Elspeth had already closed the library and was hunkered down in her rambling Russell Street house. As we hugged good-bye at the Ice Pick, she explained that her plan was to ring in the New Year in an oxygen chamber that a professor friend of hers ran near U.C. Berkeley. Carlos, his partner, Larry, and their pugs (Victoria and Albert, how cute is that!) were heading to their cabin in the mountains up by the Stanislaus National Park, near the scene of my ill-fated fence post incident, though I didn’t elect to point that out. Sydney was filling in for a French teacher who suddenly “had to” get home to Paris a day early so I had no opportunity to download to her about our latest Goth encounter. And Melanie slipped out before anyone, leaving word through Elspeth that her daughters had surprised her with a plane ticket to Boston.

In fact, an unsettling number of the B-C families had flown the coop as much as a week early, explaining in emails to Sydney that the only flights they could get to the Hana-Maui airport left last Friday. I felt their pain, really I did.

It is such a cliché to say that you could hear a pin drop. So I’ll try to do better, though you could, you really could hear a fucking pin drop. The profiles of everyone in that room were taut with confusion. Gloriously buffed faces, swept back hairstyles, eyebrows lifted to perfection. All of them were frozen. As were the businessman haircuts and the cashmere sweaters over pinpoint cotton shirts. Not a thread moved on a wool blend suit jacket. Not a rustle of silk could be discerned. The only movement, other than Dick DeNutti snapping his neck repeatedly in a most disgusting effort to crack a vertebra, or to quell the crazed tension mounting in his brain, was the soft sound of Sonya Sterling whispering Excuse me, Cerise or Pardon me, Payton as she tilted her head to the side and strode through the couples up toward John Thomas Mueskes while tiny beads of sweat formed on his skin, magnified for the world by the spotlight frying his forehead.


At just about the moment that Sonya arrived without slipping (darn) to the spot next to John Thomas, his words had begun to gel in my head. Something about a “real estate broker,” and I flashed back to that moment in the library when John Thomas and Sonya emerged from the elevator with that nauseating laughter and said something about…what was it now? A portfolio?

 

“Then tell me what Benno said in his letter to you.” I patted the sofa again. “Because that’s what I really came in here for.” Elspeth nodded as if she couldn’t avoid the topic any longer. She retrieved an envelope from her multi-colored rice paper shoulder bag made by Cambodian peasants that was slung over her desk chair, and crept back to where I guided her down into the sofa, my hands just below her hips. I loved Elspeth Waldron, but not so much that I wanted my mitts to rest on her ass any longer than necessary.

The stationery was a grayish green in the finest paper with a discreet watermark. The name Dr. Benno Beckmann was embossed across the top and the handwriting was a spidery European script. Elspeth’s hands trembled as she unfolded the paper. She cleared her throat, took a deep breath in through the nostrils, exhaled through the lips.

“Dear Elspeth,” she began. “As someone who has reached the Eight Fold Path, I trust you will find forgiveness in your heart for my absence. The weather has turned bitterly cold and I am in bed even earlier than my habitual time in California. In fact some nights, it is lights out by eight o’clock.” Elspeth smiled mutely. I nodded encouragement.

But Zach had become fixated with the street scene.

“Mama, look at that man. What is he doing?” There, in the midst of people charging into the crosswalks with iPhones pressed to their cheeks, stood a homeless man, his clothing filthy and tattered, pouring a pile of salt from a cardboard container. With methodical motions, the man poured the white grains in a pattern, building the small pile into a pillar. When he was finished, he placed the salt container on the metal New York Times box then pulled a folded paper out of his trench coat pocket. 

Zach turned to me, his eyes wide, a smile forming from ear to ear. “What the!” he whispered before looking back at the man. As people walked by or dashed past him, the man stood resolutely, calmly and proudly, and read what sounded, through the open windows, like a poem – a poem of very few stanzas. The words were melodic yet uninspiring. Something he’d whipped up but whose meaning was deeper for him than for the people flitting by who neither noticed nor heard.

“Why did the man do that with the salt?” Zach asked, relaxing his body toward the table, resuming his cookie consumption with glee.

“You know, sweetie, I’m not sure. It’s possible that pouring salt is something he needed to do to be ready for his next task.”

“What do you mean?” Zach scrunched his face.

“I mean sometimes we have to do other things, things that make no sense to anyone else, in order to prepare for what’s coming next. In other words, the man grounded himself by pouring the salt in a pile.”

“That makes no sense."

“Not to us maybe. But it does to him. Perhaps his poetry wouldn’t sound the same without that sort of superstitious movement before hand. Does that make sense?”

My mother, God love her, had plunked $250 on plastic so I could take a journey. There were four ways to get wet and have someone rub my body for a couple of hours. And since no one else was vying for that privilege, I chose the Philippine Journey during which some poor unsuspecting soul would exfoliate me with fresh ginger and raw sugar before misting me with a sweet orange concoction. My choice no doubt had to do with the fact that this treatment involved more food substances than the Brazilian Rain Forest journey. It also included a seductive soak in a tub of  “secret herbs” which Esmelda, my spa attendant, informed me was ready and waiting.
      
Her timing was impeccable. The deluge dwindled to a trickle so I dropped onto the floor the soaking wet towel that my privates rested on and reached around the glass door for a dry terry. Esmelda was waiting knowingly with a fresh, fluffy bath sheet to drape over my sagging form. She gestured toward curtains across the tiled floor on the opposite side of the central feature of the spa, the tiled hot tub with the killer view of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge beyond. At that moment it sat empty and the jets idle. But I figured it could hold at least twelve rich women and maybe half as many middle class gals. Across the floor, Esmelda pulled back a drape to reveal my bath festooned with flower petals and sprays of fake orchids. The entire set-up was a little goofy but the aromatic water smelled divine. Since no one else was around, I was able to sneak behind the curtain and step down into part two of my journey without anyone but poor Esmelda to see the way my bee-boos, as Zach named them, and abs competed to reach my thighs. 

I had no appointment when I knocked on the front door of St. Agnes Roman Catholic Church at 2023 San Pablo Avenue a week later. But inside the Rectory, I was given one hell of a reception.

St. Agnes was situated on a frenetic thoroughfare on the border of Berkeley and Oakland. Shabby apartment buildings and storefronts made up the neighborhood. An Indian sari store, a salvage depot for old appliances and a check-cashing office nearby added that little Je ne sais quo. The hood was probably lovely 75 years ago.  But the local businesses, not to mention four lane traffic and ramps to the freeway near the front of the school, left me wondering if Dick DeNutti had lost his fucking mind.

Elspeth and I parked the VW Bug behind Rainbow Foods next to the church. We were panhandled for money twice in one block, a sore reminder of the street scene at Zach’s former public school. The church rose majestically on a slight hill requiring me to haul us up two sets of sandstone stairs before Elspeth said she just couldn’t go on. I wasn’t sure if she meant live or simply climb to the top.

“You go find Father Hal,” she panted, blotting her forehead with her lace hankie. “Come get me in the sanctuary when you’re done. I’ll be the one praying like hell in the last row.” 

 
I slid into the bench of our usual window table and uttered profuse and profound apologies to everyone.  Elspeth just waved her gnarled hand and without looking up from a pill bottle she was trying to open said, as if she were black and hip, “Ain’t no thang.”

“What is it with this school and everyone and their pills?” I asked handing Carlos my tote bag to place on the bench next to him. The horrible Goth creature was seated again at the table to my right and I wasn’t sure whether or not to include him in my round of hellos. So I lifted my eyebrows and smiled limply. Sydney was busy admiring the many rings decorating Vlad’s fingers before our favorite waiter could toss a strand of Day-Glo orange hair out of his eyes.

“Would you prefer Kvass or Pinko?” he asked.

“Remind me what Kvass is again?”

“A fermented drink. Sort of like beer but tastes more like piss. You’d like it.”

I rolled my eyes. “And the Pinko?”

“Pink lemonade. Shall I put you down for one?”

“Yes, and replace one of those sesame rolls in the Proletariat Platter with a second tofu blini, would you?” Elspeth took my hands in hers. I had broken out in a sweat from racing to get to lunch on time. She felt like she’d been waiting in the walk-in freezer. 

I waited for someone to cry, “You’re on Candid Camera!” to no avail.
“You’re joking, right? I don’t belong with those fat cats. You go, Elspeth.”
“Not on your life. There’s a lecture at the Y on Chi Nei Tsang that I’m very interested in.”
“That makes no sense.”
“Taoist Medicine,” Elspeth elucidated. 
“No, not that,” I replied, lifting Zeppo off the bench to steer him out the door.  “Sydney can go as your date, Carlos.”
“Sydney has her own date. An old widower on the Board who inherited billions and once grabbed her boob.”
“He did not grab my boob,” Sydney groaned with disgust. “He fell against it when he had a mini-stroke during the centennial parade.”
“Look,” I waved my hands, thinking it best not to escalate the argument. I just typed the stupid guest list. I wasn’t invited.”
“Consider yourself invited now,” Carlos said, taking Elspeth’s elbow while she leaned her other hand on the cane. She bent forward to pat the Goth’s face goodbye.
“Yes, then you can give me an update on what Lady DeNutti served, and if she made one of her magnificent cakes. 
"Bring me home a piece. I’ll put it under my pillow.” 
“But….”
“But nothing,” Carlos interrupted. “Larry, you haven’t met my partner Larry yet, but Larry has no desire to go and as the only faculty member the Board deigns to speak to, I simply must be there. Besides, I hate Dick DeNutti. He needs to have his neck waxed.” 
My thoughts were swirling despite that last disturbing image: would I be able to hold my own in conversation with the Board members; what if the place was full of Sonya Sterlings; and what the hell would I wear?
Carlos pushed open the door to Telegraph Avenue with his back while popping open an umbrella for Elspeth. He squinted against the rain and then tossed his head once more in my direction. Cars roared by and the weather and noise were overwhelming.
“So, meet me there at eight?” he shouted.
“Carlos, I don’t even know where there is!”
“Don’t worry. You can’t miss it. Drive to the top of Grizzly Peak as high as you can go. And when you find the glass house with the gorilla glaring down at all the sycophants breathlessly climbing his driveway, you’ll know you’re in the right place.”

I took the marble stairs two at a time. Elspeth Waldron’s rump was smack dab in front of me when, out of breath and dabbing at my damp forehead with a used tissue from my coat pocket, I pushed through the glass doors of the Richard P. and Deanna D. DeNutti Community Room. As she backed up out of a worn leather sofa, the octogenarian librarian looked terribly wide. I made a mental note to myself: check out rear position in bathroom mirror at home 

Bidwell-Coggin’s oldest living creature, aside from the California buckeye tree centering the quad, was, in her own words, “seventy-plus” so it was to be expected that she might appear stiff rather than svelte with her butt high in the air. Elspeth wore wisps of white hair in a cut that looked like it was trimmed with a buzz saw. Her blue eyes could charm a spider from its web and her lips curled over a fierce overbite to smile mischievously at the children. Dangerously huge chandelier earrings banged against the sides of her dewy cheeks. That she had so few wrinkles obviously intrigued the ladies who only-eat-organic because a gaggle of them in the pick-up line once commented that the skin care products in those days just did not include the arsenal of UVA blocks and free radical targets available today. It probably bugged the shit out of them that she wasn’t injecting toxins into her face. I even heard one of them suggest that Elspeth Waldron, Our Lady of Patchouli Oil, had had her face “done!” How absurd! Elspeth Waldron had the one thing they all wanted but would never achieve: self-knowledge. She was so serene and so bloody self-possessed I wanted to curl up in her lap and completely regress until she agreed to take me home like a stray.

 “Clari, Baby. I thought you’d never get here,” Elspeth broke my reverie.

Sydney Greene zipped in and out of my line of vision so fast I might have imagined her presence except that she was black, about five-foot-ten and in the pale, anorectic world of Bidwell-Coggin, a hard one to miss.

The first time I set eyes on Sydney Greene she stole my breath and made my heart race and I think if I had truly been a dyke with a small “d” I would have gone for her.  It was at an open house the year before Zach started and Andy and I were sitting in the auditorium waiting for Sydney, dean of students, to address prospective parents. She stepped forward on the stage, underneath the theatrical lights like a magical mocha witch of Narnia that C.S. Lewis deleted from his first draft. Sydney’s hair, arranged in a wild tangle of braids, was brightened to a shocking shade of honey blonde. She wore a suede suit and three-inch heels that revealed a curious tattoo in the curve of her ankle. It was a sassy combination of professional yet deliciously edgy amidst all those rich looking parents in their camel hair coats and just the right boots who were jostling to get front row seats in the auditorium.