Elsewhere, California

by Dana Johnson

  Daddy says, And are we in pioneer days?

  And I’m getting mad because I feel like Daddy doesn’t know how smart I am. He’s asking me questions, and that means he’s trying to argue with me about something. That’s his thing. I am not stupid. Of course not. Of course this is not the pioneer days. I say, No. We are not in the pioneer days.

  Why Miss Lucille got pioneer stuff then? Why she got an outhouse? Do we have an outhouse in West Covina? Did we have one in L.A.?

  No we didn’t. We don’t, but so what? We live in the city. We live in the suburbs. So what? He and Mama wanted progress and moved to West Covina, but Granny is country. Maybe she likes things that way. That’s where she lives. In the country. She will sit for hours and hours, I swear, watching her garden. She doesn’t even watch TV. She says she ain’t stuttin’ no TV. Rather look out her back door. I even asked her once. Come to California, just once. Daddy’s mama, Mama May, does. She likes it. Comes to Dodger games and everything. But Grandmama Lucille says ain’t nothing in L.A. for her. I tell Daddy all of this. He stares at me and shakes his head. He looks at Mama and she just shrugs. I win the argument. I answered all the questions. He usually wins, but I win this time.

  But Daddy is still talking. Listen to me, he says. Miss Lucille is poor. Now I know you know what poor is.

  Poor is when you don’t have anything to eat and no place to live. To me, Granny’s house isn’t being poor, it’s just different, and I don’t mind what this is. It’s fun. It’s lovely, like Joan would say. The porch, the sound of the cicadas. Well water. Even Brenna says it’s cool to come here. It’s a nice place to visit. I just want to stop talking about it because he’s not going to understand what I’m talking about, so I just agree.

  I know what poor is, Daddy.

  Because you need to understand, Daddy says.

  Yeah, I know, I say. I think of what Brenna would say if she were talking to her daddy. She’d say, Yeah, geez, all right, Dad. God.

  Daddy says, What did you say?

  Yes, I say. Yes. I understand. Sir.

  YOUR WHOLE GENERATION including you. That’s what we say to Uncle Cesar if we think he’s too far away to catch us. If he tells us something, we curse him like that. To us it means something like Brenna would say. Fuck you. But maybe not as mean as that. Maybe it’s more like shut up and go away. Yes. Shut up and go away. He doesn’t ever run, but he will stay perfectly still so you think he’s too bored to be bothered with you, and then he’ll grab you and give you a Indian burn. He will take your arm with both hands and twist the skin in opposite directions and burn your skin. He’s a weirdo. He’s never lived anywhere on his own. He’s never had any job. He’s never had any girlfriend that anybody has ever seen. Not even holding anybody’s hand. He didn’t go to school no more after junior high, even. All he does is stay in the house or go to the library. He walks down the hill and into town and he comes back with so many books. Books on science, about planets and universes. Books on math. Books on history. Books about art. I saw one of those books. Art, Music, and Ideas. I look at the pictures of art mostly, don’t really understand the part about ideas or music. We’re in the back bedroom and it’s dark even though it’s sunny outside. There are two pictures I like in this book that Uncle Cesar is showing me. One is a picture of a statue. A woman holding a man that looks like he’s dying. She’s sitting on a chair and she’s wearing a robe, a robe or a cape, maybe, that has folds and folds that look so soft like clothes. Not hard like rock at all. You can count the man’s ribs, he’s so skinny, and you can tell that she loves the man. She is trying to take care of him. Or maybe just make him better. The other picture I like is different. It’s just lines and colors. Black and white and blue, yellow, red. I like it because it seems clean, maybe? Or easy? And that there is so much more that you can do with plain old colors like that. Plus it looks like the Partridge Family’s bus. I tell Uncle Cesar this. We’re on the bed in the back bedroom. He has brown eyes like the rest of us, but he has a face like Granny’s. His bones make his face seem like a cartoon, a face made with lines like a box. Light skin like Granny’s. But his brown eyes are the only way he is like the rest of the people in Tennessee. His voice doesn’t sound like the rest of the people. Cesar sounds like a lawyer on TV.

  He says, Avery. This is Mondrian. He’s Dutch. The Partridge Family is a silly television program that borrowed these images for their bus. That is the only thing the two have to do with each other. He looks at me like he’s worried about me, like Mama sometimes looks at me when she thinks I’m sick.

  He touches the page on the book and his fingers go over the lines in the picture soft, like he’s petting a little cat. They say everything in his life is reasoned or calculated. If a table has not been laid with perfect symmetry, it upsets him, Uncle Cesar says. But what is he talking about? What’s a perfect cemetery? What’s calculated? Uncle Cesar rolls over on his stomach and lifts his head up like he’s going to look out the window, but he can’t because of the cardboard there. What’s perfect cemetery? I ask him. He rolls over on his back and then brushes a roach off of his arm. Symmetry, he says. Lie back, he says, and I lie down next to him. We look up at the ceiling and I’m looking at another roach crawling over us that I hope doesn’t fall on my face.

  Uncle Cesar turns his head to kiss me. He has done this before. I like it. He pats my face soft, like soft little slaps, and then he kisses me on the mouth. He talks to me. His lips are almost touching mine and his breath smells sour and smoky like cigarettes. He says, Michelangelo. The sculpture you like is a Michelangelo. Remember that now Avery. And then I hear Keith’s voice. He’s in the doorway and he says, Avery getting down with Uncle Cesar. You nasty! When he says that, I feel nasty, but I didn’t feel nasty before. Uncle Cesar grabs my arm when I try to get out of bed and get to Keith. Shut up. Shut up, I tell him. Uncle Cesar pulls me down on the bed. He says, Shhh. It’s all right. But it’s not all right. Something is not right. I say, Let me go, nasty, and I yank my hand hard and I’m finally off the bed.

  Uncle Cesar sits up in bed and looks at me. Calm. Just blinks at me. You’re being silly, he says. Come here.

  No, I say. You’re an idiot.

  Uncle Cesar smiles and blinks at me like he’s playing a game. You’re an idiot, he says.

  Dumbass, I say.

  You, he says. You are. You’re a stupid little girl. He is smiling.

  Your whole generation, including you.

  Uncle Cesar laughs. Do you even know what a generation is?

  Yes, I say. But I don’t, even though we say it all the time. It’s the final word when you say that. Nobody can come back from that. I don’t know what a generation is, how long that lasts. Is it a short time or is it forever? Uncle Cesar knows this and he laughs and laughs. I can still hear him laughing when I run out of the house.

  MAMA AND DADDY call from California. They’re back home now because Daddy only had one week vacation. Mama too. All the grown folks had to go back, but me and Keith and Owen stayed. They always leave us behind for the rest of the summer and then we take the bus back home. This is good for us, Daddy says. Sometimes California ain’t, Daddy says. I asked him why when he and Mama were getting ready to leave. Why did he and Mama move all the way to California if it’s not the best? Daddy was checking out the car. He was looking under the hood. He closed the hood and tied it with rope because the hood doesn’t work right anymore. It pops up sometimes for no reason, right when you’re riding in it. Daddy wiped his hands on his pants. He said, Both places have some bad, and both places have some good. What are those good and bad things? I asked him. But he just said, A lot of different things, Ave. All kinds of things. Hot, he said. It’s hot. Blistering. I mean, he said. It gets hot in California, but that kind of hot I can take.

  I like it. I like Tennessee, even hot like this, Daddy.

  That’s right, he said. You and the pioneers. You gone rough it? I guess we may as well send all your stuff down from California so you can go head on and
stay out here then, you like outhouses so much.

  But he didn’t understand me. That’s not what I said. I wasn’t thinking one or the other. I’ll always want to go home, to California. Daddy was trying to show me, but I would show him. I would try to make him make a choice.

  Okay then, I said. If I stay here then you have to stay yonder in California and never come back.

  Unh, Daddy said. Yonder? He laughed. We both gone want to come back and forth and all around so we gone have to figure out something different. But better drop that yonder. That ain’t gone work nowhere but here, talking like that. And you ain’t staying here.

  And then he yelled to Mama, Come on now, Vicky Sue. It’s time to go.

  But now he’s on the phone sounding worried and tired.

  I tell them about the sugar toast. Sugar toast is very good, but now I am sick of it. It’s all we hardly ever eat anymore. For three weeks, at least.

  Now he tells me to put Aunt Judy on the phone.

  Judy! I call out, and Daddy says, You don’t just yell for somebody that’s grown. Yes sir, I say. I put the phone down and walk to the kitchen. She’s down in the garden with Granny. Daddy want to talk to you, I say.

  What he want?

  I don’t know, I say.

  She comes into the living room and leans on the stove while she talks to Daddy.

  She says, Spent it. I know you did. I ran out, is what happened. Bills. Phone liked to got cut off. Lectricity too. I don’t know Darnelle.

  She doesn’t say anything for a long time. She’s nodding with the phone against her ear.

  Uh huh. I know Darnelle, she says. But wasn’t nothing to help it. She’s nodding again. About three hundred be good. All right, then, she says. Bye.

  She hangs up the phone and looks like she wants to hit me. Why you tell your daddy we wasn’t feeding you?

  But I did not say that. I only said I was sick of sugar toast. I didn’t say that, I say.

  Sugar toast ain’t good enough for you? Rice ain’t good enough for you? It’s food and you eating, ain’t you?

  I don’t know how to answer these questions. It’s true what she’s saying, but we’ve been eating that Sunbeam bread and white rice forever. When we first got here, at least we were eating more greens. Had some possum and rabbit too. Sometimes fried tomatoes and fried potatoes. But I wish we could have hamburgers sometimes. Pizza. Chinese food. Spaghetti like Mama makes. I tell this to Aunt Judy.

  She chews on her bottom lip for a while. She says, You bet not call your mama and daddy again talking about we don’t feed you. She slaps me. Nobody but Mama has ever slapped my face before. I’m so surprised it doesn’t even hurt. It’s just that her hand came out of nowhere. Like a magic trick, it shocks me and surprises me so much that I don’t even know where I am. I’m standing somewhere else, it feels like. Like I don’t even know where I am with my face tingling, seeing stars in front of me and far away into Granny’s garden outside the door, and the hills even farther away, like I’m traveling to Mars and Jupiter or home to California.

  15

  MASSIMO IS HUMMING and smoking and cooking in the kitchen. Humming is what he does to calm himself. Cooking, too. It’s true that one of the reasons I fell in love with Massimo is because he cooks. Only, to say that he cooks does not describe what it is he does for us. For me. The house is filled with smells I love. Fresh smells. Garlic, which my mother never cooked with, and which I, myself, only ever used in powder form until I met Massimo, who was horrified when I first cooked spaghetti for him. Mushy, sticky spaghetti with butter, canned Heinz tomato paste and water, in which I mixed ground hamburger meat seasoned with Lawry’s Seasoned Salt and garlic powder. I never tire of the memory of the moment nearly twenty years ago when I served Massimo, sitting cross-legged in the middle of my studio apartment. I knew that I didn’t cook well. Or cook, at all, by Massimo’s definition. I opened things out of cans, heated them, and ate them. My favorite salad was iceberg lettuce dressed with bacon grease—hot, salty grease poured on top of crisp, crunchy lettuce was one of my favorite meals that my mother made for me as a child. Delicious. But there was no convincing Massimo of this. And his face when I served him his spaghetti.

  “What are you laughing at now,” Massimo says from the kitchen. His brow is knitted in concern, as though my laugh is evidence of some sort of crack-up. “Nothing,” I say, but his face then. I’d served us on plastic plates, Barbie plates that I’d purchased ironically, my twenty-one-year-old humor. I’d mixed the sauce and the spaghetti together, adding a dash of mustard, something my mother always put in her spaghetti sauce. Massimo took a bite. His eyebrows, eyes, and mouth all struggled for a pleased expression, but he couldn’t help it. I had to put my plate down so that I could roll on the floor with laughter without spilling my spaghetti.

  “Awful,” he said, finally laughing with me. “Truly awful.” But I liked it. It was food, wasn’t it? Good food. I wasn’t laughing at me and my spaghetti. I was laughing at him. I learned when I was a kid, just a chubby little girl, to eat what was put in front of me. Pigs’ feet, hog maws, boiled turnips, chitlins, hog headcheese, turkey necks, chicken gizzards, frozen pizza, Chef Boyardee. Sandwiches on white bread and mayonnaise. Saltine crackers with ketchup squeezed on top.

  Massimo thinks that Americans don’t know how to eat. I tell him, It’s class. People with money eat differently, and anyway, my family knew exactly how to eat. No one ever gives you credit for making the most of what you have, for mixing and matching, for the creativity of it all. The artistry of it. Instead, they tell you that your food is disgusting. Your clothes are tacky. You’re trying to be white. Or you are acting ghetto. When truly, you are only trying everything that is you. Massimo said at the time, “Bullshit. I had nothing when I was a child. Nothing. And everything we ate was fresh. The vegetables, the bread. Not, that, that, plastic bread you eat out of a plastic bag with polka dots.”

  Then and now, I often have to tell him. “That is in Abruzzo, Italy. And now this is West Los Angeles, in the hills. Once again, you are confusing other places with West Covina and Los Angeles, and other places elsewhere, in California.”

  I lie flat on my back on the couch. I smell sausage cooking in the kitchen. It’s organic, I know. Sweet Italian sausage, which tastes good, but not as good as Farmer John’s. Vin Scully is confirming this right now. I close my eyes. I hear the pop of a cork above the sounds of frying and the murmur of the radio, and then I feel Massimo standing over me, even though I can’t see him. When I open my eyes he stands in front of me, holding out a glass. I sit up and give him a lopsided grin, gently taking the glass out of his hand. I am comforted by the warmth of the first sip and let the feeling roll down my throat, spread throughout my chest, and settle in my stomach. Wine. Something else that came to me through Massimo. These small things, a meal being cooked for me with care and consideration. Fresh things, things just handed to me by a man as I sit, not me cooking and giving things to a man as he sits. During that first meal at my house, laughing and grabbing me around the waist, Massimo took two more bites to prove his love for me. My mother had handed things to me. My father. But because these things were common and handed to me in haste, without ceremony, because these things were thrown-away parts of something else that didn’t match, I took them for granted when I was old enough to know better.

  Massimo is asking. What kind of salad do I prefer? Arugula or a mixed green salad? “I have leftover cherry tomatoes,” he says. “Best to use them before they go bad.” “Yes,” I say. I agree. It’s best to make use of whatever you have left over, before it’s too late.

  Putting my show together for this evening, I thought about leftovers. I am always wondering what to do with them, the leftovers of my childhood. How to represent them in art? But leftover is just another word for legacy. What remains. Keith is family, and family is what we have until we die, whether or not we acknowledge them. That is the legacy. And art. Art is what we have until we die and after, if we are lucky, to k
eep talking about what’s left over. That’s what I want the people to see tonight.

  GREASE. IT’S PLAYING down at the Mi De Gay, and three times I’ve seen it. Daddy and Mama sent extra money so we could go to the movies, but it’s the only one I want to see. Saw the giant ants already. We have only one more week here in Tennessee, so I’m going to see it one more time. Keith saw it already and thinks it’s only good for one time, even if Olivia Newton-John is fine. And she is. She is so beautiful. I like her even before she changes to the nasty girl that John Travolta is going to like. In her saddle shoes and ponytail. How it bounces whenever she turns her head or jumps up and down. The way her sweater is around her shoulders, stuck by a gold chain holding it there, not with her arms through the sleeves. The skirt with a dog on it. It looks so fun when she dances and it swishes out all around her and then twists around her body again, heavy and fluffy at the same time. She’s so clean and pretty and perfect. But wait until she changes for John Travolta. The first time she shows up in them black pants I die. She is cute before, but this is different. I don’t even know what I’m feeling, a feeling like John Travolta looking at her. Like he can’t wait to get down with her and I think this too. I want her too. I want her and want to be her. I want John Travolta to want me like he wants Olivia Newton-John.

  I’m going to change like that someday. I don’t know how, but I’m going to.

  It’s going to be like people don’t see me at all, don’t know my name or even think about who I am. Or maybe they will see me and think about who I am. That’s even better. I’m going to change and then they’re going to see me. You watch. I’m going to be choice.

  After the movie is over I walk back up the hill to Granny’s, singing we’ll always be together, thinking about that halter top that ReRe has, and some red platform shoes she has. When I get in the house I put that halter top on and stuff it with toilet tissue and put some of Aunt Judy’s lipstick on. I even put it on my eyes to make eye shadow. I wait until I’m out of the house and off the porch to put on the shoes. It’s hard to walk in the road with these shoes and the rocks, but I don’t care. I keep thinking of Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta and his blue eyes. We’ll always be together. We’ll always be together, and I’m trying not to fall. If John could see me now with my long legs and lips and titties. We’ll always be together. A car is coming. It’s behind me, getting close. I get over to the side of the road but I can only go so far because there is a ditch and if I’m not careful, I will fall into it. But the car is getting closer to my side of the road. I want to get out of the way, but where do I go? There is no space for me to go anywhere.