L.A. Weather

by María Amparo Escandón

  Saturday, June 25th

  Camp was starting on Sunday, and Patricia and Daniel had just arrived in Lake Tahoe after a nine-hour drive from Los Angeles. Daniel would be spending the next two weeks with a group of LGBTQ-plus teenagers in the wilds. Daniel had found this summer camp. Patricia was surprised that it existed. She wished she’d had an opportunity like this to explore her own thoughts about sexual orientation as a teenager. She remembered a girl crush she’d had in seventh grade, a Guatemalan girl with a thick, long braid, and a wide smile, but in the end, her attraction to boys ended up pulling her in another direction.

  As the camp’s website explained, the goal was to create an environment where children could feel safe to express their thoughts, doubts, and feelings without anyone judging them, including questions of identity. How fitting, Patricia thought, that the camp would be located in Tahoe, on the shores of a lake split in half between two states, imaginary state lines dividing it lengthwise, and yet holding the same body of water.

  “I bet we’re going to go on horseback rides,” said Daniel, thrilled.

  “For sure. I saw on the website that you’re also going to have campfires and hike with a bunch of kids your age. You’ll put on a play that the parents are going to see at the end of camp. There’s also going to be an art workshop, and a lot of other stuff. How cool is that?”

  “Yeah. Cool.”

  “Are you nervous?”

  “A little. No. A lot. Are there going to be many LGBTQ-plus people?”

  “That’s the group of kids this camp is for.”

  “I’m just wondering what kind of people fall into the plus sign after the Q. Maybe I’m one of those.”

  “You’ll find out. I’m sure you’ll learn a lot from this experience. Maybe you’ll even be adding more letters to the acronym.”

  On arrival at the campground, on a wooded slope with a partial view of the lake, parents and children of various ages were ushered to the main cabin for a meet-and-greet.

  “Welcome everyone! Our counselors, Tyler and Logan, are going to pass around some baskets with pronoun pins for you to attach to your clothes. Parents too! Please pick out the one that best describes how you wish to be referred to. Don’t worry if you’re not sure. You can always get a different one later on,” said Coach Alex, a woman in her late thirties with a broad smile and sweet voice.

  Daniel passed on the “They” basket, but he picked out a “He” pin and put it on his jacket’s right pocket. Then he grabbed a “She” pin and fastened it on his left pocket.

  “Can I keep both?” he asked Logan.

  “You can do anything you want with those pins. Wear all three if you feel like it.”

  “Just these two.”

  After the orientation meeting, Patricia said good-bye to Daniel, and to convey trust in his judgment she gave him as little advice as possible. Of course he was going to brush his teeth. For sure he’d take care of his cellphone, avoid going in the lake by himself, and follow the rules and make friends. She didn’t tell him, “Enjoy camp.” Instead, she said, “Enjoy the journey.”

  Some of the parents left the campground together for an impromptu dinner at a nearby restaurant, but Patricia declined the invitation and went to town by herself.

  Open mic was in full swing at the Divided Sky. The place was overcrowded past the legal limit, so she squeezed herself into a narrow space between two stools to order a mezcal at the bar.

  “Are you into the smoky kind?” asked the man sitting on one of the stools.

  Patricia drank a sip from her shot glass and took her time to answer.

  “I do like the smoky kind, espadín, but if I can get some tobalá, I could sing all night.”

  “I’m Mexican, too,” he said, guessing accurately.

  His name was Jesús. He wore a man bun just like half the other men at the place, a flannel shirt over a dark blue T-shirt, and a pair of jeans that seemed one size too large.

  “I knew you were Mexican by the way you pronounced ‘mezcal,’” he said, preemptively answering a question Patricia had in her mind.

  “I have to go,” he said after the second round. “My friends are coming over. Want to join us?”

  Surprising herself, she did.

  Jesús drove along a dirt road into the forest and pulled into the driveway of a log cabin. Four other cars were already parked and loud music was coming out of the house, so Patricia ruled out the possibility of getting raped and murdered by a lone woodsman in a pitch-dark forest.

  “My roommates and I have an art club every Saturday night and we invite a bunch of people, some new and some regulars. We call it La Cabane Bohéme. Everyone brings an art project that needs to be completed by dawn.”

  “What’s yours?”

  “Mine is taking longer to build. It’s a Trojan horse. I’m bringing it to Burning Man this year. I’m going to sleep inside. It’s out back. I’ll show it to you later.”

  Jesús’s friends could have been the people from the bar, same kind of crowd. Everyone worked strewn about on the floor, as if they were kindergartners. One guy had brought a sewing machine and was busy putting together a vest made of shocking-pink faux fur. Another one was assembling a book using flattened cereal boxes and string. Yet another one in the far corner was painting a cartoonlike figure on a canvas leaning against the wall. Patricia could see the holes between the logs on the walls, some of them stuffed with pieces of old fabric or newspaper, but others clearly open, allowing the cool forest air in. She wondered how these people dealt with that in the winter months.

  Patricia located a few half-empty bottles of alcohol on the kitchen counter and filled a shot glass with tequila after she removed suspicious fingerprints with her shirt. She found a spot on the floor, since the only couch available already had four people crammed one on top of the other, and sat next to a girl who offered her a drag of her joint. Taking a closer look, Patricia realized that these people were actually college students. Jesús’s beard and thick eyebrows had disoriented her and she had failed to estimate his age.

  “We just graduated last week,” he said. “Most people are leaving town, but I’m hanging out here for a while. The Tahoe vibe is hard to resist.”

  Neither Jesús nor Patricia stayed in the living room to watch the art projects evolve. They spent the rest of the night in his room, where the rancid-smelling sheets badly needed washing and piles of clothes here and there resembled collapsed bodies. But the sex with Jesús was terrific; just as good as sex with Eric and with Benjamin. She added him to her mental catalog of ex-lovers: the Krav Maga instructor from Echo Park, the surfer dude from Windansea Beach in La Jolla, the silkscreen artist from Frogtown, and the landscape architect from Venice, all top performers. Those who didn’t excel had been quickly forgotten. She thought about Claudia, about Gabriel and his lover, Tammy, and suddenly her hands felt sweaty.

  Sunday, June 26th

  As she drove back to Los Angeles the next morning, Patricia realized that somehow she’d known that what seemed an innocent question about mezcal would evolve into a night of sex and abandon. She had to admit that she had been looking for it. She loved Eric, but what kind of love was it? So much in their relationship was incomplete, but taking on a lover would only result in having an incomplete relationship not just with one man, but with two.

  Then the call came from Keila.

  “Olivia is getting divorced.”

  Tuesday, June 28th

  Oscar wasn’t running from the news of Olivia’s imminent divorce, he thought. As he drove onto the freeway, he kept reminding himself that he had work to do at Happy Crunch Almond Orchard. As soon as he parked by the gate, he got busy with Los Tres Primos monitoring, evaluating, and fighting predator mites, peach tree borers, six-spotted thrips, protein-feeding ant colonies, and freeloading ground squirrels that could ruin his crop. And what about nasty sons-in-law? For the millionth time he tried to switch back to the task at hand: the traps, the rodenticides, the protection of the delicate
hulls that were about to split, but he concluded that Felix and Gabriel were the most dangerous pests and gave up avoiding the issue. Now he had two daughters whose married lives were unraveling and he couldn’t help them, just as he couldn’t help his almonds. Just as he couldn’t help himself.

  Not only did he have to save his crop, his orchard, but he had to earn money, he had to deliver. Claudia could tap into the proceeds of her royalties, but for how long? Would he have to help Olivia? Downsizing to a smaller house or an apartment would have been an option for him and Keila, but now with Claudia’s situation, it was unlikely she could ever live on her own. And Patricia? She’d never lived anywhere else. Did he have the heart to kick her out? Could she be helpful in caring for her older sister? He realized how lucky he’d been all his life, never having to worry about money, and here he was, at sixty, watching his fortune wither in the hot, thin, dry California air.

  July

  Saturday, July 2nd

  The musty smell of standing water came from the flower vase at the center of Keila’s dining table. Things had taken a turn for the worse in that tiny ecological unit: the dahlias were starting to lose their furiously red petals, which fell haphazardly onto the wooden surface, and their long, hollow stems were bending down in submission, accepting their inevitable death. Having been raised in Mexico, Keila knew that dahlias symbolized change, new life, and opportunities. But on that afternoon, she wasn’t thinking about this well-known fact.

  “But why? Why would you keep me out of this?” Keila asked.

  Olivia bit her lip hard.

  “You and Dad already had too much to deal with. I didn’t want to pile it on.”

  “I could have helped you. And why was I the only one in the dark?”

  “Only Patricia knew, Mom.”

  Patricia nodded from the other side of the table. “She wanted to protect you, Mom,” she said.

  “Protect me from what, my daughter’s ordeal?” she replied to Patricia, then turning to Olivia: “I’m your mother. I am entitled to participate in all of your life’s travails.”

  Olivia picked up a wilted dahlia from the table and squeezed it in her hand.

  “I could have given you some advice that might have avoided this terrible outcome,” said Keila, immediately regretting it. What authority did she have to give that kind of advice to her daughter? What was she doing to save her own marriage?

  “What about the twins?” she asked Olivia, maneuvering around the subject. “Are you sacrificing their well-being, their family, for two embryos, two little buggers who don’t have a life yet? And they’ll have to be destroyed anyway!”

  “They’re not buggers. And they deserve a shot at life. Besides, the reason I wanted to end my marriage with Felix was not just the embryos. I ruined our relationship by pushing him too hard. It’s my fault alone.”

  Keila wrapped her hand around Olivia’s and decided that silence was the best reply.

  Patricia kept quiet throughout the conversation, thinking that a separation from Eric would be out of the question. Her sisters had beat her to it, and she would just have to wait for a better moment, or work on her marriage. It bothered her that so many pleasurable things—or things that should be pleasurable—had been turned into work: “Are you still working on that salad?” she’d heard countless waiters ask her in the middle of a meal, prompting her to answer, “It’s not work at all. I’m actually enjoying it.”

  “You better not be thinking about leaving Eric,” said Keila all of a sudden, jolting Patricia back from her ruminations.

  Monday, July 4th

  Early in the morning Oscar had gone down to the garage to dig out a small American flag from the file cabinet where Keila kept her naturalization papers. He was now attaching it with tape to Claudia’s hospital bed headboard.

  Over the next few hours, the entire family paraded through Claudia’s room, one after the other. Olivia brought her some gossip magazines, as her sight was improving quickly. Patricia gave her brand-new pajamas. Keila got her an arrangement of red roses with white and purple orchids. A group of her friends, mostly cooks, showed up with Independence Day goodies that she would not be able to taste, not even the yellowtail sashimi with ponzu sauce and jalapeño slices that she loved so much, from her dear chef friend Hiroshi.

  “Sorry, man, tastes like rubber bands.”

  “I understand. No worries, I can give it to the nurses,” said Hiroshi, walking away with the white Styrofoam box and chopsticks in his hands.

  Up until that moment, Claudia had been sure that she’d be able to go back to work after she finished her rehabilitation. She had lost the palate to create new tastes, but she believed she would be able to rely on whatever she could remember. After all, the sense of smell was the sense of memory. She could still evoke the scent of the fresh cilantro from her mother’s garden; how she crushed a leaf between her fingers, sniffing the fragrance in delight. Then her imagination suddenly became flooded by the pungent smells of a mix of chiles being ground together in the molcajete to make mole rojo. Those were her best childhood moments, when she could not leave Keila’s kitchen, mystified by the unexpected flavors and perfumes that wafted from her pots and pans when she cooked her steamed nopales with onion and epazote, Hidalgo style; her huitlacoches with calabacitas and béchamel; her norteño tamales with black beans; her rabbit in chile ancho sauce; or her shrimp in pipián mole. And not just her Mexican recipes, but she vividly remembered her mother’s Jewish cuisine, too: her home-baked challah bread, gefilte fish, holishkes, chopped liver, knish, rugelach, and her famous matzo ball soup.

  At what point had she become an incorrigible voluptuary, finely attuned to the succulent messages coming from the outside through the windows of her body? She didn’t know. Perhaps she had been born equipped with this talent, inherited from Keila. But she had it wrong about the sense of smell. It was the actual smells and flavors that brought about memories, not the other way around. Without real scents captured by her nostrils, without flavors enchanting or repulsing her taste buds, all she had were clear recollections of her past, but they felt flat and distant, as if seen behind a thick glass.

  “I heard your show got canceled,” said Hiroshi when he returned from the nurses’ station. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Just residuals from now on, if that’s consolation,” said Claudia.

  “I’m glad I taped most of the episodes.”

  That bit of information gave Claudia’s battered self-esteem a little breath of life. She might not be able to cook again, or even to write about food. What credibility would a chef who can’t taste or smell have? But her work would transcend her, and that validated everything.

  By three o’clock everyone had left the hospital to attend Fourth of July cookouts and pool parties around town in perfect seventy-three-degree weather, while Claudia stayed behind, in her hospital bed, wearing her new pajamas one size too large, and for the first time in her life, feeling sorry for herself.

  Tuesday, July 5th

  A thought, a persistent one, forced itself into Keila’s mind as she dragged along the driveway two large trash bags full of red, white, and blue detritus and leftovers from the Fourth of July family cookout to dump in the appropriate color-coded trash bins by the side of the house: Why bother trying to save my marriage to set a good example for the girls, if they’re getting divorced themselves?

  Wednesday, July 6th

  Predawn freeway dwellers: Uber drivers taking people to LAX to catch the first flight out, territorial gym buffs rushing to get their favorite bike in spinning class, FedEx drivers starting their daily rounds, jardineros in their Mad Max trucks filled with tools and hoses and contraptions masterfully deployed to seduce the earth, someone else’s earth, into beauty. These were the people sharing the lanes with Patricia that morning. She, too, was on a mission.

  She pulled over outside the fertility lab where Olivia’s cryopreserved embryos were kept and parked.

  “I have an appointment with Dr. Kell
er to see if I’m a candidate for IVF,” she said as she arrived at the registration desk. “Patricia Remillard, eight o’clock.”

  After a few minutes of filling out paperwork, she was called in where Mabel, the ultrasound technician, waited. She closed the door behind Patricia and spoke in a low voice.

  “Is Olivia ready?”

  “She’s eager to move forward,” said Patricia. “If we really want to do this, we need to move fast. We have very few days before the lab gets the court order. It’s final now.”

  “Here are the prep meds and instructions,” she said, as she handed her a plain brown paper bag. “Make sure you start taking them today and come back in a couple of weeks.”

  Patricia had befriended Mabel during the many fertility procedures Olivia had gone through. As her sister’s treatments intensified and Felix lost all interest, she promised herself to always accompany her and hold her hand. It was during those multiple efforts and failures that Patricia and Mabel had started to go out after work. Patricia even had introduced Mabel to a copywriter from her agency. They fell in love and ended up living together. And now Mabel and Patricia had become co-conspirators in a scheme only they and Olivia knew about.

  “I’ve got all the paperwork ready and set the eggs aside. Thankfully we have a new lab technician and I was able to get around her,” said Mabel, reassuring Patricia. “We can’t let this monster get away with discarding Olivia’s embryos. Felix is such a sore loser. If he could have, he would have auctioned them off on eBay! You should have seen the ad he wanted to post. And he bragged about it to everyone in the clinic! We had to tell him it was illegal. Unbelievable.”

  * * *

  After the appointment and on the way to a meeting at Fox Studios, Patricia called Olivia.