Althea and Oliver

by Cristina Moracho

  • • •

  That night Althea dreams of dinosaurs. The theme is familiar; for years she’s dreamed dozens of variations. Sometimes she’s alone in a prehistoric forest watching a herd of triceratops from behind a cluster of iridescent jade ferns, or being chased through the streets of downtown Wilmington by a clumsy T. rex she can easily outrun, or she’s crouched on the sawdust-covered floor of a warehouse the size of a football field, hiding, stifling the sneeze that will inevitably give her away to the trio of feathered velociraptors seeking her out. These dreams have never frightened her. She was always at least vaguely aware she was asleep, but at the same time they seemed real enough to be exciting. They were certainly more interesting than Oliver’s pre-KLS dreams, thinly veiled anxiety metaphors about history exams or being left behind in the woods after a camping trip. When she pointed that out, he had groaned and asked her if she had to be competitive about even their REM cycles.

  Tonight the dream is different. In it, she sleeps in her car underneath her blankets. Her icy hands are clutched between her thighs. Two deinonychus watch her through the window, smoking cigarettes and speaking in low voices. One taps on the glass with a curved onyx talon, chuckling. Gone is the fantastic element of wonder as well as the certainty that she isn’t actually in danger. She may be able to take Coby or Oliver easily in a fight, but she’ll be no match against two theropods with crested heads and spiny fishbone teeth. She can’t hear what they’re saying, but she feels them watching her, discussing. Beer bottles clink together. Her car keys are in her vest pocket, digging into her side. Is there any chance she could lunge into the driver’s seat, start the ignition, and drive away before they could smash her windshield and devour her? Probably not. Garth is going to be so pissed, she thinks.

  The clouds are still pink when she wakes, agitated by her first nightmare in years, uncertain what brought it on. Rifling through the glove compartment, she hopes for a rogue granola bar or stale bag of candy, but there’s nothing to eat, only a broken pair of sunglasses, Minty Fresh’s pamphlets, and a stack of old lottery tickets that have been there since she inherited the car from her grandmother. It’s been too long since she showered; the car smells like vomit and garbage, but it’s too cold to roll down the windows and air it out. She ties up her greasy hair and wipes at a stain on her pants with a spit-dampened thumb. Her arm still aches.

  Last night she parallel-parked on a residential side street, hoping the apartment buildings would serve as a windbreak. It took her twenty minutes to maneuver into the minuscule spot, and she had felt a tiny rush of excitement at doing it without Oliver guiding her in with a series of hand gestures from the sidewalk. She gets out of the car to stretch and cases the block to determine if it’s still early enough for her to squat down and relieve herself by her bumper; she decides it is. Hunkering down between the Camry and the adjacent SUV, she makes a noise of satisfaction. Some small pleasures are the same anywhere. Eye-level with her fender, she watches the sidewalk to make sure no one’s coming and sees something so chilling that if she weren’t in the process of emptying her bladder, she might have lost control of it altogether.

  There’s a pile of cigarette butts, half a dozen, not two feet from where she’s crouched. White-filtered. Not her brand. And two sea-green Rolling Rock bottles lolling on the ground beside them.

  She’s barely finished but she stands anyway, hastily pulling up her pants and fastening her zipper with shaky hands, piss soaking warmly through the crotch of her jeans. The side-street hush that seemed so peaceful minutes before is malevolent now, a trap she didn’t spot soon enough. Flinging herself into the car, whispering “Go, go, go!” under her breath, terrified and rib-crackingly lonely, she peels out of the parking spot she’d been so proud to find last night.

  One of Minty’s pamphlets lists the locations of all the East Coast chapters of Bread and Roses, where they cook and where they serve. She still has some money left, but she doesn’t know how long she’ll need to make it last. The addresses for the Brooklyn chapter don’t mean anything to her; she locates them on her map, tracing her finger from Red Hook along the Belt Parkway and Leif Ericson Drive to the tiny park in Coney Island where this afternoon the Minty Freshes and Valeries of Brooklyn will be giving away free food.

  Winding through increasingly narrow and deserted streets, she emerges on Surf Avenue, low and empty, a shabby discount furniture store facing the shuttered arcades and beach shops on the opposite side of the wide thoroughfare. Only Nathan’s looks as she had imagined it, the restaurant itself dwarfed under the signs that proclaim it as THE ORIGINAL, WORLD FAMOUS FRANKFURTERS SINCE 1916. Beneath the bombast of the newer billboards, the humbler yellow signs remain, advertising the clam bar and the seafood as well as the hot dogs, referring to Nathan’s as a delicatessen.

  She parks by Nathan’s, home of the annual hot dog eating contest. Every Fourth of July Nicky comes over to watch it on ESPN, reciting the stats of each competitor before game time and then screaming ferociously at the television until it’s over, Garth blanching slightly and a mortified Oliver shrinking into his side of the couch. Afterward, they barbecue in the backyard and Althea and Oliver stage their own competition, eating until they’re sick, lying in the gazebo to recover while Nicky and Garth drink mint juleps and eat Althea’s apple pie directly from the pan. But Oliver slept through this July, so Althea had spent Independence Day with Coby, setting off bottle rockets and drinking Southern Comfort.

  The smell of the ocean is wildly comforting, and she follows it to the shore across a splintered boardwalk that rattles under her feet. It isn’t like her beach at home. The gray sand is punctuated with broken Corona bottles and cigarette butts, and there’s a deserted amusement park to her back, but that’s the same ocean rolling in against the shore. Closing her eyes, she lets the salty wind whip her hair around her face and she listens to the seagulls screeching at one another and the waves crashing over and over, an endless feedback loop of God’s own soothing white noise. She might fall asleep standing up right here if it weren’t time to go collect a free meal.

  It’s easy to spot the small group in the park, huddled around a folding table draped with a banner that reads FREE FOOD. Behind the table are a guy and a girl a few years older than Althea, doling out hot food from large aluminum containers on stands warmed from underneath by little burners that remind her of chemistry class. About half a dozen people wait in line. Dead, frosty grass crunches under Althea’s tennis shoes as she crosses the park, hood up, sunglasses on, to join them. It could almost be a backyard barbecue except all the guests are homeless, mostly older men with patchy beards wearing torn cargo pants and coats over jackets over sweatshirts. She tightens her grip on her bag.

  It’s the food that has her real attention—spinach and mashed potatoes and something that looks like meatloaf but is probably made from lentils, if this chapter is as fervent as Minty Fresh about sticking to its vegan credo. He pestered her and Oliver mercilessly about going vegan, snorting with derision every time they said they wouldn’t give up cheese. “If I put cheese on shit, you two would eat it,” Nicky used to complain, but she would have done anything to make her cooking edible. As Althea takes her plate from the petite blonde girl, whose hair spills from under her black knit cap and pools in the hood of her jacket, she averts her eyes—from the girl, from the boy with her, from the cluster of people eating on the benches. Originally she intended to go back to the beach and eat there, but now that she’s holding the plate she can see the diced garlic in the spinach and the traces of red skins in the potatoes and it’s all she can do to wait until she’s sitting on a bench to dig in. Some of the others go back for seconds or even thirds, but she can barely finish the helping she’s been given. Satisfied, she lights a cigarette—the best kind of cigarette there is, the kind you smoke after a good meal.

  She’s barely closed the pack before she’s approached by a man with lentils worked into his beard. “Excuse me,
miss,” he says. “Do you have another one of those?” She ends up passing around her pack and lighter to everyone in the park.

  As the sun begins to dip in the sky, the occupants of the other benches drift away to their unknown destinations. The blonde girl and her partner, a thin boy with glasses and red hair, speak quietly behind the table. They’re not what Althea was expecting, but she’s not sure what she was expecting—more Minty Freshes, she supposes, severe hairstyles and militant zipper pants. She thought, if anything, the Brooklyn versions would be more extreme.

  It seems like they’re bickering. The boy’s face has tightened, and the girl’s hands are on her hips. He begins covering the food, continuing their argument with disinterest. Whatever it is can’t be very serious. It might be moments like this Althea misses most, about Oliver, about everyone back home. The fleeting disagreements that seem so charged—which record to play, whether to stop and ask for directions—and then pass so quickly, tapering off with no real resolution necessary. This one looks like it’s concluding, the guy bundling up plastic forks and knives, the girl refastening her ponytail, turning away from the table and bounding across the grass toward Althea, yelling something in her direction.

  “Sorry?” Althea says, shrinking, cinching her hood around her face.

  The girl waits until she’s reached Althea’s bench to speak again. “To eat,” she asks. “Did you have enough to eat? I wanted to make sure, before we pack up the food and take it home.”

  “I did. Thanks. It was good.”

  “I made the fake meatloaf myself,” she says proudly. “You should come back tomorrow; we do a big spread for Thanksgiving.” The girl puts her hands in her back pockets and looks up at the weighty clouds sweeping in off the Atlantic. “It might snow.”

  Althea removes her sunglasses. Even without them, the sky is darkening quickly. “You think so?”

  The boy is struggling to fold the banner as the wind unfurls it comically. “Matilda!” he yells. “Get over here.”

  Matilda takes another look at the leaden clouds sinking toward them every second. “It’s gonna do something.” She lowers her gaze to Althea, grinning. “You don’t talk much, do you?”

  Althea looks at the ground helplessly. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. It’s just an observation. You from California?”

  “California?” says Althea, perplexed.

  Matilda tugs on the disintegrating sleeve of Althea’s sweatshirt. “You’re underdressed for New York.”

  “I didn’t think I was going to be here long enough to need a new wardrobe.”

  “Fucking hell,” says Matilda, seeing the bandage on Althea’s arm. “What happened here?”

  “I cut myself, it’s fine—”

  “That looks filthy. Let me see it.” She reaches for Althea’s sleeve again.

  “Don’t!” Althea pulls back. “If I just look at it wrong it starts bleeding again. Please. Don’t touch it.”

  Relenting, Matilda lights a cigarette.

  “North Carolina,” Althea says finally. “I came from Wilmington, North Carolina.”

  “Really?” Recognition lifts Matilda’s eyebrows. “I just talked to a couple of kids from there. A few weeks ago. They got my name from someone, called and asked for advice, some recipes. Shit, what were their names?”

  “Valerie and Minty Fresh?”

  “You know them?” Matilda says, surprised.

  “We were friends, yeah.”

  “They seemed nice. Minty Fresh seemed a little on the overzealous side.”

  “You have no idea,” Althea says.

  She’s about to explain about all the pamphlets he left under her windshield, how she found them in the glove compartment and they led her to Coney Island, when the wind sends a green beer bottle rolling down the sidewalk behind them with a hollow, desolate momentum. It freezes her in place, their pleasant conversation forgotten.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I just—It was that beer bottle. It reminded me about this nightmare I had last night.”

  Matilda nods, wide-eyed. “Must have been some bad dream.”

  “It wasn’t actually a dream. Part of it was. I mean, I don’t think it was actually dinosaurs watching me sleep in my car.” She rubs her eyes, trying to focus.

  “Someone was watching you sleep in your car?”

  “I think so.” She explains about the dream and finding the cigarette butts and beer bottles on the curb in the morning. Matilda listens attentively, her shoulders tightening under her coat when Althea describes the moment when the deinonychus had tapped on the window. “I don’t know, maybe it was just a dream.”

  “You’re really lucky,” says Matilda seriously.

  Althea nods.

  “You don’t have any place to stay?”

  Althea shakes her head.

  “What are you going to do about tonight?”

  Althea shrugs.

  “Okay, so we’re back to the not talking.” The boy is signaling Matilda, beckoning her back across the park. She raises her gloved hand, fingers splayed, mouthing, Five more minutes. “Look, we live around here. Why don’t you come back with us, stay at our house for the night?”

  The boy has his hands cupped around his mouth, yelling Matilda’s name.

  “I should go, your friend needs you.” Althea hastily puts on her sunglasses, yokes her bag around her neck.

  “Are you sure?” The concern in Matilda’s voice is sincere enough to bewilder Althea.

  “I’m sure. I’ll be okay. I’ll sleep someplace safe.” She rushes toward the exit of the park.

  “Come back tomorrow, okay?” Matilda hollers.

  Nodding once, Althea secures her hood and keeps going.

  • • •

  Althea buys a cup of coffee and goes back to the boardwalk. Digging the calling card out of her wallet, she finds a pay phone. She was supposed to let Garth know when she arrived safely at her mother’s house in Taos; it’s time to make a preemptive strike, lest he grow concerned and dial Alice first. Fortunately, Garth has yet to succumb to the allure of fancy technologies like call waiting and caller ID.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Dad,” she says.

  “Althea?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you there already?”

  “I just got here,” she says, staring out over the Atlantic Ocean. “I made good time.”

  “You did. Is everything okay? You getting settled?”

  “What are you doing?” She wants to be able to picture him, perfectly, wherever he is in the house.

  “Just making some notes for the book.”

  “So, napping?”

  “Don’t be smart.”

  “I can’t help it.” She presses the mouthpiece of the phone to her vest while taking a heavy drag of her cigarette. And then: “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”

  “Althea.” She can hear him sitting up on the couch in his study, and the whole image snaps immediately into place—his books spread around him, the sleep lines on his cheek, a half-eaten sandwich forgotten somewhere on the floor. Removing his glasses, then rubbing one eye with the heel of his hand, then pinching the bridge of his nose between his fingers. His voice is an outline; the rest she can fill in easily herself. She wonders if he’s doing the same thing, envisioning her safely ensconced in Alice’s guest room, surrounded by crystals and mediocre Southwestern art. Instead here she is, standing by the aquarium, hoping the distant sounds of the sea lion show aren’t leaking into the pay phone.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have come here,” she repeats.

  “You just got there,” Garth says. “Do you really want to turn all the way around and come back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Just give her a chance. I know you don’t know her that well, but you�
��re already there. You might as well let her try to be your mother for a couple of days. Maybe you’ll like her.”

  Even though she knows he’s talking about Alice, it’s Matilda who comes to Althea’s mind. “What if she doesn’t like me?”

  Garth’s teasing smile makes its way into his voice. “Now, girl, why on earth wouldn’t she like you?”

  “Don’t be smart.”

  “I can’t help it. I’ve got a PhD and everything.”

  Althea changes the subject. “How’s the book going?”

  “Did you know that Cortés was supposed to leave Spain for the New World a year before he actually did? He was injured fleeing the bedroom of a married woman from Medellín and had to postpone his departure.”

  “Sounds like a real class act.”

  Garth warms to his subject. It sounds like he’s reading an excerpt from his book-in-progress. “Fifteen years later, when he was living in Cuba, he almost missed his chance again. The man who assigned Cortés to the expedition was rethinking his decision because he was afraid that Cortés was too headstrong to remain loyal. When Cortés got wind of that, he cut his preparations short and left Cuba with his crew. And after they arrived on the mainland, he destroyed the ships so his men would have no choice but to follow him.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Try to enjoy yourself. And don’t let your mother overcook the turkey. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  No I miss you, no I love you, just a click and the hiss of the empty line. She tries not to hold it against him; he thinks she’s safe in Taos, New Mexico, wrapped warm and tight inside one of her mother’s Navajo blankets. For just one second, she wishes that she were.

  It was Minty Fresh who started drinking coffee first—not because he liked it, but because he found a vintage Popeye thermos at Goodwill and wanted an excuse to show it off. Later, they filled the thermos with gin or whiskey, whatever they could quietly loot from their parents or convince someone to buy them at the liquor store. But in the beginning it was always coffee, some fair trade dark roast Minty Fresh learned to enjoy, and eventually Althea learned, too. She never gave him enough credit for that aspect of his personality. The thermos came first, and he found a way to fill it; he gave himself an enormous blue Mohawk and then reinvented himself as a boy worthy of one; they’d given him the most ludicrous nickname they could think of, and he’d owned it.