“He is cool.”
“I mean, yeah. Duh.”
“He’s dead.”
“No, I mean, of course.” Swimming through the mud of our conversation I grab large stones and shove them in my pocket, walking deeper, where I hope to drown. Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. “I like to write,” I say suddenly, surprising myself.
“What?” he asks, confused.
“I don’t know, it just came out,” I say, laughing. “I mean, I like to read.”
“Library books? Is that why you tear pictures out of them?”
“No, I do that because I make collages with the pictures. I like to frame them sometimes. The collages I mean.”
He nods. Taking in this useless fact as if it’s useful. “What do you like to read?” He sounds kind, distracted. It’s like we’ve never met and were meeting here now at the Republic of Smokey for the first time.
“I’m not sure.”
“What did you read last?”
“Spin,” I answer, honestly.
“Oh,” he says, sounding disappointed, “I like to read, too.”
But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worthwhile.
×
I decide to stay in and listen to CDs. It’s nine thirty and the front door opens. I sit up. It’s Mom. I can hear her sigh and take off her shoes. She drops the keys in the bowl next to the door. I walk into the living room. She sees me and gives a weak smile. She seems tired. I walk to her and bury my head in her chest and she wraps her arms around me. “Mommy,” I say. She pulls me close and I breathe in the pine needle scent. She has sap on her flower apron and it smells good.
“Did you eat?” she asks walking toward the kitchen, her arm still around me. “Don’t drag your feet,” she says, trying to set me right. “You’re too big, kiddo, you’re taller than me.” I shake my head, slip to my knees, and lie dramatically across the kitchen floor like a damsel in distress. “Come on, ham, get up.”
“Mommy!” I whine, lifting my arms for her. She steps over my body and looks in Grandpa’s old room.
“Where’s Lyla?” She brought Lyla back home last week. She had a shiner. She’s hardly said two words to me except, “Get out of my way.”
“I don’t know. Out.” I drop my arms.
“Do you want an omelet?” She rummages through the onion and fruit bowl and pulls out some potatoes with small green stems. Science experiments. UFOs. “And home fries? I can put onion and bell pepper in them and …” she opens the fridge, “mushrooms and cheddar in the omelet. I’ll eat one too.”
“Yes,” I say.
“Come on, get up, the floor is dirty. You’re not a baby.”
“I am a baby.”
“I have news for you, girlie.”
“Fine.”
“Did you go to class today?” she asks, starting to cut onion and bell pepper.
“Yeah.”
“And?”
“Actually, something weird happened.” I slump in the kitchen chair, lay my head in my arms, against the table.
“Okay, tell me. Also, sit up, don’t be a slouch.”
“Ms. Lavoi my English teacher thinks I’m smart.”
“You are smart.”
“Yeah, well I think I’m her new cause célèbre.”
Mom huffs and looks at me. “Counting your chickens before they’ve hatched perhaps?”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Oh stop, you know I think you can make it. Have you sent those head shots out?”
“No,” I sigh.
“Nicole, I spent two hundred dollars on those things. It’s a phone book, open it, start mailing.”
“I know.”
“Have you called that agent back? What’s the one, the one that Marla uses?”
“No.”
She sets the knife down and looks serious. I avert my eyes. “Listen, last year you came to me and said this was important to you. You asked for my support. I gave you the gym membership, which I know you don’t use, I gave you the money for those head shots which have been sitting in that box for close to a year, I let you sign up for that class on the Westside, with, with, that cult leader, whatever his name is!” she raises the knife.
“He’s a Scientologist not a cult leader.”
“Oh lord.”
“I’m not a drone, okay? I’m not going to become a Scientologist. Jesus.”
“From your lips to God’s ears.”
“It was a boring class anyway. It didn’t help like I thought it would.”
“I’m taking a leap of faith here based on your promise that you would try, that this meant something to you.”
“I know.”
“And what do you do? You chop your hair up and cover your face like a common chola. We’re better than that. You’re better than that.”
“Oh, we’re so much better.”
“We are. You aren’t like those girls.”
“What am I like?”
“What is happening, mija? What is going on with you?”
“Nothing. I don’t know. I don’t want to talk about this. I just want to eat and be with you.”
She turns around and finishes cutting. Olive oil sizzles in the pan, smoke moves toward the ceiling where I watch it form shapes from below.
×
Tori Amos is a revolutionary. Marijuana wipes my brain clean. I drag the glue stick against the journal page and press a picture of Paul Newman into the cardboard, smoothing the edges. There is a knock at the window and I lift my head. There is another knock, this time louder, I walk over and pull back the curtain.
“Puta, let me in!” hisses Chelo.
“Why don’t you go to the front door?” I ask, making a weird face at her.
She shrugs. “Meh, I’m already here.”
“Whatever, Romeo.” I open the window and she crawls inside. “You’re stepping on my mom’s hydrangea,” I say, pulling her over.
“Oh, sorry.” She looks behind her into the flower bed. “What time is it?” she asks, brushing leaves off her sweater.
“How should I know? You’re the one who just crawled in here.”
“Don’t you have a clock?”
“Yeah,” I say, checking the digital on my dresser. “It’s one thirty. What are you doing, man?”
“I dunno,” she shrugs. “I was bored. Can’t sleep. You’re awake.”
“Yeah but I’m in my own house.”
“Man, you’re just always a bitch aren’t you? Like all the time? Even at like,” she cranes her neck dramatically and looks at the digital clock, “1:36. Fine I’ll go.” She turns around, heading back onto the windowsill.
“What are you talking about, man? Use the door, first of all, and like, I just, what are you doing here? I just, wasn’t expecting you is all.”
“Let’s go for a drive.”
“Right now? You’re crazy.”
“Why not?”
“I dunno. Where would we go?”
“Let’s go to the mountains.”
“Like, what? Altadena or something?”
“Yeah.”
I look at my journal, half-collaged, half-finished thoughts, empty pages, waiting for me to fill them up.
“Okay, fuck it,” I say, grabbing my jeans and hoodie. “Let’s go.”
“Yes!” says Chelo, smiling. “I love you man, you are, like, the coolest all the time.”
“I thought I was a bitch.”
“You are, but you’re always down. I dunno, you’re both, somehow.”
×
We push the seats back in my car and look out the scratched plastic sunroof. The stars twinkle and shine down on us. I can smell wood burning and know that one of the rich houses below has a fire going. The earth is warm tinder and grass. Moisture and light.
“You just seem so sure of yourself.” She passes the one hitter and the lighter, I reach over and grab it, not taking my eyes off
the sky.
“Does it seem that way?” A shooting star races through the night. My eyes follow it until it disappears behind a tree.
“Yes,” she says simply.
“I’m not.”
“I know,” she answers. “It just seems that way.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Fuck, I don’t know. I used to think I’d go to college and get out like that but fuck, we fucked that up, didn’t we?”
I turn my head toward her and blink. My chest hollowing out. “I guess I hadn’t thought about it.”
“What are you going to do?” she asks, moving her arm in waves.
“I don’t know.”
“You thought you were going to get into Harvard or something? You have shittier grades than I do. I’m surprised they haven’t kicked you out.”
“Stop. I can’t think about it.”
“You’ll figure it out,” she says, sounding slightly more sympathetic.
“You will too, Chelo, you’re smart.”
“I think I’m going to apply to Otis.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. The deadline hasn’t passed. Mr. Gotto thinks I have a chance.”
“You’re going to be okay.”
A bird, a whip-poor-will perhaps, a night bird, sounds around us, the echo of our words, the bright, clean taste of ash, we’re pulled into the navy, star-spotted sky, covered in blue.
“I know.”
×
Chelo nudges me and I open my eyes. “Hey,” she says, groggy. We fell asleep and now the birds are different birds, or the same, just singing morning songs. “We passed out. That shit must have been indica.”
“Yeah, or we came out here at two a.m.”
“What time is it?”
I turn the key and the dash lights up 10:47. “Fuck!” I shout, pushing my hair back. “I’m on probation, I’m gonna get kicked out!”
“No you’re not, relax.” Chelo’s language is so much smoother, softer, feminine in the morning. I look at her and all her eyeliner has smudged, her acne scars a little pinker.
“We need to go now. You said so last night, you’re surprised they haven’t kicked me out.”
She looks at me sadly. I turn the car off and fall back into my reclined chair and start to cry quietly, not dramatic or anything, just a soft morning drizzle and she lets me. I rub her Felix the Cat key chain, focusing on his yellow bag of magic tricks. The cold hard edge of the car keys. She pulls the weed out from her front hoodie pocket and flips the dash, takes the pipe and passes it. All this moonshine and dreams of things I don’t understand, swilling my daybreak. I take the pipe and cover the carb, watch her exhale, the dew cascading in small rivulets against the glass, smudging up the clean outdoors, but just through what I’m looking at, not through anything real. Outside, when the door opens, the world is still the same bright place.
×
I’m dodging squirrels toward the bus stop on Lake when an olive green 1960s Lotus pulls up beside me. I stop walking and squint into the glare of the tinted window. It was tinted in the late 1970s and is actually just an appliqué sticker with hundreds of gradating black dots blurring into one solid mass. I used to pull on it as a child.
“Hi,” says the voice, disinterested, revealing itself. Black-tinted Ray-Bans and Montecito Car Club baseball hat. Slowly the glasses are removed and I see him. I tilt my head and wipe sweat from my brow. I’m aware suddenly that my tits are hanging out through the large rips of my shirt. I have drawn hearts and dotted lines for slicing, and various X marks the spot smudges on my arms, including the star tattoo I got last summer on the inside of my wrist. Peeling Wite-Out on my fingernails. He doesn’t say anything, leans across the seat, and pops my lock. I open the door and slide into the soft, butter-yellow leather. He rolls up the window to keep the AC in. The cold air hits my face like delicious kisses. It’s winter but LA is melting. The smell of the interior is at once familiar and newly desirable. My fingers grip the polished oak and I remember how much I love money. How much I take refuge in the fact that at the end of the day I am his daughter. It all washes off. Nothing a good haircut, day in the sun, and some nice clothes can’t fix. My place is always waiting.
San Gabriel Valley, LA City girl. Honored, educated, old, and California blue. My grandmother can make paella, enchiladas, and Spanish rice. She is French, Dutch. We are blond, we are lanky, we are athletic, we are philanthropic, we are smart, and we get what we want. At the end of the day I will always be Nicole Felicia Darling, if you do or don’t please.
My grandfather tells me in his old-man way that I am a daily reminder of my father’s failures. That I am the only good thing to come of them. I am somehow always the best and worst thing to happen to my father. It is a thing they feel completely comfortable telling me. As if announcing the gazpacho was meant to be served chilled. Spoiled, sensitive, apathetic, mean, narcissistic. A righteous, moral man. The most socially honorable man I’ve ever known. The only man I know to do great good and evil in the name of progress. He is loyal only to the oath of human justice. Poor dad.
Asshole. Shitty excuse maker.
The first to offer himself in the name of the greater good. As a child, I watched as he routinely stopped his car in traffic to help someone with a flat tire. I saw him break up a fight between two men in the parking lot of a restaurant, pull a knife away from one man, and throw it into the road. He donated my first-communion dress, teddy bear, and Pound Puppy pajamas to a children’s center raising money for flood victims. “There’s always someone worse off than you, don’t ya forget.” The only hands he bites are the ones that love him.
He looks at me when I shut the door, and starts driving toward the house.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“Back home, you need to change.”
“Why? What for?”
“We’re driving to Palm Desert, your grandfather wants to see me. I thought we could go together.”
“When did you get in?”
“Yesterday morning. I’m staying with your uncle in Marina del Rey,” he says, meaning the boat.
“Oh.”
“What’s wrong with you?” He squints at me.
“What do you mean?” I ask, looking down, knowing what he means but wishing that I didn’t.
“Your mother lets you dress like that?”
“You let my mother raise me. Who says I want to go with you?”
“You don’t want to?”
“No, that’s not what I said.”
“Come on, we’ll have a nice afternoon. We can do sushi afterwards, you and I. The Ai, what about it?”
“Lyla’s here.”
He slows the car and pulls over a few houses away from ours. “Really?” he asks quietly.
“Yeah.”
“Shit.” He taps the steering wheel with his thumb. “She’s home?” I shrug and he scans the road as if looking for something out there, as if the answer will dart in front of the car.
“What’s the problem if she is?”
“Nothing. Nothing,” he says under his breath.
“Something about her boyfriend. Mom drove up and got her last week.”
“Is she okay?”
“I don’t know, man,” I say, growing agitated. “Can I like, go?”
He pulls a bitch and we head back toward the freeway. “Target’s open. You just need a new shirt, everything else looks fine.”
I slouch out and he hands me his credit card through the window. “And wash your arms.” He grabs my hand and turns it over. I see him see the star tattoo and brace myself. He drags his thumb across it lightly. “What tiny wrists you have,” he whispers, and lets go.
×
My grandfather sits in a white tennis suit with purple and turquoise lightning stripes across the ankles. The gold plastic rim of his visor glints in my eyes. The court is bright and the air is hot and dry. I can feel sweat drip from my armpits slowly down my breasts and along my rib cage.
�
�Nicole,” he says from the side of the court where he’s drinking a scotch on the rocks in a crystal tumbler. In the distance the fronds of two thin palms wiggle their fingers in what feels like imaginary breeze.
I walk toward him and he motions to my father. “Alex,” he says, pointing at me, “give her the racket.” My dad’s face turns stormy and he walks toward me and hands it over. I hold it awkwardly and watch as my father turns and starts for the bright-green lawn beyond us and toward the condo. “Where are you going?” asks my grandfather, his lips pursed and unpleased.
“To lie down,” my father says. “It’s too hot.” My grandpa makes a sour face and looks at me again saying nothing. He reaches out and grabs my wrist.
“Loosen up.” I do as he instructs and he taps my wrist lightly, almost a smack. “That’s too loose.”
“What am I trying for?”
“Trying for?” he asks, confused. “Because it’s something to do.”
“No, I mean, what is the desired looseness?”
“Desired?” His expression changes to one of confusion. I have confused him again, with my words.
“What am I going for?” He still says nothing. “How tight should I hold the racket?” I ask, taking a final approach.
“Hold it like you want to hit the ball.”
“Sounds easy enough.”
“If it were easy you would have done it by now.”
Back at the condo my grandmother arranges tulips in a tall, ceramic art deco vase. My dad is outside sitting by the pool. I can see him check his watch. He looks bored. I sit on the peach couch with the floral pattern that I’ve loved since I was a girl. Gently tugging at the plastic stitching that forms the flowers. My grandmother closes the sliding glass door and my dad becomes a blurry figure.
“I’m going to make some sandwiches,” she says. “Would you like one? Egg salad.”
“No, thank you.” I say, even though I’m hungry. I hate egg salad. The only thing here that I like is this couch. I even hate the pool. As a girl, my sister hit her head on the lip of concrete near the diving board and almost drowned. My grandfather accused her of doing it on purpose to make a scene. I remember a thin plume of her blood like ink from an octopus, or watercolor from the tip of a paint-brush dipped into a cup, expanding from her hair as my dad fished her out. I sat on this couch watching ET and decided not to go swimming in it ever again.
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