Mallory's Camera

With just four days remaining in the great You, Too, Can Pass the USMLE and Become an American DOK-TAH! sweepstakes, I have shifted into confidence-building mode.

I am praising Nafisa lavishly: You got the comma right! Way to GO!

I am actually advising her to study less (knowing full well she won’t, of course.) At this point, it’s all about relaxation.

Last night, I actually found myself advising her to pray: “Ask God to make you the vessel for His will,” I said. “You will be such a wonderful doctor! Let God use you.”

Across the Zoom ether, I watched Nafisa’s eyes fill with tears.

I could scarcely believe the words were coming out of my mouth!

For one thing, I don’t believe in God. Or, at least, in an anthropomorphic God like Allah or his disgruntled cousin Yahweh.

But they’re words I sometimes murmur to myself—like I’m asking for a personal favor or something—and not just when times are tough: Let me be the vessel of Your will.



Here I am in the halcyon days of my first marriage. That’s my first husband to my right and our friend Marco to my left. We had just completed some bicycle race across the Golden Gate Bridge:





In those days, I was a demon bike racer. In fact, bicycles are how my first husband and I met. Bill was not my biking partner of choice, though: He was a much faster cyclist than I was and had this distressing habit of speeding up to the summit of whatever steep hill we were on and then coasting back down to circle me as I plugged up the grade, gasping for breath, like some kind of raptor flying circles around an animal it had marked for death.

Eventually, I would have divorced him for that alone.

Even if everything else had been perfect.

No, my biking partner of choice was Bibbit, and unfortunately, I have no photographs of the two of us cycling together.

You know the game you play where you try to remember that one time when you were perfectly happy?

(It makes for good literature. That scene in Brideshead Revisited with Charles, Sebastien and the strawberries, where Sebastien says, “I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember”? I am very sure that is Evelyn Waugh remembering the One Perfect Day.)

For me, it will always be that glorious day when Bibbit and I rode our bicycles up Spruce Street and onto Grizzley Peak Boulevard, and the sun was out and a light breeze blew, and the smell of the sage and the brickelbush rose in the air. I got a flat tire! Neither of us had remembered to bring our puncture kits! And we just laughed. Sat by the side of the road, yodeling Some Day, My Prince Will Come and laughing. And eventually another cyclist did come—we didn’t ask to check his pedigree for royal blood—and changed my tire for me. (If we’d been committed feminists, of course, we would have insisted upon changing it ourselves! But it would have taken a lot longer.)

Ah, Bibbit!

I’d give a lot to find out what happened to you.

And now back to our regularly programmed, boring but remunerative work.

Barbara Angell hates phones as much as I do, so I was surprised to find her voicemail: I’ve been thinking about you nonstop for the last two weeks. I figured I should call.

It was nice to know the old psychic bond persists. She is definitely one of the irreplaceables.

We babbled for more than an hour. Barbara belongs to an archeological era that predates my involvement with Ben, so she didn’t know him very well. She was my best friend in nursing school, and nursing school is such a bizarre experience that we bonded on a very deep level despite the fact that we couldn’t be more different, me being brash and, despite my love affair with invisibility, essentially an attention-seeker, while Barbara is cloaked in the psychic mist, impenetrable, and could not care less about worldly enticements.
She knew my first husband Bill very well. Bill and I gave lots of impromptu parties. The photograph above was taken at one of them.

You can’t tell from that photograph, but Barbara was the most beautiful woman I ever met. Masses of honey-colored hair, aquamarine eyes, Ingrid Bergman features.

Here’s a better photo of her though it still doesn’t capture her essence:



I suppose the reason Barbara photographed badly is that she hated being photographed.

Ironically, her daughter Aemilia—who looks a lot like her though not as beautiful—is a professional Fashion Influencer with more than 500,000 Instagram followers.

Anyway, in November, Barbara and I will meet up in Calistoga and spend three days hiking in the Petrified Forest, steeping in volcanic mud, and generally chilling.

This will follow my three days in Mendocino with Eleanor whom I love deeply but who can be challenging.

The timing is perfect.

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More pictures from that long-ago party:

Me with Bill’s best friend, Jim B_____, and Sandinista, my dog.

Jim was a bass guitar player. A pretty good bass player, too, I thought—though rock ‘n’ roll was never my thing, so I may not have been the best judge.

Jim lived with the band’s lead guitarist Bill Duke and Bill Duke’s Brit girlfriend Debbie Watson in a tiny Oakland craftsman cottage that had somehow survived being razed for the MacArthur Freeway when every other craftsman cottage in the area was razed. It was a very dark and peculiar house, surrounded by the sounds of whooshing cars.

Unbeknownst to Jim and Debbie, Bill Duke was deep in the grips of a major heroin addiction. One night, Jim came home and found every one of his guitars missing plus the stereo system and everything else of value in the house. Bill Duke had stolen it all to go on one last drug-fueled orgy before turning himself in to his parents—who were rich people living somewhere on the Peninsula—for rehab.

Debbie seemed to think that made Jim her boyfriend now. Jim did not agree, and shortly thereafter, decamped for Ohio, his home state. Where he lives to this very day. In a town called Delaware, close to the Pennsylvania border. I fantasize every now and then about visiting him there. But I won’t.

Many years afterwards, it dawned on me that Jim was probably gay and in love with Bill Duke. But deeply, deeply, deeply closeted. Were there any other explanations for the enormous amount of shit he put up with?

I suspect he may also have been kind of in love with my husband Bill, whom he’d grown up with. It was great fun to listen to Bill and Jim talk about their boyhood, which seems to have been one long run of naturalist expeditions and blowing things up.

Anyway, my marriage to Bill wouldn’t have lasted even as long as it did without Jim. I was always complaining to him about Bill’s latest bout of incredibly boorish behavior, and he’d always listen sympathetically, administering carefully Platonic hugs, nodding, sighing, and rolling his eyes in all the right places: “That’s just Bill.”

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In terms of continuity, this could have been the same party except clearly, it wasn’t because I’m dressed differently:





This was my dear friend Bibbit, who was my bike-training partner. In those days I was a bicycle racer. Three or four times a week, Bibbit and I would cut across the UCB campus to Spruce Street, grind up Spruce Street to Grizzly Peak Boulevard, get on to Skyline, thence to Pinehurst, coast down to Moraga, climb back up Pinehurst—in memory, at least, an exceedingly steep road—and then back down into the city on Claremont Boulevard.

I miss Bibbit more than I can say. You know those memes that ask you to describe the happiest day in your life?

For me, it will always be one of those bicycle trips with Bibbit. I got a flat tire on Grizzly Peak Boulevard, and somehow I’d neglected to bring a patch kit though I had a pump. So we pulled over to the side of the road and began warbling Some Day My Prince Will Come at the top of our lungs, waiting for someone to come along and volunteer to patch my tire.

The day was just so sunny and beautiful and clear.

And we were laughing so hard.

Ah, Bibbit.

She also had a very sad story, one that I don’t have time to tell now because—eye on the clock—I must buckle down and get to work.