chapter eleven
In September 2011, once Nick and Laurie had settled in and made a few trips to Bed, Bath & Beyond, Laurie returned to Bridges and Borders to reconnect with Ariel.
Ariel wasn’t happy to see her. “It’s been a while. How was your vacation from the horrors of our lives?”
“Don’t be like that. I was helping Mal with a family situation.”
“Is she your family then?” Ariel asked, and swept her arms around her. “Because that’s what we are. A family. Not some means of redeeming your white guilt when you’re not gallivanting with your rich pseudo-girlfriend.”
“Mal’s moved out,” Laurie said. “I want to help.”
Ariel shrugged and walked away to set up the tents, leaving Laurie to help with putting together signs, preparing the troops for their planned protest. A petite androgyne with waist-length dreads and a nose ring worked at Laurie’s desk.
“Do you suppose something will come of all this?” Laurie asked, in an attempt to make conversation.
“What do you think we should do then? Write letters to our reps, wait patiently for Obama to care about the working class?”
“He doesn’t?”
“Of course not,” the androgyne said, scoffing. “Doesn’t seem to matter to your people that he’s kept the war going, or that he’s bailing out banks while Lozano raises college tuition fees to the point where none of us will ever own a house or be more than indentured labor.”
“Who’s Lozano?” she asked, more to avoid the part of the sentence about your people . Whichever people it was, it couldn’t be good news.
“What the hell are you doing here when you haven’t even bothered to educate yourself on the problem? Lozano’s on the Board for the University of California system. Next thing you’ll say you’ve never heard of Ward Connerly either.”
She shook her head.
“Well, let’s just say, you can’t fix systemic problems with dark faces in high places.”
She was thrown back to how Cam had once called an acquaintance “very Franzen” and then apologized for making a reference she wasn’t expected to know. Being berated for not being fluent was still better than being pitied for not being conversant.
“I’m Laurie,” she said.
They looked at her skeptically. “Ayo. They, them. But seriously, what are you even doing here?”
“Ayo!” someone called, and they skipped away without waiting for her answer.
Laurie focused on the sign she was making. People, not Profits . Not since Cornell had she felt like such an imposter. What was she doing here, trying to assert her solidarity with their ideals while she lived with a rich techie in her rent-controlled apartment?
She told Ariel she didn’t think she was helping.
Ariel nodded sagely. “Let’s unpack that. Why do you think helping is what we need from you?”
Laurie sensed the anger behind the question. Helping was right up there with Raising Awareness on a website cataloguing stuff white people did. “What else then?”
“Lo, look around you. We’re not an organization . We’re a community . If people don’t accept you as you are—if just being isn’t enough—those aren’t your people. If you think you need to do something to belong, you’re trapped in the very capitalist system that only values people for the output they deliver.”
Mal had been telling her this all along, but for some reason it only hit her now, like a wave of exhaustion cutting every synapse at once.
“So what do I do?”
“Go home. Find yourself. Then your people will find you.”
She did, heart bruised. For the rest of the day, she was lost in thought. For some reason, Will’s words from years ago kept repeating in her mind. Finding yourself is getting more and more expensive .
She asked Mal to meet her for brunch. Since Nick had moved in, the two of them went to work together, and he didn’t understand the point of making a detour to Bluebottle when the Darling gave them all free breakfast and coffee. So Laurie hadn’t seen Mal in nearly five weeks. Surely enough time to be rid of any uncomfortable situational sexual feelings, which is what she hoped they had been.
Mal asked to meet at Foreign Cinema on Mission Street. No fun going there without you . Nick raised his eyebrows but said nothing. To him, fancy restaurants were for special occasions, not Saturdays. Laurie didn’t know if he made more money than Mal or less, but Dolores now came to clean only every two weeks, and the ice-cream in the fridge was H?agen-Dazs, not Bi-Rite.
“You’ve spoiled me rotten,” she said to Mal, as they sat down at a corner table.
A waiter smiled at Mal in recognition and asked, “The usual to start?”
“For her too,” she said, then turned to Laurie. “What do you mean?”
Laurie started laughing. “Mal, one of the fanciest restaurants in the city knows you so well they’re going to bring out mocha, champagne and lavender-flavored goat cheese. You do realize nobody else lives like this? For the rest of us, San Pellegrino is luxury.”
Mal smiled half-heartedly, and Laurie felt guilty. She hadn’t meant to shame her, hadn’t really thought Mal was capable of feeling the sting of someone else’s words.
“I wanted to ask you something,” she said, changing the subject. “Are you in touch with Will at all?”
“No, why?”
“I was just wondering what drew you to him.”
Mal didn’t answer for a while, and their waiter brought them their beverages. Laurie covered the baby blue Acme coffee cup with both her palms, enjoying the perfect warmth.
“I suppose it was that he was unapologetically himself,” Mal said eventually. “Most people are too caught up in the stories of who they’re trying to be, you can practically hear their self-conscious thoughts as static noise. Does my belly show in this dress? Do they like me? Do I sound interesting? What if I fart during sex? He was…” She smiled. “Quiet. It helped my mind quiet too.”
“How do you think he got that way?”
“He claims it was magic mushrooms.”
Laurie stared, and Mal laughed.
“Something about breaking down the pretensions and boundaries of the mind. Apparently he spent a summer picking vegetables with migrants, wandering through fields of knobby artichokes and endless strawberries. He met someone there who introduced him to peyote and psilocybin.”
Somehow, the idea of Will working as a farmhand refused to resolve into an image in Laurie’s mind. In all the time she’d known him, despite his mountain-biking and rock-climbing, he’d always seemed so urban, even literary.
“Well, yes,” Mal said when she mentioned it, “That was why he did it. Following in the footsteps of a generation of mangsty dicklit. Every guy goes through a pseudo-Buddhist phase, trying to walk away from the world when he finally realizes he’s not in control of it. It’s just a more intellectual way of abdicating responsibility.”
“I thought you admired him.”
“I envied him. I suppose there’s always some envy involved in attraction. You never really know if you want to just be with someone or to actually be them.”
They ordered their main courses, and Laurie sipped on her champagne and marveled at the idea of Mal envying Will for his summer of white guilt. There was no doubt in her mind that was what it was. She’d seen so many others like him, over the years, who left high-paying jobs to install solar panels, or build orphanages, or help the Obama administration modernize. They helped rebuild New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, but always returned to some suburban home with IKEA furniture. To a wife and kids.
“There’s a tradition in Indian weddings I’ve always hated,” Mal said. “At some point during the wedding, the groom has second thoughts. He’s not ready to settle down. He wants to go to Kasi, to gain knowledge and become a saint. But the bride’s family begs him to come back and gives him gifts so he’ll marry their daughter.” She added quickly, “It’s all in jest, of course. These days, people just say whatever the priest tells them to, they don’t understand any of it.”
“No wonder you never want to get married.”
Laurie hoped she didn’t sound as bitter as she felt. And that was exactly the kind of thought Mal had just said created static noise.
“I wanted to ask you something too,” Mal said. “At work, did people ever treat you differently because you’re a woman?”
“Did they ever not ?” Laurie said, then realized she was serious. “Mal, every day is Russian Roulette. Guys are either asking me out or asking me to bring them coffee, and the girls are worse, talking about how awful it is that someone mistook them for an admin.”
“I didn’t realize,” Mal said, frowning. “They’ve never really done that with me.”
Laurie blinked. There was oblivious and there was whatever defense mechanism blinded people to uncomfortable truths that were entirely obvious to everyone else. When they met, Mal had revealed Laurie to herself in a taqueria. Maybe it was appropriate they come full-circle here, at one of San Francisco’s finest restaurants.
“Mal, how many other women are on your team?”
She frowned.
“ You’re the real unicorn,” Laurie said. “They don’t treat you as a woman at all—but that’s because you don’t act like one.”
“It’s strange,” Mal said, looking thoughtful. “My boss keeps asking me to talk to other women about how I’ve leaned in, broken ceilings, cleared paths, as if I’m some kind of rabid construction worker.”
“He wants you to enforce the patriarchy.”
Mal’s eyes widened. “That’s sick.”
“You’ve never worn a skirt to work.”
They were quiet for a while. Laurie wondered if she’d gone too far.
“We spent so much energy trying to play a rigged game,” Mal said eventually. “This generation just won’t play it anymore.”
“True,” Laurie said, thinking of Ariel and Ayo. “They might question their gender but not their right to unionize. We have more to learn from them.”
“Exactly,” Mal said, face clearing. “Thanks.”
When Mal paid for brunch, Laurie tried not to think about whether she had been sufficiently entertaining as a companion to deserve it. To free herself of the transactional worldview that capitalism had successfully infected her with before she even knew what a transaction was.
Instead of going straight back home, she went to the Embarcadero, where Ariel and the others had set up their Occupy SF tents on Justin Herman Plaza. The strangeness of the colorful tents and unkempt crowds against the backdrop of bizarrely tidy and symmetrical palm trees left her profoundly disquieted. There was something dishonest about the constructed urbanity of San Francisco, about the delicate pastel hues of the buildings that lined its streets. There was always more truth in the alleys, in the voluptuous naked women painted on the walls and the shit-stink of politicians who were fighting the move to create free automatic public toilets.
Thirty dollars per flush, they complained from their million-dollar homes.
There was a commotion at the intersection. Laurie walked over automatically, her steps quickening at the sight of flashing blue lights. Two cops, together over four hundred pounds, towered over Ayo, while Ariel had her camera out.
“Why do you need to see my ID?” Ayo shouted. “Are you arresting me?”
“Sir, you could be arrested if you don’t comply.”
“Don’t fucking call me Sir . My pronouns are they, them.”
“Is that what it says on your ID?”
Heart pounding, Laurie stepped forward, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear. Years of watching Mal at meetings should have prepared her—but the hulk of metal at the cops’ waists, the glint of their buttons and badges, the blue menacing lights—meetings with techies rarely ended in violence.
But she was in too deep. “What’s going on, officer?”
“Please don’t interfere, Ma’am. We’ll have this cleared right up.”
“I could help,” Laurie offered. She mentioned— casually —who she worked for at the Darling. “I could call him up and ask if he wants to issue a trespassing charge or if he’s cool with leaving them alone.”
She couldn’t, not really. But she opened her purse just wide enough for him to see her badge.
The cops retreated.
Ariel gave her a look of grudging appreciation. “Maybe you can help.”
It was only later, after several hours of putting up posters and passing out bottles of water, when she arrived home with multicolor stains on fingers that smelled of Sharpies, that she realized what she’d done.
That Ariel had filmed the whole thing. Her arrogant bluff. If it was posted online, if her boss saw it, she could lose her job.
She trembled for hours but didn’t regret it.