By the Bay Read online

  Mom mutters, “That woman doesn’t know what real canning is like. There’s not a spot on that apron. She’s not sweating and she’s standing next to a picture of a fruit tree, not next to a sink full of pits.”

  “Maybe,” I say, “she looks nice so we’ll want to be patriotic like her and can food whether we want to or not.

  Dad glances at Mom and reads the dedication in the front of the book: To the women who serve without banners, the homemakers of America.

  “That’s right,” she says, “I don’t see any banners for housewives across Third Avenue downtown.” But she straightens her flowered apron trimmed with rick rack.

  Dad has already counted off the quart jars we saved from last year and bought additional ones to make two dozen. He has brought out our canning pots. We line up the equipment, wash it in sudsy water, rinse it, and sterilize the jars in boiling water on our yellow and green gas stove.

  “Now for the apricots!” Dad announces and orders me to help him carry the flats from the back porch. Mom gets out the paring knives. She prepares a dishpan of lightly salted water. I scrub the outside of each apricot with the small brush the Fuller Brush man gave her the last time he came to the door. Mom cuts each cot in half, removing any spots on the skin, and plops it in salt water so it won’t turn brown. The squishy ones are set aside for puree that will also be canned. Dad assembles the grinder and puts in a couple of disks with the right size slots to make the puree smooth.

  "Now grind these," he orders me. "The kids in the neighborhood like our apricot ice cream, so you can make the puree for it."

  I put in handfuls of squishy fruit pieces, push them down with a wood mallet, and turn the crank. I feel important. I start grinding and the pulp drips like a waterfall onto the floor. I forgot to put a bowl underneath.

  My scream stops the whole canning operation. "I can't do this!" I run out of the kitchen in tears.

  After I run upstairs and throw myself on my bed, there's silence. I don't hear a sound from the kitchen. Then I hear footsteps and my door creaks open. It's Mom. "You can do it," she says. She leads me downstairs and we both clean up the pulp.

  "Here's some more fruit to mash,” Dad says. "And here's a bowl.

  Mom boils the sugar syrup on the stove to pour over the fruit halves while the jars rattle away in the pots. As she pokes strands of hair into her hair net, I think of the lady with the tidy perm on the cover of the canning book. Mom, who can read my mind, says “When I lived in San Francisco I used to get my hair Marcelled. The hairdresser would use a hot curling iron to make deep waves in my hair along the sides of my head. When we’re done, I’ll show you a picture in my scrapbook of me with my hair Marcelled, looking good and all dressed up for the opera.”

  “Do you wish you still lived in the city and got dressed up?” I ask and think of her beaded opera bag in the back of a dresser drawer.

  “If we lived in The City we wouldn’t have this house and you wouldn’t have a nice garden to play in,” she replies. “Life is way better here.” She looks out the window over the sink into the garden. Dad has turned on the fountain in the middle of the fishpond to cool off the night. The small peach tree near the side of the pond has filled out with long, pointy leaves hiding the green, fuzzy fruit waiting to ripen.

  Everything is ready for assembly—the jars and lids are sterilized, the syrup has thickened and the fruit is cut. Dad puts a glass cup with the bottom cut out over one of the jars. He asks if I’d like to fill it up, placing the fruit so each half faces down. I remember that my parents were so proud of their work last year; they wrapped up jars of apricots as gifts for their friends in San Francisco. I can read that look on Mom's face as she looks at Dad. "Are you sure…?" I stand on a wooden box. I push one piece of fruit in carefully, then another. Only one piece flips over. I get the second jar perfect. My parents take over the rest. Dad screws the tops on and sets the jars in the canner to boil. By now it's 11pm. I go to bed.

  Early the next morning I hear Dad tapping the lids of the jars to hear if the seal is tight. All the jars make the proper sound—the tune of glory for all of us.

  California Catechism

  by Adrianne Aron

  The move took a lot of money, so I had to watch my pennies, and the flat in the Haight-Ashbury was just the thing: not too expensive, and close to a good school for Brenda, who was starting kindergarten. That’s where I first met Rosie, another single mom with a kid in the same school. Like metal filings in an Etch-a-Sketch, we glommed onto each other. We saved on gas by pairing up to go to the laundromat and the supermarket, and we went out to eat on two-for-ones to save on food. If the car broke down or the sink stopped up, we’d call on each other’s boyfriends for help. If things with the boyfriends broke down, we had each other’s shoulder to cry on. My first year in San Francisco, Rosie was my compass; she knew north from south.

  One day during that first year, Brenda brought me a question that rattled me so much, I was tempted to get back in touch with Steffan, thinking I might have to get help from that skunk because I didn’t know what to do. I’d been living in Chicago, on the South Side, and before that I’d lived in Des Moines, where I grew up. Nobody had ever asked me a question like Brenda brought me in San Francisco.

  San Francisco! There was no such thing as a Jewish neighborhood. Levi Strauss was remembered as a cowboy type instead of a yeshiva boy. It was a different world. Luckily, that world had a Rosie, and I didn’t have to write to Steffan. I got on the phone to Rosie.

  Rosie’s David was a little older than Brenda, so Rosie was ahead of me on school matters. Raising a girl, I was usually a little more advanced on the social-developmental side, but this time I was way behind. Brenda had come home from school, and again the teacher’s aide hadn’t washed out the thermos. The lunch box stank when it got opened. Brenda crumpled up the baggies and the wax paper, and was getting ready to throw out the orange peels when she turned to me with her big kindergarten eyes that see everything as a wonder and asked a question to turn my mother over in her grave. “Will you buy me a white dress for my First Communion, like Mary Catherine got?”

  Would I buy her a white dress for a Communion! Quick on my feet I said to her, “We’ll talk about that later. Get in there and change your clothes, and don’t forget to hang up your jumper.”

  While she was doing that, I gave thirty seconds of thought to contacting my ex. Then I rushed to the phone to call Rosie. I didn’t have to explain, I only had to repeat the question. She said she’d come right over. “You learn to grin and bear it,” she said before she hung up. “Last December I lost a battle with David over a Christmas tree. You never saw it because I made him keep it in his bedroom.”

  I put on the coffee maker and thought about that. A Christmas tree, I felt, was one thing; a Communion was something else. Back East, this sort of thing wouldn’t come up. But here, in Assimilation Central, a six year-old could bring you a question that could turn your stomach sideways. Communion! They get down on their knees and stick out their tongues and some man in a dress says hocus pokus, and my daughter in some totally nutbucket fantasy wants a new outfit so she can take communion with Mary Catherine Ryan.

  Rosie arrived and took her place in my kitchen at the round oak table with the claw-foot pedestal. She always liked to sit in the Captain’s chair, the one with the arms. By the time she got there I had already settled on a plan, but I was glad she was there. You never know if your plans with your kids will backfire and shoot you in the foot. I didn’t have time to fill Rosie in on the plan, because no sooner had I poured the coffee as Brenda came bouncing into the room with her coloring book to show me a picture, and I knew I had to grab her while I had her attention.

  “Look,” I said, touching her sweet ponytail as it swished against my thigh, “Come and sit down here with Mommy and Aunt Rosie so I can explain something to you.”

  She had her special place at the table, too, but I let her sit on one of the grown-up chairs, which she considered a treat.
Larry was sprawled on the floor playing with colored blocks. I poured Brenda a glass of pineapple juice and added a sprig of spearmint. “Tell Aunt Rosie where you got that spearmint.”

  Brenda held the glass with two hands and took a sip, then complied in that kid tone of why-would-anybody-want-to-know-that?

  “We picked it in Shelly Mandel’s backyard and the dog peed on the roses,” she said. She brightened up at the memory of the dog.

  Rosie leaned over and placed a block on top of the tower that Larry was building. “Next time you can get some by my place,” she said to Brenda. “There’s mint growing all over my yard and there’s no dogs.”

  “But I like dogs,” Brenda said.

  I had to head off that conversation before it got into the question of our getting a dog and I’d have a temper tantrum on my hands. “I asked you about the mint because I want to tell you a story,” I said to my little girl. “It’s a story about Us and Them.”

  “Maddie,” Rosie said under her breath. “Maddie, I already told you, it’s a losing proposition. We’re outnumbered. You just hope they’ll settle for a plastic star instead of a Virgin Mary on the top of the Christmas tree.”

  “Think of it as a capitalist catechism,” I whispered back, and then I turned to Brenda and said firmly, “In our religion, Brenda, we don’t do dumb things. There are some people who believe in getting everything new. They even buy new bags to put their garbage in! They don’t pick their spearmint from the ground or their bay leaves from the trees; they go out and buy them at the store.”

  I gave Rosie a look, then went on with the training: “Some people think you have to have new outfits all the time. They even think their rags have to be new. Instead of cutting up old clothes and old sheets like we do, they go out and pay good money just to buy rags! Brenda, honey—”I paused to let this sink in. She was listening. “It’s against our religion to get a new dress for Communion,” I said, “just like it’s against our religion to buy mint leaves when God gave us mint in our friends’ backyards. Some other religions don’t have rules about that, but ours does, so, if you want to do Communion, you’ll have to do it in an old dress. In fact, you have to do it in the oldest dress you’ve got. That green plaid one with the scratchy collar: go get it and show it to Auntie Rosie.”

  “I don’t want to do communion,” she pouted. She jumped down from the table so fast that she knocked over her brother’s tower. “I’m never doing communion,” she yelled. “So there!”

  “It’s okay, honey,” Rosie said with an understanding glance in my direction. “Me neither.”

  A Love Supreme

  by Carson Beker

  Not talking to him.

  She stepped onto the 24 Divisadero to find it was only half full, but half full in that infuriating San Francisco way where there were plenty of empty seats and still nowhere to sit. He leapt onto the bus after her, so fast his elbows jabbed into her kidneys. Ouch.

  The doors sighed shut.

  She stepped away from him. He stepped closer. His fingers, long and tapered, scrambled at her hand like little white maggots. She recoiled, feeling his sweat film on her skin.

  “There’s an empty space there,” he said “You could sit down,” because yes, there was a chair with no one sitting on it, and yes, the last time she checked, she was capable of bending her legs.

  But she said nothing. Was quiet. An older man in a preposterous purple suit took that empty seat, sagging into it like overbaked eggplant.

  Hers was the silence of a pouncing lynx. No. The silence of a sprung and baited trap. Her head pulled away from her shoulders like an arrow on the bow. Her eyes were two antimatter lasers burning black holes into the night.

  The bus started.

  He, wide eyed, did not notice the flare of her nostrils. He opened his mouth.

  She could feel him breathing on her neck, onions on his breath. Then the bus was squeaking, the breaks or the suspension, something. Squeak. Squeak.

  His lips were chapped, toothpaste on the corners of his mouth.

  “err…” he said, “err…”

  The bus, Squeak. Squeak.

  Now her silence was an ancient volcano in the last seconds of its dormancy.

  He asked: “Are you mad?”

  And although she was utterly silent, deep down inside her dormant volcano there started a deep rumbling. Her villagers, tilling the fertile soil, felt it in their old joints, in the vibrations of their ploughs, knew the time had come. They dropped their tools and ran back to the village, shouting, white faced.

  But he, right next to her, was no reader of volcanoes.

  He asked: “Are you? Mad at something?”

  The bus squeaked, stopped, doors opened. A dozen schoolchildren climbed on, sticky popsicle fingered, nudging her, but she did not move. They found seats, giggling, laughing, kneeling backward on their seats to punch one another.

  The bus squeaked.

  In the volcano village of her anger, the priests and shaman were running this way, that way, upsetting market stalls, seizing goats, plucking feathers, under the shadow of the rumbling volcano.

  He tried again, “Because if you’re mad…”

  But the time for appeasing the gods was gone. In her silence, the village animals felt it now, the coming apocalypse. A donkey spun in circles, backed into the barn, braying. A rooster threw itself at the air, trying to fly, falling. Small children were screaming.

  On the bus small children were screaming. He was swaying, bumping into her, the bus was squeaking, so hot. Ahead of them, a four-year-old boy was precariously balanced on his sister’s lap, a sister who was poking at her phone.

  And out of the corner of her eye, she, of the volcano silence, watched him, maggot fingers, conclude that after all, she must not be mad, because after all, she wasn’t saying anything. He smiled, reassured. Squeak squeak, the breaks, as the bus bounced up the hill. The bus doors opened. About thirty thousand teenagers McDonald’s-reeking piled in, pushing an old lady up against her, old breasts squishing.

  In the volcano village of her anger, men and women were dropping their family bibles and running, running for their lives.

  But on the bus, he, reassured that she probably wasn’t mad, lifted one hand, a hand that held the greasy wrapped remains of his oniony sandwich.

  “Hey,” he said, “hey, could you put this in your bag?”

  And then it all happened. The bus children screamed, the bus reached the very top of the hill, in the volcano village, the sky turned night black and blood red with lava and ash, the villagers cowered in one another’s arms, and on the bus she turned slowly towards him, heat, red rimmed mouth opening—

  “Did you know,” she said calm as lava flow, bursting into flame, “did you know that the entire. Fucking. World. Does. Not. Fit. In. My. Handbag?”

  And then, the bus was going too fast. And then the bus at the hill. And then, two tween girls fighting over who could scream the shrillest. And then, bus horn blaring, and then the bus, too fast, crested the hill, and now everyone was still screaming, but screaming for different reasons, as the bus wheels spun in the air, and he was crushed up against her with his stupid sandwich squelching wetly on her white silk blouse.

  In front of her, the little boy flew straight off his sister’s knee and him, this boy, floating through the air towards her like a pancake in a spaceship, flying towards her, he landed on her POOF like a jumbo Costco bag of flour, right on her, in her own lap, knocking off her purse, which flew, scattering coins and tampons and she, flying backward into a seat, instinctively putting her arms around the boy as the bus flew above San Francisco, the city lights below exactly like stars, like a million signs of the potential for life, a man reaching over to turn off the bedside light, a bar brawl in the Marina—just two kids homesick for Tennessee, a homeless man drunk or dead on the street, a woman dragging an IV with one wayward wheel down a hospital hallway, the line at the funeral home, the line at the ice cream shop, the line at the employment center
, the line for a night club, and above them all, the sky, the stars, their impossible loneliness, the result of two atoms chance met in an infinity of chaos—colliding, fighting, really. And from this meeting, matter, planets, Siberian tigers, Boy George, an onion sandwich, this strange little boy on her lap smelling like sweet orange blossoms and peanut butter and glue, a stupid boy/man leaning over her with maggot fingers and onion breath, saying “Are you sure you’re not mad?”

  The airborne bus wheels landed on the hill, squeaking and squeaking, squeaking out exactly the first three measures of “A Love Supreme,” then they hit the ground hard and continued squeaking down the hill.

  The child tore out of her arms and ran back to his sister laughing, the moms screamed back door, back door, the cityscape was gone, obscured by a row of sweet-tart Victorians. And that’s when she realized that she had been wrong, this whole time. Because it turned out, upon further reflection, that the whole goddamn world had fit into her handbag. And now it was gone. All of it. Prison cells and beach balls, oatmeal and peacocks.

  Gone out the windows.

  There was only now a row of vacant houses and a starless night.

  Except for their now-empty bus.

  And his too-brown eyes, blinking vacantly at her, as if beginning to wonder if, perhaps, maybe, possibly, she was mad.

  Slowly she closed the zipper pocket where her keys always disappeared. She drew the quilted leather sides together. She snapped the tiny golden C shaped clasp. She folded her fingers over it, protectively.