From our apartment you can see the Bay Bridge. I like that. More people jump off that every year than the Golden Gate, but guess which one gets all the attention.

It’s just Lisa and I now. Margot fell in love and good riddance. Lisa is a hair stylist and I run a switchboard for a law office. She was supposed to work her schedule around mine so that someone could always be there for Elsbet. But she says her clients determine her schedule. She doesn’t make much but I don’t care. Money’s useless if you can’t spend it on someone else.

The beach is north of us and it’s Lisa’s favorite place in the city. She makes me walk it sometimes with her but mostly she wants to sit. She watches and comments. Never anything interesting like where pollution comes from, if a body washed up years ago. No, it’s always “That guy has great abs.” Sometimes I think that matters most to her. That’s all that Brady has going for him but I won’t tell her that. She sometimes brings a thermos of soup with her.

She pestered me for weeks to go on a date with Brady’s friend. She tried to sell me a line about him being a successful doctor. But I heard Brady tell her he’s just an administrator at the free clinic, never even passed his MCAT. I’m not sure what I’m expecting. A hairlip, receding hairline, untrimmed toenails, doughy physique, uncomplicated arrogance. Lisa does not like my suspicion and I have to play it cool. She says if I do a favor for her, she’ll do one for me. I don’t really believe her.

In preparation for the date, I start eating yogurt cups instead of ice cream. I also shave my legs that night. Lisa does not approve of my make up (there is none) but she has a million ideas for my hair. She wants to put it up, draw it down, trim the bangs, streak one side, sweep across, make a fringe, I give up.

“No,” I finally say, derailing her. Her face doesn’t stop beaming.

“I just want to help,” she finally says.

I already know my favor from her. And she’ll say no.

Brady’s friend, Milo, is not the train wreck I was expecting. He was married for four years to a jealous, possessive woman. She refused to allow him to associate with other girls and he consequently only has a circle of male friends now that the relationship has ended. They married right out of high school and dated within it so he has very little experience in meeting girls on his own.

Lisa is so happy that Brady’s happy, it almost makes me happy. Milo is self-conscious and nervous. The date isn’t very good. He orders brioche and seems stunned when it arrives. I’m pretty sure he just saw someone order it in a movie and he was trying to be cool. Milo is not cool. He is a chump. He might be loyal and kind but he’s not worldly, no intellectual curiosity. Some people do that; they create a sphere of familiarity and do their best to never break it. I feel sorry for his life because he’s already lived all of it. And only another sixty years to go.

Brady keeps interrupting my conversation with Milo to ask him who’s starting in his fantasy football league this weekend. Lisa smiles politely and keeps silent. I push a carrot around my plate. The guys split us up to say goodnight. Milo tries to kiss me but he stumbles at it and then loses his nerve. I pat his hands and say it’s okay. He asks if I had a good time. I tell him it will take time to learn the ropes but he’ll be fine.

There is a ticket from the police department taped to the door of our apartment. A fine for excessive noise. We heard the noise when we got into the stairwell but didn’t realize it was Elsbet. We were gone for almost four hours and she had been shrieking the whole time. When I tell Lisa it was her fault, she says I wanted to go on the date and we both had a good time. She’s defensive so I don’t push it. The reason it’s her fault is that she left the vacuum cleaner out and Elsbet mistook the tube for a snake.

The bird was originally my mother’s. It was a present from one of her boyfriends, probably after they broke up. I won’t say that my mom dated bad men, most of them were quite decent. She just had a knack for looking more attractive in retrospect. They would get bored and leave and then want her back. One of them got her Elsbet, but I can’t remember which. I was in high school. I didn’t want pets.

My mom killed herself. Or so the police say. Drove her car right off a cliff. But there were tire burns on the last ten feet of road before the edge of the cliff. If she did commit suicide, she changed her mind after it was too late.

Never knew my father. He died in the first Gulf War, the one that everyone felt we had won so cheaply. My mom blamed him for everything. It’s hard not to think maybe she knew what she was talking about.

The Golden Gate Bridge is more guarded and less accessible if you plan to jump. The Bay Bridge works just fine, I guess. Numbers don’t lie.

Lisa smokes outdoors but I haven’t set any rules. She’s usually on the balcony with her laptop. She tells me Milo would like another date. I use my favor. She throws a fit. Just like I knew it would be. As retaliation, she lets Elsbet go while I sleep. I notice the silence halfway through my second cup of coffee. I ask her how he got out and she plays along. Soon we’re imitating Milo down at the pier, having conversations at the fish market. We are laughing over his exodus. Her childish attempt to punish me ends up being a bonding experience.

“Hey, Gina?” she says as the laughter dies down.

“Yes, Lisa?” This is the opening of a skit we do. The response will be an insult.

But it’s not. “Do you like Brady?”

“I like someone else.”

“Not Milo?” she says, curious.

“No, not him.”

“I thought he was nice.”

“He’s just not my type. He’s a child.”

“I never see you with any guys. What is your type?”

I smile and blow on my coffee.

We go to a bar. A sports bar. Three guesses why we’re here. An overweight man with body odor offers to buy me a drink. Lisa accepts on my behalf. This means he gets to talk to me while I sip the drink I didn’t want. It’s a Fuzzy Navel.

“Where do you work?” he wants to know.

“I’m a housewife.”

“Who are you married to?”

“The sea.”

He doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t get the hint. His face twists and resets itself in confusion.

“How can you be married to the sea?”

“How can you wear a green sport coat with light gray pants?”

He looks down and then back up. “This is a costume. I’m a process server.”

“Who did you serve today?”

“Deadbeat dad.” He looks down again. “I didn’t know I had to dress to impress here.”

“So now you know.”

He turns away and walks five paces then comes back. Looking right into my eyes, he picks up the half-finished drink in front of me and then retreats.

They use seaweed in milkshakes. It’s an emulsifier. You see it less on the beach than you did a few years ago. Pollution, probably. The sea is eating itself.

I’ve dodged a couple calls from Milo before he gets the hint. He decides to unleash his wrath on my voicemail and I want to play it for someone. But I don’t know anyone detached enough that they’ll actually laugh with me. Men are like puppies and he’s pouting because he didn’t get his way.

I put on a sweater. Not just any sweater, this is a Christmas gift from three years ago and it actually says Christmas on it, in case I forget the occasion. It is a dreadful, ugly thing. It was Clarise who gifted me and I take a picture every time I wear it, send it to her. This is the fifth time in three years. I only wear it when I volunteer at the soup kitchen, so it usually falls around Thanksgiving. But I’m not volunteering today. I am wearing it in the hopes that men will stop dropping their jaws over me. I’m also wearing a bicycling helmet. I remember years ago, right after I moved back to the city, a girl I had gone to high school with was injured by a falling branch from a tree in the park. I hadn’t seen her in all those years and we were never friends but it spooked me. It was like that moment when you first realize you will die. That is not why I’m wearing the helmet.

My half-sister Viola is a marine biologist, working at one of those ridiculous water parks. She has a doctorate but chose against professorship in favor of hands-on experience. For her junior year abroad, she was an unpaid intern on a tuna boat in the north Atlantic. Now she has been working with her own team of interns to decipher the speech of dolphins at the water park. She has a government grant for this.

She was even in the news a couple years ago when a dolphin mother was pulled into the filter while trying to protect her child. She gave an interview in her ridiculous brown jumpsuit, her hair blown unappealingly in the wind, a haunted look in her eyes. When I called her that night, she informed me that everything was in crisis mode now and she used the term “minimize the damage.”

When I arrive at the water park, people don’t notice me. Men don’t notice me. They consciously don’t notice me. I arrive at Viola’s office but she is out. I wait while a maintenance man fixes the ventilation system.

“Sometimes all it takes is a few particles in the wrong place. It’ll build up for months and then blow the whole thing out,” he tells me as he unscrews the vents. Viola arrives eventually.

She hands me a print-out and beams.

“What is it?” I ask, more to please her.

“That’s the result.”

“Of bad 80s printers?”

“We did it. We cracked their code. I’m having a linguist from UCLA come up next week because we can only string a few phrases together. They appear to be as sophisticated as we are.”

“What if they’re like the Eskimos? And have, like, thirty words for water?”

“It’s still progress.”

When I was twelve years old, old enough to know but not know better, my mom dragged me by the hand on the Golden Gate Bridge. She told me to give her a hug and to say goodbye. My tears fell through the crack in the walkway and I watched them fall all the way down. I knew she would fall at the same rate.

Ants can fall from any height and not sustain injury. They are too light for impact to actually hurt them.

So there I was, crying my eyes out on the Golden Gate as cars passed by, drivers oblivious. And my mom, this beautiful, tragic woman; she just held my hands and said, “Life isn’t how it was, it’s how it is.”

A park ranger stopped his car and climbed up to meet us. He informed us that the walkway was closed and perhaps we missed the sign stating so. I’m still crying, she’s still smiling. But only her mouth is smiling, her eyes are dead. There was no sign that she was my mother anymore. The park ranger walked us back to land, careful to stay between my mother and the emptiness.

“Get her an ice cream cone,” he told my mother as we parted. “She looks like she just got dumped.”

“She’ll get used to it,” my mother said over her shoulder.

After I’ve slept with Brady, I know that he’ll tell her. I know that he’ll run his fucking mouth because he’s not the guy that either of us thought he was. But first he wants to tell me what a mistake it was. That we never should have done it. And that if you’ve gone this far, you might as well go further; so we might as well do it again.

I am on Lisa’s cell phone plan and my first indication that he’s told is when my service dies. At first I think it’s just a bad area for reception. She’s waiting when I get home.

The argument is not an argument for a while. It’s a monologue. She rattles off the ways I betrayed her, how I’m a slut that seduced her man (he came on to me, I choose not to say), and that she can’t live here anymore. About halfway through, she decides she can live here but she can’t live with me.

I interrupt to ask if I can use my favor. Her face says I’ve fallen out of favor.

“Look,” I say. “I only slept with him because I can’t sleep with you.”

There is more, but the gist of it is that I’m a backstabber, a slut, an unwelcome intruder on her happy life. Brady is pretty much off the hook. I gather up a few items of clothing and head for Viola’s.

She doesn’t seem to notice I’m staying there until my third day. She lives at the office and I finally understand that.

“Oh,” she says. “You’re staying?”

“Lisa kicked me out.”

“Okay. Take the trash out.” She often ends sentences with prepositions.

Aside from that Golden Gate experience, I wasn’t ever aware my mom was unhappy. She kept it all inside and taught us to do the same. That’s why I’m not surprised that Viola hasn’t mentioned work even though she’s obviously under a lot of stress. When she breaks down crying, I think she’s been fired. Laid off? Do they lay off people with a Ph.D.?

“It’s Equus and Idolo,” she blurts out.

I can’t place the names.

“The dolphins.”

“Oh, right. Are they okay?”

“They’re not. And I don’t know what I can do.”

“But you cracked the code! You actually know what dolphins think!”

She wipes her face clean of tears and says, “We did crack the code. And you know what they say, over and over? ‘What did you do to our mom? Bring mom back.’”