set for you to visit my sister at nine-thirty, phone ten,” Dan Crandall’s voice announced. “It’ll take them at least a half hour to bring her to the visiting area, so be there by eight-forty-five or it won’t work. You’ll be allowed ten or fifteen minutes this time, maybe more later, maybe not.”
“Phone ten?” I pronounced thickly.
“Yeah. The lawyer told me there’s a row of phones. You talk through plexiglass. They assign you a time and a phone. You’ll talk to her on phone ten.”
This set of instructions seemed unnecessarily concise for 5 a.m.
“Have you been to see your sister, Dan?”
“No.”
“So why are you doing all this?”
His sigh was more resigned than hostile. Like the sigh of somebody who’s been teaching introductory classes for too long. My kind of sigh.
“Just go talk to her. Incidentally, she won’t want to talk to you. Have you read the stuff I emailed?”
“Oddly, I don’t sleep with electronic devices,” I said, trying for a confessional tone. “There are others like me.”
“Ha,” he answered. “Call me when you’ve got some ideas.”
After leaving the number of a bayfront hotel in San Diego, Crandall hung up and I faced the rest of my life. At the moment it looked like one of those seventeenth-century Dutch paintings meant to emphasize the transitory nature of being. Wilted cabbage roses on a table with two dead birds and a snail. Except there are no snails in the desert, and my still life would be called Rumpled Sheets with Black Dog and Large Human Foot. Brontë had stretched happily across the width of my queen-size bed and was eyeing one outstretched paw as if contemplating a new shade of nail polish. The large foot was mine.
David and I are, for obvious reasons, fraternal rather than identical twins. He inherited Dad’s stocky frame and run-of-the-mill feet. I got our mother’s gangly height, topaz eyes, and feet for which the term “extended sizes” was coined. Fortunately Mom maintained a competent wardrobe. I was appropriately shod in her size ten double E black kid pumps for the all-stops-out funeral at St. Louis’s Anglican bastion, Christ Church Cathedral. A drunk driver had plowed head-on into her car as she left a meeting of the Sierra Club. My brother and I were thirteen.
Misha theorized that David began his transformation into a sleazebag criminal named Hammer when our mother died. But then Misha never met Mom or David, and for some reason couldn’t envision the relentlessly pleasant childhood that David and I enjoyed. I did describe this childhood to her. Often I marveled at odd details which, I thought, pointed to the day I would meet her. But either Misha’s own childhood, which had apparently been Faulknerian, or more likely her complete disinterest in narratives not involving the Flight of a Strong Woman from the Clutches of Patriarchy, rendered my stories meaningless. I remained strangely blind to Misha’s complete lack of interest in the details of my life for two years. Love, as they say, is like that.
Only after she’d been gone an entire year did it dawn on me that Misha, whose feminist concern for the most insignificant forms of female life rivaled that of God for sparrows, probably couldn’t have identified my hometown or remembered my mother’s name on a bet. For a while that made me feel funny, as if for the years I spent with her my own history had been lost in the mail. Pieces of it were still drifting in as I went outside with Brontë for her morning run.
“David hasn’t killed anybody,” I announced to a lone cottonwood that was probably there when the first stagecoach stopped to water horses at Coyote Creek. “But there will be similarities between his story and this woman’s. Criminology kinds of things. After all, they’re both in prison.”
As Brontë chased a black-tailed jackrabbit I recognized a certain flimsiness in this train of thought. I know a great deal about male primate proclivities, which, if not controlled, result in truly idiotic violence. But there was no precedent for what Muffin Crandall had done, or said she’d done, in the chemistry and subsequent social organization of female primates. Girl apes, as the song says, just wanna have fun. And babies. Although in the human ape the former urge usually dies almost overnight around thirty. That’s when estrogen levels begin to drop and the brain looks around, wondering where it’s been since fifth grade and where all these children came from. Female primates rarely kill except when defending their young or, more rarely, themselves. And the “self” being defended in the case of female humans is a more complicated entity than the mere physical body.
Muffin Crandall, I remembered, was sixty-one. Fifty-six when a man about whom I knew nothing was packed into a deepfreeze with sharks, tuna, doves, and mule deer. Muffin had been past prime for menopause, with its rotten reputation, at the time of the slaughter. Still, she might have been one of the late ones, one of the small, chagrined army of fifty-something women who secretly dread they’ll have to be buried with a feminine hygiene product. I threw rocks at a spindly ocotillo shrub and thought about that until Brontë loped back over the low hill which forms the eastern boundary of the gulch.
To my knowledge, the female chemical transition away from fertility and into wisdom had not been used successfully as the defense strategy in a murder case. Despite the Victorian mystique it still wears in some quarters, I was sure menopause could not cause women to start killing random strangers with paperweights on their way to the freezer. In my experience all it caused them to do was have parties.
As Brontë snuffled and growled at a kangaroo rat hole under a creosote bush, I thought about one of those parties and about the feminist icon, Eden Snow. The mythic author Eden Snow, resplendent on the only occasion that I’d actually seen her. The occasion after which nobody saw her again, or at least that was the story. Eden Snow more than four years ago, already well past sixty but ageless in that way peculiar to celebrity.
She had come to San Diego to give a lecture, to be the big draw for a symposium on Contemporary Feminism sponsored by the Women’s Studies Department of San Diego’s largest university. After the lecture there was a party at somebody’s house. Among Snow’s credentials were an impressive array of degrees, ten increasingly radical books of feminist theory, fluency in five languages, and the respect of women the world over. Despite those credentials I didn’t hear a single word Eden Snow said that night.
I had gone to the lecture and then the party with Misha, whom I knew in her capacity as program director for the Inter-Collegiate Women’s Studies Consortium. That is, I knew she arranged meetings and seemed to be everywhere. She also knew everybody, including everybody on the faculty at San Gabriel University where I was teaching. With her wiry body and strangely compelling eyes, she always made me think of the Little Match Girl. That bathos. Put her in rags on a street corner, and within eight hours she could raise enough money to fund a respectable day care center for a year. Actually, she had been a fund-raiser for some now-defunct runaway kids’ shelter before taking over the consortium directorship. I didn’t trust her.
There was, despite my mistrust, a jittery attraction between us that in her company brought a taste of hot metal to my throat and made it impossible for me to be near common household objects without harming myself or them. That night I had already splintered a chair rung and tripped over a perfectly flat expanse of carpet. Misha had spilled white wine into a toaster. We seemed to be riding some foreordained conclusion about to happen with or without our complicity. And it would happen that night. I did remember that. I do remember that.
By 2 a.m. the party had thinned to drying wheels of cheese, sesame-seed cracker crumbs, and fifteen or twenty women in turtlenecks drinking chardonnay from plastic cups near some pricey speakers. All night the background music had been foreign to me. Unfamiliar women’s movement music Misha explained was from before my time. Misha, ten years my senior, suddenly the only thing I saw in the stale, winey air.
Most of the others made a circle around Eden Snow, who sat in a wingback chair looking exultant as they belted out “Song of the Soul” for the third time. Snow’s wiry gray hair was tied back with a rumpled scarf, and she watched everything from lashless blue eyes that were at once