Necessity

9

It no longer surprises her how much information you can get from bureaucrats simply by asking for it. After two hours at a pay phone she knows the easiest order in which to obtain identification.

She applies for a Social Security card, using the birth certificate from Tucson, and when the clerk seems puzzled that she’s never had a Social Security number she explains that she has spent her adult life nursing her invalid mother, who recently died.

“I’ve been taking extension courses at UCLA but I’ve never had a regular job, you see, so I never applied before, but the people at the employment agency told me I should come and fill out an application.…”

The clerk stamps the forms, uninterested in hearing any more.

On her way out she slips another application blank into her handbag.

The card for which she’s just signed will be mailed in about ten days to the street address of her motel. In the meantime there’s a great deal to do.

On the Tuesday after the Fourth of July holiday she removes the red wig in a restaurant ladies’ room and drives down to Orange County to have her hair done in a place where they’ll never see her again and never remember her. “So hot this summer,” she says. “I’ll be cooler if it’s cut short, don’t you think?”

The hairdresser is an inquisitive man, sixtyish and overweight, gay and garrulous: Haven’t seen you before, my dear; such lovely cheekbones; do you live around here?

She has to think. Now who am I going to be today?

She becomes the wife of an aeronautical engineer who’s been unemployed for nearly a year and finally just landed an aerospace job here in Santa Ana so they’ve just moved down from Tacoma. Two kids and they are fighting the bureaucracy of school transfers this close to opening day.…

It is the sort of thing she’s done for idle amusement in the past when she found herself on an airliner seated next to a stranger she knew she’d never see again.

From childhood on she’s taken pleasure in harmless lies: they exercise the imagination. Now it is a talent she is going to have to cultivate permanently. That’s an aspect of this thing that frightens her especially: the chance that she’ll slip and misremember her own lies.

It means she needs to stay aloof-no efforts to make friends or steady companions. Not until she is comfortable in a new identity with a past so well rehearsed that it comes to mind as readily as if it were real.

The hairdresser sends her away in a wheeling cloud of advice about the most fabulous little places to shop and the most divine sushi restaurant.