For Christmas, at Michael’s request, I made sausage Jambalaya. It’s not a dish I cook much anymore, given concerns about fat and sodium content. Last night, just as I was stirring it before serving, I realized I’d left out the Thyme. That was an accident, but I also deliberately cut the amount of salt in half. (Why even add salt when you’re cooking with ham and sausage?)
Michael didn’t seem to mind, and it turns out I actually like it better this way. It’s creamier and got a nice sweetness offsetting the heat.
Also, I made a chocolate apricot cake. And a pot of Smoking Bishop. Lovely celebration.
Some friends who’d visited Australia had told us we had, absolutely had to order a coffee drink called a “flat white.” After lunch at Manly Beach we asked the waitress what a flat white was, and she launched into a description involving lots of milk (not steamed) and a little espresso, concluding with “it’s the weakest coffee drink on the spectrum, cappuccino being the strongest.” So we each ordered a small and decided to enjoy them down at the shore.
We carried them back to where we’d started out on Manly beach. Different people were swimming and surfing now. The little boy I’d seen digging in the morning was nowhere to be seen, but there were several impressive turrets of sand where he’d been and who knows, maybe he was still digging somewhere behind them and out of sight. I sipped my flat white. Yes, it was delicious, but it tasted a little familiar. I lifted up the top and looked at it.
“These look and taste like cafe au laits,” I said.
Michael, who’d been enjoying his, looked disappointed. “I thought it was an Australian thing,” he said.
“Well, they’re very, very good cafe au laits,” I told him.
Gray day. The cathedral bells just struck the noon hour. Last night I became anxious because I could not remember hearing them. We’ve lived here for over twenty years, so naturally we don’t notice the carillion, but I hated the thought of yet another pocket of silence. I listened and they rang their final hour of 9:00 pm.
More Zoom conversations yesterday afternoon. My boss’s personality is indelibly stamped with her background in theater and dance. Five years ago, on a dark rainy night, a city bus grazed her. She did a spinning pirouette and kept her footing, landing in fourth position and coming away with nothing more than a scraped and bruised elbow from hitting the side of the bus. My favorite quote, from her, during a department heads meeting years ago that got rather testy — “I’m not angry. I’m dramatic!”
She’s gotten the hang of Zoom now, so the camera came on in closeup, showing her freshly applied lipstick and the scarf she’d tied jauntily around her neck and making me conscious that I was not wearing a bra and had not brushed my hair. Our film curator was in a t-shirt and looked like he needed to trim his beard.
It was a good conversation, another little nudge out of the somnolence I mentioned the other day. The world is off balance but still spinning and we will, I pray, keep our footing. I still have a job, such as it is.
Spooky stories are part of the season. I’m convinced this holiday originated in people huddling closer to some communal fire on the longest, coldest night of the year, staring over their shoulders at the shadows and telling tales of spirits and demons. And so, I’ll tell here about my own closest brush with the uncanny. I saw and spoke with my own doppelganger.
Encountering your doppelganger is supposed to be a sign of impending death. I was twenty-seven, when I saw mine and I’m in my sixties now, so that’s obviously a myth. (One of George Sand’s lovers, the dissolute, occasionally insane poet Alfred de Musset, is said to have been badly shaken by seeing his doppelganger pass him while he was walking in a forest. He died a mere 24 years later.)
Back in the ’80s, my boyfriend and I had decided to move from Pittsburgh PA to San Francisco. He’d already done his bit by traveling to California and sofa surfing with friends until he had found a place for us. The apartment was tracked down, the lease was signed. All that was left was for me to ship our books, sell off as much as I could and, on a bitterly cold day in March, load up the car and thoroughly clean our apartment in Squirrel Hill.
This took all night, a long, depressing, discombobulating process. There’s nothing quite like scrubbing a wooden floor in an empty apartment, lit up all yellow and echoing in the dead of a black, bitterly cold night. It feels like a sort of murder. You are dismantling a segment of your life.
By the time I finally walked to my car, bearing the cat in its carrier, the sun was coming out – or rather, its smudged version behind the solid gray cloud cover. I scraped some of the ice off the windshield, climbed in, and began the trip to North Carolina, where I would spend a week with my parents before starting the cross-country journey.
I felt awful, of course. Weak. Tired. Cold. Horribly, horribly thirsty. I wanted a fruit drink so badly that when I pulled up to a McDonald’s drive thru and learned that all they had left was grapefruit juice, I settled for the pink stuff, even though I hate the taste and drinking grapefruit juice typically gives me a pounding headache. In this case, however, it tasted wonderful, which was a strange experience – the taste was the same, but I liked it. And instead of making my head hurt, it made me feel significantly better. I drove for another hour, then felt myself beginning to lose steam.
By this time, I was out on the highway, driving across a cold, snowy landscape beneath a leaden sky. If I continued, I was, without question, going to pass out at the wheel. Fortunately, I spotted a rest area up ahead, one of those places that truckers use, and I pulled into it, parked, and sat for a moment, weighing the danger of falling asleep there as opposed to falling asleep while driving. I was young, female, alone except for a cat securely locked in its carrier. The rest area seemed fairly busy – trucks were coming and going constantly, the truckers didn’t appear especially rough or menacing, and in any event, I’d locked the doors of my car.
But what if I were to hear a tapping on the window, and wake up to see someone discreetly pointing a gun at me? What if I froze to death, fell asleep and just didn’t wake up?
Something might happen to me if I took a nap here, but something would happen to me if I tried to drive in my current state.
Resigned, I crossed my arms and settled back in my seat. As I took one last anxious look around, I heard someone say, “Don’t worry.”
I looked to my right and, with no surprise or alarm, saw myself sitting on the passenger side. This was even more of a physical impossibility than it sounds since the passenger seat was piled high with boxes. Nobody could sit there. But there “I” was, leaning forward slightly in the seat to catch my own eye, looking friendly, calm, and slightly concerned.
“Sleep as long as you want,” “I” said. “I’ll keep an eye on things.”
Well, thank God for that, I thought, as I closed my eyes and drifted off.
I woke up about two hours later. In my half-awake state, I turned to let “myself” know that I was alert again, and for an instant, I was baffled to see nothing but boxes in the passenger seat. It took be a moment to get my bearings and explain to myself (internally) that “I” could not, in fact, have been sitting next to myself in the car.
What mattered was that, once I was fully awake, I felt much, much better and was confident I could make it to North Carolina without having an accident. I started the car, set off, and reached my parents’ house safely.
Since then, I’ve read about supposedly true cases of doppelgangers (and by this, I mean the apparition of oneself – not cases where long-separated identical twins meet each other on the street.) What’s striking about them is that they follow a pattern that lends verisimilitude to the accounts. The stories include:
An account from several hundred years ago, in Italy, where an isolated traveler on horseback was riding down a dark, dangerous highway in December. He was exhausted, and desperately worried about either freezing to death or falling prey to brigands. As he struggled to stay awake, he became aware of another rider on the road beside him. It was himself, looking quite alert and watchful. Reassured, he traveled on until he reached an inn safely.
An account from World War II, of a GI in Europe who was driving alone in his jeep at night, cut off, scared, in the dead of winter. He saw another GI by the road, stopped to pick him up, and saw it was himself. His doppelganger climbed into the jeep and talked him through the night, giving him advice on where to turn, where to slow down, how to survive. He made it to his destination safely.
An account by a sailing enthusiast who was out on the open sea, by himself in rough waters. He was taken ill just as a storm hit and was forced to hunker down on his bunk below decks, shivering, terrified, and miserably sick as his yacht pitched and rolled in the storm. At one point, he decided that he simply had to make the effort, go up to the deck and take the helm. He managed to drag himself up and saw, to his astonishment, that there was somebody at the wheel steering the ship through the storm. The helmsman turned his head and he recognized himself. When the doppelganger smiled encouragingly at him, he realized that it was all right, things were under control, and returned to his bunk. When he awoke, the storm was over and, of course, the doppelganger was gone.
Doppelgangers never seem to stick around for thanks.
Anyone reading this probably noticed the same pattern I did – cold, fear, exhaustion, and unfamiliar surroundings. My own theory is the doppelganger is a hallucination triggered by these things, rather than a helpful spirit. (Without a Ouija board, we probably wouldn’t have heard from a sailor telling us, “I thought my doppelganger had it all under control, but then I woke up and water was rushing down the steps and the yacht was sinking…”)
Remembering what led up to meeting my own “helpful” doppelganger is interesting. I’d just spent the previous weeks and the night before dismantling my old home. Bit by bit, all that was familiar – an armchair, a beloved oak desk, my bookshelves – had been sold off and carried away by strangers. The hours before my encounter had been spent scrubbing away the last traces of our lives there. It was as if the “I” who lived in Pittsburgh and worked in a bookstore had been erased, and I was in limbo between that and becoming another “I,” one who lived in California and worked for a magazine.
Then there had been that odd moment of sucking down a tall cup of a hated drink that normally would have made me ill. I can remember thinking how weird it was to be enjoying a taste I despised, and without getting that familiar pounding sensation in my temples. It was like being someone else for a moment, someone who loved grapefruit juice.
So, it’s not surprising that I would have a waking dream about my own ghost. The old version of my Pittsburgh self had been haunting me for weeks.
The issue is out. Shelly drove it to Sacramento this afternoon. Collating should be next Thursday, if things stay on schedule.
It was a quiet, strange day. Charlie took off for Sercon — I drove him to the airport after lunch — and for the rest of the day we worked with that giddy, disembodied feeling we always have when he is gone. Near the end of the day Faren finished the sub lists and I drove to Marin to drop them off at Chuck’s.
Chuck is a wizened, bearded old man who works with a computer he apparently constructed from a chest of drawers, a television screen, and an old typewriter keyboard. On this thing he enters the corrections, additions, and subtractions to the sub list and runs out labels for mailing day.
When he’s not at his video store, he lives in a low, dark house in the Marin Hills, a shady area of long wavy driveways and views. Just a few feet from his house is a dreary little beach where the water laps half-heartedly at a strip of brown sand. The house itself is kept tightly closed, its curtains drawn, and the inside is dark, layered with carpets, thick with heavy furniture and expensive looking memorabilia. It reminds me of places my fathers’s parents used to take me on visits when I was a little girl. Almost all their friends were old folks who lived in their own personal museums.
Chuck lives with a younger woman, a cousin who, I believe, decided he couldn’t take care of himself and moved in with her two wolf dogs. These are beautiful, huge, playful, and frightening. They don’t speak proper dog language, mixing barks and tail-wagging with deep, muzzle-wrinkling growls. Both the dogs and the humans of the house send out conflicting signals. If I walk towards the house when one of the dogs is tied outside, either Chuck will appear in the doorway urging me on (“Come on, come on, he’s just a baby, he won’t hurt you!”) or his cousin will shout at me to stand “ab-so-lute-lySTILL!” until she comes out to untie the dog and take him in.
Today it was Chuck. The white wolf dog was tied outside, and made a racket when I approached. Chuck came out with the gray wolf dog and accepted the documents from me while the two animals yipped and romped around me, thrusting their enormous heads under my hands to be petted.
The walk along the bay was as good a morning introduction to Sydney as we could have, much better than the patchwork chaos of yesterday. On one side was the Bay, on the other the green of the “Domain.” Trees with unbelievably thick roots and heavy green tops, swards of green, strange looking bushes, the ibis in the grass, the occasional cockatoo overhead. Joggers passed or overtook us, the girls usually blonde with skin tight tops and leggings and bouncing pony-tails, the men with very close cropped hair and thick arms. We paused at a place where Mrs. McQuarrie’s chair was supposed to be, but I couldn’t see it, and it was crowded with a party of tourists taking pictures. I got the impression of a shady, rocky overhang. We moved on. Sometimes ahead of us the path would curve so we could see the Opera House far ahead, like some exotic shellfish. Wet stone stairs, the smell of the water, sound of feet on gravel, standing aside to let more joggers past.
Sometimes we’d pause to sit on a bench in the shade and look at the water.
When we at last reached the Opera House, we walked up a broad mountain of stairs and crept about its immensity, peeking through its windows to see gray lit chairs and tables, desks, and one lonely janitor pushing a floor polisher. Every now and then we would step back and look up at sheer glass walls and white peaks.
A girl was taking her boyfriend’s picture as he leaned against it, resting his hand against the wall, pretending to hold it up. “When I was in Europe,” Michael commented, “I remember putting my hand against some ancient wall and wondering what other hands had rested there, over all the centuries. But of course, this place is only forty years old.”
“So our hands are what people may wonder about centuries from now.”
Morning. I sip my coffee. I look at the sun on buildings. I listen to the parrots squawking somewhere nearby.
Michael and I have been sheltering in place now for two weeks.
To keep fit, I’m running my laps around the dining room table. I’m being nudged from mental sloth by occasional emails from my co-workers. We’re all learning how to manage events online. I’ve set up a Zoom meeting at noon today with the Events Director, and our film curator and been in touch with our licensing company. (No, there’s no problem with telling our patrons, “such-and-such movie is available on Kanopy/Hoopla, etc. Watch it and we’ll meet by Zoom on Friday to discuss!”)
Strange incident yesterday with the cat. She was curled up asleep on her stand next to the window. I walked over to look out at the street and she woke into a back-arched, flat-eared, wide-eyed ball of puffed fur. Didn’t go so far as to hiss at me, but came close.
I reached out to stroke her head reassuringly and she ducked, staring at me as if I were a stranger, tail still puffed, a line of fur down her back standing up. Then she hopped off the stand and ran to her usual refuge, under the dining room table. It took her a minute to return to something close to normal, and even then she seemed doubtful (though not about Michael, whom she allowed to pet her while she kept her eyes on me.)
I left her alone for an hour and after that she was perfectly fine. No explanation for this other than that I might have awakened her from a bad dream about her feral past. Maybe it was the loose, black shirt I was wearing.
How can I blame her for being a little crazy? My own anxiety about COVID is barely kept to a simmer, bubbling up occasionally like low-grade nausea. A paperwork SNAFU has left me without health insurance until they untangle it. We checked the wrong box on a form. “You aren’t the only people who did this” the sympathetic representative told us over the phone. It will be sorted out. But until then… It’s irrational perhaps, but I’m afraid of even stepping outside.
I now think of our neighborhood markets the way I used to think of jaunts to the wine country or Point Reyes.
My morning glimpse of the city — gray and rainy. I like it.
Christmas looms. On Sunday night, on our way to a dinner party, a car tore past us, the vague shape of a fir tree strapped to the roof. “Is it legal to ignore the light if you’re bringing home a Christmas tree?” Michael asked.
Didn’t this holiday begin as a celebration of time? The darkest, longest night of the year, the present dying into the past as we slide into the future, that faint touch of the sinister that gives it a richer, more adult flavor as we age. So, people reach out to each other, and our calendar is crowded with meals out, parties. Lunch yesterday with old friends we haven’t seen for months in a dim sum place out on the avenues, eating food I should not eat, gossping about ourselves, watching rain pour down the windows, people hurrying past, hunched forward under umbrellas. ”This used to be a video cafe,” someone said. “Hamburgers and fries and shakes and VHS rentals over there behind the counter. Remember when that was new?” Which really meant “Remember when we were young?”
We stayed until we were the last customers left.
The city is emptying out. The echoes are beautiful.
I’m too old to feel the excitement of the Christmases of my long, happy, gentile childhood, but a hangover remains. It’s a pleasant, umber shadow constantly falling over me, jangly with bells, lit with colored lights and smelling of cinnamon.
I’m writing this sitting in front of my computer waiting to see if my connection to Compuserve gets through. So far, all I’ve gotten is busy signals. Maybe it’s just a waste of time. It’s just that I miss the old forum and I really want to know what’s going on these days.
The modem has developed the weird habit of spitting out the phone cord after it’s dialed a few times.
The second half of Locus didn’t get out today, but tomorrow for sure. Shelly will drive the issue to the printers in Sacramento in the afternoon and check the first section.
Work was frantic. Shelly was still worn out. Trevin was on edge, and Charles was obnoxious. I felt grateful that these days I spend most of my time in the back with Faren. Shelly has my old table, but no view anymore. She tells me Charlie won’t let her open the curtains.
Written in pale blue chalk on the dark sidewalk of Victoria Street:
“I said I loved you
But I lied.”
***
Also on Victoria Street, as Michael and I ventured out for our city walk, we saw, walking briskly far ahead, a slender young blonde woman in black leggings, a slinky black top that slid halfway off one shoulder, and bare feet.
***
At the finger wharf a tall, white haired fellow about our age waiting for his wife gave us directions to the “best walk in Sydney.” As he was immersed in drawing us a map in my notebook, his dark haired, attractive wife approached with their black spaniel, wordlessly put her arm around him and kissed him. “I have no idea who this woman is,” he said. “They just come up all the time and do this.”
His advice was to climb the steps leading from the quay up to the “domain,” a beautiful stretch of green near the Botanic Gardens, and walk along the path near the water. In particular, he said, we should check out Mrs. McQuarrie’s Chair, a stone seat on a cliff where, a couple centuries ago, a governor’s homesick wife would sit and watch the ships from England coming in. “There was nothing here,” he said. “Sydney was a penal colony, and the poor woman was top of the heap and lonely, a cut above you understand, not to sound snobbish. Everybody else here — well, rum was the lingua franca…” Perhaps suddenly realizing we were Americans, he added apologetically, “That means the common tongue.”
Pam Troy 