Alisa Wolf has worked as a feature writer and editor on the staff of three magazines and, more recently, as a financial services marketing writer. She earned an M.F.A. from Vermont College and has developed and taught adult education classes in fiction, memoir, and essay writing near her home in Medford, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI Online, Calyx, Cimarron Review, Concho River Review, Pisgah Review, Red Cedar Review, Sojourner and in the Papier Mache Press anthology, I Am Becoming the Woman I've Wanted.

Two Stale Donuts And A Bowl Of Soup (August 20, 2011. Issue 30.)

A squad car pulled trimly up to the curb. Meanwhile, on the other side of the plate glass, we were squabbling about what I should order for breakfast. I wanted toast but Leo wanted me to have cottage cheese and fruit. We ate two meals a day, sometimes one, sometimes none, depending on our money situation, so when we did eat, it seemed to me I should be able to eat what I wanted. Despite going hungry, I remained a size ten, which was slim for me but fat by street standards, and now, suddenly, by Leo's standards too. I argued that toast didn't have that many calories; he said carbohydrates were fattening. The real problem, I thought, sulking behind the menu was that he was sick of me. But that didn't give him the right to act like my father, no matter that he was twice my age.

I don't remember if I acquiesced to cottage cheese or asserted my right to toast—or even if we had a chance to put in our order—before the doors to the squad car were flung wide open. Somehow Leo knew they'd come for him. He bolted up from the table, grabbed a bunch of our stuff, and with me following close behind him, ran outside. He shoved a roll of bills into my hands seconds before he was stopped, made to drop what he was carrying, spread-eagled, frisked, handcuffed, and stuffed into the backseat of the car.

"Bring my coat and boom box to my mother's house," he said, craning his head around the doorframe.

A cop came around and pushed the door shut. Leo sat back and stared stoically ahead, his blond hair to his shoulders, his chin tilted at the angle of deference he assumed around authority figures.

"Wait, what's this? What's he being arrested for?" I asked, but the cop was already jumping into the driver's seat. Leo was whisked away.

Someone in the small crowd that was already dispersing told me that the arrest had been over outstanding jaywalking tickets. I'd never heard of jaywalking tickets—we didn't have them in Boston—and it mystified me that such a minor, even trivial offense could rouse the San Diego police so early in the morning to track a man down. My mother would have been outraged. In my place, I thought, she would do something about it—and so should I. But it also occurred to me that I could go home. I checked my cash situation and found that I had enough, with a few dollars to spare, for a cross-country bus ticket. But then a shaming voice—the one that always got the upper hand—chimed in. How could I leave Leo like this? He was my man.

The phrase "my man" jarred me, as it did every time I used it, in conversation with myself or out loud. It was a term that belonged to another girl, a type I'd cobbled together out of a philosophy of living free, trusting my instincts, and dispensing healing love like a present-day Florence Nightingale. This double gave me license to act badly. I needed her to take the pressure off Miss Straight A's, Miss Goody Goody. "My man," I said again, and I was rewarded with a surge of pride that I rarely felt beside the actual man.

I grabbed up the sleeping bags, my father's Air Force duffel bag, my oversized pink shoulder bag, and Leo's beloved boom box and trench coat, and ducked into a convenience store—not a well-lit, shiny one but an old-style family store, its wooden shelves stocked with overpriced staples and snacks. Giddy with the freedom to eat without Leo watching me, I grabbed a cellophane-wrapped cinnamon roll, thickly frosted, a package of chocolate chip cookies, and a row of powdered mini donuts. On a bench outside, I unburdened myself of our belongings and tore into my treats. Oh I was bad. But it all tasted good, so good. Soft, sweet, cakey, crunchy, soft, sweet, soft. My hunger was ignited.

***

By the time I set out for California to learn how to live—really live—it was September 1978—ten years after the Summer of Love. I stayed through July of 1979. By then, thousands before me had made the mistake of trying to find themselves by changing their scene. But I had no way of verifying their motives or gauging their influence on what I then called "modern technological society." I had no friends except for Leo, and though we carried the boom box, we veered away from the news, changing radio stations when the music stopped or popping in tapes of artists who'd made their names a decade earlier—Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin. Our days revolved around how to eat, where to sleep, and when to stick our thumbs out and head back to San Diego to pick up Leo's disability check at the post office.

We were so out of it that later, when my mother mentioned the accident at Three Mile Island, I had to ask, "What accident?" Of all of the ways in which I'd disappointed her so far, this was a lapse I knew she wouldn't easily forgive. She'd brought me up to be politically engaged, taking me on the subway at the age of five to my first anti-war protest on the Boston Commons. I'd served homemade blondies to her munched-out student radical friends, argued at the dinner table with my father against war and the death penalty, and pondered the moral dilemmas of characters from Raskolnikov to Scarlett O'Hara under the purple wings of the Woodstock dove, tacked up over my bed since before I was old enough to understand what Woodstock was. How had I turned into a person with barely enough energy to get up and walk around, let alone focus on a book or sustain a conversation? By the day of Leo's arrest, my ideas about "living on the road" had been drained of all their romance. I was well on my way to boring myself to death.

***

I sat in sugar shock on the bench, next to Leo's trench coat and the boom box, trying without success to remember which bus we'd once taken to visit his mother. If I found her and told her that Leo was in jail, would she cry, as she had on that occasion, seeing her handsome, homeless, forty-two-year-old son, a few years out of prison, hanging around with a girl young enough to be her granddaughter? "You're a good boy," she said, tears running down her sun-wrinkled face. He hung his head, crying too. I turned away. But I'd distanced myself too much. What was her street address? What was her last name? I had no idea.

I lit a cigarette. My junk food breakfast had put me a few dollars short of a one-way ticket home. I could bum the money off a stranger. But how could I leave without granting Leo his one last request?

From the other end of the bench, a middle-aged man started talking to me. When had he sat down? He had immaculate nails and slicked-back hair, wore a spotless short-sleeved shirt and belted chinos. I had no qualms about talking to strangers, even this one, who kept his voice low and glanced nervously around. Though he moved no closer, his astringent cologne gusted over to me.

***

Two days later, Leo was released to me on the bail money I put up. He strolled over to where I stood, waiting inside a cinder-block room. He looked good, as he always managed to do, even after we'd slept in the park or on the beach. His hair was clean, his mustache trimmed.

"Where'd you get the money?" he asked.

I put my hands to my hips and looked boldly into his eyes. "This guy took pictures of me."

His eyebrows shot up.

"It was just pictures," I said, dropping my arms to my sides.

"You did that for me?" Leo asked. He glanced back in the direction of the jail cells. "You didn't have to. They would have let me out in a couple of days."

"You're always saying I have to find a way to make money," I said. Was I going to cry?

Leo wrapped an arm around my shoulder. "My old lady," he said.

I leaned into him.

"Let's get out of here," he said.

***

We splurged that night on a cheap hotel room, and Leo brought me the next morning to the pier. After some walking up and down, he grabbed a tied-up rowboat, helped me in, and took us out to an anchored fishing boat that he said a friend of his owned. It was unseaworthy, he explained, and his friend had told him that if he helped to fix it up, he could live in the cabin. When his supposed friend showed up some days later and found us with our sleeping bags on the narrow bunk beds, his cooking fuel supply depleted, and cans of beans that we heated and ate with white bread and ketchup in the cabinet, his face reddened. Before he motored away, he told us he'd never said Leo could live there. But he didn't kick us off.

From the start I'd doubted Leo's story. But the first time we boarded the boat, he strutted around, as proud as a new homeowner. We had everything: shelter, food, cash. It wouldn't last. Then again, nothing did. Why couldn't I enjoy what I had in the moment?

I knew I should be able to by now. I'd apprenticed myself to Leo to change what I called my "mode of being." But my arms were soft, my eyes were wide, and the sleek, street-smart ideal I was trying for slipped ever further out of my reach. I tried and tried to get the hang of getting high without becoming paranoid, of simply "being" without withdrawing into elaborate fantasies. But my responses were all out of whack. When we ran out of cash and ate at the mission, my neck stiffened during the hour-long fire-and-brimstone sermon, and seated at a card table afterward, I resented the two stale donuts and tepid soup before me. Why did I have to eat like a penitent, under the stern eyes of the preachers, who chided anyone for laughing or joking or showing any sign of enjoyment? I didn't share the head-hanging humility Leo and the other men assumed. I didn't see why I should feel guilty.

***

"You don't have to live this way. I do, but you don't," Leo said, and he dropped one of our precious dimes into the payphone. Reluctantly, I recited my father's number—Leo's idea, though it was to my mother's house I'd be returning—and he repeated the number to the operator.

Suddenly he was talking to my father, assuring him that I was fine and ready to go home. "I've enjoyed the quiet times we've had together," Leo said—a nice evasion. Really we had nothing left to say to each other. We'd spent nights in the belly of the fishing boat, a kerosene lamp tinting our faces and hands yellow, not talking.

Leo handed me the phone, and I pressed the receiver to my ear. The numbness that had accrued around my heart like the skirts I wore, layered one over the other, gave way to a tingling pain. My father was crying.

"I'm all right, Dad. It's all right," I said, hushing him.

In a wavering voice, my father said he'd wire me money for a plane ticket home.

I said I'd rather take the bus. I needed the almost four-day ride to think.

I was carrying my toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, and hairbrush. The rest of my stuff was back on the fishing boat, where we were living on borrowed time. As we walk down the pier, the western sky—so much more spacious than the one we had back East—and the flickering sea humbled me, the way the mission hadn't managed to do. Other boats—working boats—dotted the harbor. A man in scuba gear climbed out of the sea.

Leo rowed us out to the boat and climbed nimbly on board. I followed, awkward in a calf-length patchwork skirt over a ruffled one that fell to my ankles. "I liked calling you my Jewess," he said, helping me in, and my skin prickled, as it always did when he called me that.

Down in the daytime dusk of the cabin, I shoved my outfits into the duffel bag and then followed the light back up the laddered stairs and onto the deck. Leo rowed me to the pier and walked me into town, where we picked up the money my father had wired and bought a ticket for the Boston-bound bus that left the next morning. Then he walked me to the nearby YMCA.

I cried. Leo cried. I felt close to him and grateful that he had paved the way for my retreat. I hugged him good-bye and, sobbing, lugged my duffel bag, shoulder bag, and sleeping bag into the Y, where I paid for a room and spent the night.

The next morning Leo reappeared at the Greyhound station. He'd changed his mind about letting me go. "I know you're straight," he said, a term that had nothing yet to do with sexual orientation but everything to do with being uptight and middle-class. I was too weak or timid or rigid or stupid—so my reasoning went—to make my way in the world outside of the conventional structures of the classroom and the office.

I'd been ready to accept that judgment on the pier, with my father crying in my ear and the sea shining before me. Overnight, I'd embraced the inevitability of my mother's house, the rebuking comforts of reconstituted iced tea and cups of Alba 66 chocolate drink; the Formica kitchen table, round and divided into two perfect half moons; and the purple dove, perched on a guitar fret board, tacked up over my bed. How far away it all seemed now.

At the Western Union counter, my throat closed around the sorrow and disgust my father was going to feel when he received the money I wired back to him.

I'd have plenty of time for this and other regrets, I told myself, but not now. I had to refocus my energies on changing my mode of being, living by my instincts, dispensing healing love in the style of Florence Nightingale. I shouldered my duffel bag and sagged under its weight—one night at the Y had already made me softer. My eyes were sore from crying. My legs were almost too heavy to lift. Leo balanced the boom box on his shoulder and grabbed my hand. I followed him back out to the street.

***

On the platform of the Greyhound station in Boston, my mother regarded me from a foot away. After days of washing up at rest stops, I was unkempt and reeked of the cigarette smoke that hung in a low cloud over the back of the bus. Worse, the almost four-day ride home hadn't given me enough time to construct a coherent narrative to account for my time away. Not that my mother asked for one. How was she doing? I asked while she drove. How was her boyfriend? Fine, she said, fine. I scanned my repertoire for a comfortable topic and, not finding one, gave up and stared out the window.

"You must be hungry," my mother said—the first blessed words she spoke without being prompted. She pulled over at the House of Pancakes across from Fresh Pond, and I followed her to a booth inside. We ordered our sandwiches, and when our coffee came out, she looked straight at me and said, "You know, you can't hide here. You have to get a job."

"Of course," I said and I meant it.

She never did ask me about my time in California or why I'd finally decided to come home. Neither did my father, when I met him the next day for breakfast. My old high school friends wanted to hear stories of my wild-west adventures, but I couldn't dig any out from under my shame. Instead, I gravitated to strangers in bars who didn't flinch when I said "my old man." With them, I could revive the girl I'd been with Leo, get her out of my system, and slowly distance myself from her.

But on that first day back, she was up too close for me to see her. I sat across from my mother, turning from her to the bright sunlight reflecting off the parked cars, and then back to my plate, which was shockingly empty. Had I eaten my entire tuna melt already? My mother opened her purse and laid bills down on the check, and my throat closed with anxiety. I ran my finger over the plate, gathering up the crumbs.