Lindy in the Park
I arrived at Holly’s apartment at the end of June, one week after graduation. Holly hadn’t been able to attend, she couldn’t take time from work, but she watched a recording of me crossing the stage. She saw me tossing my cap.
“The kitchen,” Holly said, with a flourish, when I finally arrived. My flight had been delayed. “The living room.” She’d moved only a couple of feet. Then, down a short hallway, “The bedroom.”
It was true, the apartment was small. But I loved the worn and sloping hardwood floors, the brick fireplace, the view of the city. It was the opposite of the house we’d grown up in, a bungalow with low ceilings and shag carpeting and a view of the matching houses around it. Holly could afford more than this, but I knew the reasons she kept it. It was rent-controlled, a short walk from the hospital where she worked. She wouldn’t have wanted more space.
We returned to the living room, where I’d dropped the blue duffle Holly had given to me when I went away to college – a bag, she said, that reminded her of me for being both unadorned and full of character.
“You don’t have to pay rent,” Holly said. “But you have to clean up after yourself. Keep things tidy.” She eyed me when she said this, and I knew she was thinking of the room we’d shared, growing up, the pile of clothes I never picked up, the books and CDs.
I put my hand over my heart. “I promise.” A joke, but I meant it.
Holly looked away from me, and for a moment I thought she might say something about this, our newfound life without parents. But she only pointed to the sofa, a tidy stack of sheets and on top of this, a washcloth and towel. “Welcome to San Francisco, Annie,” she said, and then she hugged me and made her way down the hall to bed.
*
That spring our father had died. He’d been out for a walk around the lake near his house when his heart stopped. Holly explained this to me over the phone. He died on the path near the Rose Gardens. He wasn’t in pain.
I took the bus from the school I attended, in Beloit, Wisconsin, to Minneapolis, the city in which we’d grown up. I stood with Holly in the basement of the church our father had taken us to every Sunday. We would sit together, the three of us, in a pew near the back, because our father hadn’t liked being around too many people at once. The scene at the funeral reception was familiar: folding tables laid with thin, white tablecloths and spread with casseroles and vegetable trays and cheese and crackers in rows. People we knew from church and the ones our father had known at the IT company where he worked in St. Paul. The smell of the food and the slick polish wafting down the hall from the gym.
“I could help,” I said to Holly when we were standing again in the parking lot. “I could cook for you.”
The thought had occurred to me on the ride from Beloit to Minneapolis. I could go and stay with Holly. I’d majored in journalism – I’d been the host of a campus radio show that aired at 3 a.m. – but I had no plans after college, which hadn’t bothered me until then. I hadn’t been close to our father, his death had come as a kind of relief, but now I felt panic, not so different from the way I’d felt as a child.
Holly opened the back door of her rental car and set down the things that had been given to us – condolence cards, a plate of cookies and another of small sandwiches a woman had insisted she take – Holly, she said, was too thin. Then she straightened and looked at me.
“I don’t know, Annie.”
We both knew that between the two of us, I was the one most in need of help. It was Holly who’d made sure I brushed my teeth and ate my vegetables, who told me to finish my homework and go to bed on time. Holly who checked in on me when I went away to college. Our mother had died of cancer when I was three, and Holly ten, and our father suffered from a disorder I didn’t know the name for until much later. He was often afraid to leave the house. He didn’t like loud noises or chaos or crowds. Holly was different from me – responsible, hard-working. She planned ahead. She worked, now, as a doctor in the emergency room at UCSF.
Holly pushed her hair from her face with the palm of her hand and hugged her arms to her chest. In one week it would be May, but the air was still full of cold.
“… Bumfuzzle?” I said, hopefully, smiling to show I was teasing. This had been our code, the word I used when I was afraid at night and couldn’t sleep, or when our father was in one of his panics.
Holly sighed. “Okay,” she said. I could stay. But there wasn’t much room. I would have to sleep on the couch. And it couldn’t be forever. I would have to look for a job.
A weight lifted. I wanted to be with Holly, to not be alone, but, also, to be forgiven for that part of me that was glad our father was dead.
“Thank you,” I said.
Holly hugged me easily, as she always did. She told me to text when I got back to campus, she would do the same when she landed.
*
On my first morning in San Francisco I rose early. I knew Holly’s schedule – she’d told me this when she took the job. She had to be at the hospital at 7 a.m. and often she worked a twelve-hour shift. Not because she had to – she’d been working long enough to earn better hours – but because she liked the work and didn’t have children and was happy to help the doctors who did. About this we had talked only once. I asked her, after meeting the man she dated in medical school, if she wanted a family. Holly said, without hesitation, no.
When Holly walked into the kitchen I was seated at the table, my laptop open in front of me.
She looked at me, surprised. “You’re up early.”
“Job search,” I said, although if she had looked at the screen, she would have seen it was blank.
“Right.” Holly moved from the counter to the sink, rinsing the tumbler she used for coffee. Outside, a woman stepped out of her apartment and ran a hose over a cluster of impatiens.
“What will you do,” she said – she gestured at the computer – “when you’re done with that?”
I repeated the offer. I could make her dinner.
Holly looked at me as she had before, as though this was a little bit funny. She poured her coffee and took her messenger bag down from its hook. There was a grocery store, she said, in the Sunset, where I could find what I needed.
She turned to face me. “It’s a beautiful city. You should explore.”
Holly had told me about the process of finding a residency and then later, a job. She hadn’t had much choice. Now I understood something I hadn’t before. She was happy with where she had landed. She liked it here. I thought perhaps – this was a thought I’d had as a I rode through the city in the airport van that had taken me to Holly’s apartment – this life was an escape from the one in which we’d grown up.
She crossed the kitchen and kissed the top of my head.
“Be good, Annie,” she said, the same words she’d used when I was a child. Then she walked the short hallway, down the steps and out onto the street.
*
When Holly was gone I stood up from the table. My plan had extended only so far as waking up when Holly did. I could go back to bed, but I was awake now. I wouldn’t be able to sleep.
I walked to the duffel and rummaged a T-shirt and a pair of jeans and then emptied my backpack of everything but a wallet and the spare key Holly had given me the night before. I was hungry and Holly – I knew this already, I’d looked in her cupboards – didn’t have much food.
On the sidewalk I looked up the street and then down it. Parked cars and apartment buildings painted pink and teal and green. At the top of the hill, a mass of blue gum eucalyptus. I turned right and walked to the bottom of Woodland. Right again and two blocks more to the corner of Stanyan and Carl. A small store was there. Flowers and bins of fruit were displayed on the sidewalk and inside, orderly aisles stacked with cereal and bread, flour and sugar and jam. This was not the store my sister had meant, the food was too high-end, but I liked how clean it was, how bright, the cheerfulness of the flowers on the street.
Inside, a woman knelt in front of a crate, unloading cans onto a shelf. “Can I help?”
I shook my head, but then I thought better. “I want to make something fancy.” I blushed as soon as I said it. “I’m making a meal for someone.”
She stood and brushed the front of her pants. They were linen, khaki colored, baggy at the hips. She looked like the pictures I’d seen of Grace Paley, with flyaway hair and eyes that took everything in. On her shirt, a lopsided nametag read, “Sylvia.”
“Meat or no meat?”
“No meat.” That was a thing from our childhood; our father liked meat and Holly did not. When he cooked it, instead of refusing, Holly broke the food into small and smaller pieces so that eventually it looked, to our father at least, as though she’d eaten.
Sylvia led me to an open refrigerated section, waist-height: eggs, hummus, tofu, cheese. “Panzanella,” I said, my tongue tripping over the word. Bread salad. This was a recipe I could manage, one I hoped would impress my sister for being nothing like the food we’d eaten growing up. A roommate had made it in college, from the cookbook of a celebrity.
I named the ingredients and Sylvia led me to them: shallots, tomatoes, garlic, Dijon. I considered a bottle of wine – a toast to my arrival! I would say, teasing – but Holly didn’t drink. I had, in college. Weekends in the dorm rooms of friends. I’d stumbled across the obvious truth that alcohol would both set me free and leave me with myself, both of which I knew Holly would have told me from the start. I chose fruit and cheese, a granola bar and a container of yogurt for breakfast, then walked with my things to the counter.
“You’re new here,” Sylvia said. She was looking down when she said this, examining each item for a price.
“Not new,” I said, although it was true. “Visiting.” I pointed at the food. “I’m visiting my sister.”
She looked up at me and I saw she was curious. “Who is your sister?”
I wondered if it was possible she knew her, if she kept track of the people who waited for the MUNI each morning or bought coffee at the corner café. I described Holly, her straight brown hair, how tall she was and the fact she almost always looked serious. “She’s a doctor,” I said. I was proud of this. Holly could save a life. “You probably don’t know her,” I said. “She would never shop here.” I felt myself blush.
Sylvia placed the food into a paper bag and pushed it across the counter. “I know her,” she said. “She runs in the park.”
“She does?” Both a question and an answer. Holly ran twenty, sometimes thirty miles per week. She’d done this since high school. She hadn’t told me she ran through the park but I wasn’t surprised.
“She shouldn’t do that at night,” Sylvia said. “It’s not safe.”
I waited for the explanation I knew must be coming.
“Receipt?” Sylvia said.
I shook my head, no.
She crumpled the receipt and threw it into the trash. “A woman was killed there,” she said. “Last week. A student on her way home from class.”
She was telling me this because I was new, I might not know the danger, but I wished she hadn’t. I didn’t miss my mother – I hadn’t known her – and about my father I felt a confusing mix of grief, anger, guilt and shame, all of which I preferred to ignore. But about Holly I felt a terrible fear that something could happen – that something would.
I collected the bag of groceries. “I’ll tell her.”
Sylvia nodded and closed the register. “What are you going to do?” she said. “While you visit?”
I hesitated and then, my sister’s word, “Explore.”
Sylvia nodded, as though she, like Holly, approved. She took a folded map from a drawer and pushed it across the counter. I thought to tell her I had my phone, I would be alright, but she had opened it already and was using her finger – her nails were cut short and painted dark blue – to point out to me the different parts of the city. “Seven miles by seven miles,” she said, when she straightened. “You could walk across it, one end to the other, if you wanted.”
I took the map – she shook her head when I offered to pay – and thanked her. Then she walked back to the box of cans and I returned to the street.
*
When Holly got home the food was ready. I’d found the recipe online and tried to match it. I set the table with two plates and two forks, two napkins, two knives. I arranged the fruit and cheese at the center.
“Panzanella!” I said, triumphant, when she walked into the room.
She looked at the salad – I’d overdressed it, the tomatoes shone – and then at the counters and sink.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I had made a mess.
“No.” She shook her head. “It’s nice, Annie.” She looked at me. “I’m going to shower. Okay? And then we can eat.”
When she was gone I cleaned and then straightened. I turned the radio to classic rock – she’d had it playing the night I arrived. I restored the dish towel to the bar on the oven door and opened the window to let in the breeze. I hadn’t minded making the meal, I’d imagined myself Holly’s helper, her savior from hospital food, but now I felt foolish, too obvious in my attempt to play house.
“What did you do today?” Holly said, when she returned. She looked happier now, more relaxed. Her hair was damp and she smelled of the lavender soap I’d found in the shower. She began to eat the salad.
I told her about the walk I’d taken, from the apartment all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge. I’d used Sylvia’s map. I’d studied it – she’d written things on it, to show me the places worth seeing – and then folded it up and put it into my pocket. It had taken me nearly two hours to walk there, longer to walk back.
“Did you cross it?” Holly asked.
I searched her face, but there was nothing there but the question. I lied and told her I had. The truth was it had made me afraid. When I stepped out onto the bridge my legs began to tremble and my heart to race. I stood there, sweating, and then – there were people moving around me, a few who looked back and stared – I turned and stumbled off.
Holly told me the name of the architect, the number of cars that crossed it each year. I half-listened and thought of our father. It wasn’t the first time I’d wondered if I’d inherited his fears, the crippling anxiety that so often kept him from leaving the house. The thought made me shudder. Anyone would have been nervous on that bridge – it was nearly 300 feet above water. I told myself this. But I couldn’t convince myself, not entirely, and that was what made me afraid.
Holly took a bite of the salad and then she said, “What else did you do?”
I said I’d gone to the store – I didn’t tell her which one – and that I’d met the woman who worked there. And then, before I could stop myself, “She said you shouldn’t run in the park.”
Holly looked at me, confused.
I’d found the story online and now I gave her the details – the woman walking down the path, the man stepping out, surprising her. “It’s just –” I could feel the heat in my face. “I don’t want something to happen.”
Holly looked as though she was thinking something, I couldn’t tell what. I waited for her to say I was overreacting, but she only said, “I know.” And then, “Don’t worry, Annie. I’m careful.”
Her cell phone rang then, she was on call that night. She looked at me, apologetic.
I waved my hand, eager, now, to show nonchalance. “Don’t let anyone die.”
She smiled and then she was up from the table, her mind on whatever it was that was calling her back.
I waited for the sound of her leaving the apartment and then stood. Holly had eaten some of the salad, a few grapes, some cheese. The radio bothered me now. I turned it off. As children it had been our job to tidy up after meals, to wash and dry the dishes, to sweep the floor. I liked this time, the two of us together, our father safely behind the closed door of his office. When Holly left for college the job had made me lonely. I’d turned it into a game in which I imagined the things Holly was doing, the ways in which she was happy and safe and even heroic. As I carried our plates to the sink I thought of her walking the half mile to the hospital – I’d walked it, myself, that morning, on my way to the bridge. I’d gotten no further than the emergency department’s sliding doors before my mind filled with images of blood and chaos. I wouldn’t have lasted a day – I could hear Holly saying this and I knew it was true. Now I imagined Holly breezing in, eyeing patients slumped over in chairs, knowing, immediately, how to save them. As I washed and dried the plates and forks she moved on to the operating room, applied electroshock to a person near dead on the table. I’m alive! the person said, but Holly had already moved on.
I made my way through the apartment, continuing this. I tidied Holly’s shoes at the door, I shook the small rug at the top of the steps. In the living room I came to a stop. Holly’s decorating was simple – the faded blue sofa where I slept; a misshapen wool rug on the floor; an upholstered chair she’d inherited from the previous tenant – she’d laughed when I asked if she bought it. It was early, 8 p.m., but the day had made me tired. I climbed under the covers, still dressed, and pulled them up to my chin. The walls in Holly’s apartment were thin, a fact I was still getting used to. I could hear footsteps above me, a cough, the muted sounds of conversation. I turned onto my side and pulled my knees to my chest. As a child I’d ended the ritual of cleaning with a prayer, words I’d heard on a program my father watched on TV and changed to suit my purposes. I closed my eyes and did this now. Holly with me, Holly before me, Holly behind me, Holly beneath me, Holly above me, and on until the end, along with the words, my own special addition, and please may I have a dog. It was the words, taken together, that mattered. Then I slowed my breath and began to count, a trick I’d learned from the same roommate who’d introduced me to panzanella. It wasn’t until I was nearly asleep that the thought arrived, in the easy, floating way thoughts do before sleep: my father was gone. I no longer had to defend or protect myself or even think of myself in relation to him. For a long time after that night, the truth of this eluded me. But in that moment I felt such relief.
*
The next morning I was slow to get up. My dreams had been full of my father, a presence I knew not for any of his salient features but for the watchful feeling it gave me, a particular kind of alert. I listened to the sounds of Holly showering and making coffee and drifted back to sleep. When I woke again it was nearly ten o’clock. I put on jeans and a clean T-shirt and left the apartment to walk to Sylvia’s store.
“Hello, Annie,” Sylvia said, when I came through the door. I was surprised as much at the easy way she remembered me as at the store’s disarray. The bins of fruit were not yet put out, the buckets of flowers sat in the doorway, the windows were covered by shades.
“What’s wrong?”
She was late, she explained, because her son – he was in his thirties now, he lived in New York – had called to say his appendix had burst. He was alright, but it had been a terrible night. She walked to the window and pointed. “He grew up there,” she said, and I followed her gaze to an apartment building on the corner, a yellow three-story with a cluster of potted plants on the stoop. She dropped her arm and shook her head and said, as though she couldn’t reconcile one with the other, “He never gets sick.”
I felt a surge of something, gratitude, maybe. We would commiserate over this, our shared fear of something terrible befalling our loved ones. But Sylvia sighed and turned from the door and I saw that, whatever she’d shared, she no longer wanted to talk. She asked if I could help with things, the flowers, the fruit. I turned from the window and shook myself free.
“What will you do today?” she said, when we’d finished. The store felt open now, its energy changed. The flowers and fruit had been neatly arranged, the shades lifted to let in the light.
Now that I’d seen one bridge, I told her – I’d decided this on the way to the store – I wanted to see the other.
She rang up my granola bar and yogurt and gave me a spoon. “Go to the Farmer’s Market,” she said. “They have the best peaches.”
This time I took the MUNI. I’d read in a guidebook I’d found on Holly’s shelf that there had been a controversy – the train was so slow. The city wanted to see who would get downtown faster, the MUNI or the mayor, on foot. The mayor had won, but he defended himself by saying he was a fast walker, used to being in a hurry. When I got off the train I walked through the stalls at the market. I bought three peaches from one of the vendors, a woman who’d spent summers in Minnesota as a child. “Do you miss it?” she said, implying with a gesture of her hand that there could be nothing more beautiful than where I was now. I told her I didn’t, although the truth was, I didn’t know what I missed or even what I wanted. I bought a sandwich from one of the shops, a baguette with mozzarella and tomatoes and pesto, and sat on a bench to eat it. The Bay Bridge loomed over me, all metal and full of traffic. I gazed up at it, willing myself to admire its beauty. I wanted to prove I wasn’t afraid, but it was like facing a fear of swimming by looking at a painting of the sea – I knew I was cheating. In the end, I tossed what was left of my sandwich and kept walking.
*
That night I made spaghetti with sauce from a jar and when Holly got home, she looked relieved. We sat down to eat right away.
“What did you do all day?” she said. Holly had gone for a run after work. She looked tired and flushed but happier than she had the day before.
I told her about the Farmer’s Market, the walk I had taken, all the way to Fisherman’s Wharf. I showed her the peaches – I would bring one, I had decided, to Sylvia. Holly said it was good I was seeing the city. I wasn’t just sitting around.
I waited for her to ask if I’d been looking for jobs – I had, a little – but instead she told me about one of her patients. This was something she’d done when she was in medical school, and during her residency. The stories were interesting to her but not to me – they made me nervous. But still, I liked to hear her talk. Today, she said, a man had come in complaining of chest pain. I thought of our father; he’d called her the morning he died. About this patient she’d asked all the usual questions, how much did it hurt, for how long and where. She’d run all the tests. But she hadn’t been able to find anything wrong.
By this time I was listening. “So?” I said. “What was it? What was wrong?”
She shook her head. “Nothing.” She shrugged. “Sometimes there is nothing wrong.”
I stared at her. Holly had been looking at me while she talked, but now, she returned to her food. I wondered if this was her way of telling me to stop overthinking things, not to worry so much. I thought to say she had it wrong, I wasn’t a hypochondriac, but Holly had already moved on. She told me the lawyer had called and it was good news. Things with our father would not be complicated. He hadn’t been in debt. He’d divided things evenly, between us. Not a lot of money, but some. I had nothing to say about this. It was another instance in which Holly had taken care of things and I had not.
Holly took this as my acceptance and rose from the table to clear her plate.
When the dishes were done and Holly had carried the trash down the back steps of the building and gone to take her shower, I left the kitchen and went to sit in the living room. I’d already grown used to this, the view from Holly’s apartment. I could see into other windows, blue TV lights and people coming in and out of rooms and behind all of this, the hills. I thought again of the story Holly had told me, about the man. I wondered if, perhaps, it was just that he was lonely. Growing up I’d felt like that; our house was so quiet, and then, because of our father’s moods, suddenly full of sound. Both of those things made me lonely.
When Holly came out of the shower her face was flushed and her hair was wrapped in a towel. “You must be tired,” she said. “From all that walking.”
She was teasing. Holly had tried, more than once, to get me to come on a run with her, but I’d always refused. I didn’t like to run. She rolled her eyes whenever I said this, told me I could come, at least, and sit on a bench. She didn’t think I would actually do that, sit on a bench. To Holly that would have been a waste of time. I remembered a day she’d made the drive from the apartment she rented in college, surprising me. It was late May, the air newly full of spring. We walked together to the lake and while Holly ran I sat in a spot with a view of downtown. When she came back, out of breath, sweating, she asked me what I’d done with myself. Holly was always happier after she ran, with a better sense of humor.
I pointed at the ducks. They had congregated on the beach in front of the lake. For the past thirty minutes they’d been moving in and out of the water, quacking, lifting up in a sudden flurry and then settling themselves back down. I’d given each of them a name, a backstory, hopes and dreams for the future.
“That was what you were doing?” Holly said. She didn’t believe it.
Yes, I said. That was what I was doing.
I thought now, in Holly’s apartment – Holly unwrapped the towel from her head and told me not to stay up too late – that this was the difference between us. I wanted the full story. It eased my mind. It gave me hope. Holly just wanted to keep moving.
*
July passed and then half of August. I followed the same routine. Sylvia’s store in the morning, where I lifted and carried and talked to her about her life and the life of the city, and then I explored. At night I cooked and on Holly’s days off we went to Marin or the East Bay or ate brunch with the friends she’d made at the hospital, people like Holly in the matter-of-fact way they talked about sickness and death. I began to feel I’d always been here. I might never leave. Then, on a Sunday at the end of August, Holly said she had something to show me.
“You’ll see,” she said. She’d showered and then braided her still-wet hair and dressed in a T-shirt and shorts.
We passed Kezar Stadium and walked along Lincoln Way to 9th and into the park. I’d come here, many times. I’d often found myself lost. It surprised me, each time, the way the park went on, the trails that wound and looped and left me in a different place from the one in which I had started. We walked until we reached a thing I hadn’t expected. A sea of people, dancing.
“Lindy in the Park,” Holly said, smiling, when she saw my surprise.
Four oversized speakers were set up on stands and the music – swing – was blaring. Holly walked to a row of folding chairs and sat. “You should dance.” She looked pleased, and I understood she’d planned this, to walk me to this place and tell me to dance. This had been a joke between us – I loved to dance and Holly did not. Growing up, I’d taken classes. The studio was in a store front next door to a Tom Thumb where I bought candy and Coke after class. Our father had taken me, but he didn’t like the crowded lobby or the music spilling out from the studio’s walls. More often than not, he waited for me in the car.
Now I looked away from Holly to hide my sudden distress. The lindy dancers reminded me of a day our father had found me dancing like that: jubilant and open. Carefree. Holly was upstairs and our father wasn’t home – he wasn’t, and then he was. He crossed the room and turned off the stereo and then he began to shout. He didn’t like the loud music. Holly came downstairs, she crossed the room and took my arm and led me outside. Our father was still shouting at me. If Holly was afraid, she didn’t show it. We’re going to take a walk, she said, and we did. We walked down to the lake and then all the way around it.
In the park, Holly looked at me, expectant. She told me again to dance. On the walk around the lake, she had said that what happened was not about me but about our father, I had to remember that. During the years she no longer lived with us, she repeated this when she called. I didn’t believe her, but it hardly mattered. Holly hadn’t gone far – she attended college and then medical school within 15 miles of our house – but she wasn’t with me, and that was what I hated.
“Come on, Annie,” Holly said. “Dance.”
I shook my head, no, and then gave an excuse that was also true. “It’s a partner dance.”
Holly shrugged. “Find someone to dance with.”
I turned back to the dancers, not knowing which I wanted more – to dance or to run away. The music reminded me of the black and white films I watched for the simple reason that nothing bad ever truly happened. For a while I tried to enjoy that – the music, the laughter, the low hum of conversation. Then I turned and pulled Holly out of her seat.
“Annie –,” she said, pulling back.
But in that moment, I was stronger. Holly glared, but she let me lead her. We walked to the edge of the dancers. We moved, clumsily at first. Like elephants, my dance teacher would have said. Growing up I’d spent hours watching Gene Kelly. I loved his luminous smile, his easy, exuberant grace. I knew about the hours of practice, the aching feet, but what I saw was freedom, the certainty that nothing mattered but this. That was what I wanted, now – freedom. I held Holly’s hands, I tried to learn the steps. After a while I stopped trying and simply moved. I didn’t know what I was doing, not really, but as we danced something slowly began to shift and when the music finally stopped, the fear inside me was gone.
A voice came over the loudspeakers and announced a short break. Holly stepped back and wiped the sweat from her forehead. She looked at me and shook her head, but I knew I was forgiven. I followed her to a stand set up with water. We drank and refilled our cups. “Do you want to keep dancing?” Holly said – this time, she made clear, with someone else.
I shook my head, no. I wouldn’t have minded – I felt happier than I had in as long as I could remember. But I wanted to be with Holly, more.
Holly tossed her cup into the trash. “Let’s walk.”
We made our way through the park, all the way to the beach. When we reached it, I had the same feeling I’d had when I first saw the Golden Gate Bridge – the openness, the sudden, surprising beauty – without the fear of falling. We took off our shoes and walked to the water. The air was cool but I didn’t mind; I was warm from the walk, from the dancing. There were people walking and running, a handful of swimmers, a man in a baseball cap throwing a ball to a dog. I felt swept by this, and then the thought was there that my father had never seen anything like it. He’d never flown in an airplane or driven more than eight hours from the place in which he’d grown up. The sadness I felt, I knew this, was because I was here with Holly and the dancing had opened me up and because I could afford to feel this, now that he was gone.
The dog galloped towards us, nearly crashing into our legs before it changed course. “Sorry,” the owner called. Holly smiled and waved and then she said, “Did you dance in college?”
On our walk she’d talked about the history of the park, who had built it and why, the fact that it had used to be only dunes of sand. Now, her question surprised me.
I told her I had, a little. More than one teacher suggested I loosen up, a comment I hated for the impossibility I saw in achieving it, like telling me I would be a wonderful singer if only I wasn’t mute.
“You should keep doing it,” she said, and then, as though one thought belonged to the other, “You’re not our father.”
The words were like a gunshot, they had that effect. My heart was suddenly pounding, my face flooded with heat.
“That’s a story you’re telling yourself,” she said. “But you don’t have to believe it.”
I looked away to hide the emotion I knew must show on my face. I thought of what I could say – I didn’t know what she was talking about, the thought had never occurred. But I knew it was pointless to lie. There was the longing to believe her, the struggle that came with deciding whether or not I could. I thought to offer her proof: the constant fear I felt that something would happen to her, the careful way I tidied her apartment each night to quell it. The prayer I dutifully repeated, or the fact I’d returned to the Golden Gate Bridge not once but three times without being able to cross it. But I knew these things wouldn’t convince her.
“I got a job,” I said, finally, both to acknowledge what Holly had said and to keep myself from it. It was only partially true. I’d been offered an internship. I’d received the news on Friday.
Holly looked at me, surprised. “Where?”
A radio station in Chicago. I would be working on a program that interviewed people and told their stories. For my application, I’d asked Sylvia to tell me hers. I’d been sorry, though, when I got the news. I didn’t want to leave Holly. Now, although I knew Holly was ready for me to start my own life – she’d been waiting for this all summer – I hoped she would be sorry, too.
Holly was quiet and for a moment I imagined her turning to me and telling me not to go, she would miss me too much. Then she said, considering, “Who would you interview, if you could?” She fell silent again and this time I knew she was contemplating her answer. The dog dashed past us, it ran straight into the waves and came splashing back out, stopping to shake its coat. Holly snapped her fingers. “Harry Houdini.” She had always been fascinated by his great acts of escape, his, as she saw it, avoidable cause of death.
I laughed, a little.
Holly pulled me towards her and squeezed my shoulder. “Congratulations, Annie.”
I heard in her voice the same pride she’d had when I made a good grade, when I got into college. I waited for what more she would say, about the job or Chicago or how I would make the rent. But for now she only kissed the top of my head and said, “We should turn back.”
*
Three weeks later I moved to Chicago. Now I am no longer an intern but a producer. Holly tunes in to the show each week and tells me what she thinks. Her favorite stories are the ones in which there is some kind of mystery involved, a person who does something shocking, reprehensible, or even surprisingly kind. These, she says, are the stories most true to human nature, most like the ones she hears from her patients. I often think about Holly’s question, who I would most like to interview. I’ve never told her this – she would never agree – but the person, of course, is Holly. I picture her coming into the studio in her street clothes, her hair pulled back from her face. She sits down in front of the microphone and waits for what I will say. I ask the usual questions – tell me about your childhood, your work as a doctor. Things I already know. Then I tell the audience that Holly is my sister, the person who raised me, who changed the narrative – or, more rightly, showed me there could be more than one. My listeners hear this while doing the dishes or walking the dog and it changes them to know this. It gives them hope.