L.A. Weather

by María Amparo Escandón

  By the time she reached Vermont Avenue—every other storefront posting signs in Korean and Spanish—she had vowed never to use such overused and inaccurate words as “fusion,” “global”/“local,” “syncretistic,” “niche,” “assimilated,” “mash-up,” and, worst of all, “California cuisine,” which was so broad and overused it meant nothing anymore. In her perennial search for the best foods regardless of cuisine, exploring the vast cornucopia at her disposal, she’d realized that the little mom-and-pop restaurants in the mini-malls were where she found the mother lode of deliciousness. Why? Because immigrants operated them. They had brought their homeland’s flavors in their suitcases and were adding them to the never-ending gastronomic experiment that took place every day in Los Angeles. She loved to observe, but more important, to participate in the frequent overlap between different cuisines, resulting in an endless continuum of delight and surprise. Multiply that by more than one hundred and fifty countries and you had yourself Angeleno cuisine.

  Claudia had considered opening a food truck, but developed a TV show and a catering business instead. She’d done sold-out pop-up experiences whenever she found a suitable location, but mostly she poured her passion into her cooking show, damn the Michelin stars.

  She left her car with the valet, sat at the farthest table, her preferred spot right near the kitchen (to better smell the aromas that spilled out into the dining room), and ordered plain old short-rib tacos with kimchi. She moved the napkin aside (according to Keila, true foodies didn’t use one; they licked their fingers) and rearranged the condiments on the table, a habit of hers. But when her meal arrived, she was, curiously, fast asleep, her head resting peacefully on the table by the Tsang stir-fry sauce and the bulgogi sauce.

  Thursday, March 10th

  Avoiding each other around the house became a contactless sport of sorts. If Keila was in the kitchen, Oscar went to the living room. If Oscar was in the backyard, Keila stayed inside. If they crossed paths on the staircase, they’d turn their backs to get past, like people do in an airplane’s tight aisle. Oscar had refused to move to another room, so Keila put a pillow between them at night, like a barrier, a symbol of her Crossed Legs Strike. At the table, Keila would ask Patricia, sitting next to Oscar, things like, “Please tell your dad to pass me the salt.”

  “Is this how you’re working on mending your marriage?” Patricia would ask, irritated. But neither of her parents would reply, seemingly stuck in a rut.

  Most times, Oscar would drive to Happy Crunch Almond Orchard and come back late at night. If he stayed home, Keila would make up endless errands around the neighborhood, schedule lunches with her friends from book club, or get spa treatments at the gym.

  That night, in bed, as Patricia observed how the rhythm of the house had changed, she wondered if she was witnessing, up front and in real time, her parents’ marriage implode. She buried her face on her pillow and wept.

  Friday, March 11th

  Felix forgot it was Olivia’s birthday. She didn’t remind him.

  Sunday, March 13th

  Oscar had two watches. The nice one and the one he wore whenever he traveled with Keila. “If I get mugged, I won’t be sad to lose this cheapo,” he’d say, proud to outsmart the crooks.

  This morning, he adjusted both watches to daylight saving time, wishing he could advance the hands all the way to harvest season and skip the complication of watering his almond trees during the summer months.

  He went to the toolshed by the pool’s heater—a useless piece of junk now that there was no pool to heat—and sat at the worktable to study and prepare. The next day he’d be attending an Almond Field Day and there was much to learn.

  Monday, March 14th

  Early on this chilly sixty-two-degree morning, Oscar drove along Highway 33 in Lost Hills, where the Almond Field Day sponsored by the University of California Cooperative Extension was being held. Armed with a coat, hat, sunscreen, and good walking shoes, he parked his SUV and made his way along the rows of trees showing off their full bloom to where the group of growers was already listening to the experts give their talks in folding chairs. These were UC Davis professors and soil conservationists. Him? He was a good student, exemplary, if anyone asked. As he listened to the panelists discuss highly technical topics like integrated crop pollination, or the latest in blue orchard bee research, he realized how much he’d learned about almonds since he first set foot on the land that was now Happy Crunch Almond Orchard, and how much he had yet to understand. He remembered when years before, looking on LoopNet, a commercial real estate website, for a property to buy, he’d come across an almond farm for sale. All the previous options he’d considered had been properties in the city: office buildings, apartment complexes, interesting ideas, yes, simple business opportunities, but nothing that made his heart leap. But when he saw the pictures of rows of almond trees in bloom he felt an unexpected closeness to his Mexican grandfather, Papá José, and his grandmother, Mamá Peregrina. He imagined the soil under their fingernails; their skin, sunburnt; their callous hands from working the land. How could this farm not be his calling? He’d bought it within weeks and started not just his new endeavor—a natural way of life for a true Alvarado—but a family secret that tore his heart in half: the left ventricle filled with joy, the right with dread.

  When the panel ended and the growers clapped and walked over to the panelists to ask questions, he checked his own fingernails and there it was: dirt.

  Tuesday, March 15th

  Destroy? Donate to science? Cryopreserve? Give up for adoption? The letter from the fertility lab came on a day when Olivia was in Montecito delivering a home she had just finished remodeling and Felix happened to open the mail. It was a routine notice that was sent every two years to couples who had embryos in cryopreservation, to find out if their decision had changed since their original consent. Demand was high in those days. The labs would have a better use for embryos idly sitting in the freezer. Fertility tourism had increased from countries where in-vitro fertilization was illegal. Desperate couples came to California to adopt embryos and get implanted, going back home with the promise of a family. As the field of human genetics advanced, people with hereditary diseases could now choose to adopt embryos with healthier genes to avoid passing down their illness to their offspring.

  When Olivia came home that evening, Felix presented the options to her, with his final choice.

  “Destroy them, of course.”

  “There’s no way we’ll kill our last two embryos. They are babies in the making, like Diana and Andrea.”

  “And how do you envision making those babies?”

  Felix’s stinging words sent her straight back to the day Diana and Andrea were born. Placenta percreta was the name given to her condition. Thirty-two weeks into her pregnancy and not able to continue to term, she was rushed to the hospital hemorrhaging severely. The two placentas that enveloped her babies had grown hundreds of veins and attached themselves to her uterus, causing intricate ramifications in her entire reproductive system, like the thirsty roots of a tree, and had ventured into her bladder. This was her body’s answer to how much she wanted to hang on to her children.

  The C-section had turned into a slasher-movie scene, with doctors and nurses splattered with blood, surgical instruments flying around, gauze after gauze ending up in trays that were replaced at high speed, and plenty of instructions yelled in foul language. As soon as Diana and Andrea were pulled out of Olivia’s womb, she lost consciousness and didn’t realize that she had delivered a set of healthy twins until six days later. The girls were hastily taken to the crib to get stabilized while the doctor removed Olivia’s uterus. Blood donors lined up, mostly family members with matching blood type, and a few other visitors who were later given chicken sandwiches and juice boxes and sent to sit in the waiting area to recover while the doctor tried to save Olivia. By the thirteenth hour, the doctor gave up on his race to cauterize each vein in order to stop the bleeding and called a te
am of gastroenterologists preparing to perform a gastric bypass surgery in a nearby operating room and asked for help.

  After several days of touch-and-go recovery, Olivia was finally allowed to see her daughters for a brief moment.

  “I can’t think of a happier time in my life,” she said to Felix, teary-eyed, as soon as the nurse took the babies back to the crib.

  Felix shook his head in disbelief, thinking about the painful and scary details of Olivia’s ordeal, and suddenly felt severely shortchanged by Nature for not giving men the ability to bear children.

  Now, with the form from the fertility lab in her hands, Olivia realized that Felix was right, as he put it bluntly: “No factory, no product.” How could she bear more children with nothing left of her womb but a hole impossible to fill?

  Felix broke into her thoughts, bringing her back to the letter from the fertility lab still in her hand. “I’m sick of the drama our parenthood has brought us. Miscarriages, stillbirths, surgeries, treatments. I’m done!”

  “But look at what we do have! Two beautiful girls! Wasn’t it all worth it?”

  “My decision shouldn’t be a surprise. You know how I feel about all this. Those embryos have no chance anyway.”

  He pulled a pen out of his pocket, took the form from Olivia’s hand, checked off the option to destroy the two remaining embryos that were in cryopreservation at the lab, signed at the bottom of the page, and slid the letter across the kitchen table for Olivia to sign above her name.

  “I’m not signing this. We made the choice to preserve when we first started the treatment and I’m not changing my mind now.”

  “This letter is going to stay right here, on this table, until you sign.”

  That was the table where countless conversations between Olivia and Felix had taken place. Witness to their angst and desperation to create a family, the table sat in a nook adjacent to the kitchen, withstanding tears, fist slams, laughter, and screams throughout the years. The anticipation before a result, the disappointment that came afterward, the exhaustion of it all bounced back and forth across the table, like a ball in a tennis match. To anyone else, this was a typical mid-century modern teak table with four chairs designed by Hans Olsen in the fifties. Beautifully round. Well kept. Barely a scratch. Many a knockoff had been built over time, but this was an original. Olivia had found it during one of her frequent rummaging excursions to thrift shops around town. Immediately recognizing it, she bought it for next to nothing and rejoiced all the way home, with the chairs barely fitting in the minivan’s back seat and half the table sticking out of the open back door. But objects are known to change meaning, and this table, now, was a landscape of discord.

  “Just leave the letter there. I’ll take care of it when I’m ready,” said Olivia, and left the kitchen, accidentally banging her hip against the countertop.

  Once in her bedroom, she texted Patricia.

  I need you.

  Patricia was on a flight back to Los Angeles to meet Eric for drinks and a fuck at their usual hotel right outside LAX before he got on a later flight to San Francisco, so she didn’t see Olivia’s text until eight seconds after the plane’s tires touched the runway.

  What’s going on?

  Felix wants to get rid of the embryos.

  Can I come over later?

  No. He’s home tonight. I’ll come over tomorrow after work.

  During happy hour—Negroni for Eric, mezcal for Patricia—she kept thinking about Olivia, and continued to throughout her lovemaking session with Eric. But toward the end, with her inner thighs pressing against Eric’s ears, and just before she felt what she later qualified as a monster orgasm, she switched her thoughts from Olivia to Benjamin, her client at Target. This unwanted thought was becoming more frequent, and more so when her clitoris was being stimulated. Why was Benjamin intruding in her intimate life with Eric? It wasn’t even a sexual image, just flashes of Benjamin rapping his fingers on the conference room table, or Benjamin checking his phone and typing away with his thumbs, or Benjamin looking into Patricia’s eyes and saying, “You’re so right.” She pushed him out of her mind and focused on the moment. Her time with Eric was a scarce commodity and she had to maximize every minute of it. During their after-sex routine, she cuddled in his arms. It was the wrong time to find gaps in their calendars where they could coincide somewhere, but they did anyway.

  “I want to tell you something that’s been on my mind,” said Patricia.

  Eric put his shirt on and grabbed his pants.

  Patricia felt compelled to disclose her thoughts about Benjamin, but instead delivered a different one, a suspicion that she had been nursing for a while.

  “I think Daniel is gay.”

  “Are you sure? How do you know?”

  “I don’t. I’m just guessing.”

  “Has he said anything about being gay?”

  “No. I wish he had. He seems more irritable and restless, even tired. He complained that some kid at school called him ‘bean queen.’ I got the kid’s name and told Mrs. Rodríguez. She demanded he write Daniel a letter of apology, but Daniel is still undone. Any thoughts? How should I approach this?”

  “I’m glad you told on that stupid kid. I can’t stand demeaning slurs. What a little asshole. He should have been suspended.”

  “I know. What an asshole.”

  “As for Daniel, if you want my opinion, I think it’s healthy to be open on the subject for all involved. Just ask him directly. I don’t know.”

  Patricia had hoped Eric would give her a bit more moral support. But what she usually got was stern words directing her relationship with Daniel at every turn. “Where’s his homework? You let him play video games again!” he’d snap.

  Over time she’d become aware of his inability to get emotionally involved, especially when it came to Daniel. Perhaps it was a result of Eric’s strict French education at the Lycée Français, always focused on emphasizing failures as opposed to praising accomplishments. Quite the opposite of what she’d experienced at her Montessori school.

  “That’s my thinking, too,” she said, resigned.

  She thanked Eric, and after a hug and more kisses, he hopped on the airport shuttle and Patricia drove home wanting more from her husband, but not really being able to pinpoint exactly what.

  Wednesday, March 16th

  The most loved space in the Alvarados’ Spanish Revival–style home was the living room, designed to welcome large groups of guests who gladly sank into the comfortable sofas sprinkled with cushions of various sizes and fabrics. A small collection of Latin American and Chicano art decorated the walls. Among Oscar’s favorites were a Linda Vallejo painting and a small Carlos Almaraz drawing, but it was mostly art pieces created by Keila that were the highlight—couples in love, couples in distress, all in high-fired polychrome ceramics. But Olivia and Patricia were not sitting in the living room that evening. They preferred the kitchen counter, perched on stools, each drinking a beer straight from the bottle.

  “Don’t sign it, just leave the letter where it is. He’ll forget about it and one day it’ll be gone.”

  “Impossible. He’s going to insist until I drop dead from old age.”

  “He can’t make you destroy the embryos and he can’t make a one-sided decision. If you don’t agree, you’ll have to lawyer up.”

  “What? No! He’s my husband. I want us to agree on our own, but I’m afraid it’s not going to be possible. The best I can do is procrastinate. He did say he’d wait. Maybe he’ll agree someday.”

  Patricia nodded uncertainly.

  “Look, all I want is to hold on to the embryos, to keep them right where they are. They are a possibility, a promise,” continued Olivia.

  “Not to give Felix any credit, but he has a point. There’s not much you can do now, after what you went through during Diana and Andrea’s birth. Why keep them?”

  Olivia was silent for a moment. She played with the beer bottle cap and looked out the window not registeri
ng that the sun, in its daily act of setting, had just painted everything orange.

  “They’re mine,” she said, loud, clear, for the world to listen.

  Patricia realized that Olivia would not give in.

  “If that’s your final decision, how can I help?” she asked after a long silence.

  “Just hug me.”

  Patricia reached over to Olivia and put her arms around her. “Forever, sis.”

  And in that embrace, the memory of so many colorful family calendars that had been posted on the refrigerator year after year noting everyone’s comings and goings popped into Patricia’s mind. The kitties calendar, the puppies calendar, the Provence calendar, the Disney characters calendar—all of them thematic and showing different pictures every month. She realized that there was a strong thread of unity with Olivia, and this made her hopeful for the rest of her family. She thought about her parents’ commitment to try to repair their marriage but couldn’t come up with any visible effort. And just when her hopes were about to dissolve, Keila came into the kitchen looking for scissors to cut ribbons for the Easter baskets she was making and found her daughters in mid-embrace.