and see how big she’d gotten. Once, years ago, she’d overheard her mother discussing some cousin. It’s a shande, the way she’s let herself go. Bethie puzzled over that phrase, wondering how you could let your own body get away from you, like it was a car speeding away out of control. Now she understood. You stopped weighing yourself, stopped restricting yourself to small meals and salads, stopped picking French fries off your friend’s plate and started ordering your own. It doesn’t matter, she’d tell herself, but she never really felt free of the shadow of her larger body, the irrefutable evidence of her appetites and her weakness, unless she was high, or singing. With her eyes shut and the music all around her, she could give voice to her pain and her sorrow, and imagine herself as pure emotion, not a body at all.
From Paris she flew back to Los Angeles, and from there she finally made it to San Francisco, joining the throngs of hippies drawn there by the Mamas & the Papas song, finding that, instead of a sun-dipped, golden-hued paradise, the skies were gray, the streets choked with trash and glittering with abandoned needles. There were kids everywhere, panhandling, shooting up, nodding out, lining up at Glide Memorial Church on Ellis Street for free dinner at five o’clock every night. Eventually, Bethie saved enough money to fly to London, and from there she’d gone on to Amsterdam and points east. With Jo’s rucksack on her back she traveled the route that Jo had meant to take, making her way through Tehran to Kandahar to Kabul to Peshawar and Lahore. It was easy for Bethie to attach herself to a group of college-age kids, to travel with them for a few days or even a week and then break off from the group, sometimes with some of their money or belongings in her pocket. Every once in a while, she would see a man, and the shade of his skin or the set of his shoulders would remind her of Harold Jefferson, and her heart would lift, but none of the men were ever Harold. Bethie would tell herself that it was better that way. If Harold could see her now, he’d be disgusted.
She trekked through Nepal with a bunch of kids from Sweden, and slept outdoors, in Chitwan Park, in a hammock, while monkeys swung and chattered overhead. She spent six months at a mandir in Puttaparthi, where Sai Baba himself had paused on his walk through a crowd of a thousand white-clad penitents to place his hand, in benediction, on her head. In Milan, she’d met a guy who’d said he was in the import-export business and hired Bethie to bring leather goods to New York City. Bethie loaded up her suitcase with wallets and handbags, wrote “gifts and clothing” on her declaration form, breezed through Customs, and followed the guy’s instructions. She went to the shop whose address he’d given her and turned the handbags and wallets and belts over to the man behind the fingerprint-smeared glass counter, who gave her a hundred bucks in limp twenties that reminded her of the bills Uncle Mel had paid with. “Your cut,” he said. Bethie flew back to Italy, where the guy was delighted to see her. “I figured you’d rip me off,” he said. “Who, me?” Bethie said. For almost a year, she made the circuit every six weeks, bringing over larger and larger quantities of goods. When the guy trusted her completely and sent her with her largest shipment yet, instead of taking the wallets and purses and bags to the little shop, she’d brought them to a different place, where the sign said FINE LEATHER GOODS and the owner didn’t ask questions.
When her mind was clear, which was not very often—pot and hash were cheap and plentiful in the circles in which she traveled, and did wonders when she couldn’t turn off her brain, when she couldn’t stop thinking about that night in Newport—she could understand herself. Every man she stole from or ripped off was standing in for Uncle Mel, for Devon Brady, and for the guys who’d raped her. Make them pay, she’d think, and pull her top down a little lower, and smile a sweet, tremulous smile at some man she met in a tea shop or at a bar or in a park or on a bus, and the man would smile back, happy and oblivious. Even if she