“I mean, I know that you and your mother didn’t always see eye to eye and that this must be very hard on you, Mason, not having seen her or talked to her in some time … it’s understandable that you might not be comfortable staying at the apartment.” Ron is blathering. He needs to shut up. And why does he keep saying you’ll be uncomfortable, you’ll be uncomfortable? I wouldn’t be uncomfortable—it’s where I grew up, sort of, sometimes. I have a bedroom there. At least I think I still do. My mother would say that: “There’s always a bed waiting for you. You can always come home.”
“Britt—your mother—she called it her refuge, you know,” Ron says. He’s getting weepy, red-faced on the verge of blubber.
“I know she did.” I say this through clenched teeth, angry, not sad. Ron’s mustache is disgusting. It makes me think of the column my mother once wrote about mustache versus non-mustache oral sex. I get a flash of my mother laid out on Ron’s tacky bed, wearing magenta lipstick, Ron’s mustache tickling her monkey, as she wrote in her column. I feel sick. I try to conjure other images in my head, of puppies, fast food, Seth and cowboys—anything. But I can’t erase it. Tickling my monkey. Oh God. “I did know my own mother,” I snap at Ron. Where is that fucking taxi?
“Mason, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply that you didn’t. Of course you knew your mother. You don’t have to be close or keep in touch to know someone. I’m just saying—”
“You’ve said enough.” I’m not falling for his passive-aggressive bullshit. You don’t have to be close; you don’t have to keep in touch. He’s probably pissed that he only gets a fraction of what I do of my mother’s estate if there’s anything left after the lawyer’s fees and taxes.
I turn my body as far from Ron as I possibly can once we get in the taxi that has finally arrived. I open the window and let the dense spring air blow onto my face. We drive past familiar spaces that are now something new. We drive up Kearny through downtown and I notice that the Hello Kitty store is gone. I’m sad about this but couldn’t say why. Seth and I used to load up on Hello Kitty notepads and pencils we’d buy at shops in Japantown when we were teenagers, and use them in school. People were always so surprised: the pair of us who dressed head-to-toe in black, using cutesy pink paper and pens with kitties and hearts.
Then Hello Kitty got huge, went superglobal. There was the video cartoon series and this pissed us off. The original, authentic Hello Kitty had no mouth—not until the videos. It was better when she couldn’t speak. When the big Sanrio store on Kearney opened it was immediately packed with tourists and little girls. Seth and I burned our Hello Kitty things in the fireplace in the home of my mother’s fourth husband.
Anything plastic—the key rings, the soft, miniature binders—smoked and smelled. The alarm triggered and the fire trucks came. We were ushered onto the street as we tried to explain. Neighbors gawked and my mother’s fourth husband, Gregory, had a fit. He was rich, old money—very private, he liked to say. That was crap, of course. If he was really so private, he shouldn’t have married a newspaper columnist with a well-known habit for writing about every embarrassing detail of her life and the lives of those around her. As if everyone didn’t know he was “Griffin,” her rich, society husband. As if he didn’t secretly love it. They all did until they started to hate the things they thought they loved about my mother in the first place.
The Hello Kitty false alarm was some sort of final straw between Gregory and my mother. Their arguments escalated and became more frequent, and soon we were back in North Beach spending my mother’s substantial alimony checks on an extravagant red-and-black lacquer early-nineties makeover for the apartment. I demanded baroque wallpaper in red and gold with flocked, flying black bats. It was specially ordered from Italy and cost three hundred dollars a roll.
The Hello Kitty store is gone, no longer poised for Seth and me to walk by and roll our eyes, aghast at the branding of toasters and vibrators and cars with her image. We can’t just happen by on our way to Nordstrom—if we were, for some strange reason, going to Nordstrom—and remember the Hello Kitty false alarm and how we used to scour the shops in Japantown. The store’s not there to act as a prompt for us to complain about how Hello Kitty is such a sellout and how things aren’t at all like they used to be.
“Will I see you again before you leave?” Ron asks as a bellhop opens the taxi door to let me out in front of the hotel. I don’t offer to pay or chip in. I’m broke. He can pay and get all passive-aggressive about it later. I’ll mail him a check for my part of the fare when I get my inheritance. I’ll owe him nothing and we’ll never have to speak again. “We could have lunch?”
Lunch? What is he on about? And I wish he’d stop using that horrible, patronizing tone. He doesn’t have to talk to me like I’m retarded or some horrible daughter who wasn’t close to her mother and didn’t keep in touch.
“Mason?”
I sigh and look over my shoulder. “Fine. Yes. We can have lunch,” I say just to get him to shut up. There will be no lunch. I barely know the man.
THE MARK
Before checking out of the Fairmont and meeting Seth and Janet across the street for drinks, I changed out of the Versace suit in favor of a black wrap skirt and a men’s sports jacket I wear over a T-shirt featuring a silk-screened bunny with X’s for eyes. The maître d’ and Enforcer of the Dress Code at The Top of the Mark does nothing to hide his disdain after giving me a quick once-over. What? I glare at him and shrug.
The Top of the Mark is one of San Francisco’s Great Rooms, with its polished wood, Art Deco vibe and a view of the city so breathtaking I question how I could have left this place for a lazy Canadian mountain town where everyone thinks I’m a witch. Then I remember: my mother made me do it. Suddenly, I miss Canmore and my boring job at the bookstore, but mostly I miss the quiet. There is no silence for me here.
Seth is chatting up two ladies with matching chignons. I don’t see Janet, so I plant myself at a table in the corner, and read the extensive list of extravagant cocktails I can no longer afford. I read it two, three times. Seth is still chatting with the chignons. I read the menu once more, wave the waitress over and order myself a drink and the Mediterranean appetizer platter on Seth’s tab.
“Mason, hi, I’m so sorry I’m late. I was in Oakland and got held up and it took forever to get across the Bay Bridge.” Janet is breathless and harried; her forehead is damp. She dots her face with a pad of fine pressed powder. She takes a white elastic from her bag and twists her long hair back and up, securing it in a high, messy bun that is more high-end fashion model than rat’s nest. Everything is so easy for her—it’s like her life is effortless, with only momentary blips like getting stuck in traffic trying to make it back from Oakland during rush hour. She collapses into the seat beside me.
“Wait a minute.” Now I’m confused. I narrow my eyes and push my face closer to hers.
“What?”
“Since when do you go to Oakland?” I wrinkle my nose and sniff at her shoulder.
Janet ignores this and takes the glass from my hand and finishes what was left of my martini. She laughs and raises her hand to smooth her hair, but it’s already up and just-so. “Oakland’s changed, Mason. All the artists who were driven out of the city during the dot-com boom have all set up there. It’s great—like Brooklyn, but ten years ago.”
“So you go to Oakland a lot?” I move closer again and sniff at her, and again she fusses nervously with her hair.
“A bit, yeah. There are some great little places—I have some clients.