We traded stories about work, about Jon’s school, and about his friends. We listened to the vocabulary Nate was picking up at an even faster clip now. We bought a lottery ticket from the convenience store across the street from the Dairy Flirt, and we headed home. If we’d driven up to Sacramento, we spent the holiday with Mauru’s family. In San Diego, we dropped by my parents’ home in La Jolla.
We knew we’d never hit the lottery; the odds were against us. But we bought the ticket for the family tradition it created for us.
“Dad’s going to buy Mom an island in the Caribbean,” Mauru said.
“An island.” Jon grinned. “Will it have fishes, and horses, and ducks, and cows, Dad?”
“It will have more than that, Jon. It will have canaries, and whales, and dolphins, and—”
“Snakes, Mom? Will it have snakes?” Nate asked.
“No snakes, darling. Mom isn’t having any snakes on her island. Mom will be the owner with Dad, so she gets to decide that there will be no snakes. No snakes whatsoever for Mom. Life’s too short to have snakes racing around your dream island.”
“Snakes are yucky.” Jon smiled as I looked back at him at the traffic light.
“Yucky,” Nate repeated. “Ugly. Bad. Naughty.”
“I’m proud of you, buddy,” Mauru said to Nate. “And they’re dangerous.”
Mauru let his two index fingers hang from his upper lip as he sat beside me, and he turned to our kids in the back seat and acted like he had fangs and was about to bite them. Shrieks and laughter all around.
“And rhinos, Dad,” Jon continued, “like in my book with the elephants, and the monkeys, and the giraffes, Dad.”
“Oh, buddy,” Mauru said apologetically. “Rhinos are extinct in the wild now, buddy. That means there’s only a few left in zoos, but a lot of those are closing, too. Remember I told you that the orange monkeys, the orangutans, are also extinct in the wild?”
Jon and Nate both nodded.
“Well, rhinos are the same now.”
“Seriously, though,” I asked Mauru. “Say we won ten or twenty million, what would we do with it?”
“Move out of state, babe. If we still chose to live here, pay off our mortgage. Put more into our retirement accounts if retirement still exists in the future, and we make it to that age. Put more into the kids’ college funds, and maybe go on our first family vacation abroad somewhere if that’s even possible. I’d also like us to help the kids buy their first homes, their first cars.
“I don’t want our kids to live like rock stars, babe, but I don’t want them to struggle, you know? I want them to just focus on the important stuff like what they enjoy doing, who they enjoy spending time with, and where they want to be. If I had my way, I’d buy them homes next door to us.”
“You crack me up,” I said. “I want them out and independent when they turn eighteen—”
“Mom, what’s a rock star?”
“Nate,” I said, “a rock star is someone famous. Everyone knows them, and they have a lot more money than Mom and Dad, and Nonna and Nonno, and Grandpa D. and Grandma G.”
“Are we going to be rock stars one day, Mom?” Jon asked.
“No, Jon-Jon. We’re happy that we’re not rock stars,” Mauru said, “because if we were rock stars, then we’d be in the tabloids every day, which are those shiny magazines Mom reads and hides in the bottom drawer in the kitchen and under the couch.”
I grunted, and Mauru put his hand on my shoulder.
Well, I thought, as I waited for the fundraiser at WS&X to begin, even if Mauru and I were never going to be millionaires or billionaires, I at least was going to eat like one with the help of the generous people from the California Water Party.
From the state-of-the-art kitchen at the back of the conference room rose the odors of butter, shallots, fish, and what smelled like chicken, but I was sure I was wrong because there was no chicken on the menu.
A jet of saliva was released from my mouth as I thought of caviar, monkfish, veal, and the little desserts we’d enjoy. I looked around to check that no one had seen me salivate.
Mauru and I had been back to ConfiPrice many times since the episode with Mrs. Nancy Y years before. The price of flour, the main ingredient in all the desserts that were going to be served at the fundraiser, had dropped just a little. A loaf of bread now retailed for $6.55, which many still couldn’t afford.
I’d never had monkfish, which was on the fundraiser menu, but I’d enjoyed tuna with Mauru. We ate Boston bluefin tuna once in a while (meaning once a year or so). Tuna had jumped from forty-five dollars per pound to fifty-one dollars per pound at ConfiPrice. Tuna stocks were affected by warmer waters. They were no longer found where they used to be because they dove deeper and swam further, which made them more expensive.
Veal, a delicacy I’d never tried before, was also on the menu. California laws requiring a certain amount of space for milk-fed calves raised as veal, as well as the decline in cattle population—especially in Australia, a major exporter of veal before the drought—meant that you never saw any veal at ConfiPrice. Veal, I checked online, went from twenty-five dollars per pound before the drought to forty-three dollars per pound around the time of the fundraiser.
How people managed to afford anything—in fact, how any of us managed—is still beyond me.
You heard stories of people, even in the 2030s, forming little cooperatives in California on which they pooled resources and raised their own poultry and livestock. Communities organized weekly potlucks, religious and public interest organizations sent out constant requests for donations of all kinds, and certain dishes became widely known as the “food of the new poor.” People stocked up when prices let up (if they ever did), and everything was accounted for as people talked about almost everything in terms of “budgeting.”
Communes with their own rules and traditions sprouted in unusual places, sometimes in conflict with the communities around them, and it wasn’t too long before some of them collapsed. TV and radio programming, previously the domain of the extravagant and the luxurious, became more “practical” on many channels, with a new generation of experts rising to the fore on shows like Revere the Penny, The Luxurious Staycation, A Home Unto Itself, Learning from Our Forbears, Granny M. Says ‘Look and Learn,’ and one of the most successful miniseries of the decade was called, quite simply, The End of the Prodigal Age.
There were shows on pickling and canning your own food, preserving it, and bartering it. New areas of study were born, and “home economics,” a once popular course that had taught generations of students across the world how individuals and communities engage with their environment, made a comeback. People proudly declared themselves experts in home economics and advertised their services as such.
There were, sadly, heartbreaking effects of the drought, which I didn’t want to mention, but Linda Maywrot says that a writer must always remember that the truth is not at her service; she is at its command.
Increases in suicides, deaths from substance abuse, and homicides were always in the news. There was a rise in various cancers and lung-related deaths, especially among the elderly and those with weakened immune systems. Gun violence increased, and studies underscored the correlative relationship between surges in violence and changes in the weather.
The desire to point the finger at those “who had no conscience while others suffered” led to a noticeable upsurge in reporting regarding “shamelessly wasteful individuals.”
Some, for example, had fire trucks brought to their estates and had the hoses and cannons of the fire engines turned skyward so that they could release several hundred gallons of water per minute while they and their guests ran, screaming, in and around the jets and mists of water, gleeful, as they celebrated the excesses still available to the rich.
One group of landowners, each Fourth of July, had vast blocks of ice shaped like Mount Rushmore delivered to their lands, where they let them melt in the sunlight because it was their proper
ty and their money, and they could do whatever they wanted with it.
Of course, conservation and curtailment measures had gone into effect, but nothing stopped anyone from purchasing what they could, even at exorbitant prices, to make a point of their freedom to express themselves by flaunting their wealth on their own property.
As a result, an unstated moral precept of the time arose.
Wealth for wealth’s sake was no longer worthy of celebrity, so a whole generation of children, whose only claim to fame was that they were born into wealthy families, had to find something to do if they wanted to be known. Even their parents had to be associated with some cause, not by federal or state fiat, but by the rising moral necessity of the age, which required identification with particular causes, most often in the public interest.
Enter, therefore, Jeremiah Trehoviak and his California Water Party, who presciently foresaw this state of affairs in the mid-2020s, and they began hiring, training, and preparing their organization ahead of time.
Now, I’ll admit something.
I’m a daydreamer.
When asked at the University of the Finger Lakes what I wanted to write my undergraduate thesis on, I intuitively responded, “Daydreams in American literature.”
“Um,” my thesis advisor said, “as compared to what other literature, Janet?”
“Non-American literature, Professor.”
To appear more “practical,” I abandoned the idea of studying daydreams, and I completed, instead, a thesis titled, “The Decasyllabic Curse: The Glorious Afterlife of Iambic Pentameter in the Prose of the Greatest African and American writers.”
My daydreaming continued unhindered, however, and it not only allowed me to write what my advisor called “a very imaginative thesis; evocative, Janet,” but it also allowed me to easily imagine Jeremiah Trehoviak thanking me for everything I’d done to make his fundraiser happen.
I saw it all clearly.
My moment of recognition had finally arrived.
The daughter of immigrants was finally going to have her moment.
It would be different from the “Mommy of the Year” note that Mauru helped Jon and Nate write for me on Mother’s Day. It would also be different from Mauru’s own note, which read: “For the only woman I’ve ever loved.”
Mauru always ended his note with “P.S. If you show this to my mom or Elisa, this message won’t self-destruct, but I will deny its existence.”
I envisaged my moment of recognition unfolding in the following way.
Twelve senators, four state Supreme Court justices, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and the Speaker of the House, would hear Jeremiah Trehoviak praise me.
“In these times,” the billionaire would say, “when the urge to focus on kith and kin drives many more easily inward, I’d like to thank someone whose outward selflessness has driven her to pure excellence. We often take people like her for granted. They are mothers, wives, and assistants, who work in the background and make it all come together. We’d be eating who-knows-what every day of the year without them. Our kids would go to school in the same clothes they wore to bed the night before without them. Our homes would smell like cow pens. Our offices wouldn’t have toilet paper.
“I’m going to spell her name out so she can relish this moment.
“J A N E T W H I T A K E R V I R D I S.
“Let’s all give a round of ecstatic applause to the magnanimous and magnificent Janet Whitaker Virdis! By the way, Janet, there’s also a swag bag for you. It has all your dream stuff in it:
“An all-expenses-paid first-class twenty-one-day trip for six to Cagliari, Sardinia, with accommodation at the legendary Platinum Italia on the Costa Smeralda, which is still open for business.
“An all-expenses-paid first-class twenty-one-day trip for six to the Victoria Falls in the Southern African Federation with accommodation at the stunning Thundering Smoke Palace, which is still open for business.
“A check for $45 million so that you never have to worry about the price of anything again.
“Well-paid and perpetually spritely live-in help, including his/her benefits—”
“Janet,” Hannah said, “you OK?”
“Sh-sure,” I said. “Why?”
Janet was looking at my blouse with a smirk on her face.
“Darn!” I whispered. “My pop-up timers have gone off!”
“Anyway,” Hannah said, “doors open in thirty.”
Sure enough, thirty minutes later, we were open for business. First came the lawyers and their spouses. After the lawyers and their spouses, came a variety of people from all parts of society, most of them influential and wealthy.
Hannah was beaming at one of the Hoviaks.
He was a fine man, just like . . . Hold up. That was Mike. Of the couple Mike and Granite. I ran my hands down the front of my jacket to make sure the pop-up timers weren’t having too much fun.
Hannah was smiling at Mike like she knew him.
“You know him, Hannah?”
She shook her head. “Not yet, Janet.”
Mike walked up to us.
“Jan-Janet,” I said, taking a deep breath.
Oh, Mike, I thought to myself as he smiled at me with those gorgeous dimples of his. Don’t you know not to smile at me like this? My husband’s name is Mauru Whitaker Virdis, Mike. He’s a history teacher at Saint Martin de Porres in La Jolla. Can’t you see I’m a married woman? The ring on the ring finger, Mike. The ring. Can’t you see it? Mauru secretly put it on layaway and paid it off before the wedding. Isn’t it great, Mike?
“Yes, it’s ‘Janet.’ I remember now,” Mike said. “We met at your place—”
“Janet!” Hannah laughed. “Well, I never!”
“Noooo.” Mike laughed and put his left hand over his mouth. “It’s not like that. I was with my fiancée, and we went to Janet’s place, you know—”
“Janet!” Hannah laughed even more. “I really never!”
“Let me finish.” Mike pleaded. “Greta, my fiancée, and I are both with the California Water Party, and we were doing the rounds, you know, getting to know our fellow constituents. How’s it going, Janet?”
“Well, Mike,” I said.
“It’s really great to see you again,” he said.
“Open or closed?” Hannah asked abruptly.
I knew precisely what Hannah was asking; I’ve worked around enough lawyers to know that they think nothing of their directness, which they think is cute, so I acted as if I were confused by Hannah’s question. Mike was clearly clueless as to what Hannah was asking, or he acted like it.
“Huh? You lost me there,” he said to Hannah.
“I’m just wondering if your relationship is open or—”
“Excuse me,” I said, pretending to walk away. “I need to get something from my desk. I’ll see you all in a few minutes.”
“Open or closed?” Hannah repeated her question.
“So, um, well, open.” Mike forced a smile. “If you really must know. Greta and I have an open relationship. But I’m not looking, nor is Greta.”
“Talk about morals,” Hannah said.
Mike looked bruised by the exchange and a little offended.
“Nice chatting,” he said as he joined the Hoviaks close to the front of the conference room.
I shook my head at Hannah and pretended to wag my finger at her.
“It’s a fair question,” Hannah said as I stared at her. “It’s the new way of asking a guy if he’s available or not. Mike was staring at me, and I was staring at him. The new thing is to ask whether a guy’s in an open relationship or not. You just say, ‘open or closed?’ If he’s single or otherwise available, he’s open. If he’s taken or otherwise unavailable, he’s closed. No shame here about being a woman who knows what she wants in a man and asks for it. Men always do it.”
“I have just six syllables for Mauru,” I said, “if he does this ‘open-closed’ thingy of yours: di-vorce, di-vorce, di-vorce. That’s, le
t’s see,” [I pretended to count the syllables on my left hand] “six syllables. Right. Six.”
“Funny.” Hannah yawned. “But I’m not talking about what Mauru wants. I’m talking about you, Janet. Live a little. Put a little excitement in your life. Get yourself a lover.”
“You know, Hannah, I’m gonna be straight with you,” I said. “When you really love someone who really loves you, and you know it—like really know it—you kinda learn that loving is not a feeling you have till another more exciting feeling comes along. It’s not like catching a subway in, say, New York City, where if you miss your train, you can expect another to take you to the same place in a few minutes. It’s about making a choice that this is the man to whom you choose to commit. It’s not for everyone. I get that.”
“I’ll tell you about Mike’s and my time together when we start dating,” Hannah said as we walked into the conference room.
Almost everyone had arrived.
There were people drinking champagne and eating caviar. Some requested chilled vodka, and others asked where the blinis were. The Hoviaks got them whatever they requested.
Conversation wasn’t about politics but about the weather, which had become political. The way you talked about the weather increasingly revealed your political outlook. If you were liberal, you mentioned a pattern of changes in the weather brought on by human damage and indifference, and you labeled it “climate change.”
If you were conservative, you saw several “surprising events” open to a multitude of interpretations, especially religious ones with moral origins, and you called them “God’s will.”
If you were liberal and someone asked what tomorrow’s weather might be, you talked of the weather as part of a continuum. You might say, “I wonder if it will be as dry as it was two years ago or last year.” If you were conservative, you talked instead of “accepting whatever tomorrow brings because no one knows what a new day can bring.”
The California Water Party straddled the fence, and it used the language of both the liberals and conservatives as it saw fit. You could have walked around the conference room and found that people identified with the Hoviaks because the CWP would either “Make America Grand,” or “Keep America Grand,” or “Make America Grand Again,” depending on whom you talked to.
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