The guys with girlfriends never told Rebecca they had girlfriends until after they had slept with her. Maybe they detected some moral strain in her, some impetus to protect girlfriends. Maybe they detected the opposite, and were thus protecting their girlfriends from Rebecca. Rebecca wanted to tell them not to worry, she forgot all the sex she had as soon as she had it, she didn’t really have it when she had it, and she hadn’t for a long time.
Not That Kind of Sad
THE HOUSEKEEPER is having an affair. My parents talk about her affair when nothing is wrong with the car. When something is wrong with the car, they talk about the car. The car is a Toyota, and the place that fixes the car is also called Toyota. One of my parents drives the Toyota to get fixed while the other follows in the car that is not broken. They drop the Toyota off at Toyota and drive back together in the same car.
The housekeeper says the man is just a friend. My father says there’s no way that man is just her friend. My mother says she just hopes the housekeeper is being smart. My grandmother tells my mother the housekeeper wouldn’t do it. By “do it,” she means “have an affair.” My grandmother is around the house all the time. She and the housekeeper speak Spanish with different accents and are friends.
She would do it. She’s still doing it. She makes calls from our house. She takes calls at our house. She can only have her affair twice a week, when she cleans our house. I’m in high school, so I don’t know why I follow this. I don’t have sex. I don’t have anything.
The housekeeper has been working at our house for years, but nobody noticed her until she started having an affair. Before that, she was a Jehovah’s Witness. It’s probably more interesting than what she’s doing now.
My grandmother sometimes bakes me a cake after school. She cooks, bakes, and speaks bad English. Sometimes it seems like she is our housekeeper. My grandmother had a husband, but I never met him. He wasn’t my grandfather. After he left her, she gained ninety pounds and never left the apartment she lived in in the country she lived in. This took a long time. My mother brought her to our house last year. Nobody talks about when she will leave.
I’m learning to drive. My mother and father argue about whose turn it is to take me out. Teaching me to drive is unpleasant. I’m not ready to face other cars, but they’re on the road anyway. In school, we can’t be alone in the car with the Driver’s Ed teacher. “I’m sure you know why,” the teacher says, alluding to a past or future crime. I don’t plan to get molested by him. I’m not that kind of sad.
Other kids have housekeepers. When a housekeeper quits, someone’s mom will give someone else’s mom “a name.” “Do you have a name?” “Sheila has a name.” There’s a network of moms who know women who know how to use a scrub brush, a scouring pad, a sponge mop. The women walk to and from our houses, without Toyotas.
“It’s good for them,” says my mother.
My mother works with diabetics, so she wants the world to keep its weight down. The housekeeper is not fat but she’s not thin. She’s the right weight for a husband to start ignoring her and another man to still notice.
My mother tells my father, “If you have an affair, don’t bother coming home.”
My father laughs. My mother is a pistol from another country, a diabetic counselor. Who would cheat on her? Not my father. It’s not smart.
My mother likes the slang from this country, like “SOB” and “POS.”
“The husband is probably an SOB,” she’ll whisper about the housekeeper’s husband.
“POS,” she’ll yell when someone cuts her off.
“Thank God for AC,” she’ll say in the summer.
Maybe they don’t use acronyms in other countries. When I was a kid, we visited my grandmother in her apartment without AC. A useless fan moved air around. The shower took up the whole bathroom, and the toilet was somewhere else. Every time you showered, you had to mop the whole bathroom down the drain. I cried because I had never touched a mop before.
One day the housekeeper gets picked up in a van. I can’t see who’s driving, her husband or her lover, but I don’t know what either of them looks like. She bounces out of our house, so it’s probably the lover, or maybe she’s just happy to be done making beds for some family to lie in.
I’d like someone to pick me up and take me away. Some kids already drive. They drive their parents’ cars or, if they’re really rich, their own new cars. They look stupid driving a car they didn’t buy. This is America, though. Nobody cares what I think. I doubt my parents will buy me a car, though they will buy me college. I spend most of my time making myself worthy of this purchase. In between studying, I call my one friend, invite her over for a grandmother snack.
“Does she live with you now?” asks the friend, Louisa. My grandmother stands nearby in a hairnet, setting her hair for an event that never takes place.
“No,” I say. “I don’t think so.”
“When is she leaving?”
“Monday,” I say.
We eat cake with glasses of milk. Diabetics couldn’t have this snack.
“Good cake, Grandma,” I shout from the table. “Cake is good.”
My grandmother smiles like she understands more than what we say to each other. She rinses some onions to begin dinner preparations. That’s a way not to cry. After Monday, I’ll say there’s a problem with her knees and she has to stay longer to see American doctors. It’s true that there is a problem with her knees, long-running. She can’t really walk, and gets driven by my mother to Weight Watchers and to have hair electrolysized off her chin. If I learn to drive, I can take over these errands. It’s very motivating.
“My dad’s mom is more of a regular grandma type,” I say. “She belongs to a golf club.”
“I hate golf,” says Louisa.
We have no time for golf. After this snack is over, we have to study together, which means Louisa shares her flash cards with me. As disciplined as I am, I cannot bring myself to make my own flash cards. I feel something like guilt, but I’ve already paid her in cake. I’m set for flash cards for the foreseeable future.
My mother comes into my room and offers us grapes on a tiny plate.
“We’re full,” I say. “We’re quizzing each other.”
“A plethora of snacks at your house,” says Louisa, practicing flash card words. “I like it here.”
“I’d prefer the snack wasn’t cake,” says my mother, but she can’t control what gets baked. Her mother is her mother. That’s the reason she gives my father for why my grandmother stays. My father seems ready for it to just be our family and the people who clean for our family again. My grandmother is not his family. His mother is where she belongs, eating her meals on a golf course.
The next day I get home from school and my grandmother is not there. I wonder if she’s left for good, if they took her to the airport and nobody told me. But her things are still in the basement, her housecoat, her shoes. The basement smells like her. She has sisters and brothers who smell like her, too. My grandmother was one of twelve. A few have died, but a lot are still left. They assist dentists or sell tools to dentists. My grandmother was the oldest and didn’t get to go to dental assistant school because she was needed at home.
Where is she now? She could have gone grocery shopping, walked very slowly to the Dairy Barn to buy the cream she whips for my strawberries. I wait an hour. I eat rice cakes with nothing else. I call both parents and reach neither. I call the housekeeper’s number on the refrigerator. A man answers.
“Is Isobel home?” I say.
“She cleans today,” he says.
“She’s not cleaning here today,” I say. “I can’t find my grandmother, and I thought maybe they went somewhere together. Sometimes Isobel drives her to the pool.”
“Isobel don’t have a car.”
“Right,” I say. I remember the van out front, sense he’s not its driver. “They take a taxi. From here. Isobel walks to our house and then they take a taxi to the pool. Swimming’s good e
xercise for old people.”
“Call the swimming pool,” he says, and hangs up.
Both my grandmother and the housekeeper are not where they’re supposed to be. They’ve escaped. I call my mother again. Her secretary says she’s left for the day due to a family emergency.
“I am her family.”
“Oh, I didn’t recognize your voice. Your grandmother, honey. She’s in stable condition, but she was struck by a car crossing the street this afternoon.”
“Shit,” I say. It’s not a flash card word, but something new I’m practicing.
“They’re at St. Joseph’s.”
I have no way to get to St. Joseph’s. Now my father calls and tells me to stay put. He says my grandmother crosses the street like a turtle. He says that she has been “banged up a bit,” but once she’s healed, it will be time for her to go home. By home, he doesn’t mean here. I tell him Isobel’s been lying about cleaning our house to have her affair. I tell him I don’t care, but I thought he should know.
“We’ll worry about that later,” he says, as though there will be a family meeting to decide what to do.
“How will Grandma get around after she goes back?” I say. “Will she still go to Weight Watchers?”
“It’s an international organization,” he says.
I call Louisa, tell her that we may have to study at her house from now on.
“I hope you like celery,” she says. “My mother doesn’t want me getting fat.”
“I like celery,” I say. I like most things. It’s something my parents have always valued about me. I look in the fridge to see what remains. Yesterday’s cake, outlined in foil. The grapes we should have eaten instead. Cheese, which people eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the country where my grandmother lives. I don’t know what they eat in the housekeeper’s country or in the country of her lover. Probably cheese.
The doorbell rings. Some kids’ doorbells make a song, but my parents probably never got that far in the doorbell catalog. They keep it simple—one kid, two sedans. Vans are for moms to drive around a brood, or for lovers who have to make deliveries. But there’s no van parked out front. Through the window, I see a man who looks as afraid of me as I feel of him. Without hearing his voice, I know it’s Isobel’s husband. We’re the ones stuck waiting for everyone else to come home.
It Doesn’t Have to Be a Big Deal
THE POT GROWER WAS BROKE. I paid for everything. We went to a restaurant funded by someone else’s pot money that served only the kind of food you’d eat when you had the munchies—hamburgers wrapped in mango, zucchini pop tarts. It was hard to date a grower without money. Something had happened to his crop, something dumb. It had to do with his ex-girlfriend, an older woman who threw eggs at his car while we were eating in the munchie restaurant. When we came out, the car said “Faggot” in ChapStick and he was like, “I’m surprised she would write that. She has so many gay friends.”
The car also said “Douche bag.”
I had never really dated anyone. Sometimes I wondered if a pot grower was the place to start. A lot of his sentences began, “When I had money,” and ended with guitars I’d never heard of. We drove back to his grow house with egg dripping off the side of the car, then fucked in an Aeron chair he’d bought when he had money.
Afterward he disappeared behind a duct-taped curtain to tend the plants that would make new guitars possible. I walked around his block, which looked like suburbia as imagined by stoners who had dropped out of college. It was. They had. The college was in the center of town and the dropouts thrived around it, growing richer than if they had finished. My dropout had become an exception to this rule. The growers grew vegetables, too—rhubarb, kale. I looked for the ex-girlfriend’s house. She could be anywhere, seething with misplaced homophobia, cradling intact eggs.
The whole town smelled like pot. Why was he broke? There was weed in his freezer. There was weed in ceramic frogs on his desk. When I tried to smoke a bowl with even a tiny bit of ash in it, he would refill the bowl immediately.
“I want you to smoke fresh,” he said.
He propped up my neck with pillows when my neck hurt. He propped up my crotch with pillows to enter me at pillow-propped angles. He seemed neither faggot nor douche bag, but more like a man with a lot of pillows.
The ChapStick wouldn’t come off the windshield. The grower scrubbed and scrubbed. We were taking a road trip to a naked hot spring, but he kept pulling over at gas stations and using the squeegee on “Faggot.” I blamed his Catholicism, his upbringing. Hippies always had parents.
“It’s off, for Christ’s sake,” I said. I hoped Christ would help. In my religion, he wasn’t the son of God. “Just a man,” they told us. He was just a man.
“Roll me one,” said the grower.
“While you’re driving?”
I wasn’t from California, so a lot of this was new to me, the pot culture, the nudity without shame. I liked being stoned and naked with this man, but being sober and clothed was more challenging. We had met the previous summer, felt each other up during a sing-along, and decided through emoticon-heavy negotiations that I would fly across the country so we could spend a week together. I sent pictures of myself in a bikini, chaste for our era, but I had a thing about keeping my actual boobs a surprise. He sent pictures of himself playing mandolin in a new band, chubbier than I remembered, his hair in pigtail buns and braids, hair I was excited to overlook in order to like him.
“It doesn’t have to be a big deal” was my mantra, or what my friends gave me as a mantra, or what the culture gave us as a mantra, the culture of managing your mantras.
“You can just have fun.”
“It can just be for fun.”
“It will be really fun.”
Was it fun? I learned a lot about his recent struggles as a bluegrass musician. I learned that the bluegrass community was not as big as it was years ago, when that movie with the bluegrass sound track came out.
“It was pretty influential,” he said. “Now everything is computers.”
Former bandmates had turned to electronica, left the area, died.
“After Dano had the accident, Rob sold all his instruments and headed to Hawaii,” he said, reviving a conversation we’d already had several times at his house. I thought of it as the “I’m mad at Dano for dying in a car crash and breaking up the band but I can’t admit it so I’ll resent Rob instead” loop. I guess he thought we’d try the conversation in the car. I still had no idea how to respond, except to say it was a shame to lose someone so young. Then he said his new band had stronger musicians anyway and put on their CD. The new band sounded just like the old band. All bluegrass sounded the same to me.
“None of us knew if Turkey Flower would stay together, but for Rob to just go…” The grower looked at the road, baked out of his mind, trying to understand.
I could have probed the Dano anger, but I didn’t want to talk about Dano either. I had enough of my own grief. I couldn’t make room for a twenty-four-year-old grower who had bashed his van into a traffic median. Dano had played everything I asked for at the sing-along. He had been cheating on his girlfriend, who was now his widow. Rob had gone to bed early the night we all sang together, resting up for his big betrayal.
“At least you have a fun job,” I said. “I just tutor dyslexic teens for standardized tests.”
“The way my business is, it’s not going to last,” he said. “We’re in a sweet spot right now with the medical permits.”
Cigarette companies were already buying up the land we were speeding past for the day pot became legal.
“To put the little guy out of business,” he said. “I guess I’m the little guy.”
He was a big guy, with a vengeful ex-girlfriend, in a hundred fifty dollars debt to me. The hot spring would cost twenty-five each for day use. But we had to do things. Otherwise, it wasn’t an experience. It was just sitting in his house.
“I understand why Gretchen’s mad,” he said,
eyeing a vague smear on the windshield. “She’s not a bad person. She could be really sweet.”
“I haven’t had a chance to see that side of her,” I said.
I hadn’t really dated anyone, but I had also not really dated everyone. Without a Gretchen of my own, I began to tell him about the other men. I made them seem like SAT words—this one had been impetuous, that one reclusive. My hope was to stir the pot grower to greater vocab scores.
“What a fool,” he offered. “That guy sounds like a jerk.”
“I don’t know why I’m telling you about him. He was nothing. He’s engaged.”
We pulled into a wooded lot and parked next a bulletin board that said “We Are a Clothing Optional Resort.” The springs steamed behind wet steps. Kiosk notices alerted us to internecine management conflicts, meditation workshops, the healing power of lithium. Women walked by with breasts that left you feeling conflicted. Testicles dangled. I had never even been to a hot spring with bathing suits. The grower went to the bathroom while I purchased day passes with my SAT earnings.
“It’s explained in the guidebook, but these are holy waters,” said the guy at the front desk. He had a half-shaved head and a T-shirt that said “Question Male Privilege.” He handed me a guidebook as thick as a course packet. “So we prefer you not speak, eat, or engage in sexual congress. No passion in the pools.”
We undressed in the locker room. A man rocked a woman gently in the water. A sign reminded us to be silent at all times. Sexual activity was not permitted, but the attempts to hide it were worse.
The grower and I began communicating in hot spring sign language.
Over there. I’m going over there.
Okay. I’m staying here.
His hair was longer wet.
You look like Jesus, I signed, pointing to his hair and making the sign of the cross.
He got it, smiled, gave me a wet hug. This was what it was for, dating. Wet hugs. Jesus jokes. I needed this. I would get high and have this.
The Bed Moved Page 5