Curious Affairs by Mary Jane Myers

Author:Mary Jane Myers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Paul Dry Books
Published: 2018-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

Recovery

I AM AT LOOSE ENDS the first Saturday morning after my brother Charles checks into a thirty-day rehab program in Novato, thirty miles north of San Francisco. This is his second go-round. He relapsed about two years ago, after his celebration of six years sobriety with a cake at Alcoholics Anonymous. This whole mess started, it must have been in college, those chugging contests with his fraternity brothers, the pep pills for all-nighters before exams. I’ve been teased my whole life for my goody two-shoes teetotalism. I’m his forty-year-old sister, younger than he by five years, old enough to be stoic about it all. There are only the two of us, and we are both never-married—that by itself might be a red flag for some kind of dysfunction.

We are transplants to the Bay Area. Charles encouraged me to move for the excitement, the cultural life. He was a superstar, went to Stanford, has a lucrative career as an investment banker. I’m quite in his shadow, a graduate of a small women’s college nobody ever heard of. I’m a client service associate at a downtown brokerage firm, Charles found me the job, and I manage to support myself, but there’s no money left over for glitz. I believe he’s ashamed of me, that I don’t measure up. Still, I might have been closer to him, more sisterly, more helpful and loving, but how exactly, I don’t know.

I simply don’t care this morning how I look. I throw on faded mommy-jeans and scrunch back my hair into a scraggly ponytail. I climb the mile-long slope that rises from my Cow Hollow apartment to Russian Hill, a gentrified block, a Peet’s coffee shop across the street from a boulangerie, outside both places, long lines of fit urbanites in trendy sneakers, staring at their phones and texting, compulsively twitching their thumbs. These crowded glamorous places make me nervous, and so I turn the other way, deliberately seeking solitude.

After a few blocks, the tone of the street is grittier, a liquor store wedged between a pawnshop and a sex-toys emporium, cigarette butts and beer bottles littering the gutter. Ignoring caution, I turn into a narrow alleyway, unmarked with any sign, street of no return, perhaps?—if the begrimed asphalt could speak. About halfway down its murky length is a bookshop, the display windows stuffed to the gills, a cart of bargain books outside, almost completely blocking the pavement. The sign over the door reads: Welcome. We feature soulful and scholarly books from the world’s spiritual traditions. I certainly am in a soul-searching phase, and I value scholarship.

I push open the heavyweight door. A wind-chime tinkles. The air smells of book glue mingled with lavender and cloves over a base note of mildew. The ceilings are high, higher than the room is wide, so that the space seems topsyturvy, as if beached on its side by some crazed architect. Bookshelves line the walls from the dark plank floor to the ceiling frescoed with an alchemical sun and zodiac stars.

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