36
MONTHS PASSED AND I GREW less and less human, but in a wondrous way. At least it was wondrous to me.
My stomach was still sloped. I wasn’t eating much and yet I had a considerable gut. It seemed I was holding on to the fat, as I’d heard sometimes happened after a miscarriage. Then again, I had become appallingly sedentary. Days went by that I didn’t comb my hair.
I would never have to work again, or at least not for many years. It turned out Leonard’s watch was worth not only more than his whole life but more than those of his ancestors as well. I took the watch to an appraiser in the Valley. He was so shocked when I laid it on his velvet tray that I thought he might pass out. I could have taken it elsewhere for a second opinion, but I didn’t. He might have ripped me off, but at that price point, it really didn’t matter.
I thought about moving back to New York, to Charles Street. I could now, impossibly, afford the type of apartment that Big Sky’s friend owned. The one I coveted, with the sauna wood and the thick white towels in the linen closet. But I grew to love my place near the ocean. Love is not the right word.
Most days I walked along the water, or sat at its edge with my eyes closed, watching films inside my brain. I never wore shoes. I was a cat lady on the sand. Dogs ran past me.
Eleanor and I texted several times a week. I could manage any relationship over text message. She was back home with her mother, who was on many anti-psychotic drugs. Eleanor told me that Mary watched cartoons all day. Reruns of Three’s Company.
I wish I didn’t love her, she wrote one day.
You can’t unlove someone, I wrote. You can only hate them.
She’s too broken to hate.
I’m sorry, I wrote.
I was thinking maybe of coming out there, to say hi. Maybe we could go to Cold Spring…
She would write something like that and I would avoid her for days. She always understood. She pulled back, but it was only a matter of time before she would pitch forward again. I lived in fear of a knock on my new door. I hadn’t given anyone my new address. I paid for a post office box in town.
Then one day Eleanor told me she had met someone. A girl with a good family. For girls like us, a good family was something to die for. At length she sent me a picture of herself and a woman in her late thirties outside the Freedom Tower. The two of them holding hands and looking at each other. I was so happy for her that I cried.
Naturally and daily I thought of killing myself. Not with pills, as I’d always planned, but to drown in the ocean. I felt I was owed that final beauty. But the instinct for survival is tremendous, which is why I felt my mother was stronger than I ever could have imagined.
ONE TYPICALLY CLOUDLESS DAY I was in the Dunkin’ Donuts on La Cienega and there was a woman at the counter, a very tall Black woman with beautiful sneakers and calves that sprang.
—I want it sweet, sweet, sweet, she said. I thought her voice was magic. She didn’t once look at the man she was ordering from. You hear me? And black. Black like me.
Seated at two separate tables were a Mexican woman and an old white man with paint-stained carpenter pants and a t-shirt spotted with sweat.
—Hello, Billy, the Mexican woman said.
—Hey, Rosita, said the old white man. He never looked at her. You married yet?
—No. I don’t wantu.
Billy nodded like he knew she was lying. She had huge breasts with a cavern in between. An old dress with embroidered flowers.
—How ’bout you, Rosita said. You married yet.
—Me? Naw.
—So, Rosita said. See. Why you asking me if I’m married if you ain’t?
Billy acted like Rosita hadn’t said anything. At the counter the Black lady tested her coffee.
—Ain’t sweet enough, she bellowed. I said sweet!
It was that very moment that something hurtled into my body and tried to saw me apart from the inside. I thought I might finally die. But the pain subsided and I could once again hear Rosita and Billy talking about how the one good thing about Los Angeles was that your mailboxes didn’t get crushed by the snowplow and I clocked myself being surprised that either of them had ever lived somewhere other than this Dunkin’ Donuts, and because I needed to be punished for that thought, the pain came again. Something was cracking inside of my rear. Something was whipping me. My body was attacking itself. It got worse quickly until I could no longer stand up.
I called her. I hadn’t spoken to her since the Santa Monica Pier, but she was all I had left. She had always been the only thing I had left. I’d felt her beside me in bed when she was old enough to be a straight body. I’d felt her little lips against my neck. Her little legs kicking against mine.
I watched her Prius pull into the parking lot of the worst Dunkin’ Donuts in Los Angeles. I was hunched over a table. Nobody in there cared if I was dying.
She emerged from her car in a black bodysuit and saw me through the dirty window. It wasn’t her fault that my father had come inside another woman. The next contraction was the worst one yet. The pain started in my rear. If the sound of someone hitting a cymbal could be translated into a physical sensation, that’s what it felt like. It shot up through my stomach and out through my head. I buckled. And then Alice was inside, holding me, and I was screaming.
—Too much caffeine, Alice
