Live a Little

by Madeleine Reiss

  It had been Tina’s masterpiece.

  Looking sideways at her sister sitting slumped and sleeping in the passenger seat, Lottie felt a wave of affection for her. She was glad of it. It had been many years since they had spent any quality time together or talked properly. Maybe the trip would do them good after all.

  *

  Lottie hardly noticed leaving San Francisco. One minute they were on the bridge – the cables rising as they approached the first tower – lifting them towards the sky and then curving slowly downwards before ascending again, like the verses of a song, and then the city was behind them. She could see little more than the car in front. The landscape on either side of the road was blanketed in a dense, drizzling fog, but she knew they were driving by the sea because she could smell the salt of it and hear its swell. Not having any visible markers meant it was hard somehow to get a handle on the time. The further she drove, the further she felt from home. Dean would have done almost a full day’s work by now. He always stayed far longer than he should at the school, preparing lessons for the next day or seeing pupils who needed a bit of extra help.

  ‘You’re so committed to your job,’ she once said to him when he had eschewed a night out in favour of marking essays. She had often suppressed a disloyal impulse to wonder what, exactly, teachers had to work so hard at. It was pretty much the same lessons over and over again, wasn’t it? That was what she remembered from her own schooldays, anyway.

  ‘I should be committed, you mean,’ he had said jokingly to her. ‘Only a fool would persist in trying to get Year Nine to see the poetry in Macbeth. They would much rather be left alone to sit in the gloom of their bedrooms looking at women’s bodies or blowing someone’s head off with a machine gun. I’m surplus to requirements. They think I’m too old to understand the lure of flesh and violence.’

  He had a precise way of talking, a kind of puckering of his lips and a tendency to stroke his facial hair that made him look as if he was taking the piss. But it was only himself that he mocked. He loved the children in all their grimy insolence and wouldn’t have swapped his job for any other.

  ‘Perhaps we should have a baby,’ he had said the night before she left. She knew by the diligent way he had set about making love that he wasn’t really happy about her going, although he’d tried to hide it. They had often talked vaguely about children, but the time had never seemed quite right. As a couple they had always been slow off the mark. Getting together in the first place had been an elaborate, indecisive dance. It had taken them three months to kiss each other, five years to decide to move in together and another three to renovate a kitchen, which only had half a floor and a rotting wooden draining board. Unable to decide on a honeymoon destination, they had postponed it indefinitely. Lottie couldn’t fathom how other people made up their minds about things so quickly. Making choices felt fearful to her and she had fallen in love with someone who understood – and facilitated – her indecision. His gentleness, which she knew others (including Tina) took as weakness, had been what had attracted her to him in the first place. She loved it still, although she knew that in holding each other so carefully they were sometimes in danger of holding each other back.

  She thought of the coil embedded in her womb, its plastic and copper T-shape, like a cul-de-sac, repelling the advance of life. They had probably missed their chance for children now. She was forty. Not old, but not young anymore. The imprint of the bed sheet on her face lasted longer than it used to and something was definitely happening to her knees. In any case, she couldn’t really imagine herself as a mother. She had read somewhere that when you bore a child, they left vestiges of their DNA in you after they were born, so that you were not the same as you were before they set up residence in you. They took your cells with them, too, and passed them on to their children in their turn. It seemed that everyone was a mixture of all that had gone before.

  A few miles before Monterey, the sun came out and Tina woke with a little startled gasp.

  ‘Have I been asleep?’ she asked, her face soft and puffed from sitting with her head hanging down. She looked around her. ‘Let’s stop for lunch when we get into town. I’m starving.’

  Chapter 5

  THEY FOUND A DINER BY a stretch of beach, on which a pile of elephant seals dozed in the sun. In the sea the creatures looked sleek and purposeful, but on land they were beached and blubbery, their whiskered faces and dark eyes displaying a comical contentment. They made sounds like someone gargling mouthwash and butted heads and scooped up sand and dragged their sluggish bodies across the beach, leaving a smooth pathway in their wake. People passed by, crammed into strange, canopied vehicles, and the sea beyond sucked at the legs of the pier.

  Lottie and Tina ate burgers twice the size of the ones at home, served to them by a young woman with a hairsprayed fringe so rigid it formed a jutting ledge over her forehead. A thin man was sitting in the corner, working his way steadily through a giant mound of waffles as if he was playing out a bet that he couldn’t gain a stone by the afternoon.

  ‘Right!’ Tina said with her mouth full of chips. ‘It’s time for Challenge Two. Your first challenge was to stop being such a control freak. Now we need to build on that.’

  ‘Oh, God. You’ll give me indigestion.’

  ‘I want you to make conversation with that bloke over there.’

  ‘What, him, in the corner?’

  ‘I don’t see anyone else around here,’ Tina said, with a smirk. ‘Do you?’

  ‘What shall I say?’

  ‘It’s up to you. You invent the lines. Don’t look so horrified. Although you often act as if we do, we don’t actually live in an age when women can’t talk to men unless they have been introduced at a ball.’

  ‘I can see why you get yourself into the situations you do.’ Lottie looked covertly at the man. He was of an indeterminate age with a face like a fox. He had a pointed nose and wispy facial hair and eyes just a shade too close together.

  ‘And I can see why you don’t get yourself into any situations at all,’ her sister answered, scooping a glob of tomato ketchup onto her finger and licking it off. ‘I want to see your seduction technique in action. I’m guessing it’s going to be a little rusty.’

  ‘God, you really do have the most disgusting manners,’ Lottie said. ‘I’m surprised your dates don’t run off in horror after sitting opposite you at a dinner table for a few minutes.’

  ‘Don’t think that if you start insulting me I’ll forget the matter in hand.’ Tina reached over to grab a handful of Lottie’s chips. It was lucky she was attractive, Lottie thought; otherwise she would never get away with behaving like a pig. She swallowed. She couldn’t fail so early in the expedition. She would never be able to survive her sister’s contempt. She would have to do this bloody silly thing. She cleared her throat.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said, and then realised that her voice had come out as a squeak, so she coughed. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, but I don’t suppose you know if there is anything particularly interesting that we could visit while we are here? We’re tourists.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Tina muttered under her breath, ‘you sound as if you are about a hundred and three.’

  The man raised his head and surveyed them. He slowly wiped his mouth with his napkin. ‘Depends what y’all find interesting,’ he said. He pushed his plate away from him and stood up, carefully placing his chair back under the table.

  ‘Genius. One question from you and he loses his appetite and abandons his waffles,’ Tina whispered.

  Lottie was mortified. There was nothing she found harder to bear than her sister being proved right.

  ‘I believe John Steinbeck lived and wrote here,’ she said, smiling hopefully.

  ‘Yeah, that is so,’ he answered. He sloped past them to the door.

  ‘It’s a very beautiful place,’ said Lottie, desperately, even though she had seen almost nothing of the town barring some corpulent seals, a few chubby tourists and an awful lot of ugly sig
nage. What was it with Americans and signs, anyway? They seemed to want to announce everything, and if they couldn’t use big voices they used big letters instead. Today, however, they had just hit upon the only American who didn’t want to say anything at all.

  ‘Yeah, it is that.’

  ‘And so much marine life.’ She was clutching at straws now.

  ‘Yup, there is,’ he said. Then he went out and shut the door firmly behind him.

  Tina rocked back and forth with mirth. ‘You should give lessons in how to attract men!’ she said. ‘People would pay good money to see how not to do it.’ She scooped up the last of the chips into her grinning mouth.

  ‘I’m not trying to attract men,’ Lottie said. ‘I have a perfectly good one at home.’

  ‘I didn’t mean I wanted you to have sex with him. I just wanted you to unbend and flirt a little.’

  ‘He was probably repelled by your table manners. And anyway, are men really fooled by all that touch-your-hair-and-look-at-their-mouths garbage? If I was a man it would turn me right off.’

  ‘I’m only teasing,’ Tina said, relenting. ‘He was a miserable sod. Probably suffering from cramps on account of the waffles. I wouldn’t say you passed the challenge with flying colours, but at least you didn’t duck it.’

  *

  They set off down Route 1 towards Big Sur. Lottie was glad that her sister had taken over the driving because the road was winding and precipitous. She was able to sit back and enjoy the fog-trimmed mountains, covered in feathery grass and pinkish succulents, and the sudden views of the sea, wild against craggy black stone. In the tiny space afforded between cliff and deep water, it felt somehow that they were between elements. There were palms and roses; the exotic and the familiar side by side in this light-veiled landscape. And then there were so many trees – redwoods and laurels and oaks and others she didn’t know the names of.

  They stopped by the roadside for a pee. Tina was exasperated that Lottie wouldn’t squat by the car door with her, but insisted on wandering down a path out of sight of the road.

  ‘I get stage fright!’

  ‘What’ve you got to hide?’ Tina shouted after her, leaning against the bonnet of the car and puffing on her vape. Lottie had forbidden its use in the car; she had said she couldn’t stand the sucking noise it made. Tina had simply replaced one addiction with another and now the taste of inhaled liquorice vapour seemed to be more delicious to her than tobacco.

  ‘I think you’re very oral,’ Lottie had said, in that reprimanding way that so annoyed her sister.

  ‘Damn right I am. All the best things involve the mouth, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘You’re also obsessed with sex.’

  ‘By the dreary look of Dean, it might be better if you were a little more interested in it.’

  ‘I have a very satisfactory sex life, thank you very much.’

  Tina watched her sister’s progress down the track. After a ridiculous amount of deliberation, Lottie finally found a place behind a shrub and Tina smiled to see the way she spread out her cotton skirt like a woman in a painting by Constable, so that she could piss decorously beneath its folds. She had developed this technique as a child. ‘Anyone who catches sight of me will think I’m just enjoying the landscape,’ she had announced when she complacently demonstrated the trick, sitting like an eighteenth-century lady while a trickle appeared from beneath her skirt and snaked its way through the grass.

  There was something unwavering about Lottie that Tina found perplexing. She couldn’t understand how anyone could be as certain as her sister seemed to be about life. There was a part of Tina that envied it. It must be restful to know exactly what was coming next. Lottie had found the work she wanted to do – a laudably useful role as a fundraiser for a homelessness charity. Her house was a symphony of greys and blues. She was a mistress of the low-calorie casserole. She ran six miles every other day, come rain or shine or the very occasional hangover. Perhaps most perplexing of all was the way she seemed so sure that she had found the person she wanted to be with forever. Tina thought Dean was rigid and domineering, not nearly good enough for Lottie – but she was set on him, and on the ghastly white wedding dress with pearl buttons and lacing up the back that would surely make her resemble a trussed leg of lamb. Lottie had shown her a picture of it, touching the image on her phone as if it was something precious.

  ‘Now you make sure you look after her,’ Dean had said to Tina at the airport in his teacher’s voice.

  Tina thought it was unlikely she would ever find anyone that she actually wanted to commit herself to. She thought about her current lover, a fellow photographer who was away more than he was at home. The part-time nature of their relationship suited her. Absence sharpened a passion she suspected she would not feel as acutely if he were more readily available. Sex with him kept its urgency – its weekend, freewheeling, champagne-and-celebration feeling – and never quite had the opportunity to descend into predictability. Even so, the last time she had seen him she had been aware of a new timorousness, something perilously close to need that had made her falter. She liked men, enjoyed the thrill of the chase, loved sex with the ones who bothered to put the effort in, even valued the companionship – it was nice, after all, to have someone to wake up with and accompany to parties and gigs – but she found relationships extraordinarily difficult to sustain. It just required too much . . . energy, and in any case, when a certain amount of time had elapsed (usually around the four- or five-month mark), she often found the man in question was lacking in some way or other. The hero in bed turned out to be limp in his dearth of ambition. The clever, funny chap who could transform the making of a salad into an entertainment had two young children that sucked up his time. The guy that pulled out chairs and remembered what she had said on previous dates was fatally attached to his mother. It seemed there was always some flaw to turn her heart or her mind. Besides, she was far from perfect herself. She couldn’t imagine there would be any man who would be able to absorb all that she was, the few good bits and the far greater number of things she was ashamed of, things which kept her awake at night.

  *

  When she looked again, Lottie had disappeared from her pastoral perch, so Tina got her camera and followed her down the track. The air smelt of juniper and sage and verbena and gorse, and the light was golden like honey. She found her sister in a little cove. The sea, heavy with maroon kelp, was quiet here, sheltered as it was by a stony outcrop. Lottie’s face was glowing. Tina took a close-up picture of her so that only half of her head was in the frame, the freckled skin around the side of her nose, a section of the mouth they shared, one eye, wide and greenish in the sun, and the sea lying behind like a promise. She didn’t know how lovely she was.

  ‘It’s so abundant!’ Lottie exclaimed, gesturing to the tangled, complex water, the mass of raptors sweeping overhead and the bountiful, herby track. Even the tumbled rocks were heaped in generous mounds.

  ‘The land of plenty,’ Tina said.

  *

  ‘If you were a sandwich, what sandwich would you be?’ Tina asked as they got back into the car. As a child, Mia had been obsessed with this particular game, as if, even then, she had been trying to work out what it was that exactly defined her.

  ‘I can’t believe you are still thinking about food!’

  ‘Go on, play the game, sis.’

  ‘I’d be an avocado on wholegrain bread.’

  ‘How drearily healthy you are! I’d be a pastrami and crisp bacon on rye with lashings of mayonnaise and some fat pickles,’ Tina said. ‘Being as we are in America, and all.’

  They travelled the impossibly beautiful curves of the road, view after stunning view, each better than the one before. They drove to the sound of Ray Charles’s gospel version of ‘America The Beautiful’, The Mamas and the Papas singing ‘California Dreamin’’ and Lana Del Rey’s moody ‘West Coast’. Tina insisted on having the roof down despite the chilly edge in the air and so they cranked
the heating up, which made Lottie feel profligate and a little wild.

  *

  At around seven they found a suitable overnight stop at a glamping site in Big Sur and took possession of a yurt. Lottie, who had been getting anxious about where they were going to stay, was relieved when Tina suddenly turned off the road. She still couldn’t quite come to terms with her sister’s spontaneity. Their accommodation had a polished wooden floor and two beds with faux-fur throws, and a lit stove in the centre.

  ‘It’s the epitome of hygge,’ said Lottie, looking around her in delight.

  ‘What is hooga?’ Tina said, throwing her suitcase onto one of the beds.

  ‘It’s a Danish word that means recognising special moments and celebrating them. It’s also about being cosy. A hyggekrog, for instance, is a little nook you can snuggle up in.’ Lottie unzipped her suitcase to reveal neatly arranged, rolled-up clothes.

  ‘More like a Danish marketing ploy to make us buy all those bug-ugly beeswax candles and scratchy socks. Less hooga and more hooey.’ Tina surveyed Lottie’s suitcase. ‘My God, have you brought anything on this trip that isn’t navy or black?’

  ‘It’s easier when everything matches,’ Lottie said peaceably.

  ‘OK Miss Matchy-Matchy, let’s hit the hot tub before we eat in the yurt-shaped restaurant.’ Tina pulled off her red shorts and orange sweatshirt. Her body was beautiful, pale-skinned and narrow-waisted, and Lottie was painfully conscious of the persistent roll around her own middle that wouldn’t budge however many hours she spent running.

  ‘Are you not wearing a costume?’ Lottie asked.

  ‘Challenge Number Three: sit naked in a hot tub. No towels or beach cover-ups allowed.’