sparkly purple lids. A real, no-bullshit look.
“You know what I mean.”
I did. She meant we’d known each other casually for almost a year since my first mall job. We’d seen each other around, talked on the phone about BB, had lunch a few times. Once I’d gone to Auntie’s with some of the old crowd from my years with Misha, and seen Roxie dancing provocatively with a woman who looked like Alicia Keys. It was safe to say Rox and I were comfortably, if dimly, acquainted.
Now she meant it was time either to open up and acknowledge that we might be friends or else draw the line squarely at our safer acquaintanceship. A dicey decision demanding navigational precision at least equal to that required for brain surgery. I knew she probably wouldn’t have even brought it up if she hadn’t had stomach flu for a week. Sometimes being sick makes people maudlin. The proximity of death and all that. Still, I was flattered.
“My dad’s an Episcopal priest named Jake. He lives in St. Louis,” I offered. “My mother, Elizabeth, was killed in an automobile accident twenty-two years ago. I grew up in a really little town in southern Illinois just across the Missouri state line. Waterloo.”
“Never heard of Waterloo, but we’re homies,” she said with a grin. “Sort of, anyhow. I was born in Chicago, brought up over on the Indiana side in Gary. My mother died when I was young, too. Twenty. God only knows about my peckerwood father.”
“Peckerwood?”
“White, honey, as in good old redheaded Scots-Irish stock. You know, four-chord harmony, plaintive ballads about lakes, ten thousand years of stomp-dancing just like you see on that floor out there. It’s genetic. Inherited. As it happens, I inherited it. Had to hide it from my friends, growing up. They’d have kicked my butt right into Lake Michigan.”
“You think tastes in music are genetic?” I asked, intrigued. It fit right in with my universe theory.
“Girl,” she replied, drawing out the word on purpose, “look at me. Do you see Dolly Parton? No, you don’t. What you see is an African-American woman whose DNA helix has a few codes that didn’t come from Africa. God, I love this music!”
“And you’re a psychiatrist,” I ventured, risking accusations of racism for suggesting that all little black girls in blighted Gary, Indiana, don’t grow up dreaming of the day they’ll prescribe their first antidepressant. “Is your father a doctor, too?”
“I have a picture of him and my mother,” she said, taking her wallet from her purse and showing me an enlargement of one of those photos that come in strips from a booth. The photo had captured a black woman with Rox’s eyes and broad nose, and a white man with Rox’s freckles and big ears. They both looked too young to be anybody’s parents. “I don’t think he was a doctor,” she added. “Probably a steelworker. Mama got a lot of those before the mills shut down.”
“A lot of steelworkers?”
The beads rattled conversationally as she turned her head.
“I was a trick baby. This man was the trick. She said she knew she was pregnant that very night, and kept the picture so I’d know what my daddy looked like. She never remembered his name, probably never even knew it. And maybe she made the whole thing up. That’s very possible, but this dude sure as hell looks like doe-si-doe to me.”
“And the ears, too,” I agreed, ducking the issue of mothers and prostitution entirely. “But why psychiatry?”
“All kinds of genetics,” Roxie mumbled through a soda cracker, curbing further inquiry. “So what about this woman you want me to evaluate? Do you think she’s faking it for an insanity plea? Is that why she confessed, so she’d appear incompetent?”
“I don’t know, Rox. Part of what I saw was a scam, some kind of act. I’m sure of that. On the other hand, there is something wrong with her. She looks like she’s been living on the street for years even though she hasn’t. And the prison has her in a high-security unit despite the fact that this is a first offense and there’s no record of any violent behavior subsequent to her arrest. Why would they do that?”
“Suicide precaution maybe,” Rox suggested. “If they think she’s crazy that’s standard practice. A stripped cell, no sharp objects, belts, cords, or shoelaces. A guard will check on her every twenty minutes.”
“But they let her wear this grungy old Shirley Temple wig . . .”
“I can’t think of any way to commit suicide with a wig, can you?”
Wig suicide was not a concept I had ever entertained. Suicide itself was not a concept I had ever entertained, even on the night I came home to the beach apartment Misha and I shared for two years, and she was gone. Misha, her clothes, books, and complete collection of Ms. magazines in Mylar slipcases, gone. There was a note taped to the refrigerator. “I’m sorry that . . .” had been scratched out in favor of We’ll always be together. I know you and Brontë will be okay. It was signed merely, M, as was Misha’s habit.
There was never any question of Brontë and me not being okay. Brontë is a dog and I’m not exactly unfamiliar with surviving the loss of loved ones, as they say. You just go on. Mothers die, brothers become felons, soulmates vanish without warning. I was in shock, but knew I wouldn’t die. Explanations were necessary, however. Some sort of accounting for the roaring in my ears and a sense that the only thing keeping me from a fall that would never end was my personal belief in the floor. The kitchen floor, in the kitchen, where there was a phone. It was ringing.
“Misha met someone at a conference several months ago,” I was told minutes later by the ex-nun editor of a feminist journal that published mostly translations of foreign articles about the role of women in the banking industry. The journal was so boring it was unreadable, and the editor, a nondescript woman in wire-frame glasses whose name I could never remember, was a friend of Misha’s.
Elaine Dennis. Or Denise Edsel. Something like that. She never came to our apartment and I assumed Misha saw her for lunch during the week occasionally. Now she was telling me that Misha had fallen head-over-heels for a multilingual grant writer who had just left the country for some project in New Zealand. She was telling me that Misha had gone, too.
No one among our mutual friends knew about the grant writer, but no one was surprised, either. In the following days they brought me pasta salads and sighed. Misha had always been so intense, they said. So odd. A bird of passage. Remember that time she couldn’t remember her maiden name when somebody asked her and then burst into tears at the English Department reception? Later she’d been seen defacing Republican bumper stickers in the Business School parking lot. Misha was, well, not always entirely appropriate, although God knew she could charm the socks off the pope when she wanted to. And she’d done such a great job with the Women’s Studies Consortium, and how difficult this must be for me, and blah, blah, blah.
I was numb. Then unbearably hurt. Then homicidally angry. Then numb again. I did take Brontë that weekend and drive as far as Mesquite, Nevada, before turning back. The plan had been to lose myself in some desert ghost town where no one had lived since the borax mine played out in 1947. I would waitress in a derelict truck stop with a flyblown picture of Willie Nelson on the wall. My only customers would be escaped convicts and local Native Americans exuding wordless understanding. Eventually I would publish a series of stark but transcendent essays about getting drunk and lying in ditches beside roads traversed only by tumbleweeds. Readers would be brought to their knees by my uncompromising metaphors of loss.
But people raised
