Love, Dad

Barbara Duggan was leaving for Europe, and her apartment — in its present barren state — was furnished only with a single mattress in one of the bedrooms, a half-dozen throw-pillows on the living-room floor, and an ancient battered floor lamp, none of which Barbara had been able to sell to the steady stream of bargain hunters who’d traipsed up the stairs to the third floor all through the past month. Her duffel bag was already packed, and she had $3,000 in traveler’s checks tucked into a sock in her shoulder bag, but her final destination was still a question mark. The two boys who were crashing with her were Carnegie Tech dropouts who’d come west in search of acting careers, but who were leery about making the big move to L.A. and were using San Francisco as a sort of decompression chamber.

The five of them were sitting on the living-room floor, propped on the throw-pillows, smoking pot and drinking hot chocolate. The apartment was on a street lined with factories, and fumes from their chimneys seeped through the cracks in the old sash windows to mingle with the headier aroma of marijuana. Now and again on the street outside — this was now close to midnight, California time — a horn honked, but for the most part the night was still except for the sound of machinery in the nearby factories. Barbara had sold her record player; otherwise there might have been music. Jerry, the better looking of the two Carnegie dropouts, and therefore presumably the one with the brighter theatrical future, was telling about the cops who’d stopped them in Kansas.

“Middle of a big fucking wheatfield,” he said, “not another car in sight, we were doing — what, Michael? — fifty miles an hour?”

“Maybe sixty,” the other boy said. “Point is, we were observing the speed limit.”

“That doesn’t mean anything to them,” Barbara said.

She was wearing a brightly printed caftan, her thick black hair pulled into a knot at the back of her head, gold hoop earrings on her ears, sandals on her feet, a string of Indian beads around her neck. She was perhaps Lissie’s age, a girl with a flawless, pale, almost porcelain complexion, and slanted brown eyes that gave her a composed and somewhat inscrutable Oriental appearance. She spoke in a very low, well-modulated voice (Mom would adore her, Lissie thought), her A’s broadened by her Bostonian upbringing, her cadences soft and lilting. Sitting beside her barefooted, in jeans and a scruffy T-shirt, Lissie felt bedraggled by contrast. She wanted nothing more than a hot bath and a good night’s sleep. She did not want to hear about the dropouts’ trials and tribulations on the road; she and Judd had suffered through enough of their own. But she stifled a yawn and listened.