by Paige Clark
Even then he would have been something I’m not.
‘It’s just the news,’ Davey says. ‘Stop and think about it for a second.’
‘Stop, drop and roll,’ I say.
These are the things a husband and wife fight about over breakfast. Sometimes it gets heated. Last night the neighbour came over when she heard the dish break.
‘If there’s an earthquake, and that’s if,’ he says, ‘don’t duck and cover. You’ll end up flat as a pancake.’
He’s seen videos on YouTube where that happened. In case of an emergency, you should stand near a large, tall object. Then, when the building collapses, the object absorbs the impact. What remains of it protects you, like a beam supporting a roof. Proponents of this theory call it the Triangle of Life.
‘Sure,’ I say, ‘in every quake, every building collapses.’
‘You’re the one who believes,’ he says.
I do. I want to believe that what made the dish break is the same thing that makes the earth move.
‘The real danger is falling objects,’ I say.
I tell Davey that Science says the world is heating up. This leads to more natural disasters, more earthquakes. Reduced atmospheric pressure from hurricanes allows faults deep within the Earth to move with ease. Science says anything can set off an earthquake, even a handshake.
‘What doesn’t Science say?’ Davey asks.
‘It’s been years since Northridge,’ I say. ‘That’s not Science speaking. It’s me.’
‘You’re too young to remember.’
But I wasn’t. I was lifted from sleep and carried into the hallway.
‘Mama,’ I said, ‘the wind.’
‘That’s not the wind, Lizzy,’ she said.
My whole family huddled in the hallway, in the half-lit glow of my father’s flashlight. He made shadow rabbits dance on the walls.
‘Where do the bunnies go?’ I asked.
‘It’s okay. They’re safe,’ Mama said. ‘Animals, they can sense this kind of thing before we do.’
‘But aren’t we animals too?’ my brother, Winn, asked.
‘We’re safe, aren’t we?’ she said.
Seventy-two people died in that earthquake. The other day I thought to look up how many animals died, but not a single death was documented. Not even a domesticated dog.
Davey takes the 210 freeway to work from Pasadena to Downtown LA. If he leaves early enough, he can get to work in eighteen minutes. Los Angelinos believe traffic is the natural disaster. It too can be set off by a handshake.
Northridge, I think, you fools.
I leave copies of my résumé on the table for Davey to spot before he goes. My skills include staying at home. I know all of the tallest objects. Of course, I’m well versed in duck and cover. We practised it often when I was at school.
‘In case of a real emergency,’ a voice would say over the loudspeaker, ‘stay underneath your desks until the movement stops.’
Though how do you know that it’s stopped for good?
Today, my work is a pregnancy test. I’ll look for a cross instead of a triangle.
Davey pulls out of the driveway and disappears into the smog. If he is lucky, he will see the skyline in twelve minutes. The rising sun turns the muddy sky that famous LA colour. When the fires were uncontrolled a few months back, you could see them from this stretch of freeway—not just the smoke, the blaze.
A disaster film: LA burnt to a crisp.
At one stage, the LA fires threatened a wildlife sanctuary in Tujunga. I saw it all live on late-night TV. They evacuated the animals so they didn’t roast in their enclosures. Siberian tigers, hyenas, buffalos and birds with small lung capacities were loaded onto trucks in different-sized and -shaped cages.
Where did they come from and where were they going? I watched them on parade.
In the end, they evacuated two hundred and fifty animals. The staff worked through the night by flashlight. ‘Try handling dangerous animals in the pitch black!’ one employee said on TV. ‘It was hell on Earth.’
Whose hell? I asked myself.
I wasn’t sleeping much then. I followed the story closely. I made sure no animals died a material death.
Tonight, we’re expecting company. Not just company. Davey knows it as soon as he walks through the door.
‘Don’t you want the things that I want?’ he asks.
Most of the time, I want it until I get it.
The truth is Davey has things that I don’t yet—a job, some friends. He has them over every other Thursday for poker nights. They buy pizza from Costco, drink room-temperature beer and smoke weed. I observe them play. They wage the small amounts they can, enough so that it feels like something.
‘Davey, not so much,’ I say.
‘Oh, this,’ he says, ‘it’s peanuts.’
When it’s over, he wraps his cold, thin arms around me. His body covers me delicately, like tinsel around a Christmas tree. Like the emergency blankets that come packed in tight, neat squares. Just warm enough. The smell of his breath is metallic—of stale beer and pot.
‘Don’t wait up,’ I say.
‘For what?’ he asks.
The test didn’t have a watery cross. It had parallel pink lines. One if you’re lucky. But my second line was so certain it was fluorescent. It appeared before I had the chance to wash the pee off my hands.
This is not what keeps me up this night. Nor do the empty bottles I pick up one by one and run under the hot water tap until the labels peel off and my hands are prunes. Or the pizza boxes I collect to recycle, eating the remains of congealed cheese, scraping it off the cardboard with my fingernails. One thing Mama taught me: it’s still good. She is a woman who washes Ziploc bags.
Outside the kitchen, the trees rattle in the breeze, their branches reaching towards the window as if tapping on the glass.
What keeps me up is this—whether or not to duck and cover when the big one hits.
When I was a kid, I didn’t only practise this drill at school. Once Mama found me in the closet, curled up like a roly-poly. ‘Come out, Lizzy,’ she said.
‘Is it over?’ I asked.
‘It wasn’t an earthquake,’ she said.
‘What then?’
I spent the rest of the day on the couch watching cartoons. Mama spent it on the phone to her friend Diane, recounting the incident. ‘A coward,’ she said, ‘like her father.’
But I know what I heard. It was the soundtrack to a disaster film—the door slamming shut, the sharp voices and afterwards the rubble. What other explanation for the glass that cut my foot on my way to the fridge?
Birds can predict when a quake will happen. Their ability to detect magnetic fields lets them sense disaster before it strikes. This skill is also why they can fly.
Poor Gabby the pet parakeet was in her cage in ’94. How she squawked! She pitched her body against the wire cage, her first and last attempt at flight.
‘Dumb fucking bird,’ Mama said.
I climb into bed next to Davey. His body goes cool when he sleeps. If I ever doze off myself, I often wake with a start, his icy feet on the backs of my legs. I lie on my left side only, facing the door.
A question that I always know the answer to—which way is the way out?
The popular name for what I have is sleep envy, but I think of it like this: there are times when I would kill for what he has. Still, I play the good wife. I lie mute beside him cataloguing places to hide. The closet is an obvious choice.
Wake up, Davey! We’re in the future. Aliens have invaded my body.
Luckily Davey can sleep through anything. I like him best like this. In the blue glow of the news, I watch a droplet of drool form at the corner of his mouth. Should I wipe it off or let him sleep? These are the questions I don’t know how to answer. Davey even told me himself once. ‘You don’t,’ he said, ‘have the sixth sense.’
‘What’s the sixth sense?’ I asked.
‘The common one.’
&
nbsp; Where the real drama happens: late-night TV.
On the island of Hawaii, Kilauea spews. Lava creeps towards a power plant. It laps into the Pacific Ocean and when it hits the water, it forms mist. The TV calls this laze and warns it is dangerous. But I think the real danger is calling a wolf a dog. Laze around too long and you’re in hot water.
The Big Island is made of five volcanoes. Measured from its base underwater to its tip, Mauna Kea is the tallest mountain in the world. It’s dormant. I know what that means. What erupts will erupt again.
For now, Davey’s sleeping pretty.
The news names the volcano animal-rescue effort Noah’s Ark. But Noah’s done his math wrong. He takes one hundred dogs, thirty cats, some bunnies and a guinea pig off the island. The ark departs without any native animals on board. I triple dog dare myself not to think of the ancient sea turtles left behind, paddling through laze.
I went to the Big Island once, in ’96, on our only ever family vacation. We took a shuttle bus up a narrow road to the top of Mauna Kea, Mama’s hands white the entire drive. At the halfway point, we stopped to acclimatise and the guides fed us lukewarm roast chicken and boiled vegetables. We put on rented jackets and gloves that smelt of other people’s bodies.
By this point Mama wasn’t talking.
When we got to the summit, she wouldn’t get out of the van. ‘If you are afraid, listen,’ she said. ‘Fear is for smart people.’
My father walked to what appeared to be the edge of the world, an alien bobbling in his too-big coat. Winn followed, dutifully studying everything through hired binoculars. For a minute, I forgot. I leapt out of the shuttle and threw a fistful of snow at Winn. I latched onto my father and we marched together across Hawaii. Then suddenly, everything was too orange, the sun reflecting off the ice.
By the time I got back to the van, Mama had her eyes closed, a forgery of sleep. ‘Do you know,’ she asked, ‘what makes a volcano erupt?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Earthquakes, Elizabeth.’
‘Mama, I’m here now.’
I reached out but only grazed her fingertips as she pulled her hand away.
The real late-night drama: how can I be a mother when I don’t know how to be a daughter?
In the morning, Davey’s gone to work before I wake up. In the kitchen, there’s a fresh pot of coffee and a segmented grapefruit coated in white sugar. He’s left the TV on for me too. He knows I like the company.
An internet search reveals that for once it will be easy to get what I want. There’s no procedure, just two pills taken twenty-four hours apart.
This is Science—even the body has a delete button.
I phone a clinic and a brisk receptionist tells me the whole thing will cost a thousand dollars. It seems like too much to pay to end up with nothing. I book an appointment for as soon as they can get me in, which is not soon enough.
By then, the baby will be the size of a peanut.
A fact Davey likes to deny: there are more humans born every day than there are elephants left in the entire world.
‘It’s two days,’ he said once.
‘What does it matter,’ I said. ‘There are more of us than there are of them.’
‘You can’t just make this shit up,’ he said.
‘Ain’t that the truth.’
Because it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.
There are breeding programs at the zoo that don’t work. The elephants there wander around the same half-acre concrete enclosure until their feet crack and become fatally infected. Zookeepers resort to stimulating the prostates of the males to collect their semen.
The elephants know better than to bring life into this world.
The last remaining will be kept at sanctuaries in Africa for the wealthy to discover on safaris. Or as circus performers, balancing on barrels, unable to jump off.
The year after Northridge, I won tickets for my whole family to see the Barnum and Bailey Circus. I’d written a poem about elephants that could fly and entered it in a competition in the newspaper.
At the circus, my parents bought Winn a soft pretzel, the kind that never tastes as good as you’d expect it to. They bought me a pink cotton candy gift-wrapped in a cellophane bag. The Greatest Show on Earth was inscribed on the plastic.
And wasn’t it?
Tigers leapt through circles of fire. A lion rode atop a horse. The humans were the clowns, stuffed into a too-small car. My father was wowed by the man who was shot out of a cannon. ‘Unbelievable,’ he said.
On the drive home, we passed a multi-storey car park that had been damaged by the quake. It hadn’t collapsed, just warped, the building bent over as if it were lying down to take a nap. ‘Get out, kids!’ Mama said. ‘Picture!’
In the photo, it looks as if Winn and I are visiting a funhouse. My lips are stained with food dye and my brother has a squirt of mustard in his black hair. We’re both smiling too widely, standing in front of what will surely crumble.
‘Did you know that elephants don’t actually eat peanuts?’ I ask Davey when he gets home from work.
‘Of course they do,’ he says.
‘Think about it,’ I say. ‘Peanuts are tiny! Elephants are huge.’
‘But everything,’ he says, ‘is smaller than an elephant.’
I’ve got him talking with his favourite pastime—being right. He’s been avoiding me since I told him I’d booked in the appointment. I make myself a cup of chamomile tea to steady my nerves.
‘Not everything,’ I say.
‘Leave it,’ he says.
‘An aeroplane.’
‘Leave it.’
He’s standing at the refrigerator now, deciding on cold chicken or leftover lasagne.
‘A whale,’ I say.
‘Stop.’
‘The tongue of a blue whale.’
He makes his way towards the living room and I follow him, hot tea splashing on my hands.
‘Don’t you dare walk away from me,’ I say.
‘Please,’ he says.
‘Please what?’
‘Please not today.’
Billy the elephant at the LA Zoo has been there for over thirty years. We’ve lived through the same disasters. Lately on the news there’s been talk of moving him. Until then, what choice does he have except to take from the hand that feeds him?
After the Northridge earthquake, my parents went around the house first to survey the damage. Winn and I watched from the safety of the hallway. Their large shadows stretched from carpet to ceiling.
Mama screamed when she saw the mess.
I ran as quick as I could to the kitchen to find the tiles littered with salt and glass. But the only thing that broke was a jar of Planters dry-roasted peanuts. The jar had fallen out of a cupboard with a faulty latch. Mr Peanut, with only one bespectacled eye and an uneven smile, ogled me from the debris.
‘You idiot,’ Mama said to my father. ‘I told you to fix that fucking door.’
She picked up a shard of glass, the bit with the missing eye, and dragged it across his shoulder until it drew blood.
When we talked about the big one after that, we said we were grateful that more damage wasn’t done.
Sometimes, Mama needed help to sleep. When she eventually did, Winn and I would sneak into her room. We’d lie at the foot of her bed, making faces at each other, backlit by the TV. She never woke up, never caught sight of our silhouettes on screen.
In case of emergency, stand near a large, tall object. I do this now, keeping close to Davey, letting his long arms drape over me.
‘I have a feeling,’ he says, ‘it’s a girl.’
‘Three’s a crowd,’ I say.
‘Any three points make a triangle,’ he says.
‘Unless it’s a line.’
We don’t take it further. He knows I believe the wives’ tales. As a child, I walked to school taking care not to step on any cracks.
I know when to duck and cover.
Ne
xt week the doctor will give me a pill. It’s like the one you take to sleep. It fixes the problem but not the cause.
Because inside me she’s still growing, growing—gone.
TIMES I’VE WANTED TO BE YOU
It begins with an oversized sweater and then a scarf. Next, I find myself in the optometrist’s office getting prescription lenses put into his sunglasses. Pants are a problem but I know a good tailor. My husband was tall and thin. His coat reaches my ankles but does not drag behind me when I walk. I am lucky that it’s winter. I wouldn’t know what to wear to the beach.
My best friend Janie comes to our apartment and cries around me. She has made an amount of pumpkin soup that will stay in my freezer until next winter. She repositions the sympathy cards on my mantlepiece.
‘Menswear doesn’t suit you,’ she says, noticing me for the first time.
Janie doesn’t recognise his slacks. He’d worn them only once before—at our wedding. I’d planned on wearing my dress only once too.
Janie says she’ll make more soup for me if I need. Of all the things I need, soup is the last.
I wish I were dead, and this is not the first time I’ve wanted to be him.
The last was at his funeral, cornered by a group of ageing aunts gumming finger sandwiches. I imagined the too-white velvet lining of the coffin itchy against my fingers. The pallbearers, snivelling in ill-fitting pants, lift me above their heads and into another life. I wear his skin like a suit. It fits me perfectly.
Every morning I wake up, put on his robe and his slippers and shuffle to the bathroom. In the mirror, I hope to see his face instead of mine. I try to erase the woman I find with cakey makeup and waterproof mascara. She is relentless.
So, I stop shaving my legs and plucking my eyebrows. Eventually, I sport a unibrow and fancy myself exotic and fascinating, a grieving Frida Kahlo in sportswear.