The Story of a Marriage Read Free

was not really listening to the words.
    “Miss Ash,” the older aunt said and then used my first name: “Pearlie. We’re relying on you. Don’t you let him out of your sight. You know how he loves some excitement, and it’ll kill him for sure. I don’t like him taking our old property, out in the Outside Lands, it makes me nervous, but I guess it’ll do him good, far away, out near the ocean air. He won’t need to go downtown, or worry over the past. His family should be enough, Pearlie. You should be enough.”
    “Well of course.” I could not guess what worry they meant. I was distracted by our waiter, a colored man, who was approaching, smiling at me, with a folded napkin in his hands. “I don’t know about any old trouble. We aren’t interested in frivolous things. That is not what he fought the war for.” I spoke very carefully; I thought I’d mention his war experience, as a kind of proof against this idea of weakness.
    Alice, though, had got quite worked up over something. She was inhaling in long, loud breaths like a cave at high tide and stared directly at the table in front of her. Her sister took her arm and she began to shake her head. Her jewelry blinked in the gray sunlight. Then she said something that I decided immediately I hadn’t heard right, because it was so absurd, so crazed, and before I could get her to repeat it, we were interrupted. It was a friend of theirs, a woman in a fancy hat with a pheasant quill, asking the Misses Cook about the Daffodil Festival and whether they thought there would be more flowers this year or fewer. Fewer, it was decided, because of the winter weather. As they talked, the waiter arrived, opened his napkin before me, and presented, burnished as bronze armor, a pile of hot popovers. It was so good in those days to be young.

     
    If you clenched your right hand in a fist, that would be my San Francisco, knocking on the Golden Gate. Your little finger would be sunny downtown on the bay, and your thumb would be our Ocean Beach out on the blue Pacific. They called it the Sunset. That’s where we lived, with our son, in an old property set like a rough stone among the thousands of new houses put up for returning soldiers and their families, in a part of the city no one really built on until the war was over. Then hills were flattened; soil was laid down over the sand; and they built a grid of streets and low pastel houses with garages and Spanish roofs and picture windows that flashed with the appearance of the sun, all in rows for fifty avenues until you reached the ocean. It felt outside of everything. Once, the Chronicle published a map of nuclear damage to San Francisco if it were hit, with rings of rubble and fire. The Sunset was the only district to survive.
    When we first moved in, there were so many empty lots that sand always glittered in the air, and it could bury a vegetable garden overnight. Above the sound of the ocean, one could sometimes hear the early-morning roar of the lions in the nearby zoo. It was nothing like the rest of the city, no hills or views or bohemians, nothing Italian or Victorian to make you take a photograph. A new way to live, separated from downtown by more than just a mountain with one tunnel. It sat on the very edge of the continent, with fog so dense and silver you hardly ever saw a sunset in the Sunset; any glowing light was often just a streetcar emerging like a miner from that tunnel, making its satisfied way out to the ocean.
    It was a Saturday. It was 1953, and weeks before we had all watched on television as President Eisenhower and Richard Nixon were sworn in as the first government we could remember neither to be led nor haunted by FDR. We watched that inauguration, full of worries about the Korean War, race issues, the Rosenbergs, the Communists hidden everywhere around us, the Russian bombs being prepared and inscribed like voodoo charms with our names: Pearlie, Holland, Sonny. We watched. And told ourselves:
    Help