Box Girl

by Lilibet Snellings

  “Put him on the phone,” I said. “Dad, what do you mean? It’s not supposed to hit us, is it?”

  “Well,” he said. “If our scientists are worth a damn then it’s not. But I’m enjoying a stiff Stoli martini right now just in case they’re wrong.”

  Shortly after, I had a nightmare about an earthquake. The world was swaying from side to side, like a cruise ship righting itself just before it capsizes. I was sliding from one end of a mall to the other. Everyone was slipping toward Nordstrom, then slamming back against Bloomingdale’s. Somehow, I got out of the mall and climbed a cliff with a waterfall. (I don’t know; it was a dream.) At the top of the waterfall, there was a room. I tried to get under a table, but before I could, I was thrown to the other side of the room and ejected out a window, into the sunny LA sky. I flew along the coast, over beautiful beachfront houses, some on fire, and everyone below me was clinging onto something—a mailbox, a tree trunk, a telephone pole—so they didn’t get thrown into the air like me. This sort of dream is not uncommon for me. I only have one recurring nightmare, always from the apocalyptic genre.

  The glass rattles again. This time, the Firecracker Concierge falls backward and bangs into it. I really wish he would stop. Between the nightmare and a strange, out-of-place earthquake on the East Coast, I’ve been jumpier than usual.

  The earthquake on the East Coast hadn’t even stopped trembling when my mom called me, carrying on as if the world was coming to an end. She was at the Theta House at Yale, of all places, where she is the housemother (seriously), and was helping the girls move in for the fall semester. She said Thetas were screaming and scattering everywhere.

  “Don’t worry, ya’ll!” she announced after the tremors, “I’ll call my daughter in California!”

  When she called, she asked, “Now if there’s an aftershock, should we get in the basement?”

  “The basement! God, no!” I said.

  “No Betty, the bathtub!” one of the girls shouted.

  “No, not the bathtub,” I said. “That is for hurricanes and tornadoes. You’ve got your natural disasters all mixed up.”

  Ivy League or not, these East Coast women had absolutely no idea what to do with an earthquake.

  “Get under a table,” I told her.

  “We don’t have any tables yet!” my mom said, and then she shouted to the other housemother, “Carol, we need to get that dining room table, now.”

  Then my mom said she had to get off the phone because she had to go buy a table.

  Because of my illogical and unrelenting fear of where I will be when The Big One hits, I typically spend a few moments each shift deciding what I would do in the event of an earthquake striking while I am in the box. The most serious problem is, of course, that I’m surrounded by glass. I’ve decided crawling under the mattress is my best bet, but based upon my reflexes tonight, I’m sure I’d probably just lie there and wait for the shards of glass to kill me.

  One month, this fear was particularly pronounced because the back wall of the box was covered in little porcelain plates—twenty-six of them. I counted.

  Prickly leaves and pastel roses adorned each of the twenty-six darling plates, the edges of which were scalloped and delicately rimmed in gold. I wished I could have flipped them over to see what pattern they were, but they were stuck to the wall. (I tried.) They looked like they once lived in my grandmother’s breakfront, removed from their protective cases only for the finer meals. In the front of the box were Lucite boxes filled with even more dinner plates, those ones smashed into big chunks. There were a dozen or so different patterns—I didn’t take an exact count of those. I recognized at least two of the patterns. My mom collects the green ones that look like leaves. They’re called Majolica, she told me. They have the veiny, lumpy texture of a fern frond. I also recognized the blue-and-white Chinese-looking plates. Those ornate numbers with a picture of a pagoda, two doves, and an apple tree are Blue Willow. My mom doesn’t use those for eating, though—they are hung in a cluster on her kitchen wall, for decoration. Then, most terrifyingly, there was a glass box full of plate shards mounted to the wall, right above my head.

  I’m actually not sure which would be worse during an earthquake—the box or my apartment in Venice, which is certain to collapse like a house of flimsy, worn-out cards, the ones that are hard to shuffle. The only thing I am sure of is this: In the event of The Big One, the absolute last place I want to be is among the library book stacks at the University of Southern California. While it is one of the most beautiful college libraries in the country, if you happen to find yourself in those book stacks during The Big One, well, it’s been a good run.

  The first time I ventured into these stacks I was in search of three titles, which I had scribbled on the back of a Coffee Bean receipt. A librarian turned to his computer and told me they didn’t have two of the books but one of them was “down there.” Awkwardly gripping a tiny, eraser-less pencil, he hunched over a square of scrap paper and wrote down the call number: “PS355305789z46252006.” (I’m not kidding, that was it. Of course I still have the piece of paper.) He said it was on Floor Two, so I’d have to go down four floors. Down four floors? Aren’t I on floor one? I thought. Is two not above one?

  “Have you ever been down there?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  Why did he keep referring to it as “down there”?

  He handed me a detailed yet entirely incomprehensible map, which he said needed to be returned when I got “back up.” Was I going spelunking? Did I need a headlamp? An avalanche beacon? What the hell was going on here?

  Armed with my map (which I immediately gave up using for its intended purpose and started using as a fan), I began my expedition to the inner bowels of the beast. How far below ground level is Floor Two, I thought. Will I hit water? Uncover a lost treasure? Capture a troll?

  Below me, taped firmly to the floor, was a path in the shape of stacked arrows, in a color I can only call emergency red. Laced with hot pink, it was a more panicked version of regular red, which said not just, “Follow me to the nearest exit,” but, “Drop your shit and sprint.” I followed these arrows to an archaic elevator, where I half expected an attendant to be standing inside—top hat, gloves, and all—cranking a lever to deliver me to my destination.

  As I emerged from the elevator, I actually laughed. The stacks of books went on as far as I could see, in every direction, so tall and narrow and close together that, when standing with my hands on my hips, both elbows touched book spines. My journey began in section PQ1643: French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese Literature; an ocean away from where I wanted to be. While the initial effect of this literary catacomb was dizzying, the smell was heavenly—the dusty, sour-milk-and-starch stench of old books.

  The books went on forever—books of poems, books of plays, an entire section of books of quotations: The Quotable Woman, Who Said What In 1971, What Great Men Say About Other Great Men. I began to get lost in the titles, pulling out intriguing ones, stopping, sitting, starting again. Before I knew it, I had an armful of books, none on my original list.

  Though the setting was ideal for a psychological thriller, I didn’t want to leave. It was so quiet and set apart. My own little underground world. I stopped in front of a book I’d always wanted to read and slid down the side of the stacks onto the floor. An hour went by. Maybe a day? A chair scratched against the floor above me, and I looked up. Neon white lights buzzed overhead, and the shelves, towering almost to the ceiling, were loaded with heavy, hardbound books. I took a picture from below and send it to Peter with a caption that said, “I hope there’s not an earthquake.” But the text wouldn’t send. My Blackberry signal said “SOS,” no one in, no one out.

  I began picturing my demise. The ground would start to shake, and the lights would swing overhead, some snapping in half. Shelves would fall like dominoes, one onto another, books crashing below. I’d be huddled there, hands-over-head, in the American Lit section, trapped between H.L. M
encken, J.D. Salinger, and other writers who were already dead. The final blow would come from above: At 1,285 pages, Norman Mailer’s The Time of Our Time would be the end of me.

  The Firecracker Concierge falls into the glass again. What is the deal? Is this guy drunk? Now the deejay is leaning against the glass. These people obviously don’t know how alarming this is. I eye the pane of glass above me, wondering how, exactly, it would shatter.

  Tsunami

  I recently got a notice in the mail, outlining the tsunami danger zones for coastal Los Angeles. I looked for my street. It was highlighted in purple. Purple seemed good. Purple was not red. Purple was not orange. Purple was not even yellow. What could purple possibly mean? I read the legend. Next to purple it said: “Tsunami Inundation Zone.” As if my garage apartment was not scary enough. Maybe I should start sleeping on a raft, I thought. With a helmet, and rain boots, and a life jacket, and a paddle.

  According to the pamphlet, because I am in the “Inundation Zone,” I am encouraged to get the hell out of there as soon as an earthquake stops quaking. It suggests I head for higher ground on foot, because there will probably be all sorts of crap in the streets. (I’m paraphrasing.) My most recent tsunami escape plan is to wait out the shaking in my bathroom doorway, because it’s the only interior doorway, and I think my twee Parisian café table, however darling and shabby chic, won’t suffice as a barrier between my head and falling objects. After the trembling subsides, I’ll put on a pair of running shoes, then grab a jacket, my purse, my laptop, and a box of cereal. Armed with my Multi Grain Cheerios, I will make my escape.

  I almost executed this plan one night when I was awakened by a friend who told me to turn on the news. A magnitude 8.9 earthquake had just hit the coast of Japan, and a tsunami was headed our way. I don’t know if it was my friend’s panicked voice jolting me awake, or the doomsday music on CNN, but I was positive we were done for. I called Peter (we didn’t yet live together) and told him, in my most authoritative voice, that we needed to head for higher ground.

  “Huh?” he said, his voice thick with sleep.

  “There’s been an 8.9 earthquake in Japan, and there’s a tsunami warning for the coast of California,” I said.

  “Huh?” he repeated.

  I repeated myself, more urgently this time.

  “Is Wolf Blitzer awake?” he said.

  “Huh?” I said.

  “Is Wolf Blitzer awake?” he repeated.

  “No. It’s some guy I don’t know,” I said.

  “Call me if Wolf Blitzer wakes up,” he said, then let out a loud yawn.

  “But who cares if it’s Wolf Blitzer or not? They are playing the doomsday music!”

  “Has it hit Hawaii?”

  “Has what hit Hawaii?”

  “The tsunami. Has it hit Hawaii?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Call me when it hits Hawaii,” he said, “That should give us at least six hours.”

  A friend of mine was staying in Hawaii that night at a fancy hotel. She said they moved everyone onto the golf course—the highest point on the hotel’s property. They pitched tents and set out silver buffet trays of food. A string quartet played, she said, to calm everyone’s nerves, “Like in the final moments of the Titanic.”

  The tsunami never hit Hawaii. Or at least, not very hard. It never hit the continental United States, either. Actually, that’s not true. I think a boat was overturned in Oregon.

  Scotch Please, Splash Soda

  My parents are now “snowbirds,” meaning they fly south in the winter for a warmer climate. They spend six months on the coast of southern Georgia and six months in the hills of southern Connecticut, which allows my dad to play golf in near-perfect conditions all year long.

  My parents’ Georgia home is a picture of Southern hospitality. Most every surface is monogrammed—the bath towels, the coasters, the seashell-shaped soaps. Give a WASPy Southern woman a millimeter of material, and she’ll figure out a way to put someone’s initials on it. During the holidays, the monogrammed cocktail napkins are replaced by a stack of green ones that say, “Holidays with the family are always a trip. A trip to the liquor store.” I think these napkins were created with my family in mind. As my grandmother once said, elbow-deep in a Scotch and soda, “Jews don’t recognize Jesus as the Messiah. Protestants don’t recognize the Pope as the head of the church. Baptists don’t recognize each other at the liquor store.” We’re not Baptists, but based on my family’s idolatrous worship of alcohol, we might as well be.

  While most children spend the week before Christmas shopping and wrapping, I prepare by resting, hydrating, and stretching. You have to understand, these people are animals. And by animals, I mean my grandfather, my grandmothers, and my great-aunt, all in their late eighties or early nineties. If these folks don’t have a drink in hand by four o’clock, they rattle their canes in protest. And they only drink the hard stuff, or “meaningful drinks,” as my dad calls them: bourbon and water, Scotch and soda, gin and tonic, vodka on the rocks, the occasional Bloody Mary (but only if it’s before noon), and wine (but only if it’s with dinner). If there’s one thing upstanding Southern WASPs like to do to celebrate the birth of Christ, it’s get drunk.

  The location for this bourbon-soaked soiree is Sea Island, Georgia, an emerald enclave of the rich and retired, covered in golf courses, spas, and Spanish moss, where money hangs from the Magnolia trees. While waiting tables one night, a customer said, “Wait, your parents live in Sea Island? Why the hell are you working as a waitress?” It’s that sort of place.

  At the helm of this holiday operation is my mom, a perky perfectionist who was once crowned The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi at The University of Georgia, and the Miss Augusta runner-up (but we wont talk about that). Christmas gives her an excuse to be in a great mood at 7:00 am, shower people with presents, decorate and re-decorate, and drink in the afternoon. So hopped up on the holidays, she didn’t even notice one year when I wrapped a cashmere sweater I had borrowed from her two years prior. “Oh I just love this,” she said, swirling a celery stalk into her Bloody Mary. “And it’s just my color.”

  My mom desperately wants us to share her zeal for the holidays. One Easter, she wanted her children—ages twenty-nine and twenty-six at the time—to participate in an egg hunt, so she stuffed the plastic pastel eggs full of money. Sitting on the patio, hungover, sweating, hands shaking, her “children” were barely breathing, let alone showing any interest in skipping around the yard for eggs. Finally, she yelled, “Damn it, y’all, there’s money in them!” Some eggs had singles, some fives, others tens and twenties. My brother and I tore toward the lawn. After several slide tackles and a yellow-card’s worth of elbowing each other in the ribs, our knees skinned and covered in grass stains, my mom got just what she wanted: joyful holiday togetherness.

  My mom never turns down an invitation, certainly not at Christmas. Every year on Christmas Eve, she insists we go to this god-awful caroling and Yule-log-lighting party, and she drags the entire geriatric wing of the family along. But they don’t seem to mind. After all, these bloodhounds can smell eggnog from a mile away.

  My least favorite of our holiday traditions is the dreaded staging of The Christmas Card Picture. While this was a perfectly acceptable tradition when my brother and I were kids, now that we’re adults, it’s just plain embarrassing. At least for me. My brother now has a wife and two children, so in our Christmas Card Picture it’s very obvious that there’s: 1) an older couple in their sixties, 2) a cute young married couple in their thirties with two darling little boys, and 3) shoved somewhere in the periphery, me.

  I am sure the four-hundred-plus recipients of the annual card must wonder:

  “Is she still single?”

  “She must be a lesbian.”

  “Betty with a lesbian daughter, no.”

  “But she does live in California.”

  “And I think she worked for the Obama campaign.”

  One year, after the cards w
ere delivered, my mom got an email from a friend in Texas: “Just wanted to say I’m so happy to see that Lilibet is expecting!” My mom called me immediately, horrified. I ripped the thing off my fridge.

  “Oh my god,” I said, “I do look pregnant.” Something had gone horribly wrong with the lighting, the angle, something. We discussed, in disbelief, for the next hour.

  “See, she was the only one to say something,” my mom said. “I wonder how many people thought it but didn’t say anything? I mean, my Lord, do these people actually think I’d put you in the picture pregnant with no husband?”

  At the other end of the holiday jolliness spectrum—the very other end—is my dad. He sees Christmas as nothing but one giant MasterCard bill. Bah humbug doesn’t even do it justice. Perhaps bah hum—to hell with these damn Christmas lights, why don’t we have any vermouth, damn it Betty if I have to listen to that damn Rod Stuart Christmas CD one more time—bug.

  This is, after all, a man who prefers funerals to weddings, because they’re less expensive to attend. “And you don’t have to hang around afterward and mingle,” he said to me one day. “No gift, no tux, no dancing, just a quick in and out.” I listened, brow-furrowed and eyes bulging.

  “Yeah, but someone died,” I said.

  He bulldozed on. “It’s a much more tasteful affair, much more courteous to the guests if you ask me.”

  My mom and dad fill each other’s stockings. My mom buys my dad practical items, things he likes or uses: toothpaste, Altoids, a bag of pistachios. My mom’s stocking is always a cornucopia of used objects my dad picked up around the house: a can opener, an ice cream scooper, a half-eaten banana.

  My dad hates getting presents and typically responds with “How much did this cost me?” instead of “Thank you.” That is, unless he really wants something. Then he buys it for himself, wraps it, and signs the card: “To Bill, Love Kiki.” Kiki is his imaginary girlfriend, and he thinks this is hilarious. Kiki has given him every club in his golf bag.