The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Dolores Sachs by Danny Mintz

This is what I wore when I left for Alameda County: the pink blouse that Darren got me after his first job interview in Oregon, the green wool sweater that my mother knit me when I had Stephen, the socks that I crocheted at Stephen’s bedside while he slept, the necklace that I bought for Stephen’s graduation outfit, the pleated gray pants that I bought after Stephen’s funeral, the bracelet that my grandfather bought for my grandmother in Kaunas, which is made of smooth Baltic amber that was warm the first time my mother put it on my wrist.

Just before Stephen went into the hospital, Darren took a job in Portland and he moved into our new Oregon apartment one week after Stephen’s funeral, before I was ready to leave. When I wasn’t at the office for the two weeks before I left for Claire Geddy’s trial, I was alone in our house, which felt larger than it was. I spent those weeks in our bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen, marking off my own, smaller space; tracing a shadow apartment of my own in the house where Darren, Stephen, and I used to live. When I walked from our room to the bathroom, I would touch the knob on Stephen’s door. For the first few days I touched it self-consciously—anxious that Darren would catch me even though I knew that he was gone and that he wouldn’t disapprove even if he were here. Soon, though, I only absently brushed it with my fingertips as I passed.

In the middle of the first week after Darren left, I rediscovered the records that I bought in college, before he and I had moved in with each other. Darren’s musical taste and mine differ and we own only a few CDs, so we rarely play music in the house. Now I dug my dusty Zenith hi-fi from a box in my closet and played Shingle Garden and Hermit’s Habit over and over, listening to Claire Geddy’s young voice under the record’s crackles.

Three weeks after Stephen died, Claire Geddy’s indictment was announced on the news. As the anchor gave a brief summary of Claire’s career arc, noting the disappointing sales of Songs for B.F. Skinner, I began humming “Blue Papa,” from Only Married when Sunday’s Gone. Turning away from the T.V., I walked to my room and undressed, then dressed again in my blouse, pants, and sweater. Clasping my necklace behind my neck, I went back to the kitchen to turn off the T.V. and as I walked to the set I saw the security camera footage of Claire slipping the watch into her pocket and I fingered the amber beads on my bracelet. I grabbed my purse and went out for a walk.

I walked to the Sound Transit station without knowing why. I stood on the platform until the train came, watching people enter the convenience store across the tracks and leave with snack cakes and sandwiches: meals for single people returning to vacant apartments. I spent the rail ride thinking of reasons to get off at each stop until eventually the train went beyond all the people and businesses that I knew well, and I realized that the airport was the only stop left. Only when I stepped into the terminal and handed my credit card to the ticket agent did I understand that I was going to be with Claire at her trial. Only when the pilot announced that we were over San Francisco did I think about how I don’t know her, or really anyone in northern California. Only when I woke up to tires squealing on tarmac did I think about buying a tent, and settling into a temporary vigil.

This is what I thought about on the cab ride to the sporting goods store: I read a story about Claire Geddy in the liner notes to her second album that when she was seventeen she had a baby boy, whom she delivered at home, stillborn. She wrapped him in a comforter and held him close to her body. Scared that he was so cold, she wrapped a quilt around the comforter and hugged him tighter. Holding him in those two wraps, she felt how cold he still was—an icy nub against her chest—so she wrapped him again in the linens from her mother’s bed. She stripped the house of bedding, adding layer to layer, cocooning her child in fifteen layers of bed-linens, comforters, and quilts; and then she lay down and slept on a bare mattress with her well wrapped, frigid, newborn son. The liner notes offered this as the story behind “Ice Prince,” which was really the only song of hers that got much radio time, and which wasn’t my favorite. I thought about how Stephen shivered in the hours before he died. And how I held his cold hand, and drew circles around his IV with my thumb.

Just after I arrived at the courthouse, when I walked past the concert-T-shirted girls pressed against a crowd-fence, holding “Let Claire Be Claire” posters and singing “The Sad-Hearted Monster of Ketchimu River,” I was enormously aware of being forty-five and employed, overdressed and overheated, walking in a crowd of the young and moon-eyed, nostalgic jobless. I brought a cup of coffee at the snack truck and sipped it under my tent fly, scanning the crowd of Claire supporters (“Geddians” on the news), which was smaller than I had imagined it. Almost all of the people in the courthouse parking lot were women, mostly young. They were arrayed in clumps near boomboxes, each playing a different song in Claire’s repertoire, so that I heard her career condensed and folded back onto itself, the strained hopefulness of Shingle Garden smothered by the caustic irony of B.F. Skinner. A girl sat near me who reminded me of myself after my graduation, before I had a job, withdrawn and tentative. She sang “muffled cold against the panes, I hold you to my radiator skin,” softly, under the sound from the boombox, almost to herself. Still singing, she looked at her shoes, adorned with lyrics in permanent marker. She fished a sunflower seed out of her pocket, which she opened with her fingers and ate. Her quiet voice cut out altogether while she chewed.

When Stephen played guitar at night, I would sit on my pillow outside of his door, listening with my head against the wall. He played softly, because he didn’t want to wake Darren and me but also because he was new, and not yet good. He played four fumbling folk ballads, two by Claire. After he died I learned “Blue Papa” on the guitar, poorly, and made a tape of myself playing it which I listened to on headphones as I went to sleep.

I imagined that there would be more TV cameras and more people. I thought Claire should have more of a public supporting her while her private transgression was exhibited to the world at large. Suddenly, I had an image of myself alone in a wide field with a shed that I couldn’t get into, wanting contact; and her, claustrophobic, pressed with many many people into that small shed.

The oil-leak-rainbows glinting between sparse tents and singing clumps of women were sad, shallow, and squalid. I felt alone in the unfilled lot, among just enough people for an unflattering contrast to a heartfelt rally. Was our tent exurb, marked more by open space than overcrowding and loud with listless, jumbled nostalgia, any more than a petty display for a petty thief?

I pictured myself as Claire in her limo: It turned the corner and out of the window I saw myself in my business attire, absurdly pressed against the fence by the crowd. Behind us were our tent domes and our litter, warting the asphalt. I imagined myself, Claire, opening the door, walking past shouting, singing fans, to the courthouse and then looking back over them (only three deep) from the top of the steps. In my mind, I heard “Close Tight the Cookie Jar,” the single from B.F. Skinner that made it briefly into light rotation, and I thought of the store security sensor beeping as I walked out of the store with the watch in my pocket.

My stomach sank. I thought of home, and how I didn’t know why I was here. How ridiculous to be standing in a necklace and a blouse in an Alameda County Courthouse parking lot to see a woman I’d never met at the low point of her public life. I turned to strike my tent.

This is what happened when her limo arrived: I heard the tires, turned my head, and shouted “Claire,” once, in annunciation, then turned from my tent towards the barrier. The crowd followed slowly behind me with their signs. The girls waved, and sang, and were subdued. Claire stepped out of the car both the bashful older woman who had pocketed a watch from Sears and the grieving, sheltering mother of her liner notes. She walked with her shoulders hunched and her head up; and when she turned and faced me I reached out my hand to her shawled back. The fabric was coarse, but pleasant and warm, and her televised body shuddered beneath it. Then someone behind me sang “Ice Prince,” and I was cold; and I looked at her tired cheeks, and I thought of her younger, with her wrapped son, and I felt my bracelet, warm and smooth on my wrist, and I looked down at her still watchless arm.