Joanne Two
Bill Schillaci
The eleven cabinetmakers, carvers, woodturners and furniture strippers/refinishers—plus one construction framer who used his space as a dump—comprising the Spiral Co-op were all independent businesses and community-minded people and so disagreed on nearly every aspect of the co-op’s administration while always reaching an amicable compromise. At least that’s how it played until Ray Bookings showed up at Spiral with his Ruger.
It was one of those rare mornings when the members, who tended to set their schedules according to their biorhythms or the alignment of the planets, all arrived more or less at the same time at the co-op, an unpartioned former industrial laundry on Frontage Road near the San Francisco Bay. This caused some congestion on the street out front as the first arrivals were asked by those who followed to go back out and move their vehicles since almost everybody needed more curb room to cart lumber or some antique piece of cabinetwork through the wide front door. Rather than prompting annoyance, the jockeying created a jovial mood and more happy chatter than had been heard at Spiral since the last Christmas Eve party. Nobody, it seemed, was particularly interested in starting work or even talking about it.
Personal history was the subject of one conversation over steaming Starbucks between Masha and Marcia. With no prompting, Masha revealed that she had done ten months at Perryville in Arizona for felony credit card fraud. There, in the prison’s shop, she learned to make hardwood bowls with an ancient lathe from Italy that weighed as much as a small car. After her release she lucked upon a parole officer who helped her settle into a law-abiding career. Marcia knew Masha did time—Masha was clear about that during her admission interview before the gathered members—but not why or where or about the training.
“Bowls are fabulous,” Marcia was quick to tell Masha after her application was approved. “Everybody loves bowls.”
In the months that followed, Marcia purchased several bowls she didn’t need from Masha. Marcia was the only Spiral member who held an actual degree in woodworking, this from the Rochester Institute of Technology where lathing was generally considered a poor relation of classic cabinetwork and where she discovered that after a couple of hours of training she could spin a bowl or a set of table legs or a peppermill or candlestick that was every bit as attractive as anything Masha could produce and in about half the time. So, in truth, Marcia did not love bowls, and certainly not lathing, but soon after they first met, she found she did love Masha. On this morning, the two stood side-by-side leaning back against Ray Booking’s work bench in one corner of Spiral. In addition to having names that were almost impossible to distinguish when called across the work floor, Marcia (who happily agreed to be known as Marsh) and Masha appeared to have been stirred up in the same gene pool, at least in terms of length of bone (long) and musculature (thick).
The day before, Masha said her van was getting a new clutch, and she asked Marsh to pick her up at her apartment in Fruitvale. Opening the door to Marsh’s truck, Masha said, “Marsh, thank you so much.”
“Not at all,” Marsh said lightly, although in an anticipation of the meet up Marsh had slept hardly at all.
Masha was quiet and when she did speak careful with her words—a legacy of prison life, Marsh guessed—and Marsh viewed Masha’s simple explanation of why she went to jail as a breakthrough of sorts. In the moments of stillness after Masha had spoken, a swarm of compassionate responses filled Marsh’s head, each begging for vocalization, all of which she beat back into quietude because any response would only blur the wonder of Masha’s revelation. If nothing ever developed with Masha, Marsh thought sadly, she knew at least she could cherish this moment of soft vulnerability and trust.
As Marsh speculated if there was a hidden meaning to Masha’s disclosure, Ray, the last member to arrive, approached quietly behind them and dropped his tool satchel on the bench.
“Good morning, ladies,” he said.
Masha quickly stepped away from the bench and mumbled an apology. Ray waved it off good naturedly. His work area was the largest in the co-op, ideally situated below a corner skylight, a privilege that went with being one of Spiral’s founders, the other two long since departed into entirely different and more sensible occupations. Ray built captain’s beds and nothing else, some on individual commission but most according to a single design Ray had mastered. The uniformity eliminated all surprises save for the unavoidable ones inherent in the organic nature of the poplar that Ray purchased in truckloads at a lumber yard down the peninsula. Working around the clock, Ray was able to build the beds at the eye-popping rate of two or even three a week when the demand was there. He displayed the beds at furniture outlets around the Bay and then delivered them to homes where he and anyone else at Spiral who wanted a few hours work assembled them. While the sales were not exactly regular, they were sufficient to afford Ray something close to a middleclass income, a rare phenomenon at Spiral where spousal, partner and parental subsidies were endemic. He was one of the few in the co-op who had the means to parcel out small jobs, gestures that in combination with his tenure and the fact that he was the eldest member solidified his unofficial but de facto leadership role among a party of equals.
“Aren’t you on a jury?” said Marsh.
“Settled,” said Ray. “In the women’s room, I think.”
Ray was from the Olympic Peninsula and snugly fit into at least one stereotype—bearishly proportioned and lavishly bearded, prone to understatement and faintly redolent of a redwood forest. His ferocious work ethic was a little scary, something that Masha had yet to adjust to even though Marsh assured her that he was puppy dog sweet.
“We decided to wait for you to get going,” said Marsh, aiming her chin at the other members loitering across the floor, none of whom had yet to touch a tool.
Behind his beard, Ray’s lower facial muscles shifted into what may have been a grin.
“Did you call the university about that tree?” he asked Masha. A maintenance buddy at the school informed him that they were felling a dying boxelder, a coveted wood for turning, and Ray had told Masha she could take some if she showed up on time with a chainsaw.
Masha mumbled something neither Marsh nor Ray could decipher. There was a respectful pause in which both he and Marsh wondered if Masha would say something else. She didn’t, preferring to retreat behind her Cloud Macchiato. Marsh’s theory, which she shared with no one, was that Masha viewed Ray as some kind of authority figure, probably one in a life-long progression of men beginning with her father who consigned her to a lower rung of humanity because of who she was and her affinity for trouble.
Ray unstrapped the satchel and took out an aged wooden plane that must have been two feet long. When he wasn’t gluing up beds, Ray liked to drive north to Mendocino on Sundays where every other garage housed a woodworker and prowl the yard sales for old tools he could refurbish.
“Is that apple?” Marsh asked.
Ray looked at her, impressed.
“You know your species,” he said, withdrawing his hand from the satchel and placing the Ruger on the bench beside the plane.
Marsh recoiled. “What the fuck, Ray?” she said.
“If you’re asking what the fuck this is, it’s a Ruger American with a capacity of seventeen nine millimeter rounds.” The pistol was black metal and embellished with grooves and slides. Ray swiveled the muzzle away from Marsh.
“Oh, a Ruger nine millimeter, thank you. But what I was asking was what the fuck is it doing here?”
“Well, for one, I just got my carry permit.”
“So that goes with you everywhere now?”
“I think so. It’s a dangerous world and I feel safer. You should too.”
“I’ve never felt unsafe, not here. This is a place of peace.”
“I never heard it called that.”
“Are you feeling threatened, Ray? Is somebody here trying to steal your clients, so you needed to bring in a gun to protect your business interests?”
“You have an epic imagination, Marsh.”
Ray continued to unpack, a set of chisels rolled up in a canvas holder, an electric palm sander, a plastic bag stuffed with shop rags. These he placed on the bench beside the pistol. Somewhere behind Marsh, a router was turned on, the ferocious screech of carbide cutting a groove. There would be work today after all, she thought. She turned to the sound and in the open reaches of Spiral saw that Masha had vanished.
It was Ray himself who called for the ad hoc meeting. After their tense exchange, Marsh stomped off, partly to inform the other members about Ray’s weapon but mostly to look for Masha. Predictably, the initial reactions to Ray’s gun were varied, from no reaction at all to shock and expressions of betrayal of the co-op’s pacific spirit. Overall, the news was a cold slap in the face that abruptly ended the morning’s easy conviviality. Several old kitchen chairs left over from the laundry days and dribbling stuffing and some empty five-gallon paint cans came together in a circle in the co-op’s common area. When all save Masha were seated, Ray convened the meeting and apologized for the inconvenience. He gave the reason for the interruption and pointed to his corner where he said his Ruger was safely stored in a locked box because it was apparent that some members were offended by the very sight and proximity of a gun. Saying this, he turned to Marsh who was endeavoring to look simultaneously firm in her convictions and scornful in advance of whatever Founding Fathers Second Amendment Antonin Scalia bullshit argument Ray was cooking up. Before sitting, she had checked the restroom for Masha and the street outside and given that Masha had no vehicle, was mystified and a little worried about her disappearance.
Ray repeated his baseline reasons for bringing in the Ruger—(a) that he was legally entitled to and (b) that security was fundamental today to any enterprise accessible to the public, a point underlined by reference to several criminal occurrences at the nearby South Berkeley’s Farmer’s Market, which was news to every other member. That revelation made an impression in Ray’s favor with one member while another was concerned that Ray was concocting an atmosphere of fear. Even if there was some danger that nobody else knew about, how was it, this member asked, that Ray, absent a group discussion, had appointed himself their protector? We’re discussing it now, a third member said. Someone introduced the idea that a gun was simply another kind of tool, and this was a place where the utility of tools was well understood. But somebody else said the only purpose of this so-called tool was destruction, which made it unique and out of place in the co-op. A link was drawn to the lethal potential of the nail guns that at least half the members owned, which prompted a cynical snort from a member who, looking at his feet, mumbled that that was an asinine comparison. A member said she grew up in a house with guns and never thought about it one way or the other. Then someone else recounted how he saw a guy shot in the thigh from a drive-by at a pickup basketball game, an event that sometimes flashes unpleasantly in his head when he hears the word gun spoken. There was still a dark spot on the concrete court where blood had soaked in, he said. This disclosure was followed by a brief silence until someone suggested it was time to vote on whether a gun should be allowed in Spiral. Ray said he was fine with a vote to indicate majority approval or disapproval, but he would not be compelled by the result of any plebiscite to surrender his safety to the goodness of humanity. Someone responded that the group had the authority to expel any member who caused a disruption, but someone else interjected that the gun was maybe a distraction, but could not reasonably be called a disruption unless Ray engaged in target practice on the premises or even walked around with his Ruger in a holster. There followed a discussion, if that what it’s called when almost everybody talks at the same time, about what precisely should be voted on. At this point, Marsh, who had spoken not at all during any of this, rose from her can, put on her jacket and walked out the front door.
After hearing but not relating at all to the first beep, at the second beep Marsh glanced at the rearview mirror where she made eye contact with a woman in a white car raising her hands and glaring in annoyance.
“Sorry,” Marsh muttered to no one and pulled over to the curb.
She slumped down and peeked out the side window as the driver passed, expecting the middle finger salute or her mouth contouring around a silent asshole, either of which she probably deserved. But the woman was above that, staring straight ahead over the steering wheel and entering the intersection. Nice, Marsh thought, probably a sisterhood thing, an intuitive understanding that a lone woman does not sit paralyzed in her vehicle in traffic unless she is dealing with some trauma, a kid on drugs or a deadbeat spouse or news from an oncologist. In this case, it was an inability to decide whether to turn left or right.
Marsh arrived at the corner of University and San Pablo intending, she thought, to turn left, north toward Albany where a client, a potential client anyway, wanted an estimate on kitchen cabinets. Marsh hated kitchen cabinets, the construction of which was based on sawing down hundreds of pounds of four-by-eight sheets of particle board or plywood into a boilerplate design that became a losing enterprise with the merest attempt at originality. And once installed, there would be the inevitable badgering by the customer that her trash container didn’t fit under the sink or the door hinges squeaked. This was not what Marsh had in mind after RIT, where the universal aspiration was a six-page spread in Fine Woodworking, not, generally speaking, the reference book for kitchen cabinets.
But it was not her dread of another kitchen job that stalled Marsh at the corner. The problem was that a right turn, not the direction she was supposed to be taking, would lead her south, down through Oakland, the reverse of the very route she had driven this morning from Fruitvale and Masha’s apartment. Before pulling up to this intersection, Marsh was mostly in denial about the decision she would soon confront, or denial at least about how difficult that decision would be. Now, with no more distance to travel before a turn had to be made, she stared in amazement at all the traffic, all these cars, all these people who knew where they wanted to go and did not have to pull over and be on the verge of tears about whether or not they should go there. Marsh checked herself in the sun visor’s mirror, tested her breath in her cupped hands, popped a stick of gum, threw her head back and groaned.
Of course it didn’t have to be this complicated. If she wanted to locate Masha, all she had to do was call her. After walking out of Spiral, having forgot why she was so pissed about Ray’s stupid penis proxy, she stood on Frontage Road beside her truck, staring at Masha’s number on her contact list. It was something she had gotten into the habit doing in the evenings when alone, just looking at the number and Masha’s name next to it. There were some photos of Masha as well, one Marsh had secretly snapped from a distance of Masha sitting alone on the marina grass across from Spiral eating a burrito, and a ten-second video of a blurry Masha grinding away at her lathe, a figure of impressionist art in a cloud of sawdust. These were sufficient to transport Marsh into a reverie where nothing much existed except an oceanic sense of Masha and herself, a mute, tiny figure watching from the shore. But it was the sight of Masha’s phone number on her iPhone, a shadowy bridge crossing those dark waters, that emptied her head of all but a helpless, insurmountable and, critically, inarticulate misery. In her worst moments, she was angry, partly at Masha, but more at herself. All the clues she had planted that got her nowhere. Waiting for Masha to go home in the evening so she could sweep and straighten up her work space. Or tucking a little box of chocolate samplers under Masha’s dust mask. Or offering Masha tools she said she no longer used, although of course she did. Sometimes, near her gifts, she would leave a slip of paper with a simple “M” written on it, always subduing the urge to enclose the letter in a heart. Masha would respond with a simple thank you, although it usually came late, several days after, or even the week after, and that would be it. Marsh drove herself half-crazy trying to figure out what these intervals meant. Was it that her little gestures made no impression at all on Masha? Or was it that Masha was also thoroughly smitten by Marsh but was equally confounded about how to carry her feelings to the verbal level? With each failure to elicit something more, Marsh fretted and boiled and swore to herself to give it up. And then she’d glance across Spiral’s floor to see Masha’s broad shoulders delicately rolling within her work shirt as she carved her initials into the bottom of a bowl, and Marsh would quietly fall to pieces.
Thirty minutes after making her move south on San Pablo, or more, or less, she couldn’t say really, Marsh turned into Masha’s cul de sac, a street wedged into the crease between Oakland’s flatlands and leafy highlands. It was an area of compact, tidy homes squeezed together on one-eighth-of-an-acre properties. Marsh rolled down the pavement as slow as her truck could go and still be moving. It was, she realized in a rare instant of clarity, exactly how a stalker would case a target. The thought scared her, less about how she was courting trouble for herself than about poor Masha, still reintegrating into society, not needing an unhinged admirer in her life. Biting her lip, she nudged the accelerator and braked noisily in front of the last house, Spanish revival with a terracotta roof. To one side, an earthen looking set of stairs descended to an arched doorway of heavy oak planks and Masha’s studio rental. The door was flanked by two ground-level windows no bigger than place mats with matching curtains patterned with buttercups. The bright yellow flowers were all that distinguished the outside from a frontier root cellar or, Marsh thought with a shiver, a jail cell. She lifted the door knocker, an iron ring looped through a lion’s head, took a breath and let the ring drop.
“Marsh?”
Marsh spun to see Masha, in lavender spandex shorts encasing surprisingly lean thighs, a baggy 49ers tee shirt and a white head band, observing her from the top step.
“Oh, you’re here. I mean you’re there.”
“Yes, here, there, either one, or both,” said Masha, smiling, her face and neck silvery with sweat. “And so are you.” She took hold of the stairway’s rusted hand rail, cupped her instep and pulled her leg up behind to stretch her quad.
“I, um, you, um, left. Spiral, I mean. Without your van.”
“I got a Lyft. I needed a run.”
Mounting the steps, Marsh said, “You’re a runner?”
“A new thing for me. See that?” Masha straightened and pointed between the house and its neighbor up into the hills.
“The LDS church?” Masha knew the structure, less a house of worship from the outside than what would result from slamming together a bunch of spare Saturn rockets.
“Two miles, uphill the whole way. Today I made it to the top without stopping, first time.”
“That’s something. You don’t look it. I mean you’re not out of breath.”
“Up there I was. Two miles downhill helps.”
Masha skipped down the steps and unlocked the door with a key attached to her wrist with a hair tie.
“Come along, sweety,” said Masha.
The transformation of Masha’s abode from a basement to a studio apartment seemed to be a work in progress. The space was roomy enough to live in, and the essential furnishings were there, a bed and bedroom furniture and a scrivener’s desk to one side, a kitchenette with a rustic dining table to the other, and a central area defined by a sofa, a loveseat, and a flat screen TV sitting on two-by-fours and cinder blocks. Through a half-opened door with a full-length mirror, Marsh spied a bathroom sink that looked new. But the walls of the room were concrete, the home’s bare underground foundation, and overhead, raw, uninsulated beams and the undersides of floor boards were waiting to be hidden by a ceiling. Mismatched area rugs covered most of the unfinished floor. In one corner, near a tall water heater, there was a small work bench piled with Masha’s bowls and cans of stain and varnish. In another corner a piece of HVAC equipment emitted a low hum.
“What’s that?” said Marsh, pointing to the machine.
“My clean air,” said Masha. “It runs nonstop, or I’m illegal.”
“So you are legal?”
“Yes, finally!” Masha laughed.
She directed Marsh to a seat at the table from which she gathered up breakfast remnants, a plate with a crust of toast, a cloth napkin, a butter knife and a glass with a bit of leftover orange juice.
“Tea?” said Masha, brandishing a kettle, which she filled with water and fired up on her stove. With a dish towel, she rubbed the sweat from her face, then crossed the floor to a chest of drawers where she yanked off her shirt and slipped into a black hoodie. Marsh noticed for the first time how cold the room was.
“Who owns the house?” she said.
“A professor from Mills, economics or poly sci. She’s a widow, sixty. We have this competition, who can be quieter?”
“Quiet is good, after Spiral, I mean.”
Masha dropped tea bags into two small mugs of dark polished wood and covered them with hot water. It occurred to Marsh that she could probably sit right where she was all day doing nothing at all and be perfectly happy watching Masha change her shirt and put dishes away and brew tea and pay her bills and chuckle at reality TV.
“These are pretty,” said Marsh raising her cup. “Did you make them?”
“I wish,” said Masha, sitting. “I picked them up at Pier 1. The wood’s jujube.”
“Oh, I’ve heard of that. It’s from like Madagascar, right?”
“You do know your species. I’d like to spin out something this thin without cracking it in half. That’s what I’m aiming for right now.”
“You’ll get there. So, you’re probably wondering what I’m doing here. After you left there was this meeting about Ray and his weapon.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, it got heated, and interesting, not what you’d expect. Seemed to be about fifty-fifty for or against. What I was hearing, I think, even though it wasn’t being said out loud, was that this had a to do with trust and belief in each other. And maybe there’s not as much of that as we’d all like to think there is.”
“Hey, Marsh.”
“When I left, they were talking about voting about the gun, whether or not Ray should keep it there. Which I thought was silly because this is not about counting ballots. It’s about our identity, who we are and working side-by-side in harmony and so forth.”
“Hey, Marcia.”
“Hmm?”
“That’s not why you’re here.”
“It isn’t?”
“No,” said Masha locking her eyes on Marsh’s. “You didn’t come here to tell me about Ray’s gun.”
Now Marsh realized at once that this was true. But in the same instant she also understood that she did not know why she had stumbled and fumbled her way to Masha’s house, not precisely anyway, not to the extent that there was something specific she wished to say or an action she was determined to take. Marsh groped for a backup, another line of defense. She could say she was concerned, not worried, just concerned, because, at the sight of Ray’s pistol, Masha had fled Spiral with no explanation and she felt she had to check on her. It was a solid idea, at least if one ignored her inexplicable failure to do the checking in the conventional way by using her phone. She may have opened her mouth to covey this explanation to Masha, even sputtered out the first word or two. But then all her mental labor, which transpired over the course of about six seconds, blew away because Masha had reached across the table, removed the tea cup from Marsh’s hand and then pressed that hand between both of hers. The contact sent a rubbery sensation down Marsh’s back and into her legs. Masha came around the table and firmly assisted Marsh to her feet.
“I want to show you something outside,” said Masha.
“Outside?”
Marsh obediently followed Masha back to the top of the front steps where she looked down at their coupled hands, bathed in sunlight, beat up, callused, and sinewed, the hands of farmers, not ladies. She wondered if she might ask Masha out on a manicure date, an idea that came from left field given that she had never in her life gotten a manicure.
“She’s in the back,” said Masha.
“Who is?”
“My partner.”
Masha led her along a neat, narrow garden colorfully skirting the house. Around back, Masha stopped before a large clay pot in which several long wooden poles supported ascending vines with clusters of magenta flowers.
“Here she is,” said Masha.
“A bougainvillea?”
“Yes. Meet Joanne. Actually, Joanne Two. Joanne One and I couldn’t make it work. But Joanne Two seems happy, don’t you think?”
Marsh waited for the punch line, but there was none.
“She’s lovely. So, it’s you and Joanne?”
“Joanne Two.”
“I’ve been so blind.”
Masha coughed back a laugh and sprinkled water from a tin watering can on Joanne Two
“Don’t say anything to her, but I’ve been thinking of moving on.”
“Oh? Do you have someone else in mind?”
“There’s this darling salamander at a pet shop on University I’ve had my eye on.”
They walked back to Marsh’s truck where Marsh said, “I get it, you know.”
“Yeah? Tell me.”
“It’s the relationship reboot. Start simple and small and if there’s no disaster, advance to the next level of evolution. Standard stuff around here.”
“Good word evolution,” said Masha. “Listen, about Ray. Can you go easy on him?”
“About the gun?”
“Here’s the thing. He brought it for me.”
Notwithstanding her ongoing effort to stay cute and cool, Marsh’s mouth fell open.
“There are some, um, old associates of mine, who think I have a debt to pay,” Masha went on.
“My god, Masha.”
“It’s all bluff, I’m pretty sure. I told Ray about it and he said it couldn’t hurt to have some protection. I’m not sure if he’s going to do the protecting or if the gun’s meant for me. But it didn’t matter when you got so angry. I just couldn’t bear that.”
Now that’s an opening, Marsh thought, and she wrapped her arms around Masha. She held her with no intention of letting go until Masha whispered, “It’s alright.”
Masha waited on the sidewalk as Marsh turned her truck around in the dead end and then stopped. Through the open window, Marsh said, “Hey, Masha, when you’re ready to move on to mammals, will you let me know?”
“You’ll be the first.”
Bill Schillaci
The eleven cabinetmakers, carvers, woodturners and furniture strippers/refinishers—plus one construction framer who used his space as a dump—comprising the Spiral Co-op were all independent businesses and community-minded people and so disagreed on nearly every aspect of the co-op’s administration while always reaching an amicable compromise. At least that’s how it played until Ray Bookings showed up at Spiral with his Ruger.
It was one of those rare mornings when the members, who tended to set their schedules according to their biorhythms or the alignment of the planets, all arrived more or less at the same time at the co-op, an unpartioned former industrial laundry on Frontage Road near the San Francisco Bay. This caused some congestion on the street out front as the first arrivals were asked by those who followed to go back out and move their vehicles since almost everybody needed more curb room to cart lumber or some antique piece of cabinetwork through the wide front door. Rather than prompting annoyance, the jockeying created a jovial mood and more happy chatter than had been heard at Spiral since the last Christmas Eve party. Nobody, it seemed, was particularly interested in starting work or even talking about it.
Personal history was the subject of one conversation over steaming Starbucks between Masha and Marcia. With no prompting, Masha revealed that she had done ten months at Perryville in Arizona for felony credit card fraud. There, in the prison’s shop, she learned to make hardwood bowls with an ancient lathe from Italy that weighed as much as a small car. After her release she lucked upon a parole officer who helped her settle into a law-abiding career. Marcia knew Masha did time—Masha was clear about that during her admission interview before the gathered members—but not why or where or about the training.
“Bowls are fabulous,” Marcia was quick to tell Masha after her application was approved. “Everybody loves bowls.”
In the months that followed, Marcia purchased several bowls she didn’t need from Masha. Marcia was the only Spiral member who held an actual degree in woodworking, this from the Rochester Institute of Technology where lathing was generally considered a poor relation of classic cabinetwork and where she discovered that after a couple of hours of training she could spin a bowl or a set of table legs or a peppermill or candlestick that was every bit as attractive as anything Masha could produce and in about half the time. So, in truth, Marcia did not love bowls, and certainly not lathing, but soon after they first met, she found she did love Masha. On this morning, the two stood side-by-side leaning back against Ray Booking’s work bench in one corner of Spiral. In addition to having names that were almost impossible to distinguish when called across the work floor, Marcia (who happily agreed to be known as Marsh) and Masha appeared to have been stirred up in the same gene pool, at least in terms of length of bone (long) and musculature (thick).
The day before, Masha said her van was getting a new clutch, and she asked Marsh to pick her up at her apartment in Fruitvale. Opening the door to Marsh’s truck, Masha said, “Marsh, thank you so much.”
“Not at all,” Marsh said lightly, although in an anticipation of the meet up Marsh had slept hardly at all.
Masha was quiet and when she did speak careful with her words—a legacy of prison life, Marsh guessed—and Marsh viewed Masha’s simple explanation of why she went to jail as a breakthrough of sorts. In the moments of stillness after Masha had spoken, a swarm of compassionate responses filled Marsh’s head, each begging for vocalization, all of which she beat back into quietude because any response would only blur the wonder of Masha’s revelation. If nothing ever developed with Masha, Marsh thought sadly, she knew at least she could cherish this moment of soft vulnerability and trust.
As Marsh speculated if there was a hidden meaning to Masha’s disclosure, Ray, the last member to arrive, approached quietly behind them and dropped his tool satchel on the bench.
“Good morning, ladies,” he said.
Masha quickly stepped away from the bench and mumbled an apology. Ray waved it off good naturedly. His work area was the largest in the co-op, ideally situated below a corner skylight, a privilege that went with being one of Spiral’s founders, the other two long since departed into entirely different and more sensible occupations. Ray built captain’s beds and nothing else, some on individual commission but most according to a single design Ray had mastered. The uniformity eliminated all surprises save for the unavoidable ones inherent in the organic nature of the poplar that Ray purchased in truckloads at a lumber yard down the peninsula. Working around the clock, Ray was able to build the beds at the eye-popping rate of two or even three a week when the demand was there. He displayed the beds at furniture outlets around the Bay and then delivered them to homes where he and anyone else at Spiral who wanted a few hours work assembled them. While the sales were not exactly regular, they were sufficient to afford Ray something close to a middleclass income, a rare phenomenon at Spiral where spousal, partner and parental subsidies were endemic. He was one of the few in the co-op who had the means to parcel out small jobs, gestures that in combination with his tenure and the fact that he was the eldest member solidified his unofficial but de facto leadership role among a party of equals.
“Aren’t you on a jury?” said Marsh.
“Settled,” said Ray. “In the women’s room, I think.”
Ray was from the Olympic Peninsula and snugly fit into at least one stereotype—bearishly proportioned and lavishly bearded, prone to understatement and faintly redolent of a redwood forest. His ferocious work ethic was a little scary, something that Masha had yet to adjust to even though Marsh assured her that he was puppy dog sweet.
“We decided to wait for you to get going,” said Marsh, aiming her chin at the other members loitering across the floor, none of whom had yet to touch a tool.
Behind his beard, Ray’s lower facial muscles shifted into what may have been a grin.
“Did you call the university about that tree?” he asked Masha. A maintenance buddy at the school informed him that they were felling a dying boxelder, a coveted wood for turning, and Ray had told Masha she could take some if she showed up on time with a chainsaw.
Masha mumbled something neither Marsh nor Ray could decipher. There was a respectful pause in which both he and Marsh wondered if Masha would say something else. She didn’t, preferring to retreat behind her Cloud Macchiato. Marsh’s theory, which she shared with no one, was that Masha viewed Ray as some kind of authority figure, probably one in a life-long progression of men beginning with her father who consigned her to a lower rung of humanity because of who she was and her affinity for trouble.
Ray unstrapped the satchel and took out an aged wooden plane that must have been two feet long. When he wasn’t gluing up beds, Ray liked to drive north to Mendocino on Sundays where every other garage housed a woodworker and prowl the yard sales for old tools he could refurbish.
“Is that apple?” Marsh asked.
Ray looked at her, impressed.
“You know your species,” he said, withdrawing his hand from the satchel and placing the Ruger on the bench beside the plane.
Marsh recoiled. “What the fuck, Ray?” she said.
“If you’re asking what the fuck this is, it’s a Ruger American with a capacity of seventeen nine millimeter rounds.” The pistol was black metal and embellished with grooves and slides. Ray swiveled the muzzle away from Marsh.
“Oh, a Ruger nine millimeter, thank you. But what I was asking was what the fuck is it doing here?”
“Well, for one, I just got my carry permit.”
“So that goes with you everywhere now?”
“I think so. It’s a dangerous world and I feel safer. You should too.”
“I’ve never felt unsafe, not here. This is a place of peace.”
“I never heard it called that.”
“Are you feeling threatened, Ray? Is somebody here trying to steal your clients, so you needed to bring in a gun to protect your business interests?”
“You have an epic imagination, Marsh.”
Ray continued to unpack, a set of chisels rolled up in a canvas holder, an electric palm sander, a plastic bag stuffed with shop rags. These he placed on the bench beside the pistol. Somewhere behind Marsh, a router was turned on, the ferocious screech of carbide cutting a groove. There would be work today after all, she thought. She turned to the sound and in the open reaches of Spiral saw that Masha had vanished.
It was Ray himself who called for the ad hoc meeting. After their tense exchange, Marsh stomped off, partly to inform the other members about Ray’s weapon but mostly to look for Masha. Predictably, the initial reactions to Ray’s gun were varied, from no reaction at all to shock and expressions of betrayal of the co-op’s pacific spirit. Overall, the news was a cold slap in the face that abruptly ended the morning’s easy conviviality. Several old kitchen chairs left over from the laundry days and dribbling stuffing and some empty five-gallon paint cans came together in a circle in the co-op’s common area. When all save Masha were seated, Ray convened the meeting and apologized for the inconvenience. He gave the reason for the interruption and pointed to his corner where he said his Ruger was safely stored in a locked box because it was apparent that some members were offended by the very sight and proximity of a gun. Saying this, he turned to Marsh who was endeavoring to look simultaneously firm in her convictions and scornful in advance of whatever Founding Fathers Second Amendment Antonin Scalia bullshit argument Ray was cooking up. Before sitting, she had checked the restroom for Masha and the street outside and given that Masha had no vehicle, was mystified and a little worried about her disappearance.
Ray repeated his baseline reasons for bringing in the Ruger—(a) that he was legally entitled to and (b) that security was fundamental today to any enterprise accessible to the public, a point underlined by reference to several criminal occurrences at the nearby South Berkeley’s Farmer’s Market, which was news to every other member. That revelation made an impression in Ray’s favor with one member while another was concerned that Ray was concocting an atmosphere of fear. Even if there was some danger that nobody else knew about, how was it, this member asked, that Ray, absent a group discussion, had appointed himself their protector? We’re discussing it now, a third member said. Someone introduced the idea that a gun was simply another kind of tool, and this was a place where the utility of tools was well understood. But somebody else said the only purpose of this so-called tool was destruction, which made it unique and out of place in the co-op. A link was drawn to the lethal potential of the nail guns that at least half the members owned, which prompted a cynical snort from a member who, looking at his feet, mumbled that that was an asinine comparison. A member said she grew up in a house with guns and never thought about it one way or the other. Then someone else recounted how he saw a guy shot in the thigh from a drive-by at a pickup basketball game, an event that sometimes flashes unpleasantly in his head when he hears the word gun spoken. There was still a dark spot on the concrete court where blood had soaked in, he said. This disclosure was followed by a brief silence until someone suggested it was time to vote on whether a gun should be allowed in Spiral. Ray said he was fine with a vote to indicate majority approval or disapproval, but he would not be compelled by the result of any plebiscite to surrender his safety to the goodness of humanity. Someone responded that the group had the authority to expel any member who caused a disruption, but someone else interjected that the gun was maybe a distraction, but could not reasonably be called a disruption unless Ray engaged in target practice on the premises or even walked around with his Ruger in a holster. There followed a discussion, if that what it’s called when almost everybody talks at the same time, about what precisely should be voted on. At this point, Marsh, who had spoken not at all during any of this, rose from her can, put on her jacket and walked out the front door.
After hearing but not relating at all to the first beep, at the second beep Marsh glanced at the rearview mirror where she made eye contact with a woman in a white car raising her hands and glaring in annoyance.
“Sorry,” Marsh muttered to no one and pulled over to the curb.
She slumped down and peeked out the side window as the driver passed, expecting the middle finger salute or her mouth contouring around a silent asshole, either of which she probably deserved. But the woman was above that, staring straight ahead over the steering wheel and entering the intersection. Nice, Marsh thought, probably a sisterhood thing, an intuitive understanding that a lone woman does not sit paralyzed in her vehicle in traffic unless she is dealing with some trauma, a kid on drugs or a deadbeat spouse or news from an oncologist. In this case, it was an inability to decide whether to turn left or right.
Marsh arrived at the corner of University and San Pablo intending, she thought, to turn left, north toward Albany where a client, a potential client anyway, wanted an estimate on kitchen cabinets. Marsh hated kitchen cabinets, the construction of which was based on sawing down hundreds of pounds of four-by-eight sheets of particle board or plywood into a boilerplate design that became a losing enterprise with the merest attempt at originality. And once installed, there would be the inevitable badgering by the customer that her trash container didn’t fit under the sink or the door hinges squeaked. This was not what Marsh had in mind after RIT, where the universal aspiration was a six-page spread in Fine Woodworking, not, generally speaking, the reference book for kitchen cabinets.
But it was not her dread of another kitchen job that stalled Marsh at the corner. The problem was that a right turn, not the direction she was supposed to be taking, would lead her south, down through Oakland, the reverse of the very route she had driven this morning from Fruitvale and Masha’s apartment. Before pulling up to this intersection, Marsh was mostly in denial about the decision she would soon confront, or denial at least about how difficult that decision would be. Now, with no more distance to travel before a turn had to be made, she stared in amazement at all the traffic, all these cars, all these people who knew where they wanted to go and did not have to pull over and be on the verge of tears about whether or not they should go there. Marsh checked herself in the sun visor’s mirror, tested her breath in her cupped hands, popped a stick of gum, threw her head back and groaned.
Of course it didn’t have to be this complicated. If she wanted to locate Masha, all she had to do was call her. After walking out of Spiral, having forgot why she was so pissed about Ray’s stupid penis proxy, she stood on Frontage Road beside her truck, staring at Masha’s number on her contact list. It was something she had gotten into the habit doing in the evenings when alone, just looking at the number and Masha’s name next to it. There were some photos of Masha as well, one Marsh had secretly snapped from a distance of Masha sitting alone on the marina grass across from Spiral eating a burrito, and a ten-second video of a blurry Masha grinding away at her lathe, a figure of impressionist art in a cloud of sawdust. These were sufficient to transport Marsh into a reverie where nothing much existed except an oceanic sense of Masha and herself, a mute, tiny figure watching from the shore. But it was the sight of Masha’s phone number on her iPhone, a shadowy bridge crossing those dark waters, that emptied her head of all but a helpless, insurmountable and, critically, inarticulate misery. In her worst moments, she was angry, partly at Masha, but more at herself. All the clues she had planted that got her nowhere. Waiting for Masha to go home in the evening so she could sweep and straighten up her work space. Or tucking a little box of chocolate samplers under Masha’s dust mask. Or offering Masha tools she said she no longer used, although of course she did. Sometimes, near her gifts, she would leave a slip of paper with a simple “M” written on it, always subduing the urge to enclose the letter in a heart. Masha would respond with a simple thank you, although it usually came late, several days after, or even the week after, and that would be it. Marsh drove herself half-crazy trying to figure out what these intervals meant. Was it that her little gestures made no impression at all on Masha? Or was it that Masha was also thoroughly smitten by Marsh but was equally confounded about how to carry her feelings to the verbal level? With each failure to elicit something more, Marsh fretted and boiled and swore to herself to give it up. And then she’d glance across Spiral’s floor to see Masha’s broad shoulders delicately rolling within her work shirt as she carved her initials into the bottom of a bowl, and Marsh would quietly fall to pieces.
Thirty minutes after making her move south on San Pablo, or more, or less, she couldn’t say really, Marsh turned into Masha’s cul de sac, a street wedged into the crease between Oakland’s flatlands and leafy highlands. It was an area of compact, tidy homes squeezed together on one-eighth-of-an-acre properties. Marsh rolled down the pavement as slow as her truck could go and still be moving. It was, she realized in a rare instant of clarity, exactly how a stalker would case a target. The thought scared her, less about how she was courting trouble for herself than about poor Masha, still reintegrating into society, not needing an unhinged admirer in her life. Biting her lip, she nudged the accelerator and braked noisily in front of the last house, Spanish revival with a terracotta roof. To one side, an earthen looking set of stairs descended to an arched doorway of heavy oak planks and Masha’s studio rental. The door was flanked by two ground-level windows no bigger than place mats with matching curtains patterned with buttercups. The bright yellow flowers were all that distinguished the outside from a frontier root cellar or, Marsh thought with a shiver, a jail cell. She lifted the door knocker, an iron ring looped through a lion’s head, took a breath and let the ring drop.
“Marsh?”
Marsh spun to see Masha, in lavender spandex shorts encasing surprisingly lean thighs, a baggy 49ers tee shirt and a white head band, observing her from the top step.
“Oh, you’re here. I mean you’re there.”
“Yes, here, there, either one, or both,” said Masha, smiling, her face and neck silvery with sweat. “And so are you.” She took hold of the stairway’s rusted hand rail, cupped her instep and pulled her leg up behind to stretch her quad.
“I, um, you, um, left. Spiral, I mean. Without your van.”
“I got a Lyft. I needed a run.”
Mounting the steps, Marsh said, “You’re a runner?”
“A new thing for me. See that?” Masha straightened and pointed between the house and its neighbor up into the hills.
“The LDS church?” Masha knew the structure, less a house of worship from the outside than what would result from slamming together a bunch of spare Saturn rockets.
“Two miles, uphill the whole way. Today I made it to the top without stopping, first time.”
“That’s something. You don’t look it. I mean you’re not out of breath.”
“Up there I was. Two miles downhill helps.”
Masha skipped down the steps and unlocked the door with a key attached to her wrist with a hair tie.
“Come along, sweety,” said Masha.
The transformation of Masha’s abode from a basement to a studio apartment seemed to be a work in progress. The space was roomy enough to live in, and the essential furnishings were there, a bed and bedroom furniture and a scrivener’s desk to one side, a kitchenette with a rustic dining table to the other, and a central area defined by a sofa, a loveseat, and a flat screen TV sitting on two-by-fours and cinder blocks. Through a half-opened door with a full-length mirror, Marsh spied a bathroom sink that looked new. But the walls of the room were concrete, the home’s bare underground foundation, and overhead, raw, uninsulated beams and the undersides of floor boards were waiting to be hidden by a ceiling. Mismatched area rugs covered most of the unfinished floor. In one corner, near a tall water heater, there was a small work bench piled with Masha’s bowls and cans of stain and varnish. In another corner a piece of HVAC equipment emitted a low hum.
“What’s that?” said Marsh, pointing to the machine.
“My clean air,” said Masha. “It runs nonstop, or I’m illegal.”
“So you are legal?”
“Yes, finally!” Masha laughed.
She directed Marsh to a seat at the table from which she gathered up breakfast remnants, a plate with a crust of toast, a cloth napkin, a butter knife and a glass with a bit of leftover orange juice.
“Tea?” said Masha, brandishing a kettle, which she filled with water and fired up on her stove. With a dish towel, she rubbed the sweat from her face, then crossed the floor to a chest of drawers where she yanked off her shirt and slipped into a black hoodie. Marsh noticed for the first time how cold the room was.
“Who owns the house?” she said.
“A professor from Mills, economics or poly sci. She’s a widow, sixty. We have this competition, who can be quieter?”
“Quiet is good, after Spiral, I mean.”
Masha dropped tea bags into two small mugs of dark polished wood and covered them with hot water. It occurred to Marsh that she could probably sit right where she was all day doing nothing at all and be perfectly happy watching Masha change her shirt and put dishes away and brew tea and pay her bills and chuckle at reality TV.
“These are pretty,” said Marsh raising her cup. “Did you make them?”
“I wish,” said Masha, sitting. “I picked them up at Pier 1. The wood’s jujube.”
“Oh, I’ve heard of that. It’s from like Madagascar, right?”
“You do know your species. I’d like to spin out something this thin without cracking it in half. That’s what I’m aiming for right now.”
“You’ll get there. So, you’re probably wondering what I’m doing here. After you left there was this meeting about Ray and his weapon.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, it got heated, and interesting, not what you’d expect. Seemed to be about fifty-fifty for or against. What I was hearing, I think, even though it wasn’t being said out loud, was that this had a to do with trust and belief in each other. And maybe there’s not as much of that as we’d all like to think there is.”
“Hey, Marsh.”
“When I left, they were talking about voting about the gun, whether or not Ray should keep it there. Which I thought was silly because this is not about counting ballots. It’s about our identity, who we are and working side-by-side in harmony and so forth.”
“Hey, Marcia.”
“Hmm?”
“That’s not why you’re here.”
“It isn’t?”
“No,” said Masha locking her eyes on Marsh’s. “You didn’t come here to tell me about Ray’s gun.”
Now Marsh realized at once that this was true. But in the same instant she also understood that she did not know why she had stumbled and fumbled her way to Masha’s house, not precisely anyway, not to the extent that there was something specific she wished to say or an action she was determined to take. Marsh groped for a backup, another line of defense. She could say she was concerned, not worried, just concerned, because, at the sight of Ray’s pistol, Masha had fled Spiral with no explanation and she felt she had to check on her. It was a solid idea, at least if one ignored her inexplicable failure to do the checking in the conventional way by using her phone. She may have opened her mouth to covey this explanation to Masha, even sputtered out the first word or two. But then all her mental labor, which transpired over the course of about six seconds, blew away because Masha had reached across the table, removed the tea cup from Marsh’s hand and then pressed that hand between both of hers. The contact sent a rubbery sensation down Marsh’s back and into her legs. Masha came around the table and firmly assisted Marsh to her feet.
“I want to show you something outside,” said Masha.
“Outside?”
Marsh obediently followed Masha back to the top of the front steps where she looked down at their coupled hands, bathed in sunlight, beat up, callused, and sinewed, the hands of farmers, not ladies. She wondered if she might ask Masha out on a manicure date, an idea that came from left field given that she had never in her life gotten a manicure.
“She’s in the back,” said Masha.
“Who is?”
“My partner.”
Masha led her along a neat, narrow garden colorfully skirting the house. Around back, Masha stopped before a large clay pot in which several long wooden poles supported ascending vines with clusters of magenta flowers.
“Here she is,” said Masha.
“A bougainvillea?”
“Yes. Meet Joanne. Actually, Joanne Two. Joanne One and I couldn’t make it work. But Joanne Two seems happy, don’t you think?”
Marsh waited for the punch line, but there was none.
“She’s lovely. So, it’s you and Joanne?”
“Joanne Two.”
“I’ve been so blind.”
Masha coughed back a laugh and sprinkled water from a tin watering can on Joanne Two
“Don’t say anything to her, but I’ve been thinking of moving on.”
“Oh? Do you have someone else in mind?”
“There’s this darling salamander at a pet shop on University I’ve had my eye on.”
They walked back to Marsh’s truck where Marsh said, “I get it, you know.”
“Yeah? Tell me.”
“It’s the relationship reboot. Start simple and small and if there’s no disaster, advance to the next level of evolution. Standard stuff around here.”
“Good word evolution,” said Masha. “Listen, about Ray. Can you go easy on him?”
“About the gun?”
“Here’s the thing. He brought it for me.”
Notwithstanding her ongoing effort to stay cute and cool, Marsh’s mouth fell open.
“There are some, um, old associates of mine, who think I have a debt to pay,” Masha went on.
“My god, Masha.”
“It’s all bluff, I’m pretty sure. I told Ray about it and he said it couldn’t hurt to have some protection. I’m not sure if he’s going to do the protecting or if the gun’s meant for me. But it didn’t matter when you got so angry. I just couldn’t bear that.”
Now that’s an opening, Marsh thought, and she wrapped her arms around Masha. She held her with no intention of letting go until Masha whispered, “It’s alright.”
Masha waited on the sidewalk as Marsh turned her truck around in the dead end and then stopped. Through the open window, Marsh said, “Hey, Masha, when you’re ready to move on to mammals, will you let me know?”
“You’ll be the first.”