Sleeping Tigers Read Online Free PDF Page A

brownie.
    “I do not ever terrorize anybody!” Anna was protesting, speaking in the lilting cadences of uncertain women. “You can’t scare anyone into anything? Not really, when it comes to changing their eating habits? Because people have to motivate themselves?”
    I was glad that Anna wasn’t my nutritionist. I was also happy that nobody was standing behind us. My butt would look like a beach ball next to hers, which was as small and tight as two clenched fists.
    Our conversation meandered. Anna, it turned out, was from Minnesota. “Horrible, horrible place,” she said. “Bleak skies, lots of snow, and nothing but white bread in the bakeries.”
    “What about you?” I asked Ed. “How did you end up in San Francisco?”
    Ed smiled handsomely. How else could he smile? “I’m an anomaly, a native San Franciscan. Third generation!” He pulled a wallet out of his pocket and displayed a photograph to prove it. A collection of at least two dozen people, all ages and sizes, smiled into the camera. Like Ed, they had strong chins, hairy forearms, and broad shoulders. Even the girls.
    “That’s really something,” I said.
    Anna looked stricken. “I always wanted to come from a large family. But I was an only child, the spackle on my parents’ marriage.”
    Uh oh. Here it was: The California Confession. One thing I’d learned in my two days here was that Californians could bring out the big guns of personal pain on a moment’s notice. Just today, I’d been in the corner market buying party supplies when I overheard one woman emphatically tell another that she was learning to honor her clitoris after her divorce.
    “Are your parents still together?” Ed asked, proving his true California colors by forging ahead fearlessly with the conversation.
    Anna shook her head, her satiny black curtain of hair swinging around her elfin face. “They got divorced five years ago. That’s when my repressed memories of the emotional abuse first surfaced enough for me to own them,” she explained.
    Ed folded Anna into his arms, then cupped her chin in one hand and tipped it towards him. “I want to say one word to you. Just one,” he said. “It’s a word I want you to repeat as you process your past and progress with your life’s work.”
    Embarrassed but fascinated, I stepped closer, anxious to shoplift any soul-saving secrets I could use for myself.
    Anna’s eyes brimmed. “What is it?”
    “ Forgiveness ,” Ed murmured, stroking Anna’s hair the way you’d calm an anxious horse.
    “That is so beautiful,” Anna told him.
    That is so much hooey, I thought, as a commotion broke out behind us. Dancers were skipping to the left and right, the women climbing onto the sofa and chairs, the men spinning around, flapping red paper napkins.
    “Look out! A rat!” a man cried.
    It was a mouse, actually. The terrified rodent scooted between feet and furniture legs. A bearded man in a black t-shirt and black jeans stepped forward with a dish towel held in front of him like a fireman offering a net. “Jump up here, little guy!” he coaxed. “Jump!”
    The mouse ignored this invitation and continued to zip around like a wind-up toy. Various people squealed and shrieked, including the bearded man.
    Finally, Ed dropped to a crouch, scooped the mouse into one hand and flipped it into his shirt tail. He toted the mouse in this cozy shirt hammock down the back stairs.
    A minute later he was back, not even breathing hard. “Dance?” he asked.
    I looked for Anna, but she had disappeared in the stampeding herd of mouseophobes. “Maybe just one,” I agreed.
    Three, five, then seven dances. I lost count after that. I would never wear leather pants again, I vowed, as sweat streamed down my thighs. Ed didn’t dance like anyone else I knew. He gyrated, strutted, twirled, and even took me in his arms for a number that left me upside down and seasick.
    When we finally retreated to the kitchen for more beer, he told me about his