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I went through my suitcase for the least wrinkled clothes there, which was a new pair of jeans and a white blouse with horizontal pleats in the front. Just before I left I thumbed some blush onto my cheeks that were pale from no sleep. My eyes looked sunken and I brought them out with black eyeliner.

The Legal Aid office was in the Mission District in San Francisco. I had to drive around the block a few times before I saw the window sign on the second floor of a building on 16th and Valencia. It was above one of those New Age coffee shops this city is full of, the Café Amaro. It was a half hour before lunch and all the small tables were full of west coast men and women eating food like tabouleh salads and miso spread on sesame crackers, the men skinny and clean-shaven, a lot of them with ponytails, but I was really seeing only the women as I went by, their unmade-up look, their long thick hair tied up in back with more hair, their colorful T-shirts, their breasts small, or else hanging long and heavy underneath the cotton they probably only bought from catalogs. They had handmade jewelry hanging off their ears, around their necks and on their wrists. They wore shorts or homemade skirts or loose jeans and there wasn’t a painted finger or eyelash or lip on any of them. Some of the women glanced up at me, then looked back down again, not really interested after all, and I was back in high school walking down a hallway crowded with the girls in clubs and organized activities I wasn’t interested in but felt left out anyway, my face a doughy mask.

The receptionist upstairs had the same soft voice as the man I talked to on the phone. He wore jeans and a bright aqua silk shirt. He was my age, thirty-five or-six, and when he stood to greet me he smiled and said his name was Gary, then handed me a clipboard with a form to fill out. There was no one else in the waiting room. On the walls were posters of women’s movement marches, announcements for lesbian poetry readings, boycotts of fruit and vegetable farms in the state.

After I filled out the personal information sheet, including my income and how I made it, the receptionist led me to a corner conference room that was small but full of daylight from all the tall windows that faced the street below. He offered me bottled water, herbal tea, or coffee. I told him I’d take as much coffee as he had, and I laughed, but I wasn’t feeling funny; really, I felt like an old magazine somebody finds wedged under a chair cushion, and I knew that’s where I wanted to be, under a huge cushion somewhere, curled up cool and private, to sleep a long time.