by Rachel Khong
I already knew about her. I knew about her car with its Oregon plates, parked there outside Joel’s and my old apartment, first thing in the morning. I didn’t want to see it there, I told myself, but the truth was that I did want to see the car, or else why would I have felt that it was necessary to walk down that particular street, past that particular apartment that had been ours, every chance I had, but especially in the mornings, before work? It had to be that something inside me wanted to confirm that it would be there. It always was.
Davy cried when I said goodbye—as though he knew the finality in it—and that was the hardest part, about Franklin. What makes it okay, though, is that there’s no way he remembers me now.
You know what else is unfair, about Joel? That I loosened the jar lid, so somebody else could open him.
February 23
“UP! UP! UP!” says the woman in this exercise tape, about our buttocks. As it turns out, Mom’s old workout clothes fit me, so I have on her leggings and her tank top and same-size sports bra. And hot pink terry wristbands. I’d unearthed our VCR from the attic to watch them. Mom used these tapes to get back into shape after I was born, which makes me feel I don’t know how. She was twenty-five, in her prime childbearing years.
I don’t know how I got to be thirty. I don’t feel thirty, the way I felt so definitely nine, and thirteen, and twenty-one.
This woman has us run, run, run in place. Then she has us do a series of impossible things with our arms.
Now I clean the toilet FASTER, FASTER, FASTER! and flip the pancakes STRONGER, STRONGER, STRONGER!
“Why are you shouting?” Mom asks.
February 24
The moon, tonight, looks like a cut zucchini coin. I’m filling up on gas at the cheaper station, when somebody says “Ruth.” At a different pump, my old friend Reggie is waving enthusiastically. He’s immediately recognizable: he looks exactly the same. In high school, we were in a band together. I sang backup vocals and played the guitar. We would practice in his parents’ garage. We called ourselves Bambi Mama and our hit song, meaning the song we played constantly, was “The Best Things in Life.” It went: “The best things in life / The best things in life are free / The best things in life are Fritos.” We had a good time.
Inside the gas station, Reggie buys an Almond Joy for me and a cup of decaf for himself and we sit together on the curb, near the air and water pumps, each of us catching the other up. He’d moved away and moved back recently. First he lived in New York and then he lived in Miami. For a year and a half now he’s been teaching drama at our old high school.
There is an animal in the parking lot with us. It looks like a stray dog, but something about it seems different, seems wrong. The creature doesn’t have any of that modesty that dogs have. It doesn’t seem tentative. It doesn’t seem like it wants us to tell it what to do.
“Coyote,” Reggie says. “They’re getting bolder because of the drought. They’re looking for water.”
When Reggie says water, the thing comes right up to us, as if summoned. It looks at Reggie first and then it stares at me. Over us, the moon is emitting its yellow zucchini light. Reggie reaches into his pocket and pulls out something small and shiny: a whistle. He blows on it, it makes a shrill noise, and that’s all it takes. The coyote runs away.
“It works on mountain lions, too,” he says.
He offers his hand to help me up. I notice the new tattoos on his arms, and a scar on his jaw that’s unfamiliar.
He walks me to my car. He says I can get a whistle of my own at the police department, or at city hall.
“For free?” I ask.
“For free. Like the best things in life,” Reggie says, grinning. “Like Fritos.”
February 25
At three in the morning, I find Dad in front of the TV, watching Ron Popeil sell a Ronco Showtime rotisserie. Dad pushes the loaf of bread that he’s sharing the couch with to the side, and pats the seat beside him. I take it.
We fix ourselves peanut butter sandwiches. He cuts his into rectangles; I go triangles.
I remember I used to command him, “Make me a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich!” And my dad would say, “Poof! You’re a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.”
We watch the rotating chickens, mesmerized.
“We could just set it and forget it,” Dad repeats softly.
“For a low, low price,” I agree. “Just four easy installments.”
“Fetch my credit card,” Dad says, and we call the 1-800 number to order it.
February 26
I’m getting re-used to these things. The trash trucks. The eucalyptus smell. The quiet and cold mornings during which, unlike in San Francisco, you hardly ever hear any sirens. On a walk this morning I notice a lacquered chopstick in the gutter, its twin down the road. A waitress outside the diner with the $1.99 eggs and sausage, shaking the ashes of her cigarette into a Big Gulp cup. A kid jumping over a line of traffic cones. A bunch of Great Danes being walked that move like horses.
In the park, a woman says SIT to her thin dog. The dog squats but never lets its rear end touch the ground. The woman says SIT to her other dog, and it does the same. That’s just how they were raised, I guess.
“Why doesn’t somebody get the mail?” Mom says, dramatically carrying in an armful of envelopes.
February 27
Grooms, over the phone, is telling me that she has been reading Kevin Paradise Lost. Except that, being a baby, he hasn’t seemed very interested. Finally she put Scotch tape on his forehead and it was obvious that he preferred the tape.
“Don’t be too hard on him,” I’m advising. “Remember he’s a baby.”
At the store, there are potatoes in a bin with this big sign above them that says FRESHLY DUG. They’re the size of feet.
Above the avocadoes it says TOUCH ME TENDER.
A woman is stroking a portobello.
“Wow!” she says to me, a complete stranger. “Would you look at the gills on that mushroom!” It endears her to me completely.
Also, while I’m staring at the oils, an alert employee informs me that canola oil is made from rapeseeds! Do I need any help?
At home there are two boxes on the doorstep: two boxes. One is full of loofahs: twelve colorful mesh poufs. Why, we don’t know. Dad claims all the pinks.
The other is our Ronco rotisserie that we’ve forgotten we bought.
I drive back to the store to fetch a chicken. Back at home, we put it in the machine. We set it, but we don’t forget it. We watch the chicken turn over and over and over.
“You should definitely buy one,” I call Bonnie to tell, breathy with excitement.
February 28
Is this a thing? Lately I’m more forgiving. I used to be very quick to judge the old men who don’t know that when you walk past them on the sidewalk where they’re sweeping leaves, they should stop sweeping. But now it occurs to me that maybe these old men have maladies—diseases that affect their manners—and should be pardoned.
March 1
I have a dream I’m King Midas but instead of gold it’s aluminum. Everything I touch turns to it. I hug my father and poof! he turns into a tin man.
“I have a heart,” he says sorrowfully. “That’s not the problem.”
“What’s the problem?” I ask, peering at him. He has rust-rimmed eyes.
“I am always cold,” he says.
March 2
We’re moving class off campus starting this week because Levin’s schedule has become erratic, and we no longer feel confident in our ability to avoid him. Theo has spotted him on campus every day this week. Rumor has it that he’s having trouble at home, and that’s why he’s spending all this extra time on campus.
The idea Theo and I plant into Dad’s head is that because we’re learning about the Los Angeles Aqueduct, we should take an educational field trip to go visit it. We should see it in person!
The aqueduct was started in 1908. It would divert water from farms in Owens Valley,
whose water was runoff from the Sierra Nevadas. The question was always: Who should get the water, Owens Valley or Los Angeles? Teddy Roosevelt voted in favor of Los Angeles. The farmers were unhappy with that decision. You can still make out the parts of the aqueduct that the farmers dynamited.
Dad is lecturing happily despite the sun, which is beating down on us. Nobody looks comfortable. Sweat is collecting between my boobs and I want to scoop it out.
“That looks heavy,” Theo whispers, about my purse.
“It is,” I whisper back.
Wordlessly he lifts it off my shoulder and puts it onto his.
March 4
I see, walking on the other side of the street today, a man with enormous pecs. They look as inflated as popcorn bags right after microwaving.
The phrase “born humans” is what I think of whenever I see someone wildly different from me.
Fetal circulation is different from that of born humans. Fetuses have fine hair all over them that born humans don’t have. Fetuses do a thing like breathing that isn’t actually breathing—the motions develop their lungs. They take their first breath when they’re born and that’s when the whole system changes incredibly: unborn to born.
We’re born humans, I think, about the huge-pec’ed man. With our functioning circulatory systems. Breathing, walking, having real hair. Just look at us.
Later, at the farmers’ market, I watch a couple bros sample dates.
“Shit,” says one bro, coughing. “I think I’m allergic to this giant raisin!”
“That’s not a raisin, Steve,” says another bro. “That’s a Medjool date.”
Born humans, I remind myself.
March 5
We’re at Home Depot because Dad’s decided he wants to finish building the covering for the patio. He abandoned the project years ago, when I was in high school. In a book called Backyard Structures, we find a photo of the thing he wants to build: a “pergola,” the book says, and provides a list of materials and steps, like a recipe. We load a cart with fresh two-by-fours and buy a new saw blade to replace his rusted one. Near the cash registers, an old woman is struggling to pull some orange buckets apart. Dad helps her.
We tie red bandannas to the wood that juts from the car’s open trunk and cross our fingers that the cops don’t pull us over.
My grandfather was a carpenter and a roofer.
“But I’m afraid of heights,” is what Dad confesses to me now.
March 6
Today you asked if I’d ever watched a moth eat clothes and I replied honestly: no.
Today you said you didn’t believe it!
Today you admired a magnolia tree and I told you that it was one of the earth’s oldest plants, that the flowers are so big because beetles used to crawl into them carrying the pollen on their legs. And you asked, Why should I believe you? And that was a very good question.
March 7
Linus called, so I’m trying to chop a bell pepper one-handed, and making slow progress. He’s telling me about his latest argument with Rita, which was over what to have for dinner. I don’t care, she said, when it was clear, he said, that she did.
This week Rita got back from Bali, where she’d been for a month, doing yoga and drinking fruit juice. As of three days ago, she’s back, looking fitter than she ever has, and now they are being awkward with each other. Linus worries that he has gained as much weight as she’s lost. They are having trouble getting back into the swing of things.
“You’d think we’d have so much to talk about. In terms of, like, ground to cover. Stuff that happened while we were apart,” he says. “But when I ask her questions, it’s like she’s hesitating—deciding what to tell me. Or she’ll answer in a really bare-bones way.”
“It’s not that easy, to say what happened,” I say. “What happened to you, for example, yesterday?”
“I tried to talk to my girlfriend about her vacation, that’s what happened.”
There’s a pause.
“What if she met someone?” he says.
“You’re overthinking this,” I say. I try to sound convincing, reassuring.
“Let’s talk about something else,” he says.
I tell him about what I read today: that scientists have learned how to embed false memories in mice. Using pulses of light, they were able to make the mice remember something that never happened: something unpleasant. The mice showed fear, remembering the thing that happened that had never actually happened.
Memories are stored in collections of cells, and when we remember, we reassemble the cells like a puzzle.
A few years ago, they figured out how to give mice déjà vus. They gave the mice the feeling of having been somewhere before.
Last year they figured out how to implant memories in a piece of brain in a test tube. Which—whatever, is my feeling. Why don’t they figure out how to keep mice from forgetting things? We don’t need more memories. It’s hard enough trying to get a handle on the ones we’ve got.
“What do you think happens to all the mice?” I ask Linus.
“I hope they’re retired somewhere,” Linus says.
“I hope someone is feeding them gouda and giving them massages.”
“And they’re fat. And they’re happy.”
“Is that Linus?” Mom asks, peeking into the kitchen, and I nod. “Let me talk to him,” she says, taking my phone.
“Hi, dear,” I hear her say.
March 9
Theo has sent me a photo of his parking permit and I’ve been on the computer, trying to counterfeit one for the car. The font isn’t exactly right, but it’s close enough, I figure. Not close enough to use in the actual parking lot, but realistic enough to appease Dad. I glue-stick the faux permit to the front windshield.
Today we’re in a lecture hall because Harry, one of Dad’s students, tipped us off that his philosophy teacher, who typically teaches a class on Plato during our exact time slot, has been out with the flu. The space is comically large—big enough to accommodate 150 students. The eight of us settle into the first two rows.
Today he’s talking about the gold rush, which those of us who grew up in California already know something about from our fifth-grade curriculums: the tens of thousands of men who came in hopes of striking it rich.
We panned for planted gold at Knott’s Berry Farm. In the books we read, men had to bathe in champagne because water was too expensive, and women sold pear blossoms to prospectors—tagging the trees with their names. One day they’d become pears or they wouldn’t. Everything was a gamble back then. Everything maybe still is.
Every day in San Francisco, on my commute home, I would pass the same elderly Asian woman, standing on a street corner, holding a napkin to her face and giggling behind it, playing peekaboo with nobody. Once a man talking to a mail slot turned to me and told me he was an angel. All I had on me was a five-dollar bill, which I gave to him.
A long time ago I stopped wondering why there were so many crazy people. What surprises me now is that there are so many sane ones.
After class, Theo and I convene at his apartment, to do what teaching assistants are supposed to do. What we’ve told Dad is that we’re entering essay grades into the computer system. But actually we’re eating delivery pad Thai and reading the notes Dad’s written on students’ papers. The notes are critical but thoughtful; the papers are long and well researched and earnest. I’m choking up a little bit at this whole unbelievable situation.
“How was your bedside manner, working at the hospital?” Theo asks.
“Unobtrusive,” I say. “Like a lamp.”
After I tell him about the loofahs, he shakes his head.
“Sometimes it’s just the way of the universe,” he says. “Once I got a ten-pound box of sour belts.”
“Did you send it back?”
“Not going to dignify that with a response,” he says.
Now he’s squinting at his fortune.
“Are you,” I ask, “farsighted?”
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br /> Immediately he looks sheepish.
I read it out loud for him: “You will grow slightly fatter every year.”
He fishes his glasses from his backpack.
Joel had better vision than I did, and so he was the one who, in the mornings, when we woke up, could tell me the time.
Sometimes I think: he could see things coming that I couldn’t.
The last ultrasound I gave was to a woman named Lucille. She was five months pregnant with a boy. I said something only marginally funny and she peed all over the examination table.
That they’re called “pregnancy symptoms” has always struck me as strange—symptoms, I mean. I remember the start of a yoga class, the instructor asking if anybody had any injuries, and a pregnant woman raising her hand.
“Well, you know.” She shrugged.
Same thing with “patient.” At the hospital the other day, the doctor, referring to Dad, called him “the Alzheimer’s patient.” Patient for what, I wanted to ask.
“Earth to Ruth,” Theo says. “You okay?”
Later at home my phone rings and it’s Grooms, who, instead of saying hello, is weeping into the phone. Kevin said “blah”! The most chill first word.
March 10
Dad’s in the backyard, cutting up wood and cursing. I’m walking to the library to return the DVD when a small child on a scooter shrieks at me: “A WOMAN!” In case, I guess, I’d forgotten.
Lately my thing is inventing new yoga poses. The Onion is one. You make yourself very round, then peel yourself, limb by limb.
March 11
Tonight I try my hand at dessert: baked Alaska, because of course. It’s so epic! How can you bake Alaska? How can you not?
March 12
I’m losing it, too. I intended to return a book to the library but dropped it, by mistake, into a mailbox. At the library, where I’ve gone to explain myself, I run into Regina, who was homecoming queen our junior year. She had hay-colored hair to her waist and I envied it. She has children now. They share names with hurricanes—I don’t know if it is intentional or what.