This Is Where We Live

by Janelle Brown

  Claudia turns to wave goodbye without breaking her stride, careening sideways as she dodges piles of junk. Her hip knocks into one of the teetering pillars, sending its contents sliding to the floor. Claudia stares down at Dolores’s belongings as Marcie crouches besides her, struggling to upright a stack of tattered People en Espanol magazines dating back to 1998. A cardboard box full of curling family photographs cascades across the hallway floor, and Claudia bends to pick one up.

  It’s a faded snapshot of Dolores and the mustachioed man with three teenage children, standing in front of this house in the 1980s. Dolores is almost unrecognizable: a trim woman in a plaid dress, her long hair woven up in braids, radiantly smiling as her husband tucks his arm around her waist. The house behind her is painted yellow—the same paint job that will eventually fade into its current colorless beige—and the first of the garden gnomes is already positioned amid the begonias in the front yard. One of the teenage girls (possibly Luz, though it’s hard to tell) holds a pinwheel, caught in the act of blowing into it to make it spin. The family looks happy, confident in the permanence of their surroundings, secure in their belief that their future will be like this one perfect frozen moment.

  What happened to that family? Claudia wonders. What other seemingly flawless moments happened here, in this decaying house? She looks at the squalor surrounding her, and suddenly understands that this isn’t junk after all. To Dolores, these odds and ends are memories she is unwilling to separate from, no matter how seemingly inconsequential. She is preserving the comfort of continuity.

  Claudia swallows hard and stuffs the photo back in the box before hurrying back home.

  Day Forty-five

  “Weren’t we supposed to be living in paradise? What happened to our weather?” Esme shivers and pulls her cardigan around her shoulders, moving closer to the heat lamp that is irradiating them with propane. The twinkling fairy lights, strung in the overhead olive trees, shiver as arctic fog blasts across the patio. Despite the chilly December evening, the outdoor tables surrounding Esme and Claudia are all packed with bar patrons, everyone pointedly ignoring the fact that LA’s celebrated balmy winters have apparently migrated south with the birds this year.

  “It’s the middle of winter, Esme.” It is so cold the ice in Claudia’s gin and tonic isn’t melting. The marine layer overhead traps the light from the city, illuminating the patio with a ghostly luminescence. It is only six o’clock but it feels like midnight.

  “Technically, winter doesn’t start for one week. Anyway, we’re not supposed to have winter in Los Angeles.”

  “We could always go inside,” Claudia observes.

  “That’s not the point,” Esme says. “The point is that we moved here so we wouldn’t have to make that choice.”

  “You didn’t move here,” Claudia points out. “You were born here.”

  “Maybe we should go on a trip together,” Esme says. “Someplace warm and beachy and restorative. Tulum? Hawaii? Interested?”

  Claudia shrugs and fishes an ice cube out of her glass, wishing she had stayed home. But Esme has been pestering her about a “girls’ night” for weeks, and Claudia has run out of excuses. A “girls’ night,” as far as Claudia can tell, mostly involves Claudia listening to Esme’s upbeat chatter—anecdotes about her job, the men she is dating, the condo she is decorating, lightweight subjects that seem expressly designed to take Claudia’s mind off her seeping melancholy. Or perhaps her friend’s just dancing around the awkward fact that Claudia managed to completely sabotage the opportunity that Esme’s mother gave her? Regardless, while Claudia appreciates the intention behind this gathering, she would have preferred to be at home, watching reality show reruns on standard cable (movies are just too painful these days) or staring blankly out through her newly installed double-paned windows into the depths of the canyon. And yet she knows it is time to start facing the world again; it’s been six weeks since Jeremy’s departure, and it’s occurred to her (in the abstract, but still) that she can’t stay in her house forever.

  She feels like an amputee learning how to walk again.

  Esme’s babble grows more frantic by the minute, as if she were a depth finder charting the fathomless bottoms of Claudia’s depression. Esme’s face flickers with concern as it registers Claudia’s misery, her friend’s forehead corkscrewing tightly as she musters up a new round of false cheer. It’s clear that whatever anger Esme might still feel about the Ennis Gates debacle, it’s been trumped by pity. Not that Claudia finds the latter emotion any more bearable.

  “So, anyway, I’m thinking mint, for the living room,” Esme says, abruptly returning to a previous conversation. “With coral and ivy as accent colors. I’m basing it on this wallpaper that I found on sale at a design store on Beverly. A kind of fern pattern. The big conundrum is, Do I go for a kind of contemporary beach-house feel? Or try for more of a Miami deco aesthetic? What do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” Claudia said. The ice cube melts painfully on her tongue. “Neither sounds particularly natural for a fourteenth-floor condo in downtown LA, if you ask me.”

  “You think it’s stupid for me to be worrying about this kind of stuff.” Esme deflates. “It is stupid of me to be worrying about this. I’m sorry. I’ll shut up.”

  “It’s not you. It’s me. I’m bad company tonight.” Now she feels even worse—her friend is at least trying to be cheerful.

  But Esme already looks equally morose. “I used to read fashion magazines and spend my weekends buying shoes. Now I obsess over design blogs and furniture reproductions on eBay and eco-friendly rugs,” she says. “I guess by your midthirties you’ve realized the limitations of your own body. The new frontier to decorate is the home. Not that it’s any less shallow.”

  Claudia nods, wishing she could muster the same enthusiasm for her own newly redone home. The two women sit in silence, examining the other customers of the bar. A few feet away, a group of men their age are staring at them. The men splay out at their table, leaning back in their chairs, legs positioned open in greater-than wedges that sign directly to their crotches. Cocktail waitresses weave between the tables, pints of beer slopping pools of froth across their trays. This bar is usually empty until the dinner hour; Claudia wonders if business is up because people are unemployed and have nothing better to do than get drunk before dark, or because Happy Hour beer is five dollars cheaper.

  Esme shivers and peels the label off her beer bottle. “So,” she says, her words measured and cautious. “Have you heard from Jeremy at all?”

  “No.” Claudia isn’t at all sure that this is an improvement on the previous conversation. “I’m not sure I really want to talk about him.”

  “You need to talk about him with someone,” Esme says. She picks at the sticky label residue with a ragged fingernail. “You’d tell me if you were getting divorced, right?”

  It’s the first time Claudia has heard this word spoken out loud, let alone let herself think it, and the harsh resonance of its syllables jolt her alert. Divorce. It sounds like something that happens to people much older than they are. Only now, hearing that word coming from her friend’s mouth, does Claudia realize that she’s never really felt married in that way she’d always assumed one did. That if certain benchmarks are the classic markers of middle-class adulthood—marriage, kids, mortgage, all maintained by a financially stable career—she came close but ultimately fell too far from the mark to really feel like a grown-up.

  But divorce? It just seems like she’s moving farther and farther away from life’s golden ring. She is on the verge of having to start at the beginning again, on all fronts of her life, at an age when her own parents were celebrating their twelfth anniversary, with two kids in school and the jobs they’d have for the rest of their lives. For a moment, she wishes she’d never known that a life outside of Mantanka was even possible: She could have stayed, married an accountant, become a stay-at-home mom, and lived in a modest, affordable tract home near her parents. Everyth
ing would have been so much easier if she’d never known about the other sort of happiness available to her. Then she would never have had to lose it.

  “I haven’t even heard from him,” she tells Esme. “I don’t know what’s going on. With anything, honestly.”

  “Oh.” Esme considers this. “What about the money? Have you decided what to do with it yet?”

  Claudia shrugs. “Maybe I’ll give it to charity.”

  “What charity?”

  The wind blows a stack of cocktail napkins off their table, scattering them across the patio. “I’m not sure,” she says. “Maybe a breast cancer charity.”

  Esme watches her. “Why breast cancer?”

  For a moment, even Claudia isn’t sure why she’s said this until she remembers: Jeremy’s mom died of breast cancer. His grip on her seems inescapable, even from thousands of miles away. This has to stop. “Or maybe I’ll just save it and live off it for a few years. Take a sabbatical from life.”

  Esme stares at her. “So you’d just do … nothing?”

  “Got a better idea?”

  Esme finishes peeling the beer label off and tries, unsuccessfully, to affix it to the paper tablecloth. “Why don’t you do something fun to take your mind off everything? Go travel. You never did that after college. Train around Europe. Get stoned on the beach in Thailand. Go on safari.”

  The very thought of this—of packing a suitcase and getting on a plane, of talking to strangers and scouring travel guides, of taking tours for one and eating dinner at restaurants by herself—exhausts her. “I’m thirty-four, Esme. I’d look ridiculous camping out on the beach in Thailand.”

  “Book a hotel room, then.” Esme flags down the waiter, pointing to their empty drinks. “Maybe you’re just not ready yet, but I think you should take advantage of the situation you’re in. The sooner the better.”

  “The situation I’m in? You mean, having destroyed two careers and my marriage on the same day?” She glances at Esme. “It’s worth repeating, by the way, how sorry I am about that. The whole mess with your mom. I really screwed that one up.”

  “No need to apologize again. You weren’t yourself. I get it.” Esme punctuates her words with a stiff shrug, then smiles beneficently. “The point is, you can do anything you want now. You have the financial freedom to try anything that crosses your mind. Right now, that’s a pretty rare opportunity.”

  Her words painfully mirror Jeremy’s parting shot: You can do anything you want. And they are both right. But Claudia can’t think of anything to want right now, except for something that is completely intangible and unattainable: What she really wants is to be wanted.

  She leans forward, bracing her head in her hands, her elbows on her knees. “You know what I think? I think we just know too much now. We all got too much too fast, and then we lost it even faster, and now the only thing that’s clear is that we never had any control over anything in the first place. Our generation was supposed to be young and optimistic and full of pioneering ideas about the future, right? Well, life’s scraped that right out of me. All I feel these days is jaded.” She scratches at her forehead with a fingernail. “The truth is, we’re older than we’ve been willing to accept.”

  “It kind of sounds like you’re looking for an excuse to avoid starting something new,” Esme says. “At least you have the possibility to figure all this out. I wish I could say the same thing.”

  “You’re doing just fine,” Claudia tells Esme. “You’re a high-powered marketing executive.”

  Fresh drinks arrive on the table. Esme drinks half of her beer before she answers. “Honestly? I hate my job. I hawk crappy kids’ movies for a living, convincing hard-working, possibly broke Americans to shell out twelve dollars for cynical, brainless, disposable crap that I wouldn’t ever watch myself. You know, last spring I was starting to think about quitting to try my hand at writing again? But there’s no chance of that now. I haven’t been able to save a dime. And I live in an overpriced condo that I bought just two months before the real estate market crashed, in a building that’s half-empty because the developers can’t sell the rest of the units. So I can’t move even if I wanted to. I’m stuck. You, however, are not.”

  Claudia stares at Esme, noticing for the first time that her friend has gray hair sprouting in her part, a tiny crop of wrinkles nests along her cheekbones, and she looks like she’s gained a few pounds in her hips. Is it unhappiness or stress or is it just that Esme is starting to look her age? It seems too soon for them to be already heading toward bodily deterioration. “I’m sorry. You should have said something sooner.”

  Esme shrugs. “It’s all anyone talks about anymore—how screwed they are. I’m tired of all the whinging. I’m lucky to have a job at all.”

  Claudia thinks about Esme’s words. You could do anything you want. “So where do you propose I start with reimagining my life?” she asked.

  “You need to do something drastic, right? Well, you could start by getting laid. Have cheap, tawdry sex with an attractive stranger. Get your mind off Jeremy.” Esme tilts her head in the direction of the men who sit a few feet away. “Him, for example. The guy in the plaid shirt with the beard. He’s been staring at you.”

  “I think he’s wearing a wedding ring,”

  “So are you.”

  Claudia looks down at her hand. Esme and Claudia stare at the ring together. What is she doing? Jeremy is off with Aoki, God-knows-where; he has started an entirely new life with another woman and—judging by his lack of communication—doesn’t miss her in the least. And she is sitting here with Esme at the same bar she’s been to a hundred times, still wearing Jeremy’s ring as if it’s a talisman that will magically eradicate the events of the last few months, and spending her days wallowing in apathetic self-indictment.

  She finds herself thinking of Dolores, moldering away amid her memories—widowed, probably dying from a painful disease, and helplessly counting down the moments until her home is taken away. That is real misery. Who is Claudia to feel sorry for herself?

  She finishes her second gin and tonic. Then she tugs at the ring, wedging it over her knuckle and drawing it off her finger. “You’re right,” she says. “I need to do something drastic.” She gazes over at the men. They have registered Claudia and Esme’s interest and are now blatantly staring. The bearded man makes eye contact with Claudia and then looks coyly away. Hidden speakers in the bushes crackle as Billie Holiday serenades the customers with heroin-honeyed blues.

  “I’ll give you five dollars if you go talk to them,” Esme whispers. “Ten if you go home with the beard.”

  “Save your money,” Claudia says. “I’ll call you soon, OK?” She stands, tucking the ring in the pocket of her jeans. The three men watch Claudia as she picks her way between the chairs, heading directly toward their table. The bearded man smiles at her—the facial hair and plaid shirt combined with Converse high-tops give him the appearance of an urban lumberjack, someone who would be good at fixing broken doors and capturing dangerous spiders. This isn’t entirely unattractive. The man leans forward as she approaches, and his two friends sit back respectfully, giving him the floor. He isn’t wearing a wedding ring after all.

  “Hey, there,” he says, as she sidles up beside him, and then the invitation in his face changes to an expression of bewilderment when he realizes that Claudia isn’t coming for him after all; she is passing their table entirely. The fairy lights tremble overhead, battered by wind and fog. Waitresses swivel their hips, dancing a dangerous flamenco between the tables, trays lifted aloft for a finishing flourish. The whirring propane heaters hum a sound track for her departure as Claudia makes for the exit.

  The Chicken Kitchen where Mary Hernandez works is in outer Silver Lake, across from a trendy café that sells six-dollar cups of coffee. Claudia deposits her Jetta in the restaurant’s parking lot. Crime-deterring floodlights wash the concrete patch with sterile white light. In the shadowy recesses near the back of the lot, a dreadlocked homeless ma
n rummages through a Dumpster. He removes an empty gallon jug from the bin and shakes it three times before depositing it gently atop the piles of garbage in his shopping cart.

  The evening traffic is picking up, and roving packs of hipsters throng the street, weaving between an art gallery opening, a gourmet wine shop, and a French restaurant on the corner. There is a long line at the café, the yearning for exquisite artisinal caffeine managing to trump the realities of the new economy.

  The Chicken Kitchen sits between a Salvation Army thrift store and a gay porn shop. She pushes the entrance to the restaurant open, still unsure what she is doing here. Maybe I can help Dolores, she thinks, as she heaves the swinging door open and feels a wall of air-conditioning numb her face. Maybe Mary doesn’t even know what’s going on with her grandmother. Her mind works through a half-baked math formula, in which the rescue of Dolores will somehow equate to her own personal salvation.

  You need to do something drastic.

  Unlike the artfully lit yuppie palaces across the street, the Chicken Kitchen is illuminated by bare fluorescent tubes, which reflect off orange-painted walls and sanitized white tile. Neon signs advertise a bucket of flame-grilled chicken for $5.99, a sampler of BBQ wings for $2.99, party catering, everything Fresh! Breezy! Meaty! Overhead, metallic HAPPY HOLIDAYS streamers spin slowly in the draft from the air-conditioning unit. Young families sit in plastic booths, noshing on unidentifiable chicken parts that have been broken down and remolded into perfect spherical nuggets.

  Claudia spots Mary at the end of the counter, manning a register. “Mary!” she calls softly, from her position at the end of the line. Mary turns to locate the voice, her face registering confusion, then pleasure, and then mild concern. She glances quickly behind her, where her manager—a middle-aged Middle Eastern man in tight orange polyester slacks—is lurking by the soft drink machine. Claudia waves. Mary smiles and waves back tentatively.