Joan Silber - Fools - Stories

Adinah had been sharing a cottage in Berkeley with a swarm of people, so she didn’t have tons of belongings when she moved in with me. All the same, after the first blast of mutual joy, we were kind of crowded in my small space, never out of each other’s sight. So I got together some bucks left over from a minor marijuana deal Sandie had helped me with the year before, and I ponied it up for realtor’s fees and security, and I moved Adinah and me into a bigger apartment, on a hilly block in Noe Valley. The rent wasn’t a bargain, but I did have a salary.

I loved that apartment. It had a big bay window in the living room and great old woodwork and rooms full of nooks and crannies, very San Francisco. Adinah was touched that I’d done this for both of us, and, of course, I was touched too. I rented a sander and got the floors scraped to the nub, and then we practically asphyxiated ourselves swabbing polyurethane over them. I was the director of all of this, and she was my household. “I hate this job,” she said, happily. She wanted to name the apartment, the way people name a boat or sometimes a car, but I thought that was going too far.

Nonetheless she named it. We lived in “Heaven’s Door,” after the Dylan tune, knock, knock, knockin’ on. I pointed out that in the song the guy was dying, but she didn’t care. “It’s about the death of the lesser self,” she said. Well, I liked the song. “Want to go back to the Door?” she’d ask, when we’d been out at a party long enough. Even I started saying, “The Door is so big it keeps eating my socks.”

We had a mini-view of the eastern sky out the kitchen window, and we were always congratulating ourselves on this peek of cloudy white over the neighboring roofs. One unusually clear night we spotted the sliver of the new moon, and Adinah said, “Oh, there are prayers for that.” She meant Jewish prayers. For the moon? I’d never heard of such a thing. So were the Orthodox into astrology too? “ No ,” she said. “And it sounds better than it was.” I could hardly imagine the world she came from, with its rituals daily, weekly, monthly. “I like this moon better,” she said. “Our moon.”

Adinah’s parents didn’t have our phone number, but sometimes they called her at the restaurant where she worked. One night she told me, “You know what they called to tell me one more time? I was helping the enemies of the Jews by denying who I was, and I was only kidding myself if I thought otherwise. They worked their way into it at the end of the conversation.”

“They waited that long?”

She let out a little mirthless laugh. I put my arms around her for comfort. It was terrible to me that parents, of all people, could be this cruel to someone as gentle as Adinah. Who never said a really mean word about anyone. Who covered her eyes at any bloodshed on TV. I was glad she had me, at least, her personal fortress to lean on. “They’ll get used to your being this way,” I said.

“No, they won’t,” she said.

I’d known waitresses who made good livings, but Adinah, who worked lunches, was not one of them. The rent came from me, which I didn’t mind. We were managing fine, until my rust bucket of a Volkswagen broke down on the way home from work and I had to pay to get it towed and then it needed a new transmission. I was sure that when the end of the month came I would somehow have enough cash on hand for the rent, and I told Adinah it was no problemo , but then as the days went by I saw we had a bit of an emergency on our hands. What surprised me in all this was Adinah.

“You have to do something,” she said. “You better do something.”

“I know that,” I said.

“We can’t lose the apartment. Why did we ever get it if you’re just going to lose it?”

“I’m doing my best, baby,” I said.

“I think I believe you,” she said.

The last thing I expected from my doe-eyed girl was to be pressured . Was she venal at heart, looking for what my mother would call a lunch ticket? This made me remember she’d been eating almost nothing, to help save us, and I understood she was simply scared stiff. But I was still pissed at her.

On the other hand, I knew what I had to do. I called my friend Art, who got in touch with a guy named Spud, and with my last paycheck I bought as much as I could of this high-quality Michoacán grass he had just gotten in. And I wasn’t short on customers — from my office, from Adinah’s restaurant, from our Sufi group. I got us through the crisis just fine, and the two of us had laughing fits watching TV commercials stoned when we were home celebrating the rent payment. The Frito Bandito was pretty funny. Adinah, with her head on my shoulder, snorted and hooted into my neck.

But I didn’t like it. You had to be a certain way when you were buying in bulk. You had to drive to some creepy bungalow in the middle of nowhere, walk in quiet as a cowboy, sampling a joint and muttering Nice, very nice , rubbing the dope between your fingers, making a few worldly wisecracks, shaking the hand of some joker with guns in the house, watching your back every second. Then ride the highway with your radioactive cargo. You were talking yourself into thinking you were one sly dude with balls of steel, you were no one to mess with. This is why people get hurt if they surprise a robber. He’s busy being a robber. It’s why they have to rev up soldiers to be soldiers.

I kept those kilos of dope wrapped in a quilt in a closet in the tiny room Adinah used for meditation. I didn’t want a single one of our many customers to see how much I had. We hadn’t lived in the building that long, and a grandmotherly type across the hall said, “You get a lot of company these days.”

“The door is always open to our friends,” I said.

“Is that a fact?” she said.

So I had to worry about her too. Who knew who she was? All she had to do was make a phone call. I took it out on Adinah, who had wheedled me into this. “Are you comfortable on that sofa?” I said. “Maybe you want us to get a more expensive sofa.”

“Me?” she said. “Not me. I like the opposite. I left the land of white satin sofas and plastic slipcovers. That’s why I’m here.”

“You’re still a princess,” I said.

“Of what?”

“Like the princess and the pea.”

“Where’s the pea?”

“If I left a piece of pepperoni on the sofa, you would leap into the air.”

“At least I know what I think,” she said. “Some people go through life with no guidelines whatsoever.”

“Do you hear what you sound like? You could be Miss Prissy-Ass, my fifth-grade teacher.

“Is that how you see me?” she said.

“You’re too afraid. I want you to be not afraid.”

“What a shit-head you are,” she said. She was tearful too, tight-mouthed and frowning.

“You don’t want to be free?”

“Every sleazebag says that when a woman won’t sleep with him.”

“Excuse me for offending you,” I said.

It went on like that and it didn’t get better either. She must have wondered what she was doing with a creep like me. All her innocence, all her young-girl nervousness, made me coarser sometimes.

But all couples had fights, didn’t they? Especially when money was in the mix. A day later, Adinah announced that she was taking on more hours in that hippie beanery where she worked, despite my telling her she didn’t have to, what was the point.

“I want to. A few extra pennies, okay?”

“You kids are doing so well,” my mother said. “It lifts my spirits to talk to you.”

Oh, my mother. She still had to see Luís every day at work, which couldn’t have been fun, and then — guess what? — my father had turned up at her door, looking like hell and needing a loan, just a little bail-out to tide him over. Which she gave him. I said, “You didn’t. Tell me you didn’t.” And then she wanted to talk to Adinah, and I could hear Adinah saying into the phone, “Generosity is always cool. Name a religion that doesn’t say that.”