The Sand Hill Review               http://www.sandhillreview.org 2007

Honey in The City

by Elise Miller

When Gramma and Grampa went up to join my mother in heaven, wherever their heaven is, I left Palm Springs and came to live in Hillsborough with my Auntie, Uncle, and my two little cousins. I’m taking a couple of Foundation classes at the College of San Mateo and trying to figure out what I can do to be financially independent. Please understand, that independence thing is more my goal than the family’s. They like me here, babysitting for my cousins and helping them feel like they’re doing a good deed.

Their San Francisco suburb is more forest than housing tract, and ‘the adjustment,’ as Uncle calls it, is more complicated than they imagine. At home, the desert smelled clean, as if the heat had crisped and disintegrated every nasty mite in the pores of the landscape. The forest in Hillsborough doesn’t seem lush and peaceful, but impenetrable and mysterious. It smells like mold and rot and chlorophyll. But at least, I know, there is San Francisco.

Whenever we speak about a trip to the City, Uncle and Auntie have lots of opinions. Uncle wonders if it would be safe for an eighteen-year-old girl, accustomed only to a smallish town on a large desert, to go into San Francisco alone. “Most people on the Peninsula never go up there,” he informs me. “They don’t want to risk it.”

“Perfectly safe, Honey,” Auntie, the aging feminist, disagrees. “You go right ahead.” Then adds, “But I’d be back by dark, if I were you.”

That’s a challenge. So, I take myself up to the City the first chance I get, seeking the unknown like a bloodhound in search of a criminal. I take Caltrain and walk the mile up to Market Street, a map in my pocket. I’ve been given careful directions and remind myself not to daydream. I must think deliberately about where I am going. The filthy street teems with people in a rush, but I am eager for friction, to rub elbows and smile at people, to see which types smile back. I am alone in the City, but soon I am feeling at home. I laugh out loud and bounce along as I walk. The day lay ahead like the sparkling, cold pavement, inviting me to move across it and warm it up.

My destination is the San Francisco Public Library. I love the words. What they can teach me and how far away they can take me. On Market, the bus stop is marked by the ragged line of people waiting to ride. I ask someone about money for the bus, one dollar-yes-I-have-change and it’s a good thing because a couple of minutes is all there is before the bus comes along.

I am sitting on the bus behind a man that reminds me of a suave, Latin film star past his prime, still oozing sex like a nineteen-year-old. Better: like a nineteen-year-old with savoir faire. His skin is swarthy, brows and lashes heavy and dark, but for all that, his bone structure somewhat elegant and refined. The hair is full and wavy, but peppered with gray. He must be a Greek tycoon. His suit looks really expensive. Maybe he’s a Lebanese arms dealer. Or Bosnian? Do Bosnians ever get to America? I have a chance to see his eyes before I sit down: bedroom eyes, Gramma used to call them. So much is in the eyes—blue (don’t Bosnians have blue eyes?), soft, focused, and so awfully intelligent that they seem to require eyelids thick as draperies around a four-poster bed.

Mr. Suave faces straight ahead. I think of my father, a figure of dark mystery whose memory my grandparents obscured, and whom I loved intensely, unconditionally. I never met him, but now I imagine this is the man, and soon he will recognize me and fold me into his thick bold arms.

The bus jerks to a halt and the heavy eyelids lift suddenly and a joyous cry rings out like the opening notes of a grand opera performance. Two people so different as to make any relationship between them virtually impossible are hugging. Not a pfeh pfeh cheek cheek but a wild love of a hug. Mr. Suave is on his feet, towering over the thin form nearly obliterated by his arms. The young, white hippie, a short, skinny guy with requisite strings of greasy light brown hair and peach fuzz on his jowls, slaps Mr. Suave on the back and shoulders several times, rumpling an expensive-looking gray pin-stripped suit jacket. The two smile in a nearly vertical line right into each other’s eyes and the hugging starts all over again. I can’t take my eyes off them. Here in the City, it seems, strange acquaintances are family, while elsewhere, people that are truly family to one another are barely friends. My Greek dreamboat moves over and his friend sits beside him. I am listening, straining above the roar of the bus engine.

 “Who’d have thought I would see you today,” says the small hip one. I’ll call him Jerry, after Garcia. I am thinking he is about my age, maybe a bit older. “Just happen to take the same bus!” he says. “Amazing!” Mr. Suave speaks more softly, in keeping with his unruffled demeanor, and I lose track of the conversation as the bus lurches up to another stop on the route.

Mr. Suave twists to pull the window down, but it’s stuck. He stands again and slams the thing shut with a quiet show of virility (not so much as a grunt), which his friend fails to appreciate. Jerry is busy talking about how he happens to be on the bus:  “I’m going up to my friend Debbie’s to clean her house.” Mr. Suave nods knowingly. He knows Debbie, knows that Jerry would do anything for her, would clean her house even though his own is full of mealy worms and cat’s hair and squished up used Kleenex scattered among the scraps of notebook paper, equally decimated with tear juice, used up with crying and canting for Debbie. He knows, too, that Debbie knows.

            “…her daughter?” Suave inquires. “…cute as a squirrel in Springtime…” Suave laughs and says quite audibly, “Nine years old and already searching for nuts, eh?” He laughs at his own joke, but Jerry is laughing louder. He likes his friend’s joke. It clearly relieves the tension that any conversation about Debbie inevitably produces.

            Quieter tones now. Suave has a nondescript but definite Middle Eastern accent and I strain to hear his words. I am glad no one sits next to me because I am able to lean forward, sideways, on the pretext of looking out the window for my stop. So I catch another snippet from Mr. Suave: “I’m just going up there as an excuse to see her. I simply must see her. No other reason, believe me!” Ah! He too, is smitten. He’s heading for somewhere undesirable, but like Jerry, willing to do anything in order to meet up with a certain woman. Will the meeting be accidental, from the woman’s viewpoint, or did she ask him to come? She must be truly lovely to have ensnared my sophisticated, sexy Mr. Suave. I tried to form a picture of Mr. Suave’s lady, the new, budding romance he must go out of his way to pursue.

            Four very long blocks. Lots of stops, congestion. Finally, I hear the driver shouting, “Eighth’s here.” Before I can get to the door, the path is blocked by Mr. Suave and Jerry, hugging again, making promises about getting together soon, and I’m following my tycoon out onto the street. As I stride away boldly (a touch of nonchalance which I hope will not be obvious), I sense that Mr. Suave is watching the bus pull off, waving to his friend. I imagine I’m hearing his tread behind me, but there are too many people and footsteps and fleets of delivery trucks with commanding engines and squealing brakes. I can’t distinguish the eager steps of a gentleman in a business suit and jazzy Italian shoes who takes the bus up to the Public Library, or perhaps some other building in Civic Center, to meet the woman for whom he yearns.

Here comes the corner, the white granite stone, the Grove Street entrance, and the automatic doors, blocked now by a cluster of school children standing with their teacher. I remember field trips to the library–the old, one-story town library with the Spanish tile roof–and how I looked forward to the story times, and the books with the big print and colorful illustrations.                                                                                    

I walk around the kids, into the building, and the morning sun steams in through the stacked square windows, making patterns down the granite steps all the way to the main floor.

There is a guard at the gates. An alarm is going off as a middle-aged woman is trying to exit and the guard stops her and takes the glasses right off of her face, telling her to please try the exit again. I slip in and to the right, step behind a thick square post and a potted palm. I am having a hard time keeping watch for my Greek, because the ceiling is pulling my eyes up and up, five stories into a brilliant, oval skylight. I step away from the palm toward a Grand Staircase and behind it, see a giant painting containing dozens of names rise through all five stories. I assume they are all writers’ and poets’ names, since some I recognize: Beverly Cleary, Dr. Seuss, and Maurice Sendak from grade school, and Robert Frost, T.S. Elliot, Adrienne Rich, and Allen Ginsberg from high school. I walk closer, straining my neck to look up alongside the staircase, but I can’t make out the names beyond the second floor. For that, I must forget my mission and head on up. Mr. Suave is probably far off in another building by now. I do want to get my library card, can’t wait to find a book to take out.

Turning back toward my palm-and-post stakeout, I catch a glimpse of an exotic, well-dressed figure of a man walking confidently down from the second level Larkin Street entrance, turning to cross my line of vision and head for the bank of elevators to the upper floors. I am rushing after him without thinking and enter the elevator right by his side. We make eye contact. I smile and he smiles back, nods his head. Perhaps he recognizes me from the bus. Suddenly, he says, “You like to read?” “I love it,” I answer effusively. “That’s good,” he says, “It’s nice to see young people who love to read.” He continues to smile, and when the door opens at the fifth level, he nods a silent farewell and walks out. I continue to the sixth, feeling foolish. Just a casual conversation among readers. Dammit…I blushed. Did he notice? 

I exit at the top floor and begin to explore. I’m over the skylight and sunlight is everywhere among the hard geometries of steel and stone, pouring in from broad windows. I feel baffled by all the angles and vertical planes dropping into the center of the huge building–no red tile roof, no squat desert cottage. Down below, people sit at round tables, reading magazines. A spiral staircase leads down to the reading area, and I descend quickly, hoping to catch up to Mr. Suave again on the fifth floor.

Once down, I am relieved to see that he is not right there in the Reading Room, and I begin to walk in the space surrounding it. I get to a corner room, a wood-paneled area with comfortable furniture. The Environmental Center. I am tempted to stay, but not for long. I want to find a safe vantage point and watch for Mr. Suave’s lady love. Hastily, I scan book titles: Staying Alive, Ecology and Liberation, Watersheds. Thinking like a Mountain. This last, I remove from its shelf:  if I take a book, I’m an ordinary reader.

Around the other side of the fifth level, book in hand, I see my target sitting in a row of glass-enclosed study rooms with wallpaper made of old catalog cards. I plant myself at a computer table in front of the Patents and Trademark Center, where I can keep watch for the entrance of his lovely heart’s desire.

Several minutes go by, and I notice that Mr. Suave does not look up, glance anxiously at his wristwatch, or exhibit any of the other signs of a man in love, waiting impatiently for the lady in question to appear. After about 15 minutes, he rises and disappears into an alcove in the Patents and Trademarks stacks, emerges moments later and sits at a nearby reference table with two more books. I notice now that his jaw line is soft and his gut’s too big. He is calmly reading and taking notes. I am more than bewildered. I am bored.

Sighing deeply, as if I have lost the lady myself, I rise to leave and just as I do, his head bobs up from his book. Grabbing his lower neck to rub out a cramp, he turns his head this way and that, and looks around and his eyes absently steady themselves on mine. His brows rise in puzzled recognition. Quickly, I turn and head for the Grand Staircase, heat rising on my cheeks again. I dare not look back, but feel his confusion follow me out like cold wind pressing from behind.

Angry at the time I have wasted and the embarrassment I have caused myself, I descend to the main floor, determined to start my visit all over again from the beginning. There is the entrance, the guard at the gates, the upward thrust of the five floors, the concentric ovals of the skylight. I head to the information desk, where they give me a self-guided tour of the library, then over to the opposite desk to take out a library card. I search the “Hot New Books” section and then take my tour, careful to skip the fifth floor. I check out Thinking Like a Mountain and head back for the bus down Market. Deliberately, I ignore the interesting strangers on the bus. I think about what is waiting for me at my next stop–the Dia de los Muertos exhibit at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts–and why, that morning, my eyes had locked onto the newspaper announcement about the annual exhibit.

My mother’s last glimpse of this life was from the window of Desert Hospital, where I was born eighteen years ago this month. Gramma and Grampa took me away from the hospital and raised me in their condominium overlooking the dry riverbed called the Whitewater River Storm Channel in Palm Springs.

Every day after school, I walked home a mile or so along the bank above the Channel with my friends. There the focus was low on the horizon and when my eyes skipped over the lumpy barren land, the stone’s throw of my sight generally sought out a particular creamy smooth flow of sand just beyond our condo complex. I used to pretend my hand was fondling and stroking the sand, and it would feel amazing–like the warm, dry skin of someone I loved. Then my eye would skip across the flatness and get caught in the edges of deep shadows of sage and rocks or lost in the gray blur of smoke trees.

My friends chattered on about boys and tests and hairdos, and there I was, spaced out and unconcerned about present and future, just taking in the brilliant, flat bottom of the Whitewater and thinking how, when you looked over that vastness and really saw it, you did not want to bother with the condos, the neat artificially-watered easy-care gardens, the golf courses or tennis courts. The sighting along the riverbed rested and washed your soul. “Honey?” they’d punch me. “Are you listening to a single word?”

Growing up in Palm Springs, death was all around me, old people shriveling like plants in the dry desert heat. But it wasn’t just that old people thing. I had lived with it from before memory. While Gramma and Grampa played tennis and golf, I’d sit on the sidelines or in the little caddy cart and invent memories of parents about which no one spoke. I always knew that my mother had died giving birth to me, that she had been told that to have a child was a risk and she had chosen that risk. They’d never made me feel guilty for being alive—in fact, I was convinced early on that I was more special for having been designated for life by God and Mother. Designated for life and then, as all living creatures must be, designated for death.

So when Gramma died of cancer, it seemed part of the Inevitable Process. I missed her terribly, but I was not worried about her or sad for her, only for myself. Death was like a journey to an extraordinarily pleasant destination: we began there, and without that place we would not exist. We journey forward to where we live, I reasoned, which for me was a dry, clean, sunny place, full of sharp shadows and gentle sands. And after a time there, we return home, where death welcomes us. We are calm and safe, and we belong. We know we belong because our people are all there: Mother, Gramma, and I have always thought, Father.

            Then Grampa walked in front of a tourist bus and was killed instantly. At the funeral, everyone said that he was so disturbed by Gramma’s death that he couldn’t go on without her.

I was skeptical. Gramma’s illness had been difficult for the two of us. In the months since Gramma’s funeral, I had seen Grampa’s walk take on a new bounce, his smile come more frequently as he told me about his plans with friends. “I won’t be home for dinner tonight, Honey. Can you manage okay without me?” He was a sweet old guy. I would not choose to be taken home on a tourist bus, and I can’t imagine that Grampa would have either. It occurred to me then, for the first time, that we didn’t get to choose our own mode of transport on our journey toward death. Gramma’s drug-induced calm and gradual slipping away seemed a nice way to travel. And she was able to say goodbye. Suddenly, I was frightened and mystified by the processes of death.

So here I am, at the end of a less eventful bus ride back down Market Street, entering the Center for the Arts to see the annual exhibit called Dia de los Muertos. Day of the Dead. Each year, local artists from various cultures produce personal expressions of what this day, and consequently what death, means to them. “An odd thing for a young girl to want to spend her time doing,” said Uncle. “Won’t it be depressing?” said Auntie. “Oooo, gross,” said Little Girl Cousin. “Honey’s sure a weirdo,” said Little Boy Cousin.

I toss their words into the garbage can outside the front door at the Center. I don’t expect answers here, but only hope for multiple viewpoints that converge upon Truth, keeping the Big T at a respectful distance, of course.

 The exhibition is arranged in concentric circles, like the skylight above the Public Library. I begin at the outermost circle and move around the fixed walls of the cavernous gallery space. I peek into a series of little chapels honoring the beloved dead of Mexican American artists, each containing a collection of belongings from life arranged like colorful stage sets. I feel like an intruder in someone else’s closet. Photographs of deceased individuals or whole families appear like altarpieces in a chapel of garish memorabilia. 

Further on, there is an exhibit about people who are dead, even through they are alive. I am jarred by the shift from the Mexican American chapels, the radical nature of the statement about people who go through life as arms dealers, polluters, bigots, insensitive world citizens, and extravagant consumers. I move more quickly past some exhibits, like the canine altarpiece bemoaning the fact that dogs can’t go to heaven. “Nonsense,” I think. “Dogs go back to wherever they came from, just like we all do.” But it reminds me of the sweet Heaven and fiery Hell of old time religion. I laugh out loud and shake my head like a dog shakes off the water after a cold bath.

Completing the outer circle, I move within the free-standing enclosure, and walk slowly along past dolls representing the dead, a tribute to the Jews who died in World War II, to Irish who died for freedom, and finally, I stand transfixed before a set of Plexiglas boxes, each containing a beautifully wrapped gift box and a card. The boxes memorialize the birthdays of the artist’s husband. After the death of this loved one, his birthday is a time each year for recognizing the stages of grief one travels through after a death. I think of how I have never been angry at my mother’s death. Never tried to make any deals with God to bring her back. I am thinking through the stages of grief in this way, absently watching through the opening to the outer circle as a busload of school children lines up in twos behind their teachers, preparing to leave the gallery. I am standing stiffly, a lump in my throat, thinking about the twenty-three years of my mother’s life, the eighteen years since she has died. I am lost in the math, adding the numbers and trying to arrange forty-one Plexiglas boxes on the personal wall of my loss.

From within the central core of Dia de los Muertos, a clear, imposing baritone with a slight mid-eastern accent floats on the brief, delicate wave of quiet left behind by the departing school children. “But why do you torture yourself like this?” It is a passionate plea, and an unmistakable voice.

I turn toward the narrow entrance to the innermost concentric circle. Moving slowly, as if to rush would be to attract his attention even though a wall separates us, I reach the side opening and peek around the corner. There is Mr. Suave, his demeanor looking as impeccable as if his body language was designed by his tailor. Only his forehead is lined like that of an old man. He stares down at the woman who, I know positively, is his “only” reason for being at the Dia de los Muertos.

She is a petite woman whose high-heeled stilts enable her eyes to reach the level of Mr. Suave’s chin. From there, she projects consternation across the remaining inches into his eyes. Although I can see that she was once very beautiful, she is no longer young. A mass of hennaed hair is piled neatly on the top of her head in a 1950’s style chignon. Through the layers of carefully-applied makeup, I see fine lines spreading out over her round face like cat’s hairs. The total effect is a sophisticated, exotic retro.

 “All these things,” Mr. Suave is saying, his arm sweeping the little room. “You carry this baggage around with you and the weight will split your heart open.”

“And if your heart splits open, you die, and you join the dead in Paradiso.”

He shook his head, never taking his eyes off her. “Rachel, Rachel. Oh, my darling…”

“I am not your darling,” she countered, anger trembling on her lips.

“People live, people die, and we must go on. It is the labor of the living.”

“People. My son is not people. He was our son, Vanni…”

From my hiding place, I watch and feel my throat constrict. Their son! I do not belong to this conversation, but my feet stay where they are, forcing nausea to gather behind my ribs and rise up to the throat, where it lodges against a lump that feels cancerous.

“Yes, and I have grieved,” says Vanni. “But he made his decision to stay. He was an adult.”

“A boy.”

“Twenty-three is an adult.”

Now they both look away at the display around them, avoiding each other’s eyes. Mr. Suave sighs deeply. Rachel mumbles that they have been through all this territory before. I stand there, transfixed, thinking that their son, like my mother, was twenty-three. She made her decision as an adult. Of course, she didn’t want to die, but in a way it was fortunate for Mother to choose her own path to the other side, and how similarly fortunate for the young man, the son of Rachel and the sophisticated man at her side. With great difficulty, I hold my tears inside the lump in my throat. I want to share my thoughts with Rachel, so she will feel better about her son, so she will know that he is okay and it is only the living who suffer, and I step forward into the doorway, then step quickly back again as they both turn to look at me. Too late, I realize that these people are strangers and that my thoughts will mean nothing to them. Vanni has seen me. Tears are rolling down my cheeks, flowing over the dry, cracked banks of my heart, a rare warm-weather flooding after a long, dry summer on the Whitewater River Storm Channel. I turn to run away and Vanni runs after me.

“Vanni, what is happening? Who is she?”

I can run faster and escape Vanni, but Rachel’s voice makes me stop where I stand. They catch up quickly and we all stand there breathless. We are out in the Center’s foyer, people all around. They are staring at their reflections in my tears.

“She’s been following me all day,” says Vanni at last.

“Who is she?” asks Rachel, the two of them speaking in the third person, as if I were a photograph of someone they knew quite well in the distant past. They try without success to remember my name and where they took the photograph.

“I’m sorry,” I manage to say. “I only wanted to help.”

“But how can you help us?” asks a bewildered Vanni. “Who are you to us?”

“Who is Jerry to you?” I ask. “A stranger in the City?”

“Jerry? Who is Jerry?”

“Whatever his name is. The hippie boy on the bus, going down Market Street to the library.”

“That would be Martin. What do you know of Martin?” Vanni now looks suspicious, fearful, guarded. I do not want to make enemies. I gather my wits and try to explain how I saw him with this Martin for the first time in my life on the city bus, going to the library. The rest was coincidence (a small white lie), but now I have heard them say that their son has died and he was the same age as my mother when she died and they both made the choice to do whatever it was that took their lives. I paused, breathless from the rush of words.

“This is all none of your business,” says Rachel sharply.

“But I only wanted you to see what I saw at that moment you were speaking of your son. That everyone dies, and most like my grandparents who didn’t get to choose how they died. But they, my mother and your son, they got to choose. They were twenty-three and they had this amazing opportunity and for one reason or another, they chose…”

“You’re an eavesdropper!” Rachel hisses at me under her breath. “A common voyeur.”

“But everyone here at this Dia de los Muertos is an eavesdropper!” Vanni shouts. It is the first time I have heard him raise his voice, and it captures Rachel’s attention as much as mine. He continues, “Everyone comes here to see and hear how other people died and how the living are coping with the deaths. That is what this is…an educational voyeurism. Isn’t that why you put up the exhibit on our son? To help others…”

“No, I didn’t. I just wanted to memorialize him, so that he knows how much he’s missed,” Rachel says wearily.

“And you will miss him forever, as I miss my mother,” I say quietly.

“You think you know what it is to lose a son!” says Rachel, incredulous. “To lose a mother is natural. To lose a son is unnatural and cruel.”

“Rachel, stop!”

Now Rachel and I are both weeping silently. Mr. Suave takes both of us by the arms and leads us outside and up the hill to the café overlooking the gardens. Sits us down. Walks away to the counter to order hot tea. I offer Rachel a piece of tissue, which she accepts with a shake of her head. “I’m sorry. I had no right…” she says. We both blow our noses. “I just don’t know how to get over it. I cannot get over it.”

“But he loves you so much,” I say, looking up at Vanni’s back across the room at the counter. “I can tell he just wants to help you live again.”

She sighs. “Do you know everything about us? Just from traveling on a bus with him?”

“He told Jerry–I mean Martin–that the only reason he was coming here was because he wanted to see you, only then I didn’t know where ‘here’ was.”

“Marty’s a nice boy. He used to work for Vanni before he took to some kind of illegal drugs over a broken heart. An obsession, really. The world is full of broken hearts.”

“An obsession with Debbie?”

Rachel laughs right out loud and shakes her head. “You have excellent ears, my dear young lady. Yes, with Debbie. And do you know her, too?”

I laugh along with her. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t help but hear. They were right in front of me. I was alone…”

Rachel waves away my apology. “Never mind.”

“So, you knew Marty when he worked for Vanni?”

“Yes, then, and he lived with us for a little while.”

“With us? With you and Vanni?”

After a quick sham of surprise, she accepts my intrusive questions with the grace and ease of an old friend. “Well, well. I think I have finally found something you don’t know. Vanni was my husband,” she says, then her smile fades quickly. She takes a breath and blows it back out. “After our dear son was killed in Bosnia, we tried America. Vanni has had business here for years, so it was not difficult for us to come. But I didn’t want any husband. I couldn’t love anymore, you see.”

Vanni returns with the tea. We look at him like we have a secret. Rachel says, “Well, Vanni, now she knows absolutely everything about us, and also about Marty.” He smiles, because she is smiling.

“Sugar, lemon, a little milk, perhaps?” He sits down and helps us to our condiments as if he were waiting on two helpless children in his charge. We sit limp and let him take care of us. Finally, I know what I want to say.

“Rachel, you sound as if you don’t approve of Marty’s obsession with Debbie. And you are right, of course, since it is destroying his life.”

“I just can’t stand to be around him. I used to like him. Now he’s like living refuse. How dare he waste his life when others like my son have had theirs taken away?”

Now Vanni and I are both looking her way, waiting. These passing moments are Rachel’s. She needs time to hear her own words about obsession and wasting a life. Rachel lowers her eyes, appears to be searching the tepid tea for answers. I stay still, fidget with my napkin, then suddenly in my mind, there’s a picture of Vanni hugging Marty on the bus, and I remember: Here in the City, strange acquaintances are family, while elsewhere, people that are truly family to one another are barely friends. I can’t take my eyes off these sad, beautiful people.

Rachel lifts her teacup and brings it to her lips. When she lowers it, there is an embarrassed smile on her face. She looks from her abandoned love to me and back to him again. “So it seems we are to have a new friend, Vanni. What is your name, my dear?”