so exquisitely designed most people would have framed it in an entry hall. From time to time she chewed thoughtfully on the kimono’s sash.
The women surrounding her were tenured professors, authors, attorneys, directors of grant programs pulling two hundred thousand a year in addition to whatever they picked up on the speakers’ circuit. They were remembering dark childhoods in which little girls were forbidden such futures.
One of the lawyers strummed chords on a guitar, and two women I didn’t know ran outside to their car to get balalaikas, they said. The music stopped, and somebody found an oldies station on the radio in time for the opening “sho-dote-en-sho-be-doe” of the Five Satins’ “In the Still of the Night.” The song prompted the second-“most memorable event of the evening. A sing-along with the radio.
Teenagers in the sixties, they remembered, they stood, and they sang. Perfectly. They sang to Eden Snow in four-chord harmony of feminism, of a time beloved and lost, its ghost alive again in that moment among them. A bunch of drunk, middle-aged women singing old doo-wop, or a choir in transcendent celebration of an idea, you choose. I was in tears by the time Misha and I went outside alone. Into the backyard, in the dark.
By then there was nothing else to do, nothing left but the inevitable. I am certain that neither of us would have chosen anything quite as overwhelming if we’d been asked. But we weren’t asked. We were simply drawn toward some huge intention whose purposes demanded a connection between us so deep and fierce that I realized even then, my mouth on Misha’s hungrily on mine, that I might not survive it. I didn’t care.
Later there was some stumbling, urgent progress to a shed. Bags of peat moss and potting soil. A sense of there being no time left to do this. No time at all. The suddenly pointless yet stubborn presence of clothes, buttons, zippers. The impossible necessity of touch, the pounding vortex of orgasm. And all the while, over Misha’s ragged breathing and mine, the sound of balalaikas reaching out into the dark.
Much later, sometime the following morning, it would cross my mind that Misha was a woman and so this sexual cataclysm meant I could safely sneer at all further accusations of affectional ambivalence. I hadn’t been sure what the fuss was about either way. Now I was sure. Totally.
Misha would scarcely make the “A list” of potential romantic partners, but I was unmoved by such distinctions. Prone to disguising a Southern accent under fake “Hahvahd” pronunciations and telling people she grew up in Wellesley, Misha was the object of more than one raised eyebrow. Deland wasn’t her name, but that of a teenage husband long divorced, she said. Her real surname, she told various people at various times, was Carruthers. Or Hancock. Or McAdams. Names noteworthy for nothing so much as their presumed proximity to the Mayflower. Despite her ambiguous identity she wanted nothing so much as to be widely known, preferably admired. Misha never missed a meeting she could chair, and kept on her cell phone a contact list the size of the old Manhattan Yellow Pages. She wasn’t exactly a social climber, needing instead to be known by literally everybody. But none of it mattered to me. It would never matter.
What mattered was Dad’s response when I called to tell him I was really in love at last and with a woman. It had always been an option. Misha was not the first woman I’d made love with, just the first lover I’d been flung to infinity with. Dissolved with. Transformed with. All that.
Dad didn’t bat an eye until I told him about the balalaikas, about the unfathomable intent in me and Misha that seemed to come from somewhere else and have an agenda of its own. Then his voice broke and he whispered, “Oh, my God,” in tones trailing history, and secrets. Because of Misha I would eventually hear the story of my own existence, and be shocked. Later I would begin to know two people named Jake and Elizabeth, who had dealt with balalaikas of their own.
Brontë interrupted this train of thought by getting a half-dozen fire ants up her nose, requiring my immediate attention. I was already hot even though I was wearing nothing but shorts and a pair of ratty tennis shoes. The Muffin Crandall investigation, I decided, would be a test of my ability to return to the real world. The World Before Misha. A world in which people do not run around wracked by dead love affairs and inadequately clothed.
I was not brought up to walk dogs without first putting on a shirt. In fact, our two-story frame house in Waterloo was a veritable monument to those ordinary proprieties which make society possible. Dad was the rector at a little church called simply Grace, and our mother zealously cultivated at least the appearance of successful housewifery. David never noticed, but I’d often find Mom poring over women’s magazines, her high, tanned brow knit in concentration. Sometimes she jotted things in a small spiral notebook. Then, a few days later, we’d face the “Festive Ukrainian Borscht Compote” at dinner. Or we’d come home from school to find the front porch sagging under the weight of twenty-six pink geranium plants in wicker laundry baskets lined with calico. On these days there would be homemade cookies and Dad would read aloud from old children’s books about Abraham Lincoln or Clara Barton.
My parents sighed with relief at each successfully completed domestic vignette, each family outing and holiday. David and I were watched by glowing eyes that increased in wattage every time we succeeded, failed, or were merely average at anything. Our parents were terrified, but we didn’t know it. What David and I learned from them was that every humdrum event un-shattered by primal forces is cause for celebration. But we would find out about the primal forces later. Both of us. I pondered the fact that Muffin Crandall had obviously stumbled over them as well.
In my office/living room, actually the intended reception area for Wren’s Gulch Inn, I sat down to read Dan Crandall’s emails. Beatrice Crandall, I learned, had shortly after the earthquake, confessed to assaulting the man in the Roadrunner freezer. In a prepared statement distributed by her attorney, she admitted to hitting an intruder in her garage over the head with a paperweight on a Sunday night during July five years ago.
She awoke, she said, around eleven that night to the sound of her garage door opening. At first she thought it was an electronic glitch of some kind. Probably the door responding to a neighbor’s battery-operated door-opener. After all, the garage of her condo opened into an alley shared with fifteen other units, which meant fifteen identical automatic garage doors with identical electronic openers. But after she heard the door close there was a sound of someone “mucking around down there.” The garage, she said, was directly beneath her second-story bedroom. The windows were open because the night was warm. She could hear the intruder through both floor and windows.
Still, she wasn’t overly alarmed. “I thought there was some reasonable explanation,” she said. “Maybe a neighbor borrowing a ladder. I have a nice lightweight aluminum ladder that people are always borrowing. Of course nobody would do that, break into my garage in the middle of the night to get the ladder without asking me, but that’s what I thought when I was walking down the stairs. What I really thought was maybe he’d had too much to drink. I have a neighbor who drinks a lot at night. Everybody knows. You can’t hide much, living so close together. I really just thought it was probably him and that he’d be embarrassed and go away when he saw that he’d got me out of bed.”
On her way through the darkened living room, Crandall had grabbed a paperweight from her desk “just in case.” She hadn’t really intended to use the object as a weapon, the narrative went on. There were plenty of knives in the kitchen if she’d been thinking about a weapon. She just wanted something in her hand when she opened the kitchen door to the garage. Something heavy. She didn’t really know why.
But what she saw when she opened her kitchen door wasn’t her tipsy neighbor. It was a stranger. “A dirty, evil-looking man with his back to me,” she said, was pawing through some storage boxes containing items which had belonged to her deceased husband. “It didn’t make any sense, it was horrible,” she stated. “This disgusting creature touching Deck’s things there in the dark. He was squatting on the floor like . . . like an animal, opening those boxes. He was sickening, somehow. And then his face turned toward me and in the light from the kitchen I saw his hand reach toward one of the rocks I’d been collecting for a little rock garden on my patio. The rocks were stacked along the wall. I saw this look in his eyes, saw what he was going to do with that rock. He was going to hit me. I could