by Peter Orner
The kids, of course, would have to figure out what to do with it all.
“Ruby?”
It was Lucinda, the chief.
“Yes, dear?”
“Fred’s medications, do you happen to—”
She recited them one by one by one, a litany, a chant.
The past few years they’d begun to shrink. In town, people said they’d become almost identical. This is often said of elderly people, but even she had to admit that in their case it was almost uncanny. They’d become dead ringers for each other. Same height, same wobbly gait. Really, from a distance, you couldn’t tell one from the other.
The dog died. The other dog died. Still, every morning they walked across the sewer ponds, through the fog, doubled back to Overlook, and wandered up Ocean Parkway to the place where the road crumbled down the bluff. You could stand there two hours; you could stand there five minutes. The Pacific didn’t give a hoot about time. It would eat a year for breakfast. Is that why they’d always been so drawn to it? Is that why, still, they came and stood at the edge, day after day? Its blessed indifference?
The Going Away Party
He left a note on the kitchen table. On the note, he’d drawn a map that directed where on the ridge, near the dam, they could find him. The children were still very young. The little girl was four. The boy only five months. His memory of his father would be shaped by other people. The girl, though, would probably retain glimpses of his face, scraps of his voice. Some said it was selfish, monstrously selfish. Two kids? Others said that once he decided he must have been in such a hurry to get it over with he couldn’t possibly have known what he was doing.
They hadn’t been in town long, maybe a year. He worked over the hill, so we saw him only on weekends. It wasn’t that long ago. Hard for me to believe, but the truth is I’ve already forgotten his name. Her name, though, was Mel. Or at least she called herself Mel. She painted and taught art in the after-school program. We’d begun to invite them to parties. They were friendly, distracted by their kids like we all were. He was a little shy, maybe, but gracious enough to laugh at inside jokes about our town that weren’t funny, especially if you were new. We must have bored him to exhaustion. Mel was more outgoing. She’d joined the mothers’ book club and had even offered to host meetings at her house. We figured they’d be around town for years. We figured we all would. Why wouldn’t we? West Marin County. Paradise on earth if you can keep affording it.
Her parents came to stay afterward. They were from Indiana. Kind and stoic, they’d left their jobs—and their lives—and immediately driven to California from Fort Wayne, a day and a half without stopping. The father would sit with the little girl for hours, giving voices to her dolls. After maybe three or four months, Mel bought a small camper. Her father helped her hitch it to the back of what had been her husband’s truck.
There was a kind of going away party. It was in the morning, a breakfast party. A bright day. Kitchen chairs had been carried out to the parched lawn. Her mother met us at the gate, declaring that she’d made her famous pancakes and that we’d have to shoot her before she would give up her recipe. She put her hand to her mouth. The little girl gave tours of the camper for all the other children, who promptly jumped on the mattresses until somebody’s mother shooed them out of there. Because that was a home now and you don’t just go into somebody’s home and jump on the beds. Her paintings were all bubble-wrapped and stacked in rows in the garage. They were going into storage. She’d come back for them, she said. Where she was heading she wasn’t exactly sure. First, she’d visit her brother in Boise. It was the beginning of summer. She still had time before she had to figure out school for the little girl. A new start—Mel laughed—a clean slate, the open road. I remember how she pushed her hair out of her eyes when she didn’t need to. That gesture with the back of her hand even though her hair wasn’t in her eyes. And we believed her. Why shouldn’t we have believed her? Wasn’t it possible? The interstate, the two kids, the little camper with the beds—
On the Floor, Beside the Bed
An ex-outfielder for the San Diego Padres, two seasons in the majors, mostly on the bench, but everybody in town referred to him as the guy who played for the Padres. He didn’t seem to work. He drove a tiny car, one of those old Honda Civics you could pretty much hold in the palm of your hand. What is it about big guys in small cars? Like big guys with small dogs. An attempt to say, I don’t see myself as you see me? His dog, though, wasn’t small. It was just mean. And who’s ever heard of a mean golden retriever? This one was vicious. His wife was ponytailed, small, friendly. We never saw her in town. She must have taken the bus to a job over the hill. And the only time we ever saw him was when he was driving too fast on our dirt roads. Who knows where he was driving, because we never saw him in town, either, but he drove that Civic like the pickup it wasn’t. You saw him coming, you jumped in a ditch. Soon mow you down as look at you. He was a menace, but there were worse menaces in town. And there was the fact that he’d played for the Padres.
One night, late, we got a call to his address. Over the radio, dispatch said a thirty-eight-year-old male fell out of bed. Arm injury. Lacerations, possible broken bones. They lived in a one-and-a-half-room cabin up on the Mesa, off Agate Beach, up from Jack’s Path. A bedroom and half a kitchen. When the three of us got there, his wife was holding the frothing dog by the collar. He was on the floor beside the bed, groaning. She was wearing a tank top and pajama bottoms. Her feet were bare. That dog would have taken a chomp out of any one of us. We scooted by, those raging teeth lunging for our knees. She managed to lock the dog in the closet and got down on the floor and held him, or as much of him as she could wrap her arms around. She asked if she was in the way. Macy said no, she was fine, he could work around her, not a problem. If she helped calm the patient, all the better. I handed Macy the ears and the BP monitor. Macy told Dante to do a C-spine.
The ex-ballplayer shouted, “Not my back, my arm.”
Macy kept his cool, told him it was protocol with any fall to do a C-spine. His wife moved over a bit, and Dante, on his knees, slid the collar under his neck. His vitals checked out fine. There was a small, old bruise on his left arm, but no open wound. Macy asked if he thought he’d broken anything. The ex-ballplayer said how the fuck should he know. “Did you hear any pop?” Macy said.
“I heard a pop, yeah.”
And he started moaning louder. He tried to lift his head, which was now collared. Dante gently pushed it back down. We’d seen this act before. His wasn’t even an especially good performance. The dog was trying to eat his way out of the closet. You could see his teeth gnawing under the cheap door.
Macy gave me a look and I went and scoped out the bathroom. It was clean, smelled nice. Flower-scented air freshener. I wondered if she’d cleaned it before we got there. In a bottom drawer I found a pile of empty pill bottles, the labels scratched off. I came out and gave Macy a shrug. We’re not cops.
Macy asked the ex-ballplayer if he wouldn’t feel more comfortable on the bed. “My arm!” he shouted. “Can’t you see? I’m in pain here. I need something, all right?”
And she held him, this enormous guy. I’m sometimes struck by how people who don’t look like they’d fit together actually do.
Macy was polite, all business. He told him we were only EMTs. “Or the two of us are.” He upped his chin at me. “He just helps. Talk to the medics. They’ll be here in fifteen, twenty—”
“Look, I’m telling you I need something.”
“We don’t even carry aspirin anymore.”
“Fuck you. Fuck every inch of you.”
Not just physically but how people fit together period. I’m talking about the assumption of other people’s realities. I read somewhere that we brood when we’re alone, we act when we’re together. As in act in a play. But his wife wasn’t acting, at least she didn’t know she was acting. Or maybe she was a better actor than he was. She had a shy, fearless face. This was nothing. Him shou
ting, a cabin full of strangers in the middle of the night? You should see how he is when we’re alone.
I was a volunteer, nobody important to the scene. I carried the five-minute bag for Macy. I filled out the yellow sheet, though the chief complained that my handwriting was too small. She said I wrote like an ant. I held open doors. Sometimes, I helped roll out the stretchers. Or I’d go out and scout for the ambulance in case the medics got lost, which happened sometimes because not all our roads are marked, and GPS, forget it.
Someone once told me the Pacific scrambles the maps.
Mostly, I watched. Mostly, I was invisible, hardly there at all. Two o’clock in the morning, I’d get out of bed and walk into people’s worst moments. You think I wasn’t thrilled? One night a former professional ballplayer with nothing to show for it but a dank rental, a piece-of-shit car, and a nasty dog in the closet. They got evicted a few months later, took the dog, and left town. But he had her, her thin arms around him as best she could. The two of them still on the floor. He was done with it now, weeping. She clung, Baby, baby. We waited on the medics.
Stinson Beach, 2013
He goes with his ex-wife and kids to the beach and there’s a calmness, an easy silence, between the few words they say to each other. The kids dig ruts by the edge of the water. Sammy’s on her stomach watching those weird little bugs that bounce backward. He rubs her back with sunscreen. She didn’t ask but doesn’t recoil, either. He hasn’t touched her back in three years, maybe four, since during that last year they’d hardly looked at each other. His hands linger longer than necessary to make the creamy whiteness disappear, and still she doesn’t say anything, and he thinks maybe she’s not watching the bugs anymore and has fallen asleep. Skin he knows and doesn’t know, a kind of alien familiarity he couldn’t explain with words. Why? What’s simpler than remembering—not remembering, seeing, rubbing—a mole on a left shoulder blade you’d forgotten all about? And he remembers something else, his hands still rubbing her skin, something she once said, not at the end but earlier, years earlier than the end, before it went wherever it went. What if we’re ordinary? And his response was to laugh. Us? And now, with the years having piled up, even the kids hardly argue, perhaps too afraid that this rare moment will vanish into the blue air. They’re quiet, digging in the sand, though his older daughter, at nine, believes she’s too old to be digging in the sand and would have said so had this been a normal day. And the younger one isn’t hungry and she doesn’t need to go to the bathroom. None of that. It’s as if they are both holding their breath at the edge of the water.
Sammy murmurs something.
“What?”
“Gmnec?”
“What?”
“Get my neck?”
Not a question, an order, but shaped to sound like a question, which was Sammy all the way, except now he was happy to oblige, and he wonders, as he slicks both his palms down the contours of her neck, whether love sometimes comes down to this, orders posed as questions and how we react.
She’s remarried now, to the very decent Doug. She found him online. He knows how to change the oil himself and is very kind to the kids. “Rugrats, backpacks, your dad’s here!” Doug shouts whenever he comes to the door.
Her shoulder blades are still shaped like the prows of rowboats.
Above Santa Cruz
I remember the nights in Santa Cruz as darker than nights other places. I’m sure this has to do with my state of mind when I lived there. Even so, I remember that I could feel just below the surface of the town’s smug self-satisfaction an undercurrent of seething resentment. It had, I believe, to do with money. How a number of people in and around Santa Cruz had unimaginable amounts of it while everybody else, including people with good-paying jobs, or what used to be considered good-paying jobs, like professors and chiropractors, were living paycheck to paycheck. And yet there seemed to be this unwritten edict that those who had somehow managed to hang on were expected to fall to their knees every day and kiss the ground for the privilege of living in Santa Cruz. It is true. The beaches are wide, are glorious, but this sort of obligatory genuflection cuts to the bone. Not that I spoke to a soul about any of this. I lived in a shoebox off Soquel Avenue for ten months, and aside from my students, who’d vanish so fast after class I’d be left standing there wondering if they’d been there at all, I don’t remember having a single conversation with anyone. As an adjunct, I was so far down the food chain I didn’t exist. I’d go and get my hair cut, I was so lonely for some fingers.
They weren’t paying me enough to live, but I had to sleep somewhere. For the first two weeks of the term, I stayed at the Capri Motor Inn. The drain was clogged, and every time I took a shower, I’d stand ankle deep in water that reeked of urine. I hoped at least it was my own. I’d lived in worse places. The room came with a mini-fridge and microwave. But that year I had hopes. I was teaching at a genuine accredited university. I answered an ad on Craigslist for a cheap, one-room rental. It was up in the mountains, near a place called Bonny Doon. Sounded cheerful. Bonny Doon, a place you could dance to. For some reason, I drove up there at night. The darkness around Santa Cruz is heavily populated. You never knew what your headlights were going to pick up on those mountain roads. Around one curve, I lit up a couple humping, happily, violently, on the edge of the trees.
It turned out to be a room in a mansion on an old estate. The house, which I learned later dated back to the Roaring Twenties, was dilapidated and had been chopped up into multiple apartments. On the side of the house was a sagging veranda and an empty, cracked swimming pool. I found a door, not the front door, there didn’t seem to be a front door anymore, and I followed a set of handwritten signs to “the office,” where I met a high-heeled, sunburned woman who introduced herself as Charlene. She opened a cabinet and, after some deliberation, chose a key, my key. I trailed behind her along dimly lighted hallways that echoed with odd thumpings. We passed room after room. In the shadows of half-opened doors were men. Men in white T-shirts and saggy underwear. Men cooking dinner. Men standing not quite in their doorways. Men who coughed. Men who cleared their throats. Men grinding their plates clean with a fork. Charlene called the room an efficiency, and there may well have been a hot plate and small refrigerator, but the light in the room, like the hallways, was so diffuse I couldn’t make much out. A single low-watt bulb dangled from the ceiling.
“Is there a bed?” I asked.
“Is there a bed? Didn’t you read the ad? The room comes fully furnished. Is there a bed!”
The carpet underfoot was damp and squishy. If there had once been a window, it had long since been covered over with a piece of plywood. “Not all our tenants are on public assistance,” Charlene said. “I’ve got a restaurant manager and an ex-lawyer.”
Though I could hardly see a thing, I’m certain that I watched tiny bits of Charlene’s skin flake off her face and float slowly to the carpet. I felt myself falling toward her without falling, if this makes any sense. I stood there blinking, only wanting to kiss her to stop her from disintegrating.
It may have been then that Charlene told me factoids about the estate’s history. When it was constructed, how many rooms. That it was originally built by an actor named Robert Montgomery. That he was Elizabeth Montgomery’s father. That the estate stayed in the family for a few decades before falling into ruin. Until now! She said in the last incarnation, before the new owners divided it up into these cute apartlets, the place was a group home for folks with (mild) psychiatric disorders. “Some of the residents have stayed on, and I have to say you aren’t going to meet a nicer bunch of guys.”
“Wait,” I said. “Elizabeth Montgomery from Bewitched? Samantha?”
“Right,” Charlene said. “She grew up here. Such a beautiful woman. You know she was Jeannie, also.”
“That was Barbara Eden,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
I nodded sagely.
Few things I’m sure of, aside from who played Samantha and
who played Jeannie. One wrinkled her beautiful nose, the other slept on a couch in a bottle. My life and reruns after school—
“But Elizabeth Montgomery was in something else, right? What was—”
“The Lizzie Borden TV movie,” I said.
Charlene shouted, “Now, that was creepy!”
“My mother is from Fall River,” I said.
“Where?”
“Fall River, Massachusetts, where Lizzie Borden—”
“Took an ax!” Charlene shouted.
“Forty whacks!”
For a moment, we both shared the ecstasy of those whacks. And when she saw what she had done—be honest, who hasn’t wanted at some point to swing an ax at someone and then at someone else?
“Elizabeth never came back here after she got famous,” Charlene said. “Usually how it goes, you know. Why come home if you don’t have to? I only mention her because, like I say, she’s an interesting factoid.”
I didn’t tell Charlene that in the ’60s and ’70s my mother was sometimes stopped on the streets of Chicago, she looked so much like Samantha on Bewitched. I’ve come to see that other people are immediately bored by what you consider an amazing coincidence. Elizabeth Montgomery, who could have been my mother’s twin (and who also played Fall River’s own Lizzie Borden in the movie!), grew up here, in this house, and now look, look, here I am about to move into a room in the same house! Isn’t that insane?
Not really.
But seriously, you should have seen my mother when people stopped her on the street. Hell, she was prettier than Elizabeth Montgomery, a lot—
“Why don’t you take a few minutes to get a feel?” Charlene said. And she left me. I didn’t see her walk away. She just vanished from my field of vision. You know how it is? When you’re so alone even the corner of your eye can no longer hold your latest scattershot desire? No quick, dry kiss, no sudden clutch. I remained standing, motionless, for a long time under the bulb that gave so little light. And I remember thinking, Right. Yes. Eventually, I’ll wash up somewhere. Why not here? And there are nights, still, when I wake in the dark and I’m in that room in the mountains above Santa Cruz, in that warehouse of men coughing and cooking their dinners.