Drinking Closer to Home

by Jessica Anya Blau

  “Are we still members?” Emery says.

  “Of course not,” Buzzy says. “You think we’d pay all that money when none of you even live in town?”

  “I go every time I’m in town,” Anna says. “They always let me in.”

  The boy at the front desk is about eighteen. He is cute in a tennis-y way—tan, tousled hair, lean. Anna imagines him naked—the solid cleanness of his body, the lack of excess anything: fat, hair, skin.

  “Can you tell Jerry that Anna Stein is here, and I’m with my brother, his friend, and my sister.” She looks at him a beat too long, wonders if he’ll read her eyes.

  The boy picks up a phone and speaks to Jerry. He barely enunciates, almost as if it takes too much effort to speak. Anna instantly loses all sexual interest. She wants to grab the phone out of his hand and speak for him.

  The boy hangs up the phone and says, “Jerry says you’re all welcome to spend the day here.”

  “Do you have loaner suits?” Portia asks.

  “I’m not wearing a loaner,” Emery says.

  “Well, what are you going to wear?” Portia asks.

  “We only have loaners for men,” the boy says.

  “Why?” Portia asks.

  “I dunno.”

  “They sell suits in the shop,” Anna says. “Buy one.” She can’t believe she has to wade through this bumbling suit business just to get to the pool.

  “I’ll buy one,” Alejandro says. “I need one anyway.”

  “But they only have ugly Speedo shit,” Portia says. “I’m not spending money on that ugly swim team stuff.”

  “Fucking buy it,” Anna says. “I’ll wear it and you can wear my bikini.” Now that a fling with the desk boy is out of the question, Anna could care less what she looks like.

  “I can’t believe you brought your bikini to Mom’s heart attack!” Portia says.

  “Well, you brought a fucking pedicure kit!” Fuck you! Anna thinks.

  “That’s because my husband left me and I can’t walk around looking like some woman whose husband left her!” Portia is staring at the guy behind the desk. Anna looks at him, too. He’s clearly listening, mouth half open like he’s watching a fight scene in a movie and is waiting for the next blow.

  “Then put on my fucking bikini, and you won’t look like a woman whose husband left her!” Anna thinks the bikini won’t really make any difference. Portia has been looking like a woman whose husband left her since before her husband left her, since the day she had a baby and stopped thinking about things like sex, flirtations, possibilities.

  “You know it won’t fit me,” Portia says. They have never been able to wear the same clothes. Where Portia is slender (her middle), Anna isn’t. Where Anna is slender (her limbs), Portia isn’t. They are endomorph and ectomorph; a yin-yang of body shapes.

  Anna sees her sister focusing on not crying. Portia’s obviously at the breaking point where all she’ll have to do is open her mouth and she’ll cry. And then, stupidly, she does it. She opens her mouth. “And I haven’t even gotten my pedicure yet!” Now she’s sobbing. Anna looks down at Portia’s raggedy red-chipped toes and wonders if her sister sees them as a metaphor for her raggedy, chipped-up heart. Maybe the bikini will help after all—maybe it will make her sister feel put back together. It will be too small, but it’s the idea of it that matters now.

  Alejandro and Emery are watching Portia. Anna can tell that they don’t know how to proceed. Anna has to be the one to end this public display of grief and she better end it quickly if she wants to get in any time by the pool.

  “You’re going to be okay,” Anna says, hoping that she sounds sympathetic and not impatient.

  Portia sniffs and wipes her eyes. “Your suit won’t even cover a quarter of my ass.”

  “Your ass doesn’t look that much bigger,” Alejandro says, and he leans back and checks out Portia’s ass. Everyone laughs as a form of relief.

  “Are all the suits in the shop that ugly Speedo swim team stuff?” Portia is asking the desk boy square on as if she doesn’t care about what he’s just witnessed. Her eyes are baby-flesh pink, puffed into little slits. Her face is all freckles.

  “I dunno,” the boy says.

  Everyone pauses for a moment, looking at the boy. Then Anna turns on her heel, takes her sister’s hand, and pulls her to the shop.

  Portia is wearing a navy blue Speedo suit that covers her from her collarbones to her thighs. Anna thinks she looks like a mentally disabled person: an adult who has been dressed by a mother. Anna’s suit is minimal. She has giant breasts that are tan and bulging outside the lines of her suit. Her legs are thin and toned from her ten-mile daily runs. Anna is fully aware of her baffling combination of self-loathing, insecurity, self-love, and adoration. From puberty on she has been jealous of Portia’s shape, of the way boys looked at her. But now, when Anna can sit up in a chair and not have a single fold in her stomach, when she can walk around a pool without her flesh even rippling or shaking, Anna is glad that she has her own body and not Portia’s Marilyn curves.

  The few men and women around the pool look up at Anna and watch as she settles herself. A Mexican boy rearranging the lounging chairs eyes her closely. With her black hair, black eyes, and dark skin, she is often mistaken for Mexican when she’s in California. She hated it when she was a kid, but now, as she senses the energy from being stared at, Anna understands the exoticism of her looks, the small advantage it gives her over the endless blondes who crowd the beaches here.

  Alejandro dives into the pool and swims laps. Emery is sitting at the edge of the pool with his feet hanging in the water, hesitating to jump in. Anna watches them for a moment before picking up the Star magazine she took from the hospital room. She flips through the pages quickly, then tosses it on the tiled ground. After so many celebrity magazines in so few days, she has memorized the celebrity news—what they’re wearing, who they’re dating, who’s in rehab, who’s had a baby, who’s gained weight and who’s lost it.

  Portia applies sunblock that she’s pulled out of her purse, then lies on the chair next to Anna. She appears to fall asleep, although Anna thinks she could simply be checking out of reality after her public bawling.

  Anna gets up and wades into the pool, slowly, from the shallow end. There is an overly tan, overly hirsute, barrel-bellied fiftysomething man standing in the pool, running his hands through the water as if he were a human mixer. Anna imagines what it would be like to have sex with him, someone his age. Not the body of the desk boy, but certainly he’d be more articulate. Highly skilled, perhaps.

  Anna dives down and disappears under the water. Everything goes silent. Her legs kick once as hard as they can, her eyes are shut—she feels like a blind seal. When Anna pops up, she is no longer the seal, she is Pickle Man-Boy in the alternate universe of life above the pond, heaven beyond the cantaloupe. At first the air sounds like empty noise; an impacted hollow space. Then all grows quiet and the sky seems hushed and still, like the sky before an earthquake or a solar eclipse.

  The pool is surrounded by hills that are covered with eucalyptus trees. Everywhere you look there are tall, scabby-barked trees whose finger-slim leaves shine with astringent oil. The sky is bright blue, like the sky out the window of an airplane. There is nothing in this setting that is stressful, or tense, or treacherous. Anna wonders if this is how people who don’t need to do drugs normally feel. Is this the way the nonantidepressant-pill-popping people see the world? To Anna, this moment is almost miraculous. She has never before felt such calm without being on something. And maybe it’s because her mother could die any second now. Or maybe it’s because her sister, who’s normally so ridiculously happy, has fallen apart. Perhaps when everyone else is fucked up, or fucked, Anna can actually hold it together and live in a quiet peacefulness.

  For an hour, no one speaks. They swim, and stand, and lie, and sit, and read, and look up at the trees, the sky, the water. And then they get hungry.

  Anna orders and pays for fo
od for everyone—she is feeling generous in her newfound (although certainly temporary) peacefulness. Also, she figures this will make up for her not having cooked dinner any night since they’ve been here. For herself, Alejandro and Emery, she gets the most interesting foods on the menu: an avocado-and-chicken salad, a honey-mustard chicken sandwich, and a baked mushroom-and-pepper polenta. For her sister she brings a grilled cheese sandwich.

  Portia loves the grilled cheese sandwich. She is actually smiling as she eats it.

  “You have to taste this,” Portia says, and she hands the sandwich to Anna.

  “It’s amazing,” Anna says. The bread is perfectly salty and crisp; the cheese gushes out with every oozy bite. She hands the sandwich to Alejandro.

  “Oh, my God,” he says. “That’s way better than gefilte fish.”

  “Lemme try,” Emery says. He takes a bite and smiles. “That is so good. Why is that so good?”

  Back at the hospital they smell like chlorine and sun. Anna looks in her compact mirror and sees that she is so dark, the whites of her eyes pop out like moons on her face. Portia’s long hair is wet and her cheeks appear to have new constellations of freckles. Emery and Alejandro are like two brown squirrels. Louise is still sleeping, or asleep again, as she probably was awake at some point during their absence. Buzzy looks up from his book and examines his children.

  “You had your suits with you?” he asks.

  “We had to buy them,” Portia says. “I bought this really ugly Speedo that made me look like a housewife.”

  “But aren’t you a housewife?” Buzzy asks.

  “I guess,” Portia says, and she yawns and looks away. Anna watches her sister for a second to make sure she doesn’t start bawling again. She imagines connecting Frankensteinian wires between their two heads, flipping a giant Y-shaped current paddle, and transferring her own emotions into Portia so that Portia could have a break from herself. Anna has never felt undone by the end of a relationship; it’s as if she has always known there would be someone else lined up to take the last person’s place. But Portia, who sees herself as having been replaced by Daphne Frank, is simply standing at a dead end, refusing to turn around and walk the other way.

  “Did you buy a suit, too?” Buzzy asks Emery.

  “Alejandro bought two of them—”

  “I lost my suit,” Alejandro says. “I needed new ones, anyway.”

  “I had mine,” Anna says.

  “I’ll pay for the new ones,” Buzzy says. “Let me give you the money.”

  They all wave him away. No one will let him pay, even though it might make him happy to pay, it might relieve something for him, the way tension is relieved through a fight, nervousness through a jiggling foot.

  Louise is suddenly awake. She mumbles, “Let your father pay for the suits.”

  “Mom, the suits were nothing,” Anna says. “It’s the plane tickets that set us back.”

  “I’ll pay for those, too!” Buzzy says.

  “I was kidding,” Anna says. “I used miles. The ticket didn’t even set me back.”

  “I used miles, too,” Portia says.

  “We got one of those companion-fare specials,” Emery says.

  “I’ll give you all plane tickets to pay you back,” Buzzy says, “or I’ll give you money to cover the tickets.”

  “Forget it,” Anna says. She’ll need money later for something, she always does; it wouldn’t be good to blow his generosity on this.

  “Let your father pay for the tickets,” Louise groans. “Don’t be silly.”

  “Mom,” Anna says, “why don’t you take another shot of morphine and check out for a while.”

  Louise laughs. The nurse, whose presence in the room seems somewhat like the machinery, smiles at her.

  “I had this grilled cheese sandwich at the club,” Portia says, “that was so good, it was like I was on drugs or something.”

  The nurse leaves.

  “It was as good as drugs,” Anna says.

  “It was like being on Ecstasy,” Emery says.

  “What do you mean it was like being on Ecstasy?” Buzzy asks.

  “The degree of pleasure,” Emery says.

  “I thought she had the sandwich?”

  “We all tasted it,” Alejandro says. “It was amazing.”

  “You ever done Ecstasy?” Anna asks Emery. Ecstasy became popular after Anna went to rehab. She’s always wanted to try it, although her psychiatrist has warned her against it.

  Alejandro laughs as a way of saying yes, they’ve done it plenty.

  “You shouldn’t do it,” Anna says “My shrink says it will mess up the serotonin balance in your brain.” If she ever goes off Prozac, Anna thinks, she’ll start taking Ecstasy. If you’re going to be addicted to something, it might as well be something that makes you peacefully happy, rather than manic and needy.

  “We do it, like, twice a year,” Emery says. “Nothing major.” Anna continues to be surprised at how far the most uptight, law-abiding member of the family has come.

  “Don’t do drugs,” Louise groans.

  “Not sure you should be heading the ‘Just Say No’ campaign, Mom,” Emery says. They all laugh. Alejandro laughs hardest, which makes Anna wonder what stories Emery has told him. She doesn’t really care what he’s been told about her: she is who she is and that’s that. But she is curious about how much of her past is in his mind.

  “And,” Louise tries to lift her finger as if to make this point more powerful, “be careful about who you have sex with.”

  “Mom,” Anna says, “don’t you think we should have had this talk years ago? Like, before any of us went away to college?”

  “Yeah,” Portia says. “Think how different our lives would be now if you had actually warned us against drugs and sex!”

  Chapter 12

  1981

  Buzzy picked up Anna from the airport when she flew home for Christmas break. He waited in the brown four-door sedan in front of the terminal. When Anna approached the car, she could tell her father didn’t recognize her at first. She was thinner than she’d been last summer, and she had a row of hoops running up the side of one ear.

  “Get in!” he shouted. All the windows were down. It was December 5 and about seventy degrees outside.

  Anna rolled her eyes, opened the back door, and shoved her giant suitcase on top of the newspapers and the empty shopping bag that sat on the seat. She slammed the door shut and got in the front seat. Her father was so erratic—one day smothering her with affection and then today yelling at her to get in the car when the last time he had seen her was the middle of August. Not that she missed his hugs and kisses. They were over-the-top, in her opinion.

  “I have a shrink appointment in ten minutes,” Buzzy said, and he roared away from the curb.

  “Then why didn’t Mom pick me up?” Anna asked.

  “She’s locked in her studio. She wouldn’t open up for me.”

  “Are you in a fight?” Anna asked. If they were fighting, she’d rather not be home.

  “No, we’re getting along fine. She’s busy. Trying to finish some series of something . . . I don’t know if it’s etchings or poems.”

  “Is Portia home?”

  “She’s on her way.”

  “Where’s Emery?”

  Buzzy shrugged, changed lanes, and cut someone off.

  “That guy’s honking at you,” Anna said. She put her hand against her right cheek so the angry driver wouldn’t see her. She was embarrassed to be in her father’s dirty, swerving car.

  “He’s not honking at me!” Buzzy adjusted the rearview mirror and looked in it. “There’s no one even back there.”

  “He’s fucking next to us, Dad!” Anna slunk down low in the seat. Buzzy ignored her and zoomed on.

  At the house, Buzzy kept the car running while Anna tugged her suitcase out of the backseat. He opened his door, ran around the front of the car, and gave Anna kisses all over her head.

  “I’m glad to have you h
ome, sweetheart,” Buzzy said. “I’ll see you when I get back from the shrink.” Buzzy got back in the car and sped away.

  When Anna walked into the house, the lights were off and the orange, nubby curtains were drawn.

  “Hellooooo,” she called out. The house was still as air.

  Anna stepped past the piles of shoes and books on the stairway and went up to her room. She had the eerie feeling of being in the wrong house. The mod, striped wallpaper Anna had picked out at nine years old remained, but everything else that signified her was gone.

  Buzzy’s leather armchair was in the corner where Anna’s blue beanbag chair and record player used to sit. On the bed (no bedspread, only a single white sheet) were stacks and piles of papers and books. The desk held more of the same. The bulletin board over the desk had notices and receipts having nothing to do with Anna.

  The room smelled of Buzzy—distinct and profound as any animal smell, musky but clean. Buzzy had taken over Anna’s room.

  She had been erased.

  Anna went to her sister’s room and saw that it was now Emery’s junked-up room with Portia’s old pink-flowered wallpaper on the uncovered bits of wall. Her sister’s pink desk was pushed in a corner and Anna’s blue beanbag chair sat beside Emery’s dark oak bunk bed. Taped to the walls were maps of Disneyland and Magic Mountain—there was even a map taped on the ceiling over the bed. Along the floor, Emery had lined up his shoes according to height (high-tops to flip-flops) and color (darkest to lightest). It seemed that Emery had tried to create some order within the mishmash. He was searching for an aesthetic, although Anna didn’t think he had quite found it yet.

  Downstairs, in the room that used to belong to Emery, was Portia’s bed, properly made up, and the cot that Bubbe and Zeyde had used. (The kids had been told that Bubbe and Zeyde’s annual December trip had been rescheduled for summer, as Louise couldn’t take the sudden accumulation of so many people.) Anna’s old, fuzzy white blanket and patchwork bedspread were folded on the cot with a pile of mismatched sheets from various years. Lined against the wall were cardboard grocery boxes, each with Buzzy’s nearly illegible scrawl on the sides: “Anna’s Stuff” or “Portia’s Stuff.” There was also a giant open crate, like a miniature boxcar from a train, filled with toys and stuffed animals that Emery had given up. Sticking out of the top of the crate was Emery’s sock monkey, Laird. He had loved Laird, carried him everywhere, sucked on his foot. Anna poked at Laird with the toe of her boot. He was brown and shiny, filthy. She couldn’t believe anyone would actually save a thing like Laird.