San Francisco

Avery was a rapist, but that’s not the first thing you’d notice about him. You might observe his pale skin or his glasses, the way the slender metallic frames highlighted his blue eyes. How his eyelashes brushed up against the glass. Or maybe his narrow, straight nose, and the way he was thoughtful when he listened; how he tipped his head to the side to regard the speaker. Every week when she saw him, Jackie noticed his long, white fingers and how he held each stem over the bucket, weighing it between his thumb and index before adding it to the bouquet. 

SOURDOUGH My sister Jane was full of secrets about the art of making world-famous sourdough bread. Pretty in an apron, too. She had seven aprons, custom-made, hanging in the pantry. A photographer from the San Francisco Chronicle lined them up and made a photo, and then made a photo of Mom and I. We were the backdrop, he said. That was true. Nobody would catch me smoking outside, readying for the sight of Tom looping his brown arms around Jane's tiny waist inside the Cliff House. Things were growing serious between them. The waves were rushing in and out, the sound was abrasive — the summer fog gathering syrupy thick. Hard to believe there was such a thing as summer in other places. The bay and the ocean surrounded us with a never-just-right scent. There was no way to win. Tom's daddy was in jail sometimes, sometimes not. No big crimes, just little embarrassing ones that grew like the scrub brush around Lands End. That cliff was so beautiful, nobody trusted it.

Gerda Kohl, eighty years old, sat in the den of her house, surrounded by cardboard boxes. Her two daughters were fighting in the study next door. They kept their voices lowered, but it was an old house with thin walls, and although Gerda couldn’t understand the words, the tone was clear enough. Charlotte and Anne had never gotten on at the best of times, and it was probably inevitable that they should fight now. She only wished they’d picked a more distant room. She sorted through the books while she waited for them to finish. Into the box marked “To Keep” went a Time-Life photo collection, her prayer book, and a few of her husband Otto’s old German volumes. The box marked “To Donate” was almost overflowing. She’d never been a reader, even before the diabetes weakened her eyes. The books were the easy part. Everything else was hard: the furniture, the figurines, the dishes and crystal, the boxes of old papers labeled in Otto’s blocky hand.

We didn’t know who he was. We never do know much of what goes on. We’re too far away from it all. Be it fashion, progress, war, or people’s reputations, few things make their way out here. Everything is foreign to us, as though we take part only on an honorary basis in the human race. All we know is wind and rain and the sound of waves on the rocks. Our few visitors find it sad out here. They never stay. After the excursion, they hurry back quick as they can to civilization, to the sunny shallows, as though out here were the depths: the depths of what, God alone knows. _______ But they’re wrong. It’s not sad out here, well maybe just a bit, in an infinitely gentle way. You have to be born here, and not have known anything else. Then you’d understand, you’d see how it cradles and calms you, lulls you to sleep for life.