A Theory of Small Earthquakes Read online

  A frizzy-haired girl named Wendy raised her hand. “I’m not voting for an anti-Semite, even if he is black,” she said in a thick Long Island accent. “Jesse Jackson referred to New York as Hymietown.” She shot Alison a meaningful, Hymies-should-stick-together glance. Alison looked away, wondering how Wendy knew she was Jewish.

  “That’s just slang,” Nia said. “He didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “Slang?” Wendy stared at Nia. “You of all people should—”

  “There’s no way Jesse Jackson is anti-Semitic,” a short blond girl wearing an ERACISM button interjected. “Anyway, he apologized.”

  “He’ll never win,” said Root, a stocky girl who “self-identified” as a “born-again pagan” and had once invited Alison to join her coven. “Nominating him would be like handing the election to Reagan.”

  Mariandaughter’s eyes darted around the circle. “Has anyone heard the rumors about Mondale’s running mate?”

  “He said he’d ask Geraldine Ferraro if he gets the nomination,” Root said. “I think we should all visualize a woman vice president.”

  Mariandaughter glowed with the euphoria that a dicey conundrum always lent her. “Mondale also promised to support the Equal Rights Amendment. So, given historic campaigns by two liberal candidates, how do we vote our values?”

  “This is so confusing. My head’s on fire,” Wendy said.

  “You and Michael Jackson,” Zoe said.

  “That is not funny!” Nia barked at her. “Michael Jackson is an important role model for black children. He could have died for Pepsi-Cola’s profits.”

  “Just to clarify,” Alison asked Nia, “would dying for Coke’s profits be funny?”

  “I can’t believe you two are joking about this,” Nia fumed.

  You two, Alison thought. I like the sound of that.

  Oberlin was nearly deserted over spring break. It happened every April, and every April Alison imagined all those poor little rich kids skiing in Aspen, shopping in Paris, being Sherpa’ed up some mountain somewhere. But this year she was in love with one of those poor little rich kids, who’d skipped Aspen to stay on campus with her.

  She and Zoe soaked up the quiet, lying around reading, lying in bed talking late at night, making love noisily in the empty dorm. On the last night of break they were snuggled up on Alison’s floor, eating their way through a Whitman’s Sampler.

  Zoe sat up and faced Alison. “I have an idea,” she said around a mouthful of caramel.

  Alison knew that voice. It meant Zoe’s mind was made up. And it meant that in some way, big or small, Alison’s life was about to change. Alison said the small prayer she reserved for these occasions: whatever it is, please don’t let it end us.

  “Let me guess,” Alison said, keeping it light. “You want to paint the student union orange. Join Earth First. Make me wear your clothes.”

  “None of the above.” Zoe was bouncing with excitement. “I want us to move to Berkeley when you graduate.”

  “Us?”

  “Well, yeah.” Zoe looked at Alison, puzzled. “What did you think would happen in June?”

  Zoe’s certainty settled over Alison like a feather quilt.

  “You’ve been saying you don’t know where to go after graduation,” Zoe cajoled her. “You haven’t even wanted to talk about it.”

  Alison hadn’t wanted to think about it, either. When she did, all she could see was Zoe at Oberlin, staying up all night with someone else, and Alison somewhere—New York, probably—in her meteorite drift through space.

  “What about your last three years of school?” Alison asked.

  “College is useless for a painter. And if I decide I want to finish for some weird reason, I’ve heard they have colleges in California.”

  “I’ve never even been to Berkeley. Have you?”

  “I’ve seen pictures. Blue sky. Cute houses. Sit-ins at Sproul Plaza. An artist in every garret. What more do we need to know?”

  Alison remembered Zoe telling her, on the night they now referred to as their first date, that her mom had always wanted to move to Berkeley, that Zoe wanted to raise her kids there. This is about Zoe’s mom, Alison realized. And if I say no, that’ll be about my mother. And it’ll be the end of us. And my mother will win.

  Alison pictured the two of them holding hands on a cable car clanging up Nob Hill. The two of them walking the Golden Gate Bridge, strolling arm-in-arm through drifts of fog, San Franciscans smiling at them approvingly. Where else besides the Bay Area could they find the safety and the freedom of that?

  They’d buy a motorcycle, follow the Pacific down Highway 1. Grow their own oranges. Learn to surf. Alison would be a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle or a freelancer based in Berkeley. Zoe would go to art school. There had to be an art school, or a dozen art schools, in San Francisco.

  “Do you have any idea what the weather’s like in Berkeley?” Zoe asked. “It never snows. Ever! It’s sunny all year round.”

  “Okay,” Alison said.

  “What do you mean, okay?”

  No wonder she doesn’t believe me, Alison thought. I never do this. “Okay, let’s move to Berkeley,” she said.

  “Really?” Zoe jumped up, pulled Alison to her feet, held her close. “Oh, Al. You’re the best. The best, you hear me?”

  “I hear you,” Alison said. But was this the real Alison speaking? Or was she imitating the Alison she hoped to become?

  She suspected it was the latter. And she wondered how long she could keep up the act.

  6.

  berkeley

  September 1984

  Alison sprinted up the BART station escalator, hurrying home to tell Zoe the big news.

  She pushed through the turnstile, peeling off her linen blazer as she burst into the sweltering autumn afternoon. Three months after their move to Berkeley, she’d finally gotten used to the foggy, fifty-degree northern California summer just in time for the relentlessly sunny, ninety-degree fall.

  Loping north on Sacramento Street, she ran into a display of wooden birdhouses spilling out of a stucco garage. She laughed out loud, reading the sidewalk sandwich sign:BERKELEY BIRDHOUSE COLLECTIVE

  PROVIDING HOUSING FOR HOMELESS BIRDS SINCE 1964

  We are an alliance of proactive grassroots militant radical birdhouse builders who are committed to bringing affordable housing to birds of all stripes, nationalities, genders, and sexual persuasions. Viva la Che! Viva la revolucion! Viva la CASA DE PAJARO RUSTICA.

  Alison stepped around the “Low-Income Subsidized Birdhouse” and the “Love Triangle A-frame Birdhouse,” surrendering to a moment of delight. Berkeley had charmed her, even if she thought of it as Oberlin for adults who refused to grow up. The town was a living museum of the sixties, populated by idealists frozen in time. Unlike her hometown New Yorkers, who dressed and spoke and lived as if the present was already passé, Berkeleyites still dressed and spoke and lived as if the youth revolution was just a shot away.

  She turned right on Lincoln, one of her favorite Berkeley streets. The front yards she passed were unfenced, unfettered by design; they looked like they’d been planted by Dr. Seuss. Purple-blossomed princess trees, shocking pink impatiens, Day-Glo orange nasturtiums bloomed in madcap profusion amid rusty metal sculptures, toilets sprouting red geraniums, towering papier-mâché peace signs. Strings of tattered Buddhist prayer flags danced to breezes blowing east from the bay.

  Rounding the corner onto Grant, Alison saw their ’72 Volvo wagon parked in front of the cottage she and Zoe shared: the smallest, funkiest house on the block. The others were classic Berkeley brown-shingles, windows trimmed in riotous rainbow hues, crouched on earthquake-reinforced haunches like friendly, disheveled dogs. Alison unlatched their rickety knee-high wooden gate, righted the peeling picket fence which tended to swoon to the touch, and made her way through the tumble of blackberry vines and sweetheart roses competing for domination of the mossy brick path.

  Zoe flung the door open.


  “I got the job!” Telling Zoe made it seem real, suddenly, the way telling Zoe always did.

  “I told you! I knew it!”

  “I showed them my clips from the Field,” Alison pushed on. “They loved my writing.”

  “What’s not to love?”

  “Here’s the best part.” Alison took Zoe by the shoulders, backed her five steps into the kitchen, sat her down in one of their flea market oak chairs. “Drum roll, please.”

  Zoe thumped her palms on the edge of the yellow Formica table they’d scored in the affluent Berkeley Hills on Bulky Trash Day.

  “They made me a copywriter! I’m going to write ads for Planned Parenthood and Friends of the Earth. And my starting salary is thirty thousand dollars a year.”

  “Wow.” Zoe’s lips twisted into something resembling a smile.

  “What’s wrong?” Alison asked.

  “What could be wrong?” Zoe put on her mock-Yiddish accent. “Why does something always have to be wrong, already? That’s great, dollink. Mazel tov.”

  Alison’s heart sank. How could she have been so insensitive? Poor Zoe had spent weeks driving around San Francisco with a dozen of her paintings in the trunk, trying to get a gallery to represent her. She’d been turned down by every one.

  “God, Zoe. I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “For going on about my new job when you’ve been having such a hard time with your career.”

  Zoe’s laugh sounded hollow. “You think if you don’t talk about your great job, I’ll get a gallery?”

  Alison couldn’t argue the point. But she’d seen the unhappiness on Zoe’s face. And she was the one who’d caused it.

  “I’m happy for you, baby. Can you get that through your beautiful head?”

  “Let me buy you dinner at Chez Panisse,” Alison said.

  “Downstairs or upstairs?”

  “We’re going whole hog. Downstairs.”

  “Whole artichoke, you mean.” Zoe’s eyes gleamed. “Wait. There is something you can do for me.” She pulled Alison out of her chair and danced her down the short, dark hallway where they’d hung Zoe’s Mammary Lane series.

  In the bedroom doorway, Zoe pulled Alison close and kissed her hard. She ran her lips over Alison’s nose, her eyebrows, one earlobe, the other. Alison’s breath quickened. Zoe still made her dizzy, still made her want to just lie down. It was delicious, not torturous, now that Alison wasn’t trying not to feel it.

  They lurched across the glistening oak floor they’d unearthed under layers of linoleum. They sank to the bed, tossing shirts, pants, socks, and panties over their heads.

  “Wait.” Alison wiggled out from under Zoe, went to the window, and pulled out the hairbrush they used to prop it open. Then she closed the curtains and went back to bed, back to her favorite part of sex with Zoe: blissfully surrendering, for once, to mindless desire.

  Zoe’s head drifted down the length of Alison’s body. Her tongue, her fingers were everywhere. Their breathing grew faster, shallow, rasping.

  “I love you,” Alison whispered into Zoe’s sweaty neck. It felt like an apology.

  It was shocking to Alison: the cozy, white-lace-curtains, homemade-chocolate-pudding life she shared with Zoe.

  Since she was home all day, Zoe planned the meals and bought the groceries, but she and Alison cooked together nearly every night. Bumping hips in their daffodil-yellow kitchen, boom box blasting, they sang along to “Borderline” and “What’s Love Got to Do With It” while Alison whipped up a stir-fry in the wok or Zoe chopped onions for lentil soup. Then they sat and ate at their table for two, telling each other about the time they’d spent apart, planning the things they wanted to do together. Paint the bathroom teal. Take a day trip to Point Reyes. Beat back the blackberries and roses, reclaim the front yard. Plant Dutch iris. Grow zucchini, lettuce, red and yellow chard.

  This was the passionate, peaceful domesticity, the loving and being loved that Alison had always dreamed of. The late-night pillow talk, the bone-melting sex, the best-friendship she had with Zoe were so good, they pushed her to the edge of belief. But Alison wanted more than a lover. She wanted a family.

  Zoe had started talking about having kids someday. She wanted at least two, and she was full of ideas about how they could have them. She knew lesbians who’d had kids—boys, every one of them, for reasons no one understood—using donated sperm and artificial insemination. It was easy to do, she said, and getting easier all the time. “You’ll have the first kid, since you’re older,” Zoe told Alison. “I’ll have the second one. We’ll use the same donor. Our kids will be siblings for real.”

  Alison found these conversations disturbingly clinical. She always changed the subject, and Zoe seemed to have taken the hint. They hadn’t discussed it for a while.

  But now all the gay papers and magazines were running stories about “the lesbian baby boom.” Mama Bear’s, the women’s bookstore in South Berkeley, had hung an exhibit of photos of two women and their son. The little boy was adorable. But his mothers were big and butch, both decked out in full “wimmin-loving-wimmin” regalia. They were dykes, nothing like her and Zoe.

  The exhibit was titled “Love Makes a Family, Nothing More, Nothing Less.” Alison knew better. She’d been stuck in a family without love after her father died. Now she had love with Zoe, but they weren’t a family.

  Leaflets stapled to telephone poles all over Berkeley offered three words of advice: be here now. Alison took the reminder personally. Being where she was now, she was happier than she’d ever been, happier than she’d ever thought she would be. But sometimes late at night, with Zoe sleeping beside her, Alison’s maternal longings bubbled up and she couldn’t swallow them down. She’d lie awake, twisting the Rubik’s Cube of her future into scenarios, none conceivable. Staying with Zoe but not having children. Having children with a man but not being with Zoe. Conceiving a test-tube baby with some stranger’s sperm and raising it with Zoe. Medical science had figured out how to turn lesbians into mothers and lesbian couples into “alternative families,” but Alison was too wounded by her own childhood to force any kind of freakish childhood on her kids.

  Alison’s search for a happy ending always brought her to the same unhappy conclusion. To have what she wanted most, eventually she’d need to give up what she had.

  Alison’s job at San Francisco’s most progressive ad agency, Public Media Center, was much more than a paycheck to her. She liked the grown-up life she was living, the parentheses of a structured workday, the built-in camaraderie with her smart, committed coworkers and clients, the views of Union Square from PMC’s glass-brick and steel-beamed office. The steady build of regular income eased Alison’s nervousness about depending so much on Zoe. Paying her half, having her own savings account, made Alison less afraid of ending up as poor and bitter as her mother had.

  “My biggest mistake was putting all my eggs in one basket,” her mother had told her often. “When I got married, I thought I was set for life. And what did I end up with besides a little insurance money? Nothing.”

  It was satisfying to help the firm’s nonprofit clients get their messages out, thrilling to see her words in print in full-page San Francisco Chronicle ads and the fund-raising packets that came in the mail. Learning to write to the pica, to say the most with the least number of words, was bleeding into her poems and short stories, making them more incisive and concise.

  Alison was away from home ten hours each weekday, but she and Zoe kept their art at the center of their lives. Zoe turned the falling-down shed in the backyard into her studio. Alison used their second bedroom as hers. She painted the walls a soothing gray-green, assembled a plywood-and-file-cabinet desk, threw a Cost Plus Indian print bedspread over the easy chair she’d scavenged on trash day in the hills. Above her desk she hung a broadsheet that Black Oak Books had printed as a New Year’s gift to its customers, her favorite Raymond Carver poem, “Late Fragment”:And did you get what you wanted from this life, ev
en so?

  I did.

  And what did you want?

  To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.

  After dinner most nights, Zoe went back to her studio to paint and Alison carried a mug of peppermint tea to her desk. No matter what had happened at work that day, once she started scribbling, she slipped into a mellow, meditative trance: deeply happy, deeply alone.

  Writing cracked Alison open, and she let it because no one and nothing could take her writing away. All those letters and commas and paragraphs were hers for the borrowing, hers to rearrange. In a world of her own creation, her fears and defenses fell away. She never even felt them go.

  Alison had always been a stumbling, halting, demon-driven writer. Now she wrote with an ease, a confidence, an effortlessness that she felt only one other time: when she and Zoe made love. Now that Zoe made her “beloved on this earth,” Alison had the courage to start a poem or a story and keep going, even when she had no idea where it might take her or how it might end.

  Most of their evenings ended the same way. At ten or eleven or midnight, one of them would glance at her watch, pull herself up and out of her trance, and go fetch the other out of hers. There was no sweeter moment in any day than when Alison heard Zoe say, “It’s midnight, sweetie,” and she put her pen down, spun her chair around, and saw Zoe right there, smiling at her, waiting for her to come to bed.

  “It costs twenty-two cents to send your poems to some obscure literary journal no one will ever read,” Zoe said, flipping through the envelopes Alison had left for the mailman. “And it costs twenty-two cents to send them to The New Yorker.” She waved the envelopes at Alison. “Why isn’t The New Yorker in here?”

  Alison bit her tongue to keep from mentioning the obvious. Zoe was still painting, but after two years, she’d given up trying to get her paintings into prestigious San Francisco galleries. When stacks of finished canvases threatened to squeeze her out of her studio, she’d load a few into the Volvo and drive to one of the Berkeley cafés, pizza joints, hair salons, and Laundromats that displayed rotating shows of their customers’ artwork. When she had an “opening,” she mailed out the postcards and paid for the wine and cheese herself.