odd things did Muffin do?” I asked casually.
“Well, just lots of things, for heaven’s sake. Keeping that food locker in the desert like Deck did when he was alive. We told her it was silly, but she wanted to keep everything just the way it was. She didn’t even clean out his closet for months, just kept his clothes there instead of donating them to charity. That’s the thing, you know, just donate to charity and try to get on with your life. That’s what we do. But Muffin wouldn’t let go. We should have seen there was a mental problem.”
I should have seen that Helen Tewalt had just told me absolutely nothing, but I wasn’t used to real people with their charming duplicity. Numbers, graphs, hard data—these I can deal with. Real people are so sweet and complicated that I’m almost always mesmerized by them. I forget to stand back and check to see if what they’re telling me meshes with the big picture. Later I would realize that Helen Tewalt actually meshed way too well.
“Here’s my card,” I told her. “Would you mind if I called you at some point? There are so many things about this case that I can’t quite grasp.”
“Of course, dear.” She smiled. “I’m in the book. In Rancho Almas. H. Tewalt. Any of Muffin’s friends will be happy to talk to the psychologist who’s trying to analyze this awful thing. Just call anytime.”
“I’m not a clinical psychologist and I don’t analyze . . .” I began. But Helen Tewalt had veered off toward a cream-colored Buick, popping open the door lock with the remote control on her key chain. She merely waved as she slipped inside and started the engine.
“Why do I feel as if I’ve just walked through the set for a Martha Stewart special?” I asked Brontë when I got to the camper and gave the command that she could run free. The cookie held more interest for her than my question. But I knew somebody else I could ask, even though I’d have to wait until seven that night when Auntie Buck’s Country and Western Bistro cleared its hardwood floor for line-dancing lessons. I’d be there. I had a lot of questions.
Chapter Four
But first I had to make a living. It was, after all, Thursday. Tuesdays and Thursdays are devoted to accumulating wealth, although as I told Muffin Crandall, I don’t know why I’m accumulating it. Nor is it wealth, exactly. More like what is meant when people say “comfortable.” As in “Well, I wouldn’t say the Kramers are rich, but they’re comfortable.” This comment is invariably accompanied by a meaningful look which suggests that the Kramers could buy and sell your grandmother if they wanted to. My wealth might be defined as a category of comfort several levels below that one. Many, many levels below, actually.
My truck is paid for and has four new tires. I own Wren’s Gulch Inn outright, and can afford the hauled-in water necessary to live there. Brontë and I both have the best medical insurance coverage available in California, and except on Tuesdays and Thursdays neither of us really needs clothes. Still, when a year ago a Pakistani strip mall owner at a party bet me a semester’s salary that I couldn’t rescue his investment from bankruptcy, I jumped at the chance. The job would be fun, I thought. But the real draw was the lure of income derived from an application of my skill as a social psychologist. Income not requiring panty hose, faculty politics, or a cheery attitude.
The little mall was in a dicey, ethnically mixed area of San Diego. The owner assumed that nothing could be done about the sequential armed robberies, drug dealing, and shoplifting that were driving out his commercial tenants. Had he not downed too many margaritas by the time I had downed too many margaritas, he would not have responded as enthusiastically to my assertion that men do not, in fact cannot, understand shopping and its context.
I did tell him that with the exception of guns, automobile parts, and beer, between eighty and ninety percent of over-the-counter sales are to women. Women are the purchasers of goods and services. If you want a successful shopping mall, make sure women like to go there. That part is not complicated.
Where men lose it completely is in understanding the aesthetic, social, even spiritual dimensions of shopping. They think—you need an item, you buy it, you leave. A man who needs a plumber’s wrench will buy the wrench from the back of a van, a dusty hardware store, or online. He doesn’t care as long as he gets the wrench. He will make this transaction alone and will not discuss it with other men. Should another man later criticize the wrench, suggest that there are better wrenches, the first man will become defensive. There is no social context for the wrench, so an assault against it is an assault on the man. It is an assault on his competence, his status. In the presence of other variables such as alcohol consumption, this kind of thing can result in headlines the next day which read, “Local Man Murdered in Dispute Over Wrench.”
What I didn’t try to explain to the strip mall owner is that women are entirely different. Women nest, which is just a cute way of saying that women construct social reality. The sight, scent, sound, touch, and taste of life is the construction of women, and the work is never done. Variety is necessary to keep things interesting, has been since our hunter-gatherer days. Getting tired of leached acorns? Try these nettles boiled in salt water. Maddened by your bland little cubicle at work? I know this place where they have silk plants really cheap. Shopping is for women the sacrament of reality construction. And it is not done alone.
It is done in the company of other women so that all aspects of the construction may be performed at once. Fabric for bathroom curtains is selected as you discuss what to do about your brother-in-law’s alcoholism. When somebody later suggests that the curtains don’t quite pick up the blue in the floor tile, you know the curtains are just fine because that idiot Ben finally got himself into a treatment program like you suggested and hasn’t had a drink in four months. When Ben falls off the wagon a year from now you’ll change the curtains. And go on. It’s an intricate tapestry, endlessly woven, ripped apart, altered, rewoven. Most men are completely oblivious to it. Certainly the Pakistani strip mall owner was.
But he gave me carte blanche to do anything I wanted, and I knew what to do. First I analyzed the demographics of the neighborhood and concluded that less than 7 percent of the local women who might patronize the mall’s remaining dry cleaner, convenience store, beauty salon, and Vietnamese takeout restaurant had access to cars. A twenty-four-hour surveillance of the parking lot revealed that it was rarely used except at night when local males bought beer at the convenience store and sat on their cars drinking it until they were ready to pass out or get in fights over whose wrench was the biggest. It was clear that the parking lot had to be reclaimed for the true purpose of the mall—shopping. Shopping in the sense of constructing life.
First I had a low cement-block wall built around the lot, which claimed the space from the street. Then it and all the mall shop facades were painted a pale mauve, just pink enough to identify the structure’s function as essentially feminine without deterring entrance by individual males on legitimate business. An extension of the wall into the parking lot created a small courtyard adjacent to the convenience store and beauty salon. A place for talking. This area was covered during the day by a rollout awning for shade over conversational groupings of green plastic chairs around small tables. A number of flowering plants on casters completed the experiment. The plants, furniture, and awning were removed and stored in one of the empty shops at five o’clock each day.
There were a few disasters at first, involving trash left in the courtyard, competing music from the beauty salon (black) and the take-out restaurant (Asian) and several attempts by warring gangs of adolescent males to claim the courtyard for afternoon beer drinking and drug deals. The latter problem was addressed by a combination of classical music blasted alternately from the salon and restaurant, and some serious pressure on the convenience store owner to stop selling beer to minors. The alternative involved his explaining the practice to an Alcoholic Beverage Control agent whose name
