When I arrived, Brenda threw a party and ceremoniously gave me a graduation present - - two Nigerian wooden carvings, a man and a woman, which I named the God and Goddess of Library Science, after the chic new name for library school, as Brenda and I choked on our beers. Science? Library science?

We didn’t even have Mar-o-Snacks back then, Quincy, I said in my head to the dog waiting at home. Dogs didn’t have all the options they have today. It was Milk-Bones or Milk-Bones.

With Mar-o-Snacks bought and bagged, I drove back to Slum Von’s at Broadway and Atlantic for the other items on my list. They had potatoes and broccoflower, but they were out of organic milk and yogurt. So I drove back over to Albertson’s, mad by now. Striding, almost stomping, up and down the aisles, I glanced at a box of Triscuits, and saw that it read, Now Tastes Worse Than Ever.

What? I picked up the box and stared at it. Its lettering cleared up, and I saw that what it really said was “Now Tastes Better Than Ever.”

Albertson’s, just like Von’s, was out of organic milk. I picked up and looked at several yogurt brands, non-organic, with pictures of cows and their babies, and I almost cried, and I did scream inside, knowing I could never eat this yogurt, knowing that in non-organic factory farms, cow babies weren’t allowed to suckle, though they and their mother cows so desperately wanted it.
Tears welled in my eyes. I walked down the rice aisle and took two Success Boil-a-Bags brown rice, which left just one all alone on the shelf, and I whispered to it, “Hi, sweetheart. I’m sorry. Be okay,” sad and guilty, as though I were walking away from the last dog in the pound.

My sister, Brenda, was so kindhearted to animals, she was protective even of the kombucha mushrooms she grew in containers in her house. The mushrooms grew and multiplied and had babies too fast to keep up with. They were hanging out of everywhere, even in the refrigerator, pushing cheese off the shelves and crowding out plates.

When her partner, Vicki, couldn’t take it any longer, Brenda called up her friends and placed a notice in the Press-Telegram. She couldn’t just throw the mushrooms away, anymore than she could throw a deceased hamster out a car window. She would have given the hamster a decent burial, and sung it hymns. For the kombuchas, she had to “find them good homes.”

I took one of the saucer-like mushrooms, promising Brenda to follow proper care and feeding instructions.

When I took my first bite of what was supposed to be the antioxidant of the ages, I immediately broke out in hives and threw what remained of the kombucha down the Bellamar Luxury Apartment’s trash chute, without its dinner or its snack.
Bad kombucha. Bad Carolyn.
Now I had to drive all the way to Trader Joe’s to get organic milk and yogurt.

A car was parked in the Trader Joe’s handicapped space, and it didn’t have a handicapped placard or license. Instantaneously enraged, I paced around the car and exclaimed to those going in and out of Trader Joe’s that the car was parked in a handicapped space, and it didn’t have a handicapped sticker! I pulled out a yellow notepad from my purse and wrote Asshole motherfucker!!!!! on it and slapped it under the car’s wipers.

About that time, a man walked out of the store, went to the car and unlocked the door.
“Is this your car?” I shrieked. The creaking old man turned to face me, and I saw he carried a cane. Why hadn’t he used it to walk?
“You’re taking up the handicapped parking!”
He shook his cane at me.
“Why don’t you have a placard ?!”
He said he forgot it. He raised his cane and said he would hit me with it. He got in his car and drove off.

A much younger man was walking into Trader Joe’s with a woman companion, and he stopped in his tracks and yelled at me.
“Who do you think you are? Why are you bothering this old man?”

I sputtered and cursed. He dared me to hit him. Unreality was setting in. I took a step, up into his face, presented my jaw and shouted, “You hit me first!
Was this really happening?
Customers entering and exiting Trader Joe’s glanced at us without wanting to meet us. I imagined the employees inside were asking each other if it was a full moon.

I blurted something about my sister ending up in a wheelchair before she died because her cancer spread to her bones, we lugged her around to chemo and useless recreational venues, she needed those parking spaces, she had a placard, and I just lost it anymore when I saw somebody without one, taking up the space!

The man stared off in the distance, trying to cool down from wanting to deck a woman thirty years older.
“When did your sister die?” the woman asked me.
“Three months ago,” I said.
She nodded and glanced at the man. He looked away. I said something unintelligible and walked to my car, to hell with organic milk and yogurt, just to hell with it.

On the way home, I started to feel queasy. But I still had to walk my dog. Quincy wouldn’t go with anyone else. Whenever anybody else tried, Quincy sat his thirty-five pound butt down in the hall and glued it there, no budging, barking at the top of his lungs, he who never barked at any other time, “Attention! Alert! Let everyone come out of their unit! Let everyone stop and apprehend the dognappers!”

Always my friends would turn back to my door, and Quincy would run happily to sit beside me in our condo and say, “I only trust you to walk me, Mommy. It doesn’t matter if you’re too sick to stand.”
I stuck packets of candied ginger in my pocket, for tender stomach.
When Quincy and I got to the First Congregational Church at 3rd and Cedar, I handed out my ginger and wished it were dollars.
Usually, the homeless and the winos made over Quincy, but tonight my voice quavered, and I could only croak, “God love you, God love us all, in honor of my sister.”

When Brenda got where she couldn’t drink her wine from a glass anymore, she sipped it out of a straw.

By now it was 9:30 at night, and as I walked Quincy, I talked out loud to Brenda and asked her to walk with me. I laughed over our funny escapades and agonized and apologized over all the times I had let her down. I rounded a corner past Carnitas Michoacan, the Mexican food place on Broadway, and headed down Broadway, past the Aerospace Workers and Machinists Union door, and saw a couple of people standing there watching me, so I explained I was talking to my dead sister.
They looked at me like, uh-huh.
Quincy stopped to sniff and pee on the fire hydrant.
“Come on, Quincy, I said.
He kept sniffing, nose to the ground.
“Because I said so, that’s why,” I said.
Quincy peed a second time in the same place and didn’t look up.
“Because I’m the Mom Dog, that’s why.”

Well, that got his attention. Quincy and I continued on, and the people standing in front of the union door watched us go, the same way I watched crazy patrons leave the library, glad to see them in my rear view window.
Quincy and I crossed Broadway and entered the pocket park of the Long Beach City Hall and the Main Library.

My sister was afraid of libraries. All her life, even when marched in street protests, or when she spoke before the U.S. House Appropriations Committee during the Carter administration, or when she spoke before adoring crowds, or faced down hostile ones, or entered perilous places to save animals, or strode across the RV park to tell the man who was abusing his son that if he did it one more time, she was going to personally march him over to the Ranger Station and turn him in, had me look things up in the library for her because she was afraid to go inside one, and when she did, turned timid, and, ever since, in every timid patron, I would see my smart sister and ache to help them.

I think she had a bad experience with a mean librarian, or someone haughty, like one of my library school teachers, Mrs. Whatzerface.
I didn’t know. I walked the streets with my dog and talked to myself and wondered why.
By the time I got back home and stuffed my fat little dog with Mar-o-Snacks, I had the flu so bad, my brain was pushing against the inside of my skull like it wanted out.
I could only lie on my bed and wait to die, remembering Brenda, remembering Brenda.

I wanted to have cancer just so I could refuse treatment. Glancing around the room for a last look, my eyes came to rest on a plastic hospital bucket. When my then-partner’s mother died of cirrhosis, Jenny and I brought her mother home from the hospital to die, along with this wonderful bucket, gratis from the hospital, to hold her valuables, that is her Betty Boop watch and pink plastic earrings that I coveted and now wore.

The hospital bucket’s purpose was to sit on my mattress and prevent books from falling off the bed into the limbo between wall and bed. Books I was reading came and went, in and out of the bucket, except for one, which had lived in the bucket for longer than I could remember - - a tattered paperback, The Complete Guide to Symptoms, Illness and Surgery. It was five years old. I considered getting up and throwing it out, but I didn’t. This was the tool that had enabled me over the years to ascertain that I had brain abscesses, diptheria, myocardial infarction and the rarest, most quickly fatal form of bird flu.

Quincy snuggled beside me and went right to snoring, but I went in out of sleep.

Why was it so hard to find Mar-o-Snacks? Why did I have to go to so many stores to find what was on one grocery list? Why wouldn’t my dog eat any old treat, like regular dogs do? My sister’s dogs ate anything you threw at them.

Von’s only had Meaty Bone, and picky Quincy only ate Mar-o-Snacks. I drove to Albertson’s. They, too, were out of Mar-o-Snacks, so I drove over to Pet Smart at Cherry and Willow, a familiar intersection, and I wasn’t expecting the nostalgia that engulfed me when I reached it. It was no longer Cherry and Willow in 2005, but Cherry Avenue in 1966. My big sister, Brenda, lived in a beat-up apartment off of Cherry. She had moved out to California from Texas to finish college, after she’d gotten kicked out of a Texas university in 1957, when she was 20, for “moral turpitude,” which stood for “gay.” The police had even handcuffed her, hauled her down to the station and talked filth at her, but she refused to repudiate her lesbianism.

The night she graduated from Cal State Long Beach, she, her one-eyed lover, her friends, the crotchety old couple in the apartment next door, the hippies down the alley, and I drank beer and marched up and down the alley, with Brenda’s dogs hopping and trotting beside us, loudly humming Pomp and Circumstance, taking turns wearing her mortarboard and flipping the tassel this way, that way, up and down and around.

The next week, I went back to Texas to finish library school.

Then I, too, moved to California, at Brenda’s urging, and wore around my neck love beads and, in my imagination, a flower in my hair.

I had a dream that I was a famous writer, speaking before a group of librarians. The notes I held in my hands caught fire and dropped in pieces to the floor, ash by ash. My dry throat stuck shut. I swallowed water from a disintegrating plastic bottle, and I spoke, “When I was a child, I didn’t go to the library. I didn’t even know there was one.”
My hands shot up to choke me, like Dr. Strangelove’s.
I peeled them off and began again.
“I never knew a librarian,” I confessed. “I never even heard of Story Time till I was in my twenties and went to library school. One of the instructors was Mrs. Whatzerface, a hard diva concerned with standing and status, who successfully fooled the unsuspecting into thinking she was sweet, who required her students to fawn over her regularly, but I just couldn’t. Not only did she blackball me from my first job, that bitch even made me be the Virgin Mary in a library school Christmas pageant! One morning, in back of the model library, she shouted that I was insubordinate and pulled back her fist, then stopped herself in mid-swing from clobbering me in the jaw.”
Suddenly, I wasn’t a famous writer at the podium, but an attendee at the banquet, a school reunion thirty years after. I was sitting with tables of friends and acquaintances from 1965, enjoying smoked salmon and Merlot, camaraderie and reminiscences.
My old college pal, Connie, said, “Remember when you were the Virgin Mary in the Christmas skit?” And she split her sides laughing.
“Ha, ha,” I said.

At a table on our right sat a policeman chewing on a cigar that oozed mud and excrement. And to his right, even more horrible, sat a wizened old woman.
“My god,” I said to Connie, “It’s Mrs. Whatzerface! She’s still alive!”
Mrs. Whatzerface smiled and nodded as she received accolades from the speakers and obsequious old students.
Young library students on the stage talked about mentors.
I gasped.
“Mentors? We hadn’t even heard of mentors back then, anymore than seat belts! Or non-smokers!”
Again, my murderous fingers tried to throttle me.
“Here’s to Mrs. Whatzerface. Accolades to Mrs. Whatzerface. Presenting the Mrs. Whatzerface Award to the most promising, suck-up student,” said the speaker.
“I’m gonna mash her face in,” I said.
“Now, Carolyn, Mrs. Whatzername is an old lady now,” said my old college buddy.
“I’m gonna mash her face in. Hold me down.”
I woke up, cheek to jowl with sweet, mellow Quincy, who wouldn’t attack a mouse, not even if it was sneaking off with his Mar-o-Snacks.

Maybe I’d feel better if I heated a can of chicken noodle soup, but I fell into a hole of hopelessness because the stovetop grates blackened every single time the flame went on. They were not like when I first bought the stove. No matter what I cooked, or what boiled over, the claw-grates stayed gray and clean. Now I had to scrub them off after each use, even if I had only steamed turnips and broccoflower.

The chicken soup was hot and bubbly. I poured it out into the bowl. I turned the little sauce pan over and saw it had black on the bottom. I scrubbed and scrubbed. Did I need to buy a new sauce pan? What if that didn’t solve the problem? What if I bought a new sauce pan, but the increasingly ominous Stove Claws also needed replacing, and I had to go back to the store, when I could have taken care of both these items in one trip? Should I combine this trip with a Mar-o-Snack expedition? What about organic dairy? I was already driving in an unending Twilight Zone continuum all over Long Beach to countless stores, and I hadn’t even left home yet.
Should I unfreeze some turkey or open a can of tuna?
It was just too much.

Quincy wouldn’t eat his dry food even when I put pot roast in it.
“Yucky pucky”, said Quincy.
I gave him just the roast, undiluted by kibble.
Quincy sniffed and walked off.
“What? Beef again?!”
“Some dogs would kill for this, Quincy!” I said and sat down at my computer.

Nothing worked, not the zip drive on my Mac, the pagination on my Microsoft Word, the mire in my frontal lobes. On my desk were ten corrupt floppies of old journals, gone forever. I inserted a floppy. My computer made a startling thunking sound and showed the message: Fatal error - - information may have been lost.

Should I get a new USP port or a new flash drive, and should I get them on the same day off from work?
There was no end to the spending of precious time on possible solutions that might not work. I tried Hotmail again, and it came up Hospice-mail.

My concern for my To-Do list was disintegrating, replaced by a longing to start my day with marijuana in the morning, snort coke with my second cup of coffee, mellow out with wine in the afternoon. Of course, I couldn’t work and do that.
“I want to retire and take drugs,” I said into the phone to Jenny.
Jenny, my ex and closest friend said, “No! Don’t do that!”
She said she saw people walking around Elm in house slippers, mumbling to themselves, they were so out of it. They made beelines to their dealers, running out in front of traffic because they spotted the dealer across the street. She said come to her art opening instead.

Tour d-Artiste ended at her gallery, but foot traffic was slow. We holed up behind the partition dividing her gallery from her funky studio where she lived, and we ate cheese, crackers and little chocolate Easter bunnies left over from thrifty Jenny’s art show in April the year before.

We sat with on her lopsided sofa-bed and listened to Jenny’s CD of Façade with oddball Edith Sitwell reciting her poems eccentrically to Walton’s music. Jenny and I, egghead artists, ate it up.
My emotions went up and down with Sitwell’s voice.

From where I sat on the sofa-bed, I could look out in the gallery directly at one of Jenny’s paintings - - which she called Debonair - - the one that always made me want to both chuckle and knock imaginary water out of my ears, the one of a woman in a black corset and fishnets, leaning jauntily on a whip as though it were a ritzy cane from a 1930s musical. The woman’s head was a human skull with canine fangs. Encasing the painting was a huge, elaborately-carved, almost-fussy, rococo frame, the kind of frame suited to an eighteenth century painting by Fragonard or Watteau, filled with airy and delicate clouds and pastel courtiers picnicking on ambrosia. Jenny loved weird juxtapositions.
Somewhat comforted, I left an hour later. Jenny walked me home and reminded me that I didn’t really want to take drugs.
Maybe, maybe not. But I did want to take my dog’s medication.

The vet said Quincy’s liver function was up. Just like Brenda’s when her lung cancer spread to her liver and caused her bilirubins to rise. Her Billy Rubins, we called them. “Uh, oh, the Billy Rubins are back in town.”
Adenosyl, said the medication label. I looked it up online.
May cause mania, Google said. My ears perked up. I adored mania.
Fast jolts out of depression, it said.
“Thank-you-God-and-Jesus!” I said.
I could tell the vet I’d lost Quincy’s meds. The vet would give me a replacement bottle for Quincy to take, and I could keep Quincy’s original bottle for myself. It was a win/win.
Outside, the misfiring ice cream wagon, my fellow, played O, Tannenbaum, and it was June.

On the table in the staff kitchen, someone had brought in a package of sweet rolls whose label read Danish Variety 8PK - - but, at first, it looked like Danish Urinary Tract to me. The liquor store across the street, the one next door to Rabid Screen Repair, sold cans of 7-Urp, and the lettering on the van going down the street said Firefighter Snake Removal System.
Snake removal?! I looked again. Oh, better. Smoke Removal.

It was good to be at work with the caring, wisecracking staff. Good humor bounced around the workroom, and I got to help a timid patron at the reference desk. That afternoon, folksingers came to present a children’s Summer Reading Program. How those old songs took me back. I clapped my hands in time to the music. I spotted two young sisters in the audience. They were about seven and ten, the age difference of Brenda and me. They sang with all their hearts, as Brenda and I had sung everything from hymns to work songs, country songs, protest songs, bawdy songs, drinking songs, folk songs and barbershop duets for 60-something years.

My mood soared to high spirits, then dropped like a rock in water. I ran into the workroom and started bawling. Four staff women came up in support. They said: Tell us a Brenda story, and I did, a funny one, but however funny, now poignant. Then they shared little stories of those they’d loved who had died.
Then, on instructions from my boss, I went home for the day.
I drove across Terminal Cancer Freeway to El Dorado Nature Park in Long Beach and walked on its two-mile path, not once but twice, because I couldn’t find the way out and finally had to ask a hiker going the other direction which direction I should be going in.

On the way out, I stopped on a small wooden bridge, the same bridge where, four months earlier, I had pushed Brenda’s wheelchair and tried to get her to notice the turtles in the pond under the bridge, notice how very many there were, notice what cute turtles they were, notice anything.

Now, one of the turtles was swimming along, minding its own business, and another turtle reached out for it, took it by the neck and held it under water, deep under, and the poor turtle shook its short legs, and I never saw it come up again. Surely, it came up again, alive, down the pond.
The attacked turtle was the only one with red stripes on its face.
Out of all those turtles it couldn’t have been the only female. Nature wouldn’t allow a gazillion male turtles to one female, surely. So it must not be a mating protocol. Maybe it was the only gay turtle. No, wait - - one in ten would have meant many more gay turtles than just one. Maybe it was the only out gay turtle.

Oh, Brenda would have loved that. I tried to stop myself from laughing out loud on the little bridge but couldn’t.
Even when Brenda and I cried, we never stopped laughing.
When Brenda had just one week to live, she held lay in her bed and weakly held onto my thumb.
A week before that, when she had two weeks to live, she wanted wine. Vicki was out on a medication run. I went to the kitchen and came to the bedroom with a cold bottle of white zinfandel, Brenda’s favorite, two glasses and one Flex-straw.
We clinked glasses and sipped. No, slurped.

Her oxygen tank whumped.
She wanted a cigarette so bad. But she had an oxygen cannula in her nose, those little plastic prongs that fit in your nostrils and flow in oxygen. So she quietly took the cannula out, asked if I’d accompany her, dragged herself to her chair, with my help, and rolled outside on her porch, where she could smoke.

After her cigarette, she rolled back to her room, put the cannula tubing back around her ears with the prongs back in her nose, and said she had done the right thing by going outside to have a cigarette.
“After all,” she said, “everyone knows it’s dangerous to smoke around oxygen.”
Only a second’s pause. Then we collapsed laughing so hard, her in her bed and me in a chair by her bed, we could only look at each other and grimace and shriek, knowing full well it was our last great gallows laugh together.

Laughing and crying, I drove home from El Dorado Park that late June evening three months after Brenda’s death and got there just in time to catch the ice cream wagon going down the street playing, in its cheerful chipmunk kind of way, Jingle Bells.
Quincy ambled up for a head scratch. I gave him a Mar-o-Snack, and we went for a walk.
Who knew what fine talks we would have, or with whom.

 

To my sister, Brenda, who died in March 2005. To LAPL’s Sally Dumaux, who died the following year. Both loved animals, cigarettes, wine and irreverent humor. To LAPL’s Cheryl Funada, whose sister, Diane, died a couple of years before Brenda. To the picture in my mind of Brenda and Sally, smoking with panache, and doing the Key West Duval Crawl in 1992, shortly after Hurricane Andrew.

 

NOTE:
Carolyn Weathers is a librarian at the San Pedro Regional Library. She is also a writer. Both Carolyn and her sister, Brenda Weathers, appear in two recent books: Gay LA: a History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians, by Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons (Basic Books, 2006); and Feminists Who Changed America 1963-1975, edited by Barbara Love (University of Illinois, 2006.)