Summer in the City of Roses

by Michelle Ruiz Keil

  Lorna settles on the floor on the other side of the coffee table with Scout in her lap. She is such a slut. Not Lorna! Iph is a feminist, even in jealousy. It’s Scout who spreads herself around like peanut butter on crackers. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Certainly some people would say Iph is a slut. She’s known George for—how many days now? If Lorna hadn’t come in, who knows what they’d be doing?

  “How about you, Iph? Truth or dare?” Lorna’s face is freshly scrubbed, and she’s wearing a white baby tee, pink shorts, the gold shoes, and a ponytail. She looks like a fourteen-year-old runway model.

  “Truth.” It’s what Iph always says—the only way to survive this game, which should rightly be called Sex & Misdemeanors.

  “Hmmm.” Lorna is pretending to think. It’s true: when you’re that pretty, you don’t have to be able to act.

  Me-ow, Iph thinks. So much for my inner feminist.

  “Lorna, no,” George says. “Come on. Don’t be like this.”

  “I’m playing. Trying to, you know, make the moment less awkward. But I can go now.” She stands. Iph would bet her last ten bucks from busking that Lorna is bluffing. “Sorry for the interruption.” Lorna says interruption like it’s the title of a porno.

  “I didn’t say you had to go,” George says. “I’m just not in the mood for games.”

  Go, Iph thinks. Go, go, go!

  Lorna’s face slides from femme fatale straight into girl next door. Maybe she can act after all. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I barged in. I came to talk, but if it’s a bad time . . .”

  Is she being honest or manipulative? And when is she going to leave? Not that they’ll ever get the mood back. One look at George is all Iph needs to see that.

  “We can talk . . . we’ll go have one cigarette, okay?”

  Iph’s body fills with poisonous gas. She will expel it and kill them all. Except, of course, because of the patriarchy and her own passive personality, she won’t kill anyone. She will swallow it. Swallow the poison, her own tongue, until her stomach balloons. Her eye whites will turn saffron, and her skin will follow. And no, she doesn’t think this is overdramatic.

  Iph stands. “Don’t leave on my account,” she says. “I’m going to bed.”

  “Iph!” George stands, too, as if suddenly remembering she’s there.

  Iph wills her face to be still. Wills her body to the bedroom. Except she isn’t going. Her face is contorting. Her eyes sting.

  NO!

  No no no no no no no.

  She’s crying.

  In front of George. In front of Lorna.

  “Oh my god!” Lorna says. Yet again, her face is different. This one seems closer to the real girl. “I’m such a dick. Wouldn’t you know? It was me, not George! I’m the one who made you cry.”

  “Not just you,” George says, grabbing Iph’s hand and pulling her back to the sofa. Everyone breathes and drinks and listens to the bus clacking along outside.

  “Things have been so weird since that night I met you at the movies,” Lorna finally says. “It almost feels like it’s the shoes. I keep wanting to go to the train station to visit my mom in Tacoma, except we’re not speaking. I left work early tonight and started walking to the opposite side of Burnside. I didn’t even know where I was going. I figured it out when I got off the bus and starting walking toward Division. And here”—she hands George a key—“I should have left it when I bailed.”

  George takes it. More silence. Iph sniffs. There’s Kleenex in a mother-of-pearl tissue holder that is one of Iph’s favorite things in Nana’s house. It’s such a sweetness, to make this thing used for colds and crying a pretty part of the decor. She takes a tissue and blows her nose, not worrying herself about dainty Lorna.

  “I kept thinking about you,” Lorna is saying. Wait—she’s talking to Iph. “How nice you were. How decent. I could tell how much you liked Georgie. You could have done ten different things besides try to get me to go down and patch it up. But you didn’t.”

  “If you and George want to be together, that’s what you should do,” Iph says. “I’m going home soon anyway.”

  “You are?” George’s eyes are wide.

  “Orr called my dad. He’s fine.”

  “So wait, you’re leaving, then?”

  “I can leave now. Or I can stay. My dad doesn’t care what I do.” That’s not quite true, but Iph can’t stop her own pity party. There’s one way to be sure of the outcome here, and that’s to beat them to the punch. She folds her arms and refuses to look at either of them.

  “All right, that’s it.” Lorna is surprisingly versatile. In this mode, she could easily be cast as the older sister or a young mom. “George, come on. You’re totally over me and into Iph, right? Be honest! I can take it.”

  George’s open mouth is classic. It’s weird how responses considered cliché onstage feel natural in real life. “You want to talk about this now?”

  “Yes,” Lorna says. “I think it’s only fair.”

  “Fair to who?” Iph is surprised to hear herself asking.

  “To you,” Lorna says to Iph, wrinkling her adorable nose like that’s the obvious answer. “I mean, I came in drama-ready. You were an innocent bystander.”

  “I guess some things never change.” It could have been an insult, but George says it like it’s the opposite. These two have some serious history.

  Lorna smiles for real, and of course she has dimples. “So, out with it, George. Just how over me are you?”

  George laughs outright. Iph finds herself . . . smiling. The whole thing is oddly not embarrassing. Just interesting. Her kingdom for a notepad. Or a video camera.

  “Last week, it was hovering at fifty percent. But the last few days . . . I have to admit, it’s closer to ninety. Maybe eighty-five. I might always love you a little, okay? But I see how I put a lot on you. We didn’t even know each other that well. We never really talked that much.”

  “Oh my god, you guys. I don’t need to hear about your sex life.” Iph can’t believe she’s joking now, but every time she tries to buy into the drama of this love triangle, something else happens instead.

  Lorna is laughing. George is laughing, red. Iph is laughing so hard she sneezes. Lora hands her another tissue.

  They all reach for their gins and sip on cue.

  “So, Lorna,” Iph says. “Truth or dare?”

  18

  If I Were

  to Go Back

  Orr can’t fall asleep in the graveyard. The dead are buried too deep to be any company, and the moon has traveled somewhere behind the trees. He’s waited as long as he can for something to happen, an X-Files–worthy brush with aliens or the occult, but there is only a pair of fat raccoons.

  Orr has been thinking about the baby squirrel Mom found last year. They first saw it sitting preternaturally still on the driveway down to their house. Mom stopped the car and jumped out, knelt, held out her hand. “I don’t know how,” Mom had said, “but I knew she’d trust me.”

  They called the Audubon Society, but the person on the phone decided that because it was born so late in the season, it must be a red squirrel, not native, and therefore ineligible for rescue.

  Undaunted, Mom called the library information line, where the librarians would look things up for you on their computer. A squirrel rescue was found. The lady there knew exactly what to do. She held out her cupped hand and took the little thing, stroking it with her finger until it stretched with pleasure. “This is no red squirrel,” she said. “This is a Douglas pine squirrel. It has every right to be here in Oregon. Every right!”

  They’d all loved that so much. Even Dad. Every once in a while, one of them would say it out of nowhere. “This is a Douglas pine squirrel! It has every right to be in Oregon. Every right!”

  Would they ever say it again?

  That squirrel lady was
so much like Jane, so calm and assured and easy to relax around. But unlike that little squirrel, Orr is no orphan, and his right to be at Penelope is tenuous at best. Even though he was trying to protect Jane, there’s something off about what happened. In what he did. He wishes he could figure out what.

  Mom always says love is complicated—usually when he bugs her for stories about her family. There is something bad in Mom’s past, a love there she doesn’t think she should feel. And a terrible, destroying hurt. She cries sometimes, and Dad holds her. Once, Orr saw her curled up in Dad’s lap like she was child. He rocked her back and forth the way he used to with Orr before the meltdowns and freak-outs hollowed out the love between them.

  That’s what Jane needs. Someone who loves her the way Dad loves Mom. But Orr can’t make her hold out for that. Maybe it’s something she needs to figure out for herself.

  And then there is the violence. Orr knows he needs to think about that. Once is an anomaly. Now there is a pattern.

  The worst was the thing that happened when Mom was packing. The way he pushed her suitcase off the bed. The way the green silk earring box flew out and hit her below the eye. Orr never meant to hurt her, but the box left a mark. Orr saw it when she came to say goodbye.

  Tonight, it was Jane he hurt, even if he hadn’t meant to. But Red—he’d meant to hurt him. Orr had never used his fists that way before, not on a person. It was a little like a meltdown, a sort of fugue state. The worst part is that Orr liked it—being stronger than Red. Making him fall. Defeating him.

  Orr gets up and brushes off his butt. Why his bare feet aren’t killing him is a mystery, but they feel normal. Portland has toughened them.

  It’s close to sunrise, and he knows where to go. He stretches and begins a slow trot. Out of the corner of his eye, a white flash of something. A ghost? No, ghosts probably aren’t so cliché. He runs again, a little faster.

  Again, a flash. He stops. Nothing. Starts. Stops.

  Finally, he sees them. A slinky white dog, tall as a wolfhound with the legs of a gazelle, and a smaller pure-white wolf dog about the size of Orr’s friend, the lady coyote, running together on the far side of the graveyard. Orr crouches. They bow. Orr bows back. They charge, stopping a few feet away from him, tails wagging.

  The big one approaches first, sniffing Orr in an almost maternal way. Her cool nose on his forehead erases the last of the throbbing headache. The smaller dog, her protégé by the look of things, bounds over, unable to wait any longer. This one must still be a pup. Orr romps with him in the grass, then races the ghost dogs out of the cemetery. They pace him to the exit and trot alongside as he heads down Stark Street toward Plum’s house. At Southeast 30th, they part ways. Orr’s trot falters. He’s tired now. And very hungry.

  Two blocks away, he tastes Plum on the air—dandelion greens, hot sauce, and honey. He also smells a cigarette. Closer, he sees the red glow on Plum’s porch.

  It’s Jane, sitting on the front steps.

  He slows to a walk. Stands on the sidewalk—looking respectful, he hopes. He waits for her to say something first.

  “Orr.” Jane’s face is all worry and mascara. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’ve never done that before. Never hit anyone.”

  “Whoa,” Jane says. “You cleaned Red’s clock, babe. He’ll certainly think twice before pissing off the next skinny fifteen-year-old.”

  Orr is shaking, so relieved it tells him how scared he was. Jane pats the step beside her. He sits, close but not too close.

  “Jane,” he says, “you deserve someone good.”

  Jane closes her eyes. “Red used to be different.”

  “Different how?”

  Jane cocks her head and looks at Orr. “I’m trying to think.” She laughs. “Actually, he was drunk then, too. We met in a train yard. He showed me how to ride the rails.”

  “Like a Woody Guthrie song?” This is stuff Dad likes, Depression-era old-timey freight-riding troubadour stuff. That and Sinatra.

  “More like don’t get killed, don’t get raped. Traveling with a guy was smart.”

  “Red doesn’t seem smart, Jane.” Orr lets a twinkle show in his eyes so Jane knows he’s teasing her.

  “Nope. That hasn’t changed, that’s for sure.” She sucks on her cigarette and blows some feeling out with the smoke. Sitting up straighter, she says, “If I’m honest, nothing about him has. He wasn’t different back then. I was. Now he’s just a bad habit. One I gotta break.”

  “I have those, too. I think that’s why my dad wanted to send me somewhere.”

  “Some people think you need to break to heal. Not me, man. I think that’s bullshit. I think joy is what heals you.”

  “Me, too,” Orr says. “You helped me so much, Jane. I wanted to help you back.”

  “Oh, you did!” Jane says. “Tonight was the last straw, kid. Mika and Allison told me I’m the one getting kicked out if I let Red in again. They’re making me pay to change the locks.”

  “I don’t want them to kick you out!”

  “No—babe. They’re messing with me. We had a good talk. Those girls, the band, it’s the first time I’ve felt part of something real. I got kinda messed up after Plum’s mom died. She meant a lot to me.”

  The sky is turning to roses. A snore sounds from somewhere on the porch. Orr stands and pads up the stairs toward it.

  Plum is lying across the porch swing like a drooping poppy in a yellow nightgown, her hair in a pile on the blue floor. She opens her eyes.

  “I told Jane,” she says. “I knew you’d come here.”

  “Are you playing a painting again?”

  Plum stretches, laughs. “No, crazy man cub. I’m sleeping.”

  “If I’m the man cub,” Orr says, loving the Jungle Book reference, “then which one are you?”

  “Me?” Plum thinks. “Definitely Kaa,” she hisses, making her eyes snakelike.

  “You’re not Kaa.” Orr is thinking about the girl at the end of the Disney version. The beauty who lures Mowgli to the village.

  “I’m not that girl.” Apparently Plum is reading his mind again. “I’m not any of them. Just a girl cub you met in the jungle.”

  “Hey,” Jane says, coming up onto the porch. “Does the Paradox Café still open at six? I’d roll a nun for some vegan biscuits and gravy about now.”

  “I’m pretty sure,” Plum says. “Maybe you should go see if my dad’s up. Just yell from the bottom of the stairs. My goal is getting him out of the house at least three times a week. Remind him of the cornmeal pancakes.”

  Jane leaves and Orr sits next to Plum on the porch swing.

  “I’m going home after tomorrow night,” he says. “But it’s not far—will you ever visit me?”

  “I might.” Plum says it like it’s a yes.

  The sky is hibiscus tea and honey now. The wisteria climbing the purple trim on the lizard-green house stretches all the way to the porch roof.

  “You did look like a painting when you were asleep, you know,” Orr tells her. “It’s called Flaming June. It’s in one of my dad’s art history books. There’s a beautiful redhaired lady sleeping in a long orange dress sort of half sitting, half lying down with her hair flowing down to the floor.”

  “Orr?” Plum says like she’s going to laugh. “Are you doing it again?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Calling me beautiful.”

  “Yes,” Orr says. “I am.”

  19

  First Experience

  as a Director

  “Dare,” Lorna says.

  Iph takes her time. Something is happening here—or maybe something needs to happen. There’s a space for change. She thinks about her drama teacher’s litany: Make the most dramatic choice.

  “I dare you,” Iph says, “to show us your favorite move from work.”


  George’s mouth hangs open again. Mission accomplished.

  The one virtue of this stupid game is that it’s good for airing certain truths. Iph shouldn’t hate it so much. It was Truth or Dare that helped her realize she liked girls when it devolved, as it always did, into a directive brand of spin the bottle.

  Lorna laughs. “I mean, we don’t have a pole, so—”

  “You said you were no good at pole tricks.” George’s tone is petulant, trying for a fight.

  “Practice makes perfect, right?” Iph says. Her light tone is both a dare and a rescue. She’s seen Mom remind people of their manners this way before. Like, Are you going to make this situation worse with your bad behavior? Or are you going to save face and grab this rope and pretend you were joking?

  “Well, in that case, I guess Lorna’s probably going to win an award, considering she spends all her time at that disgusting place.” Clearly, no. The rope has been bypassed, and George is going full-on jealous ex. So much for that eighty-five to ninety percent. George is not over Lorna at all.

  “Wow,” Iph says. “That was rude.”

  “I’ll say.” The calm in Lorna’s voice belies her tense posture, the way a cat is silent before it pounces and rips your face off.

  Iph giggles, not because it’s funny, but because she’s nervous, and also because it reminds her of four-year-old Orr’s confusion about the term spitting mad. He thought it meant that instead of yelling, a person would literally act like a cat to show displeasure—growling, spitting, arching their back. The family had been pretty confused when he whipped that out to protest bedtime.

  “Is this funny to you?” George asks Iph.

  “No! No, not at all. I’m remembering this thing from when my brother was little. He didn’t get euphemistic language—”