Valley Fever (10 page)

Anne and I love to hate Fresno. We take great pleasure in the insubstantial bookstores, the striking resemblance of everyone in line at the Starbucks with their identical suburban haircuts (Anne calls it the “Fresno Crop”), the treeless boulevards and pink shopping mall after pink shopping mall. There is beauty there, too, but the real beauty of the place causes us anxiety and irreconcilable conflict.

As a teenager, I drove Mother's old red Mustang up and down Blackstone, the city's main thoroughfare and a boulevard of broken car lots, going nowhere. My friends piled blonde after blonde in the passenger seat and nearly stacked on top of each other in the back. I never let them smoke pot or even cigarettes in the back. They would complain, but I was firm. I was a sixteen-year-old dictator. Our screaming streak of hair whipped along Blackstone Avenue, from Herndon past Shaw, past Ashlan to McKinley, and back again up Blackstone. My parents would answer phone calls from their friends, “First I saw the red car, and then I noticed it was full of young blond girls, and then I saw Ingrid driving.” I was bad at driving but excellent at talking my way out of tickets. I loved to go fast.

That night, Anne and I stopped at Lorenzo's in the Tower District, across from the dinner theater, next to the Salvation Army and not far from Bootsie's Quality Food and Beverage.

A man dressed as a wolf smoked a cigarette outside the back door of the dinner theater. He had a real beard, a long, rough beard. He looked like a wolf that hadn't showered in some time. He threw the cigarette down and crushed it with his back paw, and then he stood there watching Anne and me as we walked through the parking lot to Lorenzo's.

“That wolf is watching you,” I said to Anne.

“In a past life, he would have been just my type.”

“He was never your type.”

“I loved wolves.”

Lorenzo's was crowded with actors from the dinner theater's rehearsal space next door—married accountants and young housewives and pimply city college students with loud voices all eating and drinking and carrying on, engaging in assignations of one sort or another. As everyone in Fresno knows, doing plays at the dinner theater is a sure sign that your marriage is over.

Soon the place would be packed entrance to emergency exit with dinner theater actors, once the wolf and his friends finished their show and got out of costume.

Anne and I sat at the bar and ordered vodka gimlets that came in teeny-tiny glasses.

“It's depressing when drinks come in small glasses,” Anne said, “because then you have to drink so many more of them.”

“I like small drinks,” I said. “This way you don't feel bad when you have four gimlets.”

There were red-and-white checked tablecloths in the dining room and elk heads on the rafters above the bar. The walls were plastered with advertisements for every show at Roger Rocka's Music Hall from 1978 through the present day:
Pajama Game
!
Godspell!
Merrily We Roll Along
!

I took off my glasses so as not to see any grade school friends or friends' parents, parents' friends, or boys I'd kissed who were now paunchy men.

Anne spun her tennis bracelet around and around her wrist. Our mother's old tennis bracelet. She must have just taken it. Anne appropriates any valuables she's afraid I might get to first. “The Matheuses are sitting in the corner.”

“I'm not wearing my glasses.”

“Put on your glasses, for chrissake, Ingrid.”

“I prefer not to wear them.”

The Matheus brothers used to have thirty thousand acres of row crops—primarily melon. But the wives didn't get along and this led to the predictable strife and so, years ago, the ranch was split in half, the greatest of all misfortunes that can befall an agricultural family. As it turned out, one brother was good at numbers and the other was good at land, and separately they each lost everything. Jim Matheus had taken loans from the company selling him chemicals, and now his part of the ranch belonged to the Chemtech Corporation, based in Connecticut. The Matheus brothers now sell real estate, separately.

“Do you think we should say hello?”

“I don't have to say hello because I can't see them.”

Everything, everything, everything about Fresno depressed me.

Anne said, “Why don't you come back to LA with me and we'll find you an apartment?”

“I don't have first month's and last month's and a deposit,” I said. Then, to release us both from that alarming truth, as if that were not really the reason I was lingering in Fresno, I said, “I'm not sure I want to live in Los Angeles.”

“Of course you do. Where else will you go?”

“I could go back to New York.”

“And do what, darling? You can't be a journalist anymore. Journalism is an anachronism.”

“Anne, stick to your drink.”

“Being a journalist is like being a phrenologist.”

“Anne.”

“We can get you a job writing at voice-over. Or you could get a job on any show, Ingrid.”

“I don't want to work in Hollywood.”

“Yes you do. What else are you going to do?”

“What?”

“Where else are you going to go?” Anne had a special talent for making me feel awful. Only sisters know how to make you feel so loved and understood and then, moments later, make you want to hang yourself.

“Here comes Broadway,” Anne said.

A group thrust through the door, laughing and exclaiming and speaking in voices far too loud for any dining room. The wolf was there, with his beard. Without his paws and fur, the wolf looked quite nice. He looked like a gentle professor of Italian, or a poet living in Williamsburg. I'd always enjoyed the companionship of the bearded poets of Williamsburg.

I looked at the elk on the wall. Poor elk, stuck in this place forever, nailed here, frozen.

There was a lot of noise, made of voices and feet and clattering plates. Lorenzo's is always cozy. We ordered a spicy penne alla vodka and spaghetti carbonara with thin, melty slivers of dissolving pancetta.

“When will you start eating again?” Anne said. Her blond hair fell over her shoulders in feathered pieces. I could smell her soapiness from where I was sitting.

“When will you start eating?” I said.

“I never eat. Please don't bring up what I told you. Please forget I told you. I'm miserable that I told you.”

“Why?”

“Stop talking. Start eating.” Anne wasn't eating, either. When we were little, Mother had these cross-stitched cocktail napkins embroidered with
Dinner is poured
. We always thought that was very funny. We still think it's very funny.

“I'm eating. I'm practically over this.”

“You're still on the mend.”

“I'm practically over it,” I said. No one likes to see grief go on for longer than two weeks. Forty days, possibly, but only if your mother has died—that's what the Armenians say. It wasn't like I hadn't been through this before, and continuing to mourn over Howard seemed plain indulgent. I would do it in secret. “I'm not even hurt, really. I'm just upset that I failed. The worst thing about a breakup is this feeling of humiliation.”

“Humiliation is ninety percent of sadness.”

For a moment I believed that to be true, because I believed most everything Anne said, even then. “That's strange, that you think that.”

Anne casually raised her finger to the bartender. Bartenders love Anne and respond to her smallest gestures. “I'm strange,” she said. “I'm glad it's taken you this long to realize it. But I must tell you, other people catch on much quicker.” The food was for show. We drank our gimlets and drank small thimbles of grappa for dessert. Despite the dinner theater people and despite our general discomfort with anything in Fresno resembling familiarity, I liked it here because Lorenzo's was the kind of place that could make you nostalgic. We'd been coming to Lorenzo's as a family since before the house on the river was built, when we lived two blocks away, on the corner of Palm, in a 1927 Craftsman with a tire swing hung from the front yard's magnolia.

There were only a few places in Fresno that felt safe: Lorenzo's, the club, the house on the river.

*   *   *

Afterward, we were good and drunk, so Anne and I walked up the street, back past the dinner theater and past the Chicken Pie Shop and across Olive Avenue to Bootsie's Quality Food and Beverage, a former dry cleaner's right next to Roger's Theatre in the Round.

“I don't think we should get in the car,” Anne said.

Bootsie's was still throbbing with people after midnight, the sidewalk crowded with smokers. Inside, there were orange booths and heavy wood tables, wide planks on the floor and naked bulbs hanging from the ceiling. There were several women with the Fresno Crop. The kitchen opened onto the bar and onto the restaurant, so you could see the sweat-soaked chef in his white smock at the stove. The backsplash behind the bar was made of tiny orange and yellow glass tiles, and the tiles spelled
BOOTSIE'S
.

And then there was Bootsie, a bomb of blond curls, like a beacon in the center of everything, laughing a girlish horse laugh with a customer seated in a booth at the edge of the room. Her tank top showed off her sharp shoulders and long clavicles and no cleavage. Her tank top made her look like a boy, but then there was her face: peachy, apple-like, all girlishness. Her smile took up the whole thing.

“Let's sit,” Anne said. The place was very small and very crowded but cool even so, a relief from the hot night and the short walk from Lorenzo's. A girl in a yellow dress came up to take our order. “Two frozen mojitos,” Anne said. “Each.”

“Not each,” I said. “Just one for me.”

“All right, just one each.”

Without making eye contact, the girl in the yellow dress took our place settings away. She had a great volume of hair held back in a messy knot with an elastic. She was probably here temporarily, working for Bootsie on her way from one place to another and didn't look very Fresno at all. Bootsie had this effect on people: she could keep you places you didn't belong.

Bootsie laughed her explosive laugh and across the room we could hear her say, “Embrace your bed head, Sheila, embrace it!” She made her way around the restaurant, enjoying herself.

She was the usual Bootsie, the Bootsie I could never be sure whether I could trust. You never knew with Bootsie if that smile was for real, if she was being sincere or putting you on. We had played soccer together from the time we were six. Bootsie was her soccer name, because she could boot that ball from one end of the field to the other, and would occasionally boot people, too. I was always glad to be on Bootsie's team, because if you were not on her team, she would invariably knock her knee into your ribs or stick her elbow in your jaw when the officials were not looking. Bootsie was the best at that.

We hadn't spoken in years: Three years? Four?

She put her hand on the back of our booth and turned around to greet us as a proprietor greets her guests. She hardly even took a beat when she realized who we were. “Well, hello! It's you.” As if she had been waiting and waiting for us, expecting us. “Oh, I missed you,” she said, sliding into the seat next to Anne.

“We missed you,” Anne said. “That's why we're here.”

“Is it really, or are you just saying?” Bootsie's big huge mouthy smile made you happy and exhilarated just to be near her.

“It's why we're here,” I said.

“You two.” Her voice got as quiet as it could. “I have missed you. I mean, like, really missed you. Especially you.” She looked at me. “I'm sorry,” she said.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“Why didn't you call me back?” The restaurant was busy and Bootsie did always get right to the point of things.

“Because I'm here now,” I said.

“You knew I had moved back, so you knew things were bad, very bad,” she said. She smiled her spacious smile as she said these things, so that nothing she said seemed confrontational.

“I know.”

“I wouldn't have ever called you again if I hadn't really needed you. Really needed to speak to you.”

“If you had needed to speak to me, you might have called me twice.”

“But I know you,” she said. “If you're not going to call, you're not going to call.” She did know me. “Why didn't you call me, then, Inky?”

“I don't know. Eventually I didn't call you because I was so embarrassed that I hadn't called you back.”

She reached across the table and took my wrist, gently, as if she were taking my pulse. “But you're here now,” she said. Her hand was cool and dry.

“We're here!” Anne exclaimed, in her cartoon voice, the fake high pitch she uses for protection. My mother did that, too. They were alike in more ways than either would admit.

“What happened between us was awful and stupid and my fault,” Bootsie said.

“I was stupid, too.”

“You were only stupid when you didn't call me back.”

“Yes.”

“But that was my fault also.”

Four years previous, after I'd left Newton Greene and come back to New York, directionless, jobless, the way I sometimes am, Bootsie suggested I come live with her until I sorted myself out. She was living on Laight Street then, in an unfinished loft her father had purchased for her when she got her first graphics position at the
Times
. He hadn't been so impressed by the job—in the Central Valley, it's much more respectable to be employed by
The Fresno Bee
than
The New York Times
—but she'd been hired just after the terrorist attacks downtown, and for two or three months in the fall of 2001, property in TriBeCa was very cheap. Mr. Calhoun couldn't pass up an excellent deal.

“Can we be friends now?” Bootsie said. “Or do we have to rehash everything that went on between us?”