There is a pause before he says, “I’m joking, daughter.”
We watch episode after episode in silence, until somehow several hours manage to elapse.
“Shall we?” I say. “Give sleep another go?”
“I don’t go to sleep,” my father says, with some indignation. “I go to sleeps.”
“Good night, Dad,” I say, not adding that I know exactly what he means, though I am my father’s daughter, and I do.
It’s occurring to me that I can’t not stay.
“Just the year,” I’m going to tell my mother.
Just the year is all it will be.
January 6
But first, it’s back to San Francisco. There’s my job I have to quit, and all the things still in my apartment. I start driving in the morning and reach San Francisco by midafternoon.
First stop is the Medical Center. My supervisor is in the cafeteria, bent over a tangle of lo mein, looking too young to be a supervisor, and tired like he always does. He likes to use diamond as a term of measurement. “Just a diamond,” he sometimes said, if we were at lunch together, and I was squeezing ketchup onto both our burgers. I liked that.
This past Halloween, he and I showed up at the same party, in matching outfits we hadn’t planned. He was the Burger King and I was the Dairy Queen and—a little bit drunk, newly disengaged from Franklin, who had been distracting me from my disengagement from Joel—I put moves on him. He was having troubles with his girlfriend at the time, and did not refuse them.
“So,” I say now, taking a seat in the empty chair across from him. “I quit, I guess.”
“Just like that?” he says. He tears open a packet of hot sauce with his mouth. This can’t be coming as a surprise. I like my job—I’m adept enough—but I was never anything special.
“Just like that,” I say.
He wordlessly tosses me his fortune cookie. He has a policy about eating the cookie first. He insists on eating the cookie before reading the fortune. Not eating the cookie, he believes, voids the fortune. I eat the cookie, to indicate to him that I haven’t forgotten.
“?‘To remember is to understand,’?” I read out loud. “That’s dumb,” I say, without thinking, and right away I regret it, because what if these were actually the words of a famous wise person? Words that everybody else knew about but somehow I’d missed encountering? Maybe Jesus had said it, or maybe Confucius.
I ask him how Christina is doing. Christina is his girlfriend. At Halloween he’d been having troubles with his girlfriend, at the time, not his girlfriend at the time. When they got back together, after the Halloween incident, it was a relief to us both.
“We’re looking for a place together,” he tells me. “Something month-to-month. She’s afraid to sign a one-year lease.”
“What’s so bad about a one-year lease?” I say.
“That’s what I said.”
“Here’s what you do,” I say. “You say, ‘Let’s get married,’ and wait a moment before you say, ‘Just kidding! Let’s sign a one-year lease.’ ‘Let’s have five kids. Let’s sign a one-year lease.’?”
“Let’s move in with my parents. It’ll save on rent,” he says, catching on. “Let’s sign a one-year lease.”
“Let’s adopt a child from Korea.”
“Let’s sign a suicide pact.”
“No? How about a one-year lease?”
“See you next year?” he says.
“See you next year,” I agree.
The light coming in through my apartment’s bay windows would be pretty, except all it does is illuminate the dust on the floor. I never fully committed to unpacking. I feel not even the slightest attachment to this apartment.
I fill a big suitcase with as many clothes as it will take, and the rest of the clothes I throw into a garbage bag for the Goodwill. I pack one box and then two more and when it still seems I have not made a dent in my belongings, I decide to trash the rest.
For example: the jar of old almonds on my desk. I like to collect those almonds with the slight curve, the ones that hold your thumb. And not only the curved nuts, but also the nuts that don’t have the standard tear shape, that are shaped more like buttons, with a rounded edge instead of the point. Almond anomalies.
What a ridiculous person I am. I unscrew the jar and tip as many anomalies as will fit into my mouth. They’re stale and it hurts to chew. I give myself the hiccups.
For example: ticket stubs to movies Joel liked more than I did. His spare car keys. A receipt from the airport drugstore from when, the morning after a red-eye, I bought mascara to wear in an attempt to look less tired. (Joel was picking me up. In the end I looked worse.) Seeds, from the one time we broke our own rule and shared an apple in bed.
It was grotesque, the way I kept trying to save that relationship. Like trying to tuck an elephant into pants.
I put the guitar I never play anymore on the curb. I sweep and mop. I hear somebody pick the guitar up and start strumming a Simon and Garfunkel song.
The doorbell rings. It’s Maxine Grooms, MD, here to help with the furniture.
“Way to say goodbye,” Grooms says, unhappily.
“I’ll miss you,” I say, and hug her tightly.
Grooms was the one who happened to be around when I’d caught her—and myself—off guard, by crying, after a fight with Joel, one week near the end. We’d always been cordial, but, at that point, we couldn’t have exchanged more than ten words.
What could we have in common? was what, I’m sure, the both of us had thought.
She is ten years older than I am. She wears tall high heels with her doctor’s coat; she wears expensive glasses and the perfect, complementary shade of lipstick. She appears flawless and smells amazing, always. Patients respect her implicitly.
We were at work and I was waiting for the handicapped stall that she was coming out of, and she could’ve simply left me, looking sad and red as a tomato, but she didn’t. She stood next to me outside the bathroom and gave my back a few awkward pats.
We had no choice but to become friends after that.
Now we are having a last dinner together, at the Spaghetti Shack—a dinner I’m buying because I feel responsible, because it was my fault, our becoming friends.
That’s what I think, sometimes: Who is to blame for this friendship?
After spaghetti, after wine, we tipsily drag my mattress to the curb. Within the minute, we watch a man in a Buick pull up. He pushes the mattress onto the top of his car—doesn’t bother tying it down or anything—and drives quickly away.
Four years ago Grooms had been married, and two and a half years ago her husband had left her for his barista, who was younger but less pretty and less smart, and last year the divorce was made official.
“But there are days now,” was what she said, after she found me crying in the bathroom, “I wake up and it’s like none of those ugly things ever happened.”
“You’re the doctor,” I said. “What’s your prescription?”