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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 and number were taped to the window of each storefront, facing out. But it wasn’t enough.

Incidentally, I don’t know why adolescent males in gangs hate classical music, but they do. It actually seems to hurt them. My own research into primate behavior involves a time before there was music, so I can add nothing to the puzzle. Except that gangs are probably a regression to male primate social organization and the complexity of the music reminds them that they’re supposed to have evolved. I remember wondering at the time why David, who played French horn in our high school band, had become a criminal. David liked classical music. But then David was never in a gang. Until now.

That first mall conversion was eventually so successful that the owner began touting my services to his friends, all of whom seemed to own and lease retail property. I got gigs planning layouts for lingerie departments and security for sidewalk sales. A Japanese-run convenience store chain put me on retainer just to determine from store diagrams the optimal placement of feminine personal items. (Across from canned goods in an aisle which does not lead to the beer cooler.) I began to accumulate money. When I realized that the thousands in my savings account were at a number more than half my age, it felt sort of good. Nothing like holding Misha, feeling her birdlike heart, but good. We take what we can get.

Still, the project should never have worked. There were too many problems in the area. Charles Dickens named them—poverty, ignorance, disease. Even the life-building spirit of women is broken by these. But I found a secret weapon. When I tacked up an announcement for a part-time minimum wage job “managing” the first little mall at a community center up the street, the ad was answered by a large black woman in a conservative business suit. Her hair was in about a hundred and fifty looped braids woven with tortoiseshell beads. She wore cowboy boots. The beads made a pleasant clacking sound as she threw her substantial frame into a chair in the mall courtyard.

“Rox Bouchie,” she introduced herself, carefully pronouncing her surname “Boo-she” so I’d get it. It would have helped if she’d given the same attention to her first name, which I thought was “Rocks” for the initial half hour of our acquaintance. I also thought she was either the director of the community center or a social worker as she questioned me about my work at the mall. When I explained that the part-time job I’d advertised would involve keeping the courtyard area clean and alerting the police about drug deals and illegal drinking, she lowered gold-shadowed lids over coffee-brown eyes and shook her head. The beads rattled. She just said, “Girl. . .”

The way black women say “girl” can be magical. Frankly, I have no solid beliefs about the survival of consciousness after physical death. But if it’s going to happen I know what I want to see after my trek toward the light. I want to see a black woman who will smile and say, “Girl . . .”

The word’s resonance is utterly female, the opening syllable of a story that will explain what’s really going on. It says, “You don’t have a clue, but I’m going to give you the inside scoop.” The sound is hypnotic, like an audio version of that top-of-the-Ferris-wheel moment just before the downward rush. At that moment after my death I would like to be told exactly what the universe is, and why. I would like to see the point. And in my fantasy the story will begin with that word on the tongue of a black woman.

“Um, do you know of anyone, a woman from the neighborhood preferably, who might be interested in—”

“No,” she interrupted. “Nobody in this neighborhood is that dumb. The job you’re offering is suicide. But I like the way your mind works. I might be able to help.”

A client of hers, she said, was looking for a small storefront in which to open a used-clothing boutique. Skilled with sewing machine and serger, he enjoyed redesigning clothes. He also created wall hangings and fabric art. For six months’ free rent against a year’s lease on one of the empty storefronts, he might be willing to clean the courtyard and police the mall.

“He sounds promising,” I said. “Why don’t you run the idea by him, and I’ll talk to the mall’s owner. But why would he want the job if it’s so dangerous?”

“He learned to sew in prison and can handle anything that drifts in here,” Rox Bouchie said, watching for my reaction. “Got a problem with hiring ex-cons?”

“My twin brother’s in prison. In Missouri.”

I felt that the response established my credentials as a savvy, street-wise person. The twin sister of an incarcerated felon. Way cool.

“How often do you get back to the Midwest to see your brother?” Rox asked while frowning at something stuck to the bottom of her left boot.

“Um, actually I haven’t had a chance to visit him, uh, there,” I answered, giving similar attention to the removal of a shipping label from the table leg.

“I see.”

So much for cool. And the finesse with which Rox Bouchie unmasked my distance from David should have suggested that I was dealing with a pro in the unmasking field, but it didn’t. I was too ashamed of what I’d just said to notice.

“What’s this guy’s name?” I asked, changing the subject.

“BB. BB the Punk.”

“Uh, strange name.”

Rox shook her head again, slowly. The beads made a sound like acorns falling on dry ground as I noticed a smattering of freckles over her broad nose.

“His real name is Bernard Berryman. Do you know what ‘punk’ means in prison?”

I sensed that I was already a million points behind. Why lie?

“Probably not,” I said. “So just tell me.”

“It means ‘turned out,’ as in ‘whore.’ It means being beaten close to death, repeatedly gang-raped, permitted to remain alive only in the role of slave to a group of predators or, if you’re lucky, to one ‘daddy’ who protects you from the others. It’s done to the young, the weak, the naive. BB has a flair for the dramatic. He saved his life by getting into the role. He got out of prison two months ago. He’ll never get out of the role.”

David had been twenty-eight when he went to prison. Was that young? And had he been weak and naive? I felt a crippling wave of nausea. A need to run away.

“Girl, you’re turning green,” Rox Bouchie pointed out. “Never seen anybody so homophobic.”

“I’m not homophobic,” I yelled at her and an additional hundred yards of mean street. “I’m ready to puke!” Anger was displacing the nausea, which felt better. Later it would occur to me that Rox had called me homophobic to make me angry. She had done it deliberately to distract me from my fears about my brother. She had been kind.

“Sorry,” she said, rising and throwing a business card on the table. “Think about it and give me a call.”

When she was gone I looked at the card. It said, “Roxanne D. Bouchie, M.D., Forensic Psychiatry, Donovan State Prison.” I had been talking to a psychiatrist. A forensic psychiatrist. Now I can see the mark of the grid all over that encounter. I can see the shove at my shoulder blades. But I wasn’t ready to hop back on the ride. Not entirely. Because I’d be hopping back on alone. Thinking about David alone. And I would have to remember Misha. No way. I ignored it.

I did arrange for BB the Punk’s management position at the mall, however. And his shop, Death Row, took off. When not creating stylish outfits for the mannequin in his shop window, he patrolled the mall in dreadlocks, missing nothing that went on. He wore a prison denim costume with “Needle Freak” stenciled across the back of his blue chambray workshirt. He kept an enormous, curved carpet needle hooked through a front pocket. And nobody messed with BB. Everybody assumed that he had nothing left to lose. My project, and my future, were secure.

So secure that close to a year later on the day of my first interview with Muffin Crandall, I had three jobs going at once. The first was the Crandall Case, and the second involved nothing more than picking up some data for analysis from a failing vegetarian restaurant in a mall where nothing else was failing but a shop specializing in silver gifts and tableware. I could have told the silver owner to give it up and move back east, if asked. No charge. Silver tableware just doesn’t work in Southern California, probably because the region lacks both an entrenched aristocracy and cold nights. If a sterling compote can’t point to seven generations who’ve lived in the manor, then it needs to reflect lots of candlelight. Even in winter, nights here are rarely cold enough to tolerate more than two tapers on a table for eight. And no­body knows which fork to use for the fish tacos, anyway.

My third job was the one I’d taken as backup in case more retail gigs failed to materialize. I also took it because I love teaching. Real teaching, where you get to see the lights go on as people start thinking. The third job is responsible for my Tuesday-Thursday wealth-mongering schedule. Those are the days in which I spend three hours, one to four, teaching a class called American Problems to girls at San Diego’s juvenile detention center. The curriculum is vague to nonexistent, so I can teach the kids pretty much what I want as long as they glean a few standard concepts along the way. Like, there are social problems in the United States.

And of course my choice of a juvenile prison as venue may be traced to my ongoing conflict over David. At the time I thought it was just an interesting population on which to test the conclusion of my dissertation. I had concluded that understanding our primate behavior patterns enables us to reject them in favor of better things before we wind up with six kids or in prison doing twenty-five to life.

I wasn’t going to talk high theory to the kids that Thursday less than three weeks ago, though. I wasn’t going to talk any theory. On that day I was going to listen, because something was going on at juvy. Something weird.

Like all institutions, juvenile detention centers generate folklore. The traditional adolescent tales of prosthetic arms clawing at car doors and virgins who die of shock after finding mummified penises in their lockers are repeated, with jailhouse twists.

People in stressful transitional states lean on folklore to clarify fears and address them. Adolescence is nothing if not transition, and being in jail is major stress. Juvy produces a wealth of folklore.

For the girls it was a legendary former detainee named Frankie. Nobody currently in juvy had ever seen Frankie Lopez, who according to the story had been there and gone years ago. But Frankie hadn’t just been released to her mother or the foster care system like everybody else. Frankie had (a) stabbed a guard and then starved to death while trying to complete a secret escape tunnel that was still there, complete with her bones, although nobody knew where; (b) romantically entranced a guard and been carried by him in a laundry bag to his car where she died of suffocation as he drove frantically toward the Mexican border and safety; or (c) been killed by a guard and buried late that night beneath the curbside flower bed of the gas station visible through the dorm windows facing the street.

And while the most obvious feature of the Frankie tales is conflict and confusion about authority figures as embodied in the guard, there is also the theme of death, which doesn’t necessarily mean death. It can mean inexplicable change. It can mean absence. It always means fear.

Something had happened to Frankie Lopez, if indeed there had ever been such a person, which created enough fear for the story to become folklore. On the day of my interview with Muffin Crandall I walked Brontë in Balboa Park, picked up the data from the veggie restaurant, and arrived early at juvy. The kids were already in the classroom, which is unheard of. I’d changed into the slacks I usually wear so I can perch cross-legged on the desk to lecture. They were ordinary khakis with a nice-enough silk blouse. I’d worn them twenty times before.

“Hey, Dr. McCarron, you look pretty good today,” one of them greeted me.

I insist on the use of honorifics in my classes, so the kids call me Dr. and I call them Ms. or in a few instances Mrs., which is unnerving when the person being addressed is fourteen.

“Yeah, pants are pretty cool, like that pretty top, too,” said an­other.

“Gonna get me some tan pants like that, look like I’m in college.”

“Yeah.”

Female primates pick insects from the body hair of others in a grooming ritual which creates bonds and defuses tensions. Human females do this grooming verbally with compliments. I knew the kids were feeling tension about something and wanted to bond.

“Thanks,” I said. “Who’s read today’s assignment, the chapter on patterns in marriage and divorce in the U.S. since World War II?”

Nobody had read it.

“I heard they found that tunnel Frankie Lopez dug,” one of the girls said as though I’d never mentioned an assignment. “Did you hear that?”

“No, but then I just walked in the door and haven’t talked to anybody.”

“Well, somebody said they found it.”

The room was silent but full of a twitchy energy even Brontë was picking up. She kept pricking her ears and looking around, puzzled. I knew nobody had discovered an escape tunnel because there had never been an escape tunnel. Nobody stays at juvy long enough to dig tunnels and there’s no point in any event. It’s easy enough just to climb out a window. The kids do it all the time and are almost always immediately recaptured at the 7-Eleven next to the gas station, stealing Coke Slurpees and cigarettes. But the discovered-tunnel story meant something had been discovered. Something had changed. If I handled it right, I might be enlightened.

“Wow,” I said with forced neutrality, “that’s interesting. Tell me about it.”

The silence grew heavy as twenty pairs of clear young eyes looked grave.

“They didn’t find Frankie’s bones in there,” somebody finally said.

“Weren’t no bones in that tunnel.”

“Nothin’ there but mud, I heard. Just a buncha mud.”

They all knew the other variants of the Frankie story, but were not mentioning them. It was as if everyone in the room had heard only the tunnel version, and had believed it. I knew this meant something, but what? It’s always safe to punt.

“So it looks like that story about a character who died in an escape tunnel didn’t exactly happen, huh?”

I used “character” in an attempt to set up a discussion about what’s real and what are the uses of stories. I might as well have begun an explanation of the chi-square statistical analysis. They ignored the ploy. They wanted to talk about Frankie.

“Frankie was not in that tunnel,” the oldest and brightest girl said with finality, nodding toward the north side of the building.

I vaguely remembered seeing some construction in that direction when I parked. It made no impression. There’s always construction on government property. Campaign donors and relatives of elected officials have to make a living.

“There’s a lot of mud over there because I heard they accidentally cut into a water pipe,” another girl said.

It made perfect sense. But so what? What did somebody jack-hammering through a buried water pipe do to get these kids worked up over an urban folktale? There had to be something else. I scrounged around for a thread in what they were saying.

Frankie isn’t in a secret escape tunnel, seemed to be it. Which left the question, Then where is Frankie? A question about the possible futures of young women already off to a bad start.

“Maybe this Frankie really did okay and has a job up in Sacramento repairing computers for the state legislature by now,” I suggested. “What do you think?”

And it worked, sort of. One by one they advanced theories about where Frankie might be, doing what. The room has a pull-down map of the United States, which I pulled down so we could locate Frankie in cities all over the U.S. even though the map only has forty-eight states. We made a chart of jobs, job training, predicted income. At the break the kids went outside to smoke and play with Brontë as usual. I went to the office and asked for the record of a girl named Frankie Lopez. To my surprise, there was one.

Francesca Maria Elena Lopez had been in juvy several times, her last stay five years in the past, for prostitution. She was then fourteen. The ID photo clipped to her file showed a scrawny, big-eyed kid snarling at the camera. And failing to hide that hurt, lost look you invariably see in baby hookers. I can’t stand that look. It makes me think about killing adults who use children for sex. And then about going to prison like David, breaking my father’s heart. Unpleasant thoughts.

According to the record, Frankie Lopez served out her time and was released to the custody of juvenile court, which probably meant she was placed in foster care. The social worker, a Glenda Martin, had referred the girl to a family counseling center, but there was no follow-up on whether she ever went there. The juvenile probation officer had also contributed no paper to the file. Frankie Lopez, for all practical purposes, was just gone.

I didn’t tell the kids any of this. Confidentiality rules prevent any discussion of cases, but that wasn’t why. Something had happened to upset the girls, make them jittery as a herd rather than as individuals. Telling them about Frankie’s file wasn’t going to produce the explanation I wanted. Only their trust would do that.

After the break I talked about marriage and divorce rates even though nobody had read the chapter. They took notes as I drove home the fact that every woman must have a marketable skill, married or not. My mother and Carter Upchurch had told me the same thing. “You must be able to get a job and make money, just in case something happens to your husband.” All little girls are told that. It made me wonder why I needed a Ph.D. to say the same thing.

When the class was over three of the girls somberly approached my desk. Two of them petted Brontë while the third handed me a postcard.

“I got a library book outta the library this morning,” she said, watching me. “This book.”

It was a copy of Jane Eyre, not a big seller at juvenile detention centers.

“An interesting book,” I plugged. “About an orphan girl who has a rough childhood and later falls madly in love with a man who has a terrible secret. But she doesn’t let him—”

“That was in it,” she interrupted as the other two, and Brontë, looked at me expectantly.

I read the postcard, which had a photograph of tulips in a public park on the front. It had been mailed years ago, shortly after Frankie’s discharge. It had been mailed from Albany, New York, to a Bugsy Sneller at the detention center’s address. The message just said, It’s working out great! For sure! But you can’t write to me or anything. Okay? The bottom was a tangle of Xs and Os followed by Frankie. The I was dotted with a heart.

“Frankie Lopez?” I asked.

They all nodded.

“So who is Bugsy Sneller?”

They all shrugged.

“I’d like to keep this until next Tuesday and think about it, if that’s all right. It’s so interesting, isn’t it?”

Nods, big smiles of relief. They wanted me to take this voice from a past similar to their own. Take it away until they could revise their folktale. By next Tuesday it would be done. There would be new stories about Frankie Lopez, stories accepted as gospel, as if they had always been.

The clerical staff was gone when I left, so I couldn’t check the file on Bugsy Sneller. But at least I knew what was spooking the kids. The postcard, no matter who really wrote it, meant to them that their legend hadn’t died after all. And somehow that was scarier than starving to death in a tunnel. I realized how bad a real future could look to kids who didn’t have any future. It made me sick.

And tired. After feeding Brontë in the truck and grabbing a curried tofu salad for myself at a health food grocery, I went to the beach. Brontë chased a tennis ball for fifteen minutes and then I stretched out on my beach towel for a nap. San Diego’s beaches aren’t crowded at dinnertime in September, and the summer lifeguards are gone. But it didn’t matter. I could have been snoozing under a blanket of loose twenty dollar bills and no one would have come within six yards. Watchful Doberman eyes made sure of that.

An hour later I had more energy. A good thing, since I was about to hit Roxie Bouchie’s Thursday night line-dancing class at Auntie Buck’s Country and Western Bistro. I was going to ask Rox to do a psychiatric evaluation on Muffin Crandall. She’d do it; I already knew that. But I’d have to pay for the favor by learning the Tennessee Stomp or something. Rox had been at me to learn line-dancing since I discovered her secret two months after our first meeting. The secret is that on Thursday nights Roxie Bouchie assumes an alternate identity—The Only Black Woman in North America Who Knows All the Words to Every Song Recorded by Garth Brooks. I had resisted her suggestions about the line-dancing classes, but curiosity about Muffin Crandall was pushing me over the edge. I hoped Rox wouldn’t expect me to have bought cowboy boots for my first lesson.