by Tish Cohen
There was a knock at the door. Holding her father’s drink, Lila opened it up to find an angry-looking man on the stoop. He was vaguely familiar—in his mid- to late thirties, bald on top with what remained of his hair curled down to the shoulders of his PLANET ORGANIC T-shirt. Eying the scotch glass in her hand, he grunted and said, “That explains a few things.”
“Can I help you?”
He held up a two-page note, handwritten and stapled. “Did you leave this under my wiper?”
She recognized her father’s elegant script. The note was unsigned. “You’re the owner of the Prius?”
“Do you realize it’s full of threats? I could take this to the police and have you people investigated.”
She reached for the note. “What kind of threats, exactly?”
“Could have you arrested even. My lawyer wants to have a look at the letter.”
“You do realize you dinged my father’s car? It’s vintage. Original paint.”
“So your father wrote the note? Good to know for when I’m filing the deposition.”
“He’s just a little sensitive about his vehicle. If you could give his car a bit of distance, it’ll make life easier all around.”
He stuffed the note in his pocket. “I’m hanging on to this.”
“Just, please, next time you’re in the neighborhood—”
“Most other folks welcomed us with wine or flowers. Your father threatens my hybrid.”
She looked from his bald spot to the house next door and back again. The one with the dog that woke them up before six that morning. And every morning for the past week. “You’re the new neighbor?”
“Keith Angel, and believe me, I’m regretting this move as much as you are right now.” He started walking toward his property. “Tell your father no more notes.”
“No more dings. And while you’re here, can we do something about the barking? I’m not getting any sleep.”
“Don’t drink if you aren’t sleeping,” he shouted back as he hiked up the incline onto his property, huffing with effort. “People don’t realize alcohol’s a stimulant a few hours later. It’ll actually wake you up.”
His dog, a slender red-and-white animal with a curly tail and pricked ears, yipped and danced as he crossed his yard.
“No, it won’t,” Lila called before downing her father’s scotch and choking on the biting taste. “I’ll already be up from your dog!”
SEPTEMBER 8, 1996
She couldn’t have known it would be her last September in Toronto, those stifling days and cool nights back in 1996. It was a Sunday. Delilah was eight, sitting cross-legged on a wooden bench inside a darkened bus shelter near the west end. A pair of headlights lit up her father’s impeccably trimmed beard as he trotted farther and farther from the stalled car in an effort to get a good cell signal, motioning for his daughter to stay exactly where he’d placed her. She shivered in the thin blouse and jeans she’d worn for an afternoon of picking apples and running through corn mazes at a fall fair north of the city; but Victor had refused to allow her to wait in the warmth of the car lest someone driving with his eyes shut plowed into the trunk.
Even after hours of feeding handfuls of mystery pellets to donkeys in Schomberg, and chasing his daughter through a haunted barn in his white button-down shirt, pressed jeans, and loafers, Victor managed to look just as crisp as when he picked her up from her mother’s that morning. He slipped his phone into his pocket. “Can’t get a decent signal. Let’s go find a phone.” He scooped up his daughter.
Victor began marching forward, then paused in front of the stalled Datsun. Scanning the barren, industrial surroundings, he wondered aloud, “You think the car is safe here?”
“Safe from what?” Delilah asked.
He didn’t answer. Just shook his head and started down the street. “We’ll be quick. Nip into the nearest restaurant or bar so I can call your mother before she gets the police involved, then we’ll call for a tow truck.”
“Are kids even allowed in bars?”
“The alternative is spending the night in that bus shelter.”
Delilah ran her fingers along the prickly edge of her father’s
beard. “Don’t worry, Dad. I won’t tell her about your bar.”
“It won’t be my bar,” Victor said with a sigh. “Though I suppose we can keep it quiet. Let’s not rile your mother over nothing.”
The first place they happened upon had a rooftop neon sign of a woman in a miniskirt who bent over, exposing her neon bottom, then stood back up again with an “oopsie” kind of smile, before repeating her indiscretion over and over again. When Delilah asked if this was a bar with a phone, Victor grunted and kept walking.
After another two blocks of closed tile showrooms and electrical parts dealers, the sidewalk lit only by the glow of a rusty moon, Victor led them up the steps of a place called Hogan’s, which, from the outside, appeared innocuous enough with its phony log cabin construction and cedar-shingled roof. A western-themed menu was displayed behind glass at the entrance, and the only thing lit up in neon was a small purple cowboy boot beside the door, which was fashioned out of splintered planks.
They stepped inside to hear U2 playing on a jukebox by the empty dance floor. “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” A tired older woman with eyes lined in kohl pencil, dressed in a flowered blazer and peasant skirt, leaned against the bar, trying to attract the attention of a baby-faced biker. Behind the bar stood an elephantine man with a mustache protruding like charred tusks beneath a bulbous trunk nose. He pulled beer glasses from a mirrored shelf and polished them, his vigorous scrubbing causing great gelatinous waves to thunder down his T-shirt. He looked up and nodded as they passed.
“Sweet mother of God,” whispered Victor. “We’ve stepped into A Confederacy of Dunces.”
“What’s that?” Delilah asked.
Without answering, Victor led them to the back and began feeding coins into the pay phone. Delilah slid into an empty booth and eyed the mess on the table—a near-empty plate of nachos and two sweaty glasses containing about a half inch each of swampy brown liquid. She rested her chin on the dirty table and poked one of the liquor glasses with her finger. The dregs of the cloudy liquid sloshed and burped against the sides of the glass. She looked up to see a young boy staring at her. A tall, weedy waitress with crowded teeth and a chin that jutted out like an open cutlery drawer kept rushing past him, gathering up dirty dishes, and ordering him to go back out to the car and tell his daddy she’d be out in just a minute.
He was more fetus than boy, as if his features hadn’t had sufficient time in the womb to fully develop and, after a premature birth, he’d been pickled in a jar of vinegar in the hope that his nose and cheekbones would ripen into a fully human face. He blinked slitted eyes. “I’m Deak.”
She didn’t much feel like sharing her name. Most kids laughed when they heard it so what was the point? She nodded toward the dirty glass in front of her. “How much will you give me if I drink it?”
“You’re not going to live to see your own titties grow.”
“Give me five dollars.”
“It has food floating in it. And anyways all I have is a quarter.” He dug in his front pocket and held out a grimy coin.
“Fifty cents and I’ll do it.” She picked up the glass. Her tongue darted out and touched the lipstick-stained rim.
Deak slid his money back into his pocket and made for the door. “Okay. Forget it.”
“No, wait. I’ll do it for a quarter.”
“Deal. But you have to drink it all.” Delilah wrapped both hands around the greasy tumbler as if warming her fingers on a steaming cup of cocoa. Bringing the glass close to her face, she stared into it, humming tunelessly for a few moments, before tipping back her head and pouring the lumpy sap down the back of her throat. She slammed the glass on the table and swallowed, then stretched out a hand and waggled her fingers. “Pay up.”
Four
Not even ten A.M. and the day was filthy
with heat. A slender woman in an antique lace skirt, white tank top, and battered ballerina flats meandered along the avenue and stopped, her posture so plumb the top of her head may well have been strung from the sky. She looked around at the streetscape—sun-bleached up above, fading into a dingy potato-colored haze closer to the ground—blurred just enough that she thought her eyes had gone funny and tried to blink the neighborhood back into focus.
With bronze hair wrapped into a braid and enormous black sunglasses shielding her eyes, she ducked under an awning and peered through the window of a gallery. Her ninth that week. Third that morning. Last in West Hollywood. After one final drag, she dropped her cigarette to the sidewalk, pushed her sunglasses up onto her head, and waded into the watery darkness of the shop.
The gallery assistant looked up from his People magazine and appraised her from his perch behind the desk. As elegant as was her gait, there was something sensual about the swing of her limbs, the rocking of her hips. As she passed him by, she eyed him. It felt like being snapped with a rubber band and he sat up taller, sucked in his belly.
She stopped. “Are you the owner?”
“Me? No, I’m his assistant.”
She moved on.
Life-size sculptures crowded the center of the room, with drawings and paintings lining the walls. Prices varied from the $47,000 bronze sculpture of an old man the assistant dusted just prior to the woman’s arrival, to the series of inexpensive pencil sketches the gallery owner’s pampered niece had eked out last month at college.
The woman wove her way through the statues, looked up briefly to ask the price of a small lithograph. When the assistant told her she frowned, looked again. “You’re not charging enough. It’s insulting to the artist.”
When he shrugged, she moved toward the walls. She looked moneyed, the assistant thought to himself. Had that thrift-store patina of the very rich. Only those living paycheck to paycheck pulled out their finery to check out the gallery. The others, the ones that might drop a hundred thousand dollars in an afternoon, were nearly impossible to spot. Her scuffed ballet shoes raised his hopes, creased as they were by years, possibly decades, of use. Every suburbanite and her sister owned them these days, but the assistant knew only the very fashionable, and, hopefully in this case, very flush, had been wearing them all along.
She drifted closer to his desk, staring all the while at the art lining the long brick wall. She passed the corner and came upon the graphite sketches. For a moment she appeared unimpressed. Not surprising—the assistant was certain the owner’s niece was a talentless hack. He wondered if he should speak up lest she think he had bad taste; let her know that the display was nothing more than nepotism and that she’d be better off checking out the pricier pen and inks on the opposite wall. He was, after all, on full commission.
The woman moved closer to one of the sketches and her posture changed. Stiffened. She turned, palefaced, toward the assistant. “What do you know about this nude?”
Five
Lila stood in front of the mirror in underwear and a sports bra and stared at her face, puffy and red from a rough October night.
In spite of its breezy locale high up the hillside, in spite of visible slivers of the sky where the cabin walls weren’t flush with the ceiling, in spite of adventitious air streams that inevitably accompany such primitive construction, the Mack house wrapped itself around the squirming heat and held it down as if forcing an apology. As soon as the late-afternoon sun settled across the roof shingles, they worried and throbbed with the swimmy waves of a highway mirage, heating up the living quarters well into the night. The brick floor that ran throughout, probably installed with the intention of cooling overheated occupants, instead digested the soaring temperature and enveloped the family with an inescapable degree of closeness. In cool winter months, this intimacy was homely and sure. In the heat of California autumn, it grew yeasty and thick, making the simple act of falling asleep a formidable task.
And then there was the Angels’ dog, who’d been up serenading the canyon much of the airless night. There had been three glorious acts: a beseeching episode of wailing just after one o’clock; another, more fed up installment of what sounded like a jilted teenage girl weeping into her pillow around four-thirty; and then the crescendo—a frenzied climax of groaning and warbling that started up around five-forty, just as Lila began to drift off again.
As for her school situation, something had to give. Student loans were out of the question. Victor had flat-out refused to allow her to submit one piece of personal or household information to the government, citing immigration red tape that still hadn’t been cleared up since they’d moved from Canada. Besides, he’d said, coming out of art school hip-deep in debt was like starting a race with not one but two feet encased in cement.
So now the only other means of funding even a church basement art class was filling out an application—and actually getting hired—at someplace like Mel’s Drive-in or Book Soup or anyplace else that would require regular attendance and would take her further and further away from her mother opening up that most excellent issue of Vanity Fair. Lila now realized she’d made a grave mistake quitting her modeling gig. She realized she had little choice but to put on a repentant face, go to Lichty’s studio, and hope like hell he’d let her get naked in his class again.
She squared her body and examined her upper arms. What had Lichty called them? Scanty. Unbalanced. Disappointing to future lovers. She balled her right fist and flexed her bicep. The elongated muscle leaped into action, forming a hardened knoll that was only somewhat reassuring. She dropped her arm to her side.
There was a scuffle in the yard, followed by a high-pitched wail, then silence. There, not three feet from her window, stood a large coyote, sandy gray tail tipped with black. One enormous, feathery ear stood erect, the other drooped at half-mast, having been chewed up in a long ago brawl. The gold eyes didn’t blink. While coyotes were rampant in the hills, this particular canine, notorious for his mangled ear, had simply become known to the locals as Slash.
Mythology portrayed coyotes as either heroic—with heart and even a sense of humor—or clever, impulsive, and greedy. Slash lived up to the latter by finding a way into even the most carefully bungeed and locked trash cans. If you tried to beat him by putting your trash out the morning of pickup, it was as if he knew it was Thursday, waiting in the bracken to dart out, not when your front door slammed shut and you might still hear the outdoor tussle, but once you turned on the shower, climbed in, and lathered yourself up with soap.
Cunning to the core.
As if mocking her, the wild dog stared back and shook the bloodied limbs of the headless hare he held between his teeth. She reached for her discarded boot on the floor behind her and hurled it through the open window. “Out of here! Go!”
The animal blinked at her calmly, then loped away into the bushes.
“Lila? What’s all that screaming?”
“Nothing.” She threw on a tank top and shorts and padded to her father’s doorway, watched him smooth his hair in the mirror, then lick his thumb and use the saliva to paste his locks to one side. Seven-thirty A.M. and the man was all decked out in a gray suit, Egyptian cotton shirt, suspenders. The flesh under his eyes looked puffy and sore.
She yawned into her hand. “Did the dog keep you up too?”
“Only half the night. The other half it was the heat.”
“I heard you snoring sometime around two, Mister.”
He thrust his chin upward and fussed with his collar. “I’ve half a mind to steal it.”
“Steal what?”
“The Basenji. Deserves a better home than living out back in a half-buried rain barrel. The breed originated in the Congo. Was used by the Pygmies as a hunting dog. It’s not suited to living outside in the winter. Even in Southern California. The nights can be quite cold. Gen used to have one.”
She squinted. “Since when do you know about Pygmy hunting dogs and who is Gen?”
“Like what? He was a warrior in the rain forest in a past life?”
“Like he did a project on the breed in his last year of high school because his extraordinarily attractive science teacher was a breeder and he thought it would impress her.”
“Ah. Well then. On the basis of pubescent efforts toward love that was ultimately doomed, your Basenji facts are allowed.”
“It’s one of the only dog breeds known to have no bark.”
“Why bother when you have far more annoying sounds at your disposal?”
“They can only mate during one thirty-day period each year because—”
“No.” She covered her ears. “Please. No canine gynecology before I have my coffee.”
With an impish expression, he turned to face the mirror over his dresser. “Who knew I raised such a lightweight?” A green tie hung loose from his neck and he picked up one end and wound it around the other. When she saw he’d left the narrow end too short, she moved to help. Positioning herself behind him, she wrapped her arms around the front of his neck and began looping the silk around itself into a triangular knot.
The dog crowed again from next door.
“I did a bit of research,” Lila said, smoothing his now-perfect knot. “The neighborhood bylaws say no excessive noise between eleven and seven.”
He let out a long tired breath. “If only you would throw these research skills into learning the value of a good business education. You can do anything with a business degree. You don’t have to follow in my footsteps. Start an arts-based business. It’s the best damned foundation for almost any career.”
“Dad…”
“I mean, look how you’ve spent the last few weeks. Holed up in the cellar all day every day. You’re wasting your life.”