
all I need to know.” He gazes at the photograph, wipes a speck of dust from the
toddler’s face. “HCG means human chorionic gonadotropin, miss. It’s a hormone
essential for enriching the endometrium so that the fetus is nourished from the
mother. Production of HCG begins right after implantation of the egg. When they
do the HCG test, they take your urine sample and inject it into the abdomens of
laboratory animals. Female rabbits, to be exact. They kill the rabbits after
two days and examine their ovaries. If HCG is present in your urine, the
rabbits’ ovaries will have hemorrhaged. They take each rabbit by her ears and
twist her little neck. Snap! Rabbits don’t have very strong necks, you know.
They killed three rabbits just for you and your pregnancy test. Do you have any
idea, miss, how many female rabbits are killed for pregnancy tests? Pregnancies
that are terminated?”

Susan
swallows a Tums. Tears spill her eyes.

“What’s
your price, Doc Clyde?” Ruby says in her sweet-as-poison voice.

“Five
hundred bucks for a D and C.”

“After
that bedtime story, make it two hundred.”

“Three.”

“Forget
it.”

“Two
fifty.”

Ruby
explodes. “Go to hell, you bastard! I hope you crawl with guilt. I hope you
can’t sleep at night and lose
all
your hair and get raging ulcers. You
owe
me, man.”

Susan
stares, horrified. What on earth is Ruby talking about?

“What
do you want, Ruby?” Doc Clyde says.

“
I
don’t need anything from you, not anymore, but this girl does, and her fate is
in your hands. So this one is gonna be on you. And you better do the job right
this time.”

Ruby
storms out of the sunny office. Susan sees her through the picture window,
stalking around the parking lot, pulling leaves off trees, kicking at the
gravel.

Church
bells toll.

Doc
Clyde pulls out a fresh file folder. “Okay. So. You’re not pregnant, are you,
miss? No,
don’t
answer that. We both know you’re not pregnant, you’ve
just got a menstrual problem. You’re over twenty-one? No,
don’t
answer
that. Don’t tell me your name. I don’t want to know anything about you.”

“My
daddy is a dentist,” Susan whispers. She isn’t sure why she blurts that out
but, when she dares to glance at him again, she knows exactly why.

His
face is purple, stricken with compunction. “Are you allergic to penicillin?” he
asks gruffly. “Good. Go in there, take off your clothes. Put on the hospital
gown. I’m just a rose gardener, miss. I’ve been pruning roses since 1953.”

*  
*   *

Because
the pregnancy is so early, Susan only has to have a menstrual extraction. A
sipping of her uterus without cervical dilation or anesthesia. A slipping-out
of the uterine lining and the troublesome egg.

It
hurts when Doc Clyde withdraws the suction from the syringe. A short, sharp
pain, but not a whole lot worse than a bad cramp. Afterward, she doesn’t bleed
much. She gets up on her feet. Doc Clyde tells her to come back in three weeks
for a checkup.

Susan
has no intention of coming back in three weeks. She never wants to see Doc
Clyde again.

As
Ruby drives them back over the bridge, a tear slides from Susan’s eye.

“You
okay, kid?” Ruby is brusque. It’s amazing what she’s just done for Susan. They’ve
known each other for maybe a week. “He did the job, and no funny stuff?”

“I’m
sorry.” Another tear.

Ruby
guns the Mercedes between two VW vans spattered with flowers and peace signs.
“Damn it, Starbright, you told me you were sure.”

“I’m
sorry,” Susan says, “about the female rabbits. And the egg.”

*  
*   *

It’s
past noon by the time Susan and Ruby return to the Mystic Eye. Haight Street is
just beginning to stir. After another groovy Saturday night, the Sunday crowd
wakes late.

Ruby’s
cats saunter into the kitchen to greet them, tiny lions and lionesses hungry
for their lunch. Ruby spoils them shamelessly. She feeds them roast turkey and roast
lamb, cottage cheese and cheddar cheese, brown rice and sweet corn seasoned
with alfalfa.

The
Summer of Love is like that, Susan observes. Topsy-turvy. A fellow who calls
himself Red walks an Irish setter named Man. A Beat friend of Ruby’s named
Feather carries Penelope P. Parrot on her shoulder. A tattooed girl known only
as Tangerine wraps a python she calls Sir Galahad around her neck. And a boy
who looks too young for the street even to Susan sits shivering, shirtless,
next to a fat piebald guinea pig known to everyone as God. God reclines in a
laundry basket lined with threadbare towels. The boy nibbles on the tips of
carrots God leaves behind.

Ruby
fusses over her cats so much, sometimes Susan gets jealous. When did Mom and
Daddy fuss over her like that? And when did Mom and Daddy realize she’s gone
for good? Have they reconstructed their memory of Nance’s postcard from the
ashes and concluded she’s fled to San Francisco? Will they hire someone to come
looking for her? That would be like Daddy.

Susan
is always looking over her shoulder. Looking for the Man, for the girl with her
face, for anyone following her. It’s her very own personal paranoia, added to
the paranoia infecting the Haight-Ashbury, shrouding the Summer of Love like
the fog.

Ruby
dishes out homemade cat food. She seems more wound up after the ordeal with Doc
Clyde than Susan. Ruby takes a Sonoma sherry from her pantry and bangs the
bottle down on her kitchen counter.

Susan
aches deep inside, but she feels dreamy. No more Section 25951. No more law
clerks. No more nightmares. No more Stan the Man. She’s free. She drifts to the
kitchen window overlooking Ruby’s backyard.

And spies
Chi. He’s bending over the garden he’s digging for Ruby. He says dirt is clean,
unlike doorknobs and bongs passed around. He says a lot of strange things, the
five-hundred-year-old man from Mars. Oh, excuse me. He’s really only
twenty-one. Susan likes to shuck him. “So what town on Mars are you from?” she
asks. “Are you living forward or backward in time?” He hates that. He sulks.

Susan
has seen and heard so many strange things in the Haight-Ashbury, she doesn’t
believe Chi’s t-porter rap for one second. So he’s got a maser. So what. Ruby
says they’ll probably be selling masers at Macy’s next year. It’s just some
Japanese high-tech thingie that hasn’t hit American stores yet. And so he’s got
a stone-thing that pricked her when he pressed it to her chest. The so-called
scanner is like one of those jokes you buy in a magic shop, a whoopee cushion that
farts or a joy buzzer that goes
bzt
when you shake someone’s hand. He
doesn’t have a time machine, not even a tricorder like the crew on
Star
Trek.

In
the yard below, he’s taken off his shirt, which is weird because he’s usually
such a prude, shirt cuffs and collar buttoned up tight. The oddity makes her
pause and watch. The skin on his lean, muscular back shines like wet ivory.
Rainbows practically ripple off him. He’s a tall, slim, pearlescent man under
the sun. Strange and beautiful. Almost alien.

As
if he senses her watching him, he suddenly looks up. His face opens up in a big
smile, and he waves.

Maybe
Susan has been unfair to Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco. He’s never been mean or
crude or pushy. She’s been so sick with her pregnancy, she’s barely spoken two
civil words to him. After her crazy time at the Double Barrel house, she’s
slept whole days away in her little room.

Chi
is
beautiful. From some rich European family, that’s Ruby’s theory. People who own
property in Sausalito. Susan blinks, dispelling the rainbows. She waves back.

The
thing is, he’s always watching her.

Every
time she turns around, she finds his eyes but there’s nothing especially flattering
about his surveillance. He watches her like you would watch a fly crawling up a
wall. She finds it annoying, sometimes distressing. He sneaks past her room at
night. He watches her washing Ruby’s dishes in the kitchen. He follows her when
she goes out to the Scene. He’s always asking her dumb questions like he thinks
she wants to tell him the story of her life.

Susan
doesn’t want to tell him the story of her life. If she could, she would
reinvent
the story of her life.

Could
Chi be a detective sent by Daddy?

*  
*   *

Ruby
phones downstairs, checking up on business. “How’s the drawer doing, Morgana?”
she says. Susan thinks it’s amazing how Ruby runs her own store. Susan’s mother
doesn’t do much of anything. Her mother is like a servant to her father.

Susan
turns away from the kitchen window and climbs the stairs to the sitting room on
the third floor. She loves her little room. The skylight lets in the sunset and
the first star of the evening, to which she sings the Star Bright song every
night. She’s talked Ruby into letting her take the funky old black-and-white TV
from the storeroom in the garage. She and Ruby, they’ve got a deal. Ruby must
never hear voices on the devil box when she’s trying to sleep, and Susan is
only allowed to watch
Star Trek,
Time Tunnel,
The Twilight
Zone,
and
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

Susan
is startled by a knock on the door. Ruby pokes in her head. She’s got that
bottle of sherry and two cordial glasses. “I got this out just for you,
Starbright. Want a nip? It might help.”

They
sit down on the mattress on the floor.

“Okay.”
Susan has never tasted sherry, but she takes the cordial glass and sips. The
sip rockets to her head, but in a nice way. Not at all like grass or acid. A peaceful
sort of way.

“Got
any pain?” Ruby asks.

“A
little here.” Susan rubs her tummy. “A lot in here.” She rubs her heart.

“Forget
Doc Clyde’s bedtime story. I hear they’re working on a new pregnancy test
that’s faster and better and doesn’t rely on killing female rabbits. I can’t
believe he told you that.” She gulps her glass, pours another.

Susan
takes another sip for courage. “Ruby, what did you mean? About Doc Clyde owing
you?”

Ruby
drains her second glass and sighs. “Oh hell, kid. I knew Doc Clyde when he
didn’t have the potbelly and all those kids. We’re talking fourteen years ago.
Mediocre GP, fresh out of med school, greedy and stupid. He had this cousin, a
nice Beat lady. Black sheep of the family, right? She hung around North Beach
when I lived there, and she put out the word he did D and Cs. Mostly he did
okay, but a couple of times, in the early days, he screwed up. Screwed up bad.
I mean, he never gave a damn, he just did it for the money. Things got ugly.”
Ruby pours herself a third glass. “I can’t forgive him for that.”

“Oh,
Ruby, I’m sorry.” But Susan still isn’t sure what she means.

“He’s
okay now. Clyde’s the only local I know who’s a real doctor and will do minors.
Otherwise, a girl like you would have to go to Switzerland or Brazil.” Ruby
reaches over, tucks a stray lock of hair behind Susan’s ear. “I would never
have taken you to him if I didn’t believe he could get the job done. You
believe me, don’t you?”

“Of
course. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what you did for me. So I want
to do something for you. I can get a Sacramento station that reruns
Star
Trek
in the afternoon. Will you watch an episode with me? Just this once?
You’ll have fun.”

Ruby
looks doubtful, but she says, “Okay.”

Susan
crawls across the mattress, turns on the TV.

The
episode is “Mudd’s Women,” in which a con man, Harry Mudd, wants to trade three
stunning women--Eve, Ruth, and Magda--to Rigel XII miners in exchange for
dilithium crystals. The miners are crude and rough-looking. They are not exactly
prizes. Why would these women settle for these men? It turns out the women have
a dark secret. They keep popping a pill called the Venus drug, which is highly
illegal and instantly turns them from hideous crones into stunning women.