Femlandia

the crowds turn our local Safeway into a kind of organized human zoo. If the past two weeks are anything to go by, the lines will already stretch a block by noon. The pushing and shoving and crying of I was here first will have started by eight in the morning. While I get two backpacks from the hall closet, I run through a list of where we might head next.



The front seat of my Mazda roadster would have been all right, uncomfortable as it sounds. Cramped and sticky, but all right. Someone came for it a week ago, minutes after our mobile phones made their last calls and texts. So the car won't do. With gas at twenty bucks a gallon-and that was last week when the pumps were still flowing-the Mazda wasn't really a car anymore, only a couple of leather seats on wheels, a static jumble of metal and wires that wasn't going anywhere. It was a car in name but not in function, like a clock with all the right parts that no longer tells time. Which is fine, I guess, since I have no idea where there is to go.



One of those last calls I made was to our local YMCA. We'd been members since Emma was born so she could use the pool. Sixteen years of seventy-five dollars a month should have been worth something-a cot or a yoga mat in the corner of the Pilates room. Use of the showers and towels, the same ones Beatrice, the massage therapist, used to drape carefully over my limbs when she worked on me.



Nobody answered the Y's phone, so I tried Emma's high school. Then the local shelter. Then the zoo as a last resort.



The zoo.



It sounds worse than it is. There were a few rooms there, emergency pit stops for veterinarians who needed to monitor the primate house. They had beds and bathrooms and functional kitchenettes. And that holy of holies-air-conditioning.



Again, no answer.



Robert picked up on his cell, though. He sounded tired when he told me they were down to a skeleton operation, enough to oversee the animal transfers to another state