In the Land of Porcelain

Chapter One

I started walking, what I call City Buddha-Mind walking, the summer before Mark left for Georgetown. The day Mark left I woke up early, his arm heavy across me. I rolled out from under it, threw on some clothes, and slipped outside into the fragile San Francisco dawn.

City Buddha-Mind walking always took a few blocks to get going, to drop into the rhythm, to absorb the mood of the light and weather. Stepping out the door, I’d plan my course, visualize the terrain, and then head towards a good-sized hill to get my blood moving. Somewhere near the top I would find my pace for the day; I’d hit my stride. And then I could think. Or even better, not think. Just perceive

San Francisco has amazing light. Mark said he never thought my love affair with the city would last so long: for someone who prided herself in being practical and logical, couldn’t I see that a city was just concrete and asphalt and throngs of people hassled from living so close together? But on a clear day the sunlight in San Francisco dazzles, etching color and form with a clarity so keen it stings the retina. Then, as afternoon darkens to evening, clouds roll in and tuck the city in under an opalescent blanket of pearl. For better or worse, I knew I belonged on this troubled tip of peninsula and nowhere else.

That summer before Mark left, our impending separation circled our heads like a buzzard. In August it descended with a swoop and found me on the crest of Liberty Street hugging my arms against the morning chill. The air was misty, the sky a lilac rose, the porcelain city spread in front of me. He’s really going, I told myself. With a sharp plunge the process of flesh eating and bone pecking had begun.

“Come here,” Mark said to me from rumpled sheets when I slipped back into our bedroom.

Mark had dark brown hair that curled in waves, broad shoulders, a defined jaw. The kind of guy that looks good even unshaven and half awake. He stretched out a hand to me and I went. After all, it would be a while before we had the chance again.

“Thank you for your patience, ladies and gentlemen. We will begin boarding Flight 642 to Washington in a few moments. Please remain seated until . . .”

Everyone in the crowded waiting area sprang to their feet clutching boarding passes like lottery tickets. Mark and I stayed where we were.

“So this is it,” I said. “You’re going 3000 miles away.”

“Only for a while,” Mark answered, trying to reassure me. But the fact was, he was excited. Eager. His whole future lay ahead of him. And me? Well, my future lay ahead of me too.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we will board by row. Please remain seated until . . .”

A queue half a block long coiled through the waiting area.

Mark and I weren’t naive about what lay ahead. We recognized living apart would be difficult, even inconvenient, but Mark would study industriously, I would concentrate on my career, and we would crisscross the skies to see each other almost every month. Three years of law school would pass by in a flash. BCDR, my sister, Amanda, called it. Bi-coastal, dual rental. All sorts of couples were doing it these days.

“You could still come with me,” Mark suggested. “You’d find a job in a week.”

I’d just been promoted; I didn’t want to move. “You could still go to law school here,” I mumbled back.

“Airports are crummy places to say good-bye.”

I handed Mark a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude to read on the plane.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please. Only rows 36 through 42 should . . .”

Passengers trickled by like water through a clogged drain. Mark put his arms around me; I kept mine folded against the front of his chest. “Don’t look so sad, Sara. It’ll be okay. You’ll see.”

But I didn’t see. I looked down at the ring on my left hand and idly circled it around my finger with my thumb. Was I crazy to be taking this kind of risk? There’s no risk, I told myself.

“You’ll wear a groove in your finger if you keep twisting your ring like that.”

I leaned my head in, he leaned his against mine, and we stood, foreheads touching and silent amid the hubbub.

Amanda grandly tells our relatives she lives in San Francisco for its ambiance. Whenever I climb to the top of Liberty Street, the city at my feet, I always feel exhilarated, as if I’ve arrived at an apex of the world. With my pulse pounding from exertion, I gaze and gaze at the view, and as I do, I feel my heart crack and expand, just a little, like it does whenever I see someone I love from a distance.

“Last call for flight 642. I repeat, last . . .”

Mark and I stood close in the now deserted waiting area. “Time to go,” he said.

I stretched out my hand in the gesture of an offer. “I love you.”

Mark took my hand, told me he loved me too, and then inexorable forces of the universe sucked him away, yanking our orbits loose from each other.

So this is it, I thought despondently.

Mark walked jauntily down the ramp like an explorer off to jungles of deepest green.

Thinking back on that summer, I recognize I started walking to practice being without Mark. I’d go out for only an hour, take in a few hills, look over the city, and tell myself Washington was flat, really flat. I convinced myself interesting topography was essential to my sanity. Maybe it was. I’d return to find Mark reading the newspaper on the couch beneath his favorite poster of John Reed shaking hands with Emma Goldman. I’d tell myself I was lucky to be loved by someone so attractive, so intelligent, so passionate about justice and fairness. Then I’d say something like, “Why did we get married if we can’t even agree on where to live?”

“Sara, Sara, Sara,” he’d say and read on just a little further which always irritated me. I was important enough to stop mid-sentence for. Then Mark would sigh, put the paper down, and I’d forlornly curl up next to him on the couch.

No doubt it was easier in the past when the wife followed her husband wherever he went, or waited at home, no questions asked, but I knew compliance of that sort would be more unacceptable than my insecurity. Over the millennium of time, men have gone hunting, gone exploring, gone to war. At least graduate school was a relatively safe activity. Clearly Mark was going on a journey he needed. It took me much longer to realize I’d set off on a journey of my own.

Journeys. Everyone, including Mark, thought I stayed behind for my job, but it wasn’t just for that. It was for San Francisco and independence and self-definition and topography, though I will say, getting promoted at the tender age of twenty-seven had taken me four years of determined effort, and just when I got it, boom, Mark wanted to move. I worked for a corporation called Appleton-Smith. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. They make everything under the sun, from laundry soap to snack crackers. My promotion had made me the manager of a group of people whose reason for being was to manufacture hand cream. Very large quantities of it. We made high quality, department store kind of stuff in nice containers with fancy labels. Scented, sometimes unscented, with glycerin or vitamin E or aloe added in, depending on what would sell. We didn’t decide what sold, marketing and sales did. They said make it, we made it. My job was to get the materials, people, and machinery together as efficiently and inexpensively as possible while meeting quality standards. I had a business degree, but this job took the patience of a playground supervisor and the shrewdness of Talleyrand during the Reign of Terror. Some knowledge of logistics, machine maintenance, budgeting, and concise memo writing also came in handy. Really, the most important prerequisite for business is common sense, but as Voltaire said in an age with its own kinds of CEOs, padded expense accounts, and strained labor-management relations, common sense is not so common.

And so Mark left and I was miserable, but I did what I had to do and coped. Mark, in contrast, was immediately delighted with the challenges of law school. He joined an environmental student group, and his conversation began to narrow to events in Washington. I told him I was glad for him, and truly, I was. If Mark doesn’t have a cause to immerse himself in, he’s lost. During those first long weeks of September, I focused on my job; in the evenings, I plowed through novels like a caffeine junkie knocks back lattes. It was a simple existence, little to look forward to or regret, and I accepted that this was the price I had to pay for staying in San Francisco. There was, however, a minor factor that I didn’t count on, one small principle of the universe that would eventually rip the pickets off my fenced-in life. Nature (as anyone in first-year physics will tell you) always abhors a vacuum.

One morning a month after Mark left, I was doing the usual: settling down into the turbulence of a bumpy Monday at work. Glancing at my watch, I was startled to see it was only ten o’clock. Already I’d returned six phone calls, dealt with a late glycerin truck, and consoled an employee sobbing in my office because his wife had left him over the weekend. Now I gazed out my large office window that looked onto the factory floor and listened to the muffled clatter of machinery seeping through the glass. On a good day the din roared like the ocean; today it sputtered like a dyspeptic lawn mower. I closed my eyes and wondered for the five hundredth time why I hadn’t moved to Washington with Mark.

My eyes opened with a start. A man in an expensive charcoal gray suit stood quietly in my office doorway watching me.

“Are you Sara Whitfield?” he asked. “I believe I have an appointment to meet with you.”

I quickly rose to my feet. “Yes, I’m Sara.” Paul, my boss, had mentioned in passing we’d have a consultant coming this week from Merrisocks Gospout, a prestige consulting firm in the city. Foolish me, I’d assumed I’d be given pertinent details, like when and why, in due time.

“I’m Aaron Lambert,” the consultant said, shaking my hand. As I hesitated, not sure whether to bluff or confess ignorance, Aaron calmly snapped opened his briefcase. “Accounting and purchasing procedures. That’s why I’m here. Don’t worry you’re the third person I’ve met with this morning and the other two didn’t know either.” I winced. I hated for Appleton-Smith to look so disorganized to an outsider. What must he think of us? “Your company appears to like surprises,” he commented dryly. “It must make this a festive place to work.”

Not highly, that’s what he thinks of us. Wonderful, I thought. Not only do I get a mystery consultant in my office before my second cup of coffee, I get an annoyed one. “Sorry. I wish I were more prepared. How can I help you?”

“Appleton-Smith’s last audit showed problems with employees following purchasing procedures. What you and I need to do is go over your department records from the last year and trace a few equipment purchases.”

I stifled a groan. No wonder Paul hadn’t given me more warning —I would’ve been tempted to call in sick. Many people in my department purchased many things; I now hoped it’d all been done according to the snarled web of procedures our purchasing department loved to create. I looked at him, this consultant. In his thirties, black hair, intelligent eyes that probably didn’t miss much, not as tall as Mark, maybe five ten. His gray suit was more than expensive, it was elegant, and he wore a subdued, but absolutely beautiful violet-blue silk tie. He looked used to higher stakes assignments: I wondered what he was doing auditing us. As Aaron settled back into his chair, he made a few notes and began to look less annoyed. I, on the other hand, began to feel as if the Spanish Inquisition had descended on me to extract a confession of guilt.

Aaron glanced up. “You look like I’m here to pull your teeth. Cheer up. This may be dull, but it won’t be that bad.”

Well, dullness I could take. After all, lately it’d been my constant companion. I had to dig out reams of computer reports, and then Aaron and I sat across from each other as we sorted through them.

“Are you an expert on accounting and purchasing procedures?” I asked.

“Not in the least,” Aaron answered affably enough.

“Why did they bring you in then?”

“I think my main qualification is that I don’t work for Appleton-Smith, which in theory makes me an unbiased observer.”

“Oh,” I said. “Are you?”

“Unbiased?” He sounded amused. “Enough for something this routine. Do you have a printout of orders from June and July?”

I flipped through a large stack to find it.

“How long have you worked for Appleton-Smith?” Aaron asked as he jotted down an account code.

“Four years.”

“You’re married?” he said conversationally.

 I glanced at a picture of Mark propped in a frame on my desk and then at Aaron’s left hand. No ring. “Yes. Are you?”

“No. Do you and your husband live on the Peninsula?”

“We live in the city, or at least I do. My husband’s in Washington DC, going to law school.”

Aaron pulled a calculator out of his briefcase. “A long-distance marriage. That must be challenging.”

“I’m surviving. Whenever I’m bored, I just browse through old purchasing records and the hours fly by.”

The corners of Aaron’s mouth tugged into a smile. “A scintillating hobby. Is purchase order 45901 on your sheet?”

Scintillating, indeed. More like mind-numbing and coma-inducing. But he had a sense of humor, an encouraging sign. A friendly auditor is always preferable to a grumpy one.

“Three’s too many,” an angry voice boomed from out of the blue.

I looked up with dismay. “Joe—”

“One. Tell her we’re doing one.”

“Excuse me,” I said to Aaron before hustling Joe, the production supervisor, out of my office and into the hall. I knew what he was upset about. “Joe, Althea wouldn’t have scheduled the changeovers if they weren’t necessary, you know that. She needs them to lower our inventories.”

Joe was a Korean War veteran twice my age who’d run the mechanical side of the department for years. He tended to bark out orders like a Marine and wore a bristly crew cut so short I wasn’t quite sure what color his hair was. He leaned forward now, pointing a stubby finger at my face. I steeled myself for the onslaught.

“What do they do in college these days—everyone sit around thinking how to screw up my packing lines? Changing over this much is like cutting off our legs when we’re trying to run. I don’t give a flying frog’s hiney about inventories. I refuse, do you hear me? Refuse.” With that he folded his thick arms over his barrel chest. Though Joe and I were roughly the same height, he had a good sixty pounds on me, and from time to time I’d seen him arm-wrestle some of the guys in the break room. Given the chance, he would’ve snapped my arm to the table like a straw.

I didn’t like being yelled at, but I needed his cooperation, and he knew it. “Inventories cost money, Joe. It’s money tied up that you can’t do anything else with. Most other companies have been working to lower inventories for years.”

“Things didn’t used to be this way. We used to run one scent of hand cream for two weeks straight, and the lines ran smooth as silk.”

“Joe, it’s 1992, not 1962. You used to only have two scents and one size of tube. Now we’ve got bottles, tubes, and eight scents.”

“Not doing it,” he said, pointing again. “Not three. Make that woman understand.”

“Maybe you could talk with Althea yourself. She could show you how she—”

“You talk with her. And tell her she gets one. No more.”

I took a deep breath. I didn’t want to do this, but I had to. “Let’s compromise. How about two changeovers this week?”

“You got it.” Joe sauntered down the hall pleased.

I irritably ran my hand through my hair that was chin length, brown, and quite straight. Now Althea would be upset. There must be some other way to deal with Joe, I thought. Until I found it, this stonewalling would go on and on.

“Sorry,” I said to Aaron, slipping back in my chair after giving Althea the bad news, not that I’d needed to. She’d heard the whole conversation from her office. As had Aaron, no doubt. “Sometimes I feel more like a referee than manager around here.”

“No problem,” he replied. We both got back to our numbers.

Near noon, I was getting hungry and glanced at my watch. Aaron put down the stack of forms he held. “This’ll take at least another hour. Can I take you to lunch?”

“Sorry?” I said, surprised.

“Lunch. You’re a client. It’s a common practice.”

I was used to eating alone, reading a book over a sandwich at a deli. Well, Amanda had been encouraging me to be more social, and besides, he might be interesting to talk to. I said yes and suggested a Chinese restaurant close by.

“What do you think of Appleton-Smith?” I asked after we ordered.

Aaron poured us both tea. “The truth? A standard company making standard mistakes.”

I blinked in surprise. Surely we were a little better than standard?

“Sorry if that’s blunt,” he said, noting my reaction. “Your particular department seems to be doing well.”

“How do you know? You’ve been analyzing purchase orders the last two hours.”

 “Your lines didn’t stop running during those two hours, the equipment’s clean and well-tended, your employees pay attention to their work, and you have Deming’s Fourteen Points on your wall. All good signs.”

I couldn’t help but be pleased by his words. “Thanks,” I said.

“It wasn’t meant as a compliment, just an observation.”

“Then thanks for noticing.”

He paused, evaluating me. “You don’t get much positive feedback at work, do you?”

I shrugged. Not since Jack retired, I thought, but it wasn’t worth going into. I eyed Aaron speculatively as our food was served, impressed he knew about Deming’s Fourteen Points. I was curious about what made him tick. “Most consultants I know do nothing but work,” I observed, picking up my chopsticks.

“The job can be demanding,” he agreed.

“Outside work, what do you do?”

Aaron looked me over a second. “Outside work, I write poetry.”

“A poet,” I said, tilting my head to one side. “In a business suit?”

“It pays the bills. Business does, I mean, not poetry.”

A poet, I thought, has come to Appleton-Smith. How extraordinary. “I don’t read much poetry,” I said. “I suppose I should.”

“These days more people seem to be writing poetry than reading it,” he said without rancor. “Maybe it’s a dying genre.”

“I read a lot of novels,” I offered.

“Novels,” he repeated. “What kind?”

“Oh, classics mostly. I majored in business in college, and now I’ve got a lot to catch up on. I tend to hop around between centuries. If I were more disciplined, I guess I’d do it properly, start with Robinson Crusoe and move forward.”

“Literature’s not like accounting. A random order will probably help.” Aaron appeared amused as he sipped his tea. “Do you like your job?” he asked. “You seem to be doing well: you have a lot of responsibility.”

“It’s why I didn’t go to Washington.” I looked across the room at a scene of Chinese pilgrims traversing a bridge under a cloud of cherry blossoms. Perhaps I looked wistful because his next question surprised me.

“You have regrets?”

“Oh, no. I mean, Mark just left, and I’m living with my sister, and we keep each other company. I once read a book where someone criticized Americans for not having time for an interior life. Now I’ve got time for it.” As I readjusted my chopsticks in my fingers, it occurred to me that I shouldn’t let the conversation get any more personal. Curiosity, however, overwhelmed etiquette. “What about you?” I asked. “Any relationships, girlfriends?”

“A long distance one” he answered with a smile. “Familiar story.”

“So we have something in common. What’s her name?”

“Elizabeth. We’re engaged, actually.”

“Congratulations,” I said. “Where does she live?”

“Boston. She’s studying at Harvard Divinity School to be a minister.”

“That’s unusual. Good for her.”

“Yes, she’s remarkable.”

Definitely in love, I thought. How nice. I always liked it when men spoke highly of the woman in their life. “And you don’t mind being alone?” I couldn’t resist asking.

Aaron looked up from his chopsticks. “I suppose I’m used to it.” He drank some more tea, his eyes curious as he scrutinized me. His expression reminded me of the way people at the Museum of Modern Art look when they like a piece well enough to struggle with it, though I didn’t think I’d been that oblique. How black his lashes are, I thought, and his eyes were an interesting blue. Sapphire? You’re staring, Sara. I glanced back over at the pilgrims.

After lunch we didn’t find any major deviations and finished up the audit. I told him which aspects of our purchasing procedures were insane (in my opinion) and suggested improvements. When Aaron went on to the Shampoo and Foaming Baths department, I gave a sigh of relief at having passed the inquisition. Why had he asked me to lunch? Well, maybe for consultants it was bad form to eat a sandwich solo at a deli. He’d been intriguing to talk to anyway.

I met with Althea later that afternoon. She was a tall black woman in her early thirties who looked less than cheerful as she sat down in my office. I wondered what Althea’s life was like outside of work. I knew she had a husband and a three-year-old daughter, that she sang in her church choir, and that was about it. I didn’t imagine it was easy to be black and work at Appleton-Smith, there were so few African Americans working here.

We discussed her project to get smaller quantities of tubes more frequently from our supplier so we could cut our tube inventories. I asked if she needed any help.

“I could use you not changing the schedule when Joe yells,” Althea said, brushing a piece of lint off the sleeve of her deep purple sweater. “With all the fuss he makes, you’d think I was scheduling him for a root canal. I thought he had a project to reduce changeover time.”

“He does,” I said with a sigh, “but he’s convinced the lines run better on longer runs. I wish engineering would deliver the new parts like they promised. That should make things easier.”

“Hmm.” She sounded as if she agreed with me, but she was also frowning.

“Althea, do you like working here?”

Althea’s face turned blank and impassive, like a cat ready to ignore a scolding. “It’s a job.”

“You’re doing good work; keep pushing, okay? If it gets too ugly, come talk to me. Let me know how I can help.”

“Sara, you need to figure out what’ll get those bozos to change. You do your work, I’ll do mine.”

“You sound angry.”

“Maybe I am. You’re the boss, stop caving in. Do what you know is right.”

We were both silent, not exactly looking at each other. “Anything else?”

“Nope. That’s all the glad tidings for today.”

She rose. This meeting with her wasn’t going any better than my run-in with Joe.

“Althea—” She turned. I paused, grasping for some bridge, some connection. “I—I like the color of your sweater.”

“Thanks,” she answered deadpan.

Sara, how utterly, utterly inadequate. My eyes followed Althea’s elegant, straight back as she left the room, and then I put my head down in my arms. Immediately I popped back up. I could be seen through my office window, and I knew appearing on the verge of despair wouldn’t help me any. I wanted to support Althea and to get Joe to change, but there were times I felt powerless to accomplish either. The guys running the lines were on Joe’s side. If I pushed Joe too hard, he could create mishaps that would ensure no hand cream got produced for weeks, and it’d be my head on the block. The old plant manager, Jack, had warned when he promoted me that I’d have to dance carefully on this job, but he’d assured me I could do it. How I wish Jack hadn’t retired and moved to Arizona.

What would Deming say? Good old Edwards Deming, the first business quality guru, ignored by his own country in the wake of World War II and made a hero by the Japanese instead. As Aaron had noted, on the wall above my desk I’d hung a poster of Deming’s Fourteen Points. Point number nine now stood out accusingly: “Break down barriers between departments.” The barrier between Joe and Althea should be an easy one to conquer, a little baby step when I had so far to go.

“For heaven’s sake, quit with the moping,” Amanda said after I’d wandered listlessly around the apartment that evening. Amanda, my older sister, was much less responsible and more cheerfully manic than I could ever be. When we were little, we created some costumes and tricks and put on a circus for our parents. Amanda had Dad shine a flashlight on her as she introduced us as “Serious Sara, Amazing Amanda,” a pronouncement I resented but accepted as truth. Now I was living with her, ILOM, itinerant lodger of the moment. I was by no means the first to have the honor.

“Your sympathy is touching,” I said. “Next time, send a card.”

“Look, I’m plenty sympathetic, but you’ve got to quit wasting your energy feeling bad. Either move to Washington or get busy living.”

“I’m in transition. I’ve got to refigure out my life.”

“So get a hobby. Take a class. Volunteer somewhere. Sara, look at you; you’re turning into a hermit. Next thing you know, you’ll stop taking showers.”

“My personal hygiene is not at risk,” I said crisply. “Having no social life isn’t a crime. It’s what I feel like. I feel withdrawn. Like a turtle.” I could picture two little eyes staring out from the shadow of its shell.

Amanda went into the kitchen and came back out. “Here’s the phone book, here’s the newspaper. There’s plenty to do in a city like this. Give yourself some structured activities, or you’ll end up doing nothing but reading.”

I took the phone book and newspaper and plopped them on the coffee table. I wanted understanding, not solutions. “I’ll do it when I feel like it,” I said, getting up off the couch.

“Where are you going?”

“To my room.”

“You’re going to read,” she accused.

“Yep. Solzhenitsyn. Gulag Archipelago.” I left the room.

On Wednesday of the same week, Aaron stopped by my office. I hadn’t seen him since Monday, and immediately I feared he’d found a miscoded purchase order and I’d have to spend the rest of the day on a treadmill of numbers. It was quite the opposite. He apologized for the short notice, but he had tickets to the symphony the next evening, and would I be interested? I tapped my pen against my lower lip. Well, he was interesting, well-mannered, and quite betrothed. The symphony sounded appealing—I did need to get out more—but would Mark get upset? Aaron stood waiting for my response. I decided that I’d call Mark and tell him. If he had a fit, I could always cancel. I told Aaron yes, and we agreed on a restaurant where we’d meet for dinner. It was all casual and painless, nothing like the clumsy awkwardness of dating.

“I’ve got a date,” I told Mark that night on the phone.

“Oh?”

“Just kidding. I’m going to the symphony with a guy I met at work. He’s practically married to some woman in Boston. We’ll commiserate about our long-distance phone bills.”

“Sounds kind of dull. You should go see that new Noam Chomsky documentary instead. I’m sure it’s playing somewhere in the city. Hey, did you hear what they’re proposing as the latest safeguard against oil spills? It’s such a joke.”

“No, tell me.”

He certainly took it well, I thought later as I hung up. I went over to the living room window and gazed at fog blotting out the lights of the Financial District. I’d always coveted this view from Amanda’s apartment, and now it was mine, too, for a while. Suddenly I wished with all my heart that I could turn and find Mark stretched out on the couch, reading the paper with his reassuring frown of concentration. But it was a ridiculous wish. I could see in the window’s reflection that the couch was empty. What could you see from Mark’s apartment? I’d find out in two weeks when I flew out to Washington to visit him.

Restlessly I picked up the newspaper still lying on the coffee table where I’d dropped it days ago. Maybe Amanda had a point. I turned to the section that listed organizations looking for volunteers and saw that a shelter for battered women wanted someone to teach how to budget and how to balance a checkbook. I could do that. I called the number and left my name on an answering machine.

A few minutes later Amanda bounded in the front door, home late from her job at an art supply store. She was humming to herself in a pleasant sort of way. Over the past decade Amanda had changed her hair color more often than some people change their sheets, but lately she’d settled on a deep brownish red, permed and cut in a short bob.

“You’re in a good mood,” I said.

She hung up her coat and headed to the kitchen. “Yes, indeedy.”

I followed behind. “Why so chipper?”

“I’ve got a date for Friday night.”

“My, my. Who’s the lucky guy?”

“You haven’t met him.” Amanda peered into the freezer. “He’s a doctor.” She whisked a frozen dinner out, stabbed the plastic wrapping in a couple of places with a knife and popped it in the microwave.

I frowned. “I thought you didn’t like doctors.” In college she’d gone out with a medical student who’d argued constantly, was too busy to see her, forgot her birthday, and then called every day for two months after she gave him the boot. She’d had no trouble being merciless.

“I don’t. But this one’s different.”

“Statistically improbable. How’d you meet him?”

“He came in the store, and we started talking.”

“Amanda, doctors don’t buy art supplies.”

“This one does. His wife’s an artist—monoprints, I guess.”

“He’s married?”

“Yep.” Amanda pulled her dinner from the beeping microwave. “A lot of people are these days.”

“Oh, Amanda. It’s sleazy, it’s worm-like. It’s so, so . . . Genine.” Genine was our father’s second wife, former girlfriend.

Amanda peeled the plastic off her chicken enchilada, yipping as steam burnt her fingers. “So I’m Miss Scum of the Earth. I’ve been called worse. And it’s nothing at all like Genine, thank you very much.”

“You have an affair, he dumps you—then what? You’ll get hurt.”

“I’m a big girl. If I get hurt, it won’t be the first time.”

I sighed. “I care about you.”

“Yeah, I know.” She put down her plate and hugged me. “I appreciate it, but it won’t do any good.”

“Amanda—” I paused, undecided whether to tell her about the symphony. If I did, she’d give me as much grief as I’d just given her.

“Sara. What?” She faced me, eyebrows raised, hands on her hips.

“Forget it. I’m going to bed.”

“You going to go read?”

“I feel like walking, actually, but it’s dark and I don’t want to go alone.”

“I’ll go with you,” she offered. “For a short one.”

We went just to the top of the hill, the wind whipping our breath away. The bank of clouds had blown away, uncovering the lights of the Bay Bridge and the East Bay as well as the spangled downtown skyline.

“What a magnificent city,” Amanda said.

“You can’t see any of the problems from up here,” I said dourly. “No homeless, no crime, no potholes, no AIDS.”

“Sometimes illusions are a nice break.”

At that moment I felt content to be living in San Francisco with my sister. We went home and I read until eleven, lying in a bed still more compressed and hollowed on Mark’s side than mine.