the floor with my back against the closed door, and he is at his desk. He is trying to talk me out of beginning an affair with the married man on whom I have a crush, and who (as I confide to my father) is after me. You’ve had your married affair, he says, and it took you a year to get over. Didn’t you learn anything at all from the experience? Because, baby, ignorance is curable, stupidity is forever. I hang on his every word. We drink more whiskey and talk. We are so close, cronies, allies, family. He says that the clean thing would be not to sleep with Richard, and that there was happiness in clean. And I’m nodding, suddenly solemn and wise, and promise the both of us to nip this one in the bud. So when I do proceed with the affair, I lie through my teeth to my parents about where I am going at night and who I am seeing. The married man and I have a ball, and there is absolutely no way my parents can find out. Except that one afternoon there was a letter to my parents from the wife. I was met at the front door by my father, who was almost crying as he handed me the letter. My mother came into the hall looking at me with an expression I’d only seen on her face when she was watching Nixon on TV: Liar! Liar!
I study the three of us for a moment. “Backwards,” says the hypnotist.
I see myself at nineteen in love with a man who was not particularly bright, but handsome and streetwise and cool. We had been sleeping together for three weeks or so when my period started, and it started just an hour or so before we went out to celebrate something at a fancy restaurant. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him what was going on. He was not enlightened. He didn’t like the smell or taste of women’s bodies. “This is wonderful,” said the therapist I was seeing at the time, when I called for an emergency consultation. “You’ve always had this disgust toward your own body, and now you’ve found someone you can share that with.” She coached me on how to tell him, urged me to just get it over with, but God, it filled me with so much fear, fear that he would want me to go sleep outside in the hut until it had passed. And all through dinner at this fancy restaurant he made sexy little jokes about what he had in store for me later. I would laugh prettily and try to blurt out the news. I kept trying to tell myself that it was really no big deal, that it was okay to have periods, that it just meant I was a woman, and so on and so on, but I couldn’t get a word out. He insisted that we go home to his house, and we held hands in the car and I tried to blurt out the first few words and I couldn’t, until we were finally in his bedroom. “Oh,” I said. “There’s something I wanted to tell you.” He took off his cuff links and started to pull his shirt off over his head and said to me, “Wait, wait, I want to tell you something first!” I nodded and smiled, waiting.
“Good news!” he said. “Clean sheets!”
Nineteen, eighteen, seventeen. There is lots of sorrow and low self-esteem but I also remember it as having been a time when my family was particularly close: we all fought against Nixon and marched against the war and boycotted lettuce and tried to stem the tide of developers who were building homes for rich people, building shops for tourists. I see myself returning from my only year in college, knowing more then than I ever will again. I spent the year hanging out with other bleeding-heart liberals who worked for McGovern and who would never ever drink Gallo or Coors, unless there was absolutely nothing else around. In my struggle to find out who I am, I take only philosophy and literature courses, reading most of the required books so that I could say I had read them, or because a paper was due, and I develop some rather gross intellectual pretensions. For a while I affect a slight and artsy lisp, and then move on to a scholarly, William F. Buckley stammer. I see myself sitting at my parents’ dinner table telling them about the courses I was taking, and I see my hands near my mouth, gnarled with passion and emphasis, saying something like “The—thuhhh—thuhhh—theeeeee matrix through which we studied Thales of Miletus . . .” and my generous parents somehow manage to keep straight faces as I blather on and on; but after dinner when I’m headed upstairs, I hear them chuckle. I stop on the stairs and slowly turn toward the sound. My mother is saying softly, “The—thuhhh—thuhhh—theee uh matrix,” and I can hear that my father is laughing through his nose. “Dear God,” he says.
I see myself a year earlier, my senior year.
I go to a tiny private high school for rich hippies, although I am neither, and one night at dinner I announce, sighing with poignant resignation, that, after all, the unexamined life is not worth living. My parents smile nicely at me, the same way my cousin Lynnie smiles at me when I complainingly remark that all these cats on Market Street keep asking me for bread. She peers into my face and asks, “They do?”
I look at that girl, at me and my pretensions, and then I see another moment in my senior year.
It is one of those Northern California dappled dawns, pink-blue-gray, and I have taken the early commute ferry across San Francisco Bay. Every morning I stop to pick up my best friend at her apartment on California at Larkin, and we walk to our little hippie high school together. This morning I get into her elevator and am joined on the second floor by a sweet handsome man maybe ten years older than I, who has soft black curly Jewish hair. I think I have seen him before, I think I have had a crush on him many times, or else he just looks like the man who organizes the action at peace marches, who introduces the rock groups on weekends at Golden Gate Park, who performs with the improvisational comedy troupe we go to see every weekend, who taught us how to clean up the beach and shorebirds below Slide Ranch, near Stinson, after the oil spill, who taught us what to say when we manned the phones at Suicide Prevention. We say hello and the door closes and then something comes over him, pain in his face, and he leans against a wall, grimacing, and I see that his knee is in spasm. I ask, can I help, can I help, and he nods and begins to slump to the floor. “I’m having a seizure,” he whispers, and all I can think of doing is grabbing for his tongue so he doesn’t choke to death, but he says, “Sit on me and hold my shoulders down.” So I sit astride him and press his shoulders to the floor, and then he starts moaning and writhing, aroused and leering. “Ahhhhhh!” I shout and leap to my feet, nauseated with shame. I stare at the picture of this moment. I have never mentioned it to a soul.
Even years later I couldn’t bear to think of it, and couldn’t keep it out of my mind. It was one of the wormy memories that made up the House of Horrors ride in my head, where around every corner your cart goes flying into the mouth of the snake, or into the fire. But here I am watching it blithely. “Backwards, backwards,” he says softly and I hear the soft rubbery knock as he taps his pencil eraser on his desk.
I am sixteen and in love with an older man, and it is a cat-brown night in San Francisco. I have told my parents that I am staying overnight with my best friend, but I am at my lover’s apartment, and we have made hash brownies to eat the next day at Golden Gate Park, where Quicksilver and Santana will be playing. My lover is in bed and I am wrapping the brownies in foil, and nibbling at the corners and crumbs, just for the taste of the fudge. Everything is normal and lovely, and both of us fall asleep. Then I’m awake, the room is pitch black, and the cat is on my chest, and when I stroke it, its back is as long as a tunnel, my hand is going off into eternity. I bolt into a sitting position and turn on the light. The bed and the floor don’t exist or maybe they do somewhere way way down below; I’m sitting on an infinite expanse of solid white air. My mouth is so dry that my tongue comes off my palate like Velcro, and I can’t breathe. I’m having a heart attack! I shake my lover awake and try to explain that I’m dying, but I can’t talk right—I sound like an Australian talking through Novocain and Quaaludes.
He drives me to the hospital and we are walking toward the emergency ward. He is grouchy and worried, and finally I realize that I’m just stoned from the brownies. I drop back, and when he turns to find me, I am lurking in the corridor like an egret, and I have to tell him I made a mistake: I’m not really having a heart attack, we can go home. And he looks at me with a hatred bordering on horror. “Ferret them out,” the hypnotist coaches.
I am a sophomore at my hippie high school, where three of our students have died this semester, three out of a hundred and fifty, all three with socialite parents. One jumped from a window on Geary on acid,
