by Ilana Masad
She wondered if it was too late for them. She hoped not.
When she got home, she entered Peter’s office, but he was on a video call and could only glance up at her and half smile in the midst of his chatter about banner widths and necessary resolution. She went to the bedroom and rolled off her pantyhose and took off her skirt and blouse and got into her comfy home clothes, the yoga pants and overlarge T-shirt. Last of all, she removed her necklace. She fingered the raw amber in its setting, bought by her grandfather long ago and given to his youngest daughter, Iris’s mother, who wore the jagged edges smooth with years of worrying it. She gave it to Iris when she married Peter, because, she said, Iris had finally given her naches, and she didn’t have to worry about her anymore. It was only after her mother died, though, that Iris turned it into the regular companion it became—it had felt somehow like tempting the evil eye to wear it before, like stealing her mother’s luck before it had run out.
Iris stared at the mirror, at her face that looked no different than it had that morning but which seemed to symbolize a whole lot more. The crow’s-feet, the way her lips were grooved all over, the loose skin below her cheeks that weren’t quite jowls but implied them. She had to write a will, she realized. It was time. She was sure she and Peter had some boilerplate thing, probably made when the kids were little, but she needed to write something proper. She needed her children to know she loved them. Come to think of it, she needed everyone she’d loved to know it.
AUGUST 24, 2017
Dad, Ariel,
I’ve gone to carry out a few of Mom’s wishes. Not sure how long it’ll take, but I’ll update you. Hold down the fort. Be nice to people (please) and eat their food because there’s going to be a lot of it. Kick them out early if you need to. Love you.
—Maggie
She leaves the note in the middle of the kitchen island, anchored by the black and red salt and pepper shakers, which, when put together, look like two vaguely humanoid blobs hugging. She deposits her suitcase in the trunk of Peter’s Prius and puts the Sacramento address into her phone. If she takes the I-5, it’ll take her less than six hours. But she remembers that the scenic route, up the 101, is supposed to be much prettier, and besides, she isn’t sure she wants to be back so quickly. She chooses the longer option, despite the map’s dire warning of tolls—she doesn’t remember there being any a decade ago when she drove up the coast with Morgan and Kyle to see a queer punk band in Oakland. If she comes across any tollbooths, she can afford to pay, she thinks, a luxury she never really expected when younger, assuming always that she’d live a hand-to-mouth artist’s life. Not because she had any artistic passion, let alone talent, but because that’s what she thought being a queer millennial meant. Her friends from college all seem to be actors or artists or musicians—Allison sings and plays piano in an all-girl band called Twatter; Micah is doing a Fulbright in Nicaragua, collecting the oral histories of the Sutiava Primitivista painting workshop participants from the 1980s; Blair works at a coffee shop and does community theater on the weekend; Harper freelances as a technical writer and self-publishes young adult novels—and for a long time, Maggie wanted to be like them. She tried, sort of, but nothing stuck. Instead, she works in insurance and has benefits and vacation days and actual weekends, which gives her time for brunches with friends and concerts and movies and getting involved in local queer stuff.
“Let’s go,” she says to the empty car.
As the garage door opens in front of her, revealing shadowy six o’clock light, she has the uncanny feeling of being inside a movie again. Lone girl in search of the truth, she thinks, or child looking for her mother’s secret life. Grieving woman out for revenge, maybe. Of course, she realizes, this may all be moot. These guys may turn out to be some professional contacts. Maybe they’re Mafia dudes her mother owes money to. That’d be the day, she thinks; her mother was always careful with money, which is why they didn’t come out of 2008 in worse shape than they did, she supposes, unlike many middle-class families they knew. Iris had a good money-manager person, some woman named Glinda, like the good witch from The Wizard of Oz, which Maggie always found very ironic. During high school, when she had a rudimentary obsession with Communism that mostly had to do with sticking it to the capital-M Man, Maggie had made fun of this Glinda person, saying that no good witch would ever use her powers to make money out of nothing—which was what she understood of the stock market and investments—and that Glinda must be an impostor, that she was actually the Wicked Witch of the West and killed the Good Witch and taken over her life. It was a whole narrative she’d spun herself, and it was one of the best ways to get Iris into a fight with her. “How’s Glinda the Wicked Witch?” she’d ask when her mother was doing something innocuous like heating up meat loaf in the microwave. Or “Have you stolen from the poor yet today?” when her mother was washing her bras in the sink.
Maggie fiddles with the air-conditioning setting, smiles. She can laugh at herself about it now, if sheepishly. She’s not proud of it. After all, she’s learned since that everything her mother hurled at her at the time was true: she and Ariel were a big part of the reason her parents invested and saved money; it was them the money was meant to protect, educate, and eventually go to, if there was anything left; her life had been incredibly easy, all things considered, her needs always met. She’d never wanted for anything necessary. She had absolutely no right to complain to her mother about her own privilege. It was naive, and it was stupid. She supposes most teenagers are, in one way or another.
How incredibly lucky she was in life had become clear to her only when she was in college already, in St. Louis. During her first year she had two roommates, all of them in a cramped triple with another triple across a dilapidated common room that held only a three-seater couch whose cushions were sky blue and stained and made of some scratchy woven fabric. The six of them shared one bathroom. The school required all freshmen to live in the dorms, and one of her roommates had needed to work two jobs to be able to afford it because her scholarship didn’t cover room and board. This seemed patently unfair to Maggie, that the school would require a student who couldn’t afford it to live in campus housing when, as Tiffany pointed out, there were cheaper accommodations in town. Maggie ranted about it drunkenly to some people during orientation week, and Tiffany had been there too, holding a forty and raising her eyebrows. She tossed her long, overly straightened and dyed blond hair back and said, “You must be pretty rich to be this surprised.” Then she’d walked away, and a boy wearing a flannel shirt followed her, and Maggie realized how stupid and lucky she was, had always been.
She’s less stupid now, she knows that, but lucky? The last few days seem to indicate that whatever luck she’s had in the past is gone now. It’s bad enough that Iris . . . but then with Peter the way he is . . . “Nope, not now, drive, focus, drive,” she says loudly, gripping the steering wheel hard enough to see her knuckles whiten.
Merging onto the highway is strangely liberating. It’s not empty, and plenty of people are on their way to work, but traffic is moving swiftly, and she opens the front-seat windows a crack on either side so she can feel the air, which is still cool and smells just a little bit like the ocean amid the exhaust and dust. She wonders if this is why her mother liked to travel. Alone, that is. Iris liked to travel alone. She took Maggie and Ariel occasionally when they were little, but they never took a family vacation all of them together, not once, even though Maggie saw her parents’ friends and her friends’ parents doing exactly that. She remembers Ariel being jealous, but by the time he was old enough to be, she was a teenager and pretty relieved not to need to trek around with embarrassing parents and a geeky brother. She isn’t sure whether she’d complained like he did when she was younger; if she did, she can’t remember it now.
When Maggie turned thirteen, her father took her on a sorta-kinda bat mitzvah trip—they didn’t celebrate it in any other fashion—to wherever Maggi
e chose. Ariel got to do the same thing when he turned thirteen. Maggie had asked to go to Joshua Tree and also to Disneyland’s new park, Disney California. Ariel had thought much bigger—he’d chosen Vietnam, but he’d gotten a terrible stomach bug on the plane, before ever setting foot in Hanoi, and had spent three of the five days there lying in a hotel bed, running to the bathroom every so often to puke or shit whatever he’d attempted to eat each time he thought he was feeling better. It was still a sore subject for him.
But Iris didn’t do this with them. Instead, she stayed behind, first with Ariel, and then with Maggie, making sure to be home so that the house wasn’t empty. But Maggie was eighteen when Ariel took his trip, about to go to college, and she had no interest in hanging out with her mom. At other times during her childhood, Iris would suggest the four of them take a short trip somewhere in the United States, somewhere kitschy like the Grand Canyon, which neither she nor Peter had ever been to, or New York, where they could see where Iris grew up. But those trips never actually happened. Everyone was busy, Maggie and Ariel had their own activities and social circles, Iris rarely refused any work that came her way, and Peter seemed perfectly content at home.
Maggie tries rolling down the window down further but the wind buffets her and makes the gelled curls on the top of her head whip stiffly sideways, so she rolls it back up. There’s a knot of traffic ahead, and the GPS tells her to get off at Exit 101B to avoid some of it. She drives down what appears like a smallish back highway named San Marcos Pass Road just as the morning fog begins to lift enough to open the view of the mountains in front of her. She can see their broad bases and their not-so-high tops with a band of cloud cutting them right across. Maybe they’re hills, she thinks, and not mountains. Lucia grew up in Colorado, and she’s scoffed at Maggie’s puny idea of what mountains are. She misses Lucia. She texted her this morning, finally, telling her about the letters and her plan, but Lucia hasn’t texted back. It’s Thursday, though, and Maggie reminds herself that Lucia is probably just busy, because it’s the day she teaches simple clay-work and pottery to kids at a summer arts camp. It’s probably the last week of that, though—the school year must be starting soon.
A growl of hunger announces itself in Maggie’s gut, so she pulls over to the shoulder and searches for somewhere to turn off and eat, but the closest places are all behind her, a detour barely forty-five minutes into her journey. She considers—and decides, fuck it. She can treat this as a vacation of sorts, can’t she? Just like her mother treated her trips. She makes a U-turn and heads toward a Mexican place that says it’s open and where the reviews recommend the breakfast burritos, which sounds perfect just about now.
Iris used to regale them with stories of inconsequential things that happened at work. Peter never needed to tell stories like that, the type with a beginning, middle, and punchline-end, because he was always right there, right in Maggie’s line of sight. She didn’t know details, but she knew vaguely what he was working on at any given time because his office was basically decorated with his own ongoing work. Other than the bookcase holding his heavy, overlarge art books at the bottom and a combination of old and new well-thumbed design books above that, there was a large bulletin board on one wall and a magnetic white board on another. Here he would pin and magnetize a variety of printed and hand-drawn sketches of logos and banners and office stationery borders and doodle new ideas and notes beside them. Even though he did all the real work on his computer, his office was still a big signpost for whoever his current clients were.
But Maggie remembers how the stories Iris told always sounded so scripted, a narrative that she built carefully to pass along. One tale that Maggie remembers, because Iris liked to tell it again and again, was about her love affair with a particular out-of-the-way Mexican restaurant that she’d accidentally ended up at twice in one trip—once because she’d been driving around aimlessly, starving, after a client had missed an appointment that morning in Soledad. “There I was,” Iris told them over dinner more than once, though she usually only repeated stories for company, “all alone in a place called Soledad—so fitting, right?—and I ended up finding the least solitary place imaginable.”
She’d walked into the restaurant on a day that a beloved community member was retiring from the local police force, and there was a huge celebration underway. She’d tried to leave, feeling like she was encroaching on a private party, but instead she’d been welcomed by two young servers and invited to sit right along with everyone. Iris claimed it was the only time she’d ever gotten drunk during the day, and she didn’t regret a minute of it, though she’d needed to nap in her car for an hour before setting out on the road later in the afternoon.
“And the second time? You said you went there twice,” someone would always prompt.
“The second time,” Iris would say, smiling, “was the very next morning. The client I was supposed to meet the first day took me there. He was so sorry for missing our first meeting he said he’d take me to the best-kept secret in the whole county, which was this place. But I’d already discovered it all on my own.”
Maggie wishes she knew what it was called, that place. Iris said they served the best enmoladas she’d ever tasted, the mole sauce so delectable, smooth and bitter yet fiery, that she wanted to let it sit in her mouth forever. But, of course, Maggie has no idea where exactly the restaurant was, if it’s even still there. It’s been ages, probably a decade, really, since she heard this story.
I’m at the age where I can remember conversations over a decade old, she thinks as she pulls into the parking lot of Papa Cantina. It’s basically empty, with a bright turquoise-painted bar along one side and tables with red-and-white-checkered tablecloths on them spread neatly around a small central stage. The fliers by the door advertise a range of musical performances, including, she’s tickled to see, a drag show special tomorrow. Maybe she’ll make it back to see it, she thinks. Alone, though? She’s not sure she’s ever gone to a drag show, or any queer event really, without thirsty undertones. But Lucia and she have lasted twice as long as any former quote-relationship-unquote, and she doesn’t want to screw it up. Not that she hasn’t cheated before—she has. But usually as an excuse to end whatever unsatisfactory dating experience she’d found herself in.
“Hi, anywhere is fine,” a young man tells her. He’s sitting at a corner table along with two men wearing big white aprons, one of whom slowly raises himself up and heads into the kitchen. The other one keeps staring at his phone, and the young man gets up and picks out a menu to bring to her. They hover around each other, awkward, as she dithers between tables stupidly, wondering where would be easiest for him in terms of cleanup and delivery—she waited tables during her summers off from college and hated it, but is grateful for one thing that came out of the experience: she’ll never again take for granted the servers and busboys and cooks anywhere she eats. She chooses the table closest to the kitchen, which is just to the right of where one of the cooks is still sitting, and hopes that he doesn’t think she’s encroaching on his space.
“Thanks,” she says, taking the menu. “But I know what I want, actually. I hear you make good breakfast burritos?”
“We do. Seven kinds.” He grins and leaves the menu with her. A moment later he’s back with a glass of water and asks if she wants coffee.
“Omigod, please. And, um, the mushroom-and-mozzarella burrito?”
“You got it.”
The coffee, when he brings it, has a hint of cinnamon in it, she’s pretty sure. And it isn’t too hot, so she can actually drink it without surreptitiously pouring in some cold water or waiting until after her meal. She leaves it black to better enjoy the flavor. It beats the five-dollar lattes and cold brews she’s grown accustomed to drinking; it makes her mouth feel warm even after she’s swallowed, the sweet bite of the spice making her think of her mother’s beloved mole sauce.
Unexpectedly, tears prickle in her eyes. She take
s out her phone as a distraction, to check text messages; Facebook, where she keeps up with a mix of faraway friends and acquaintances and older work buddies; and Instagram, where she mostly follows her close local friends like Allison and Micah and Harper and Blair, as well as various queer news, joy, and fashion accounts. She takes a photo of the mural across from her, which shows a stone wall in the forefront and behind it a small square building in the middle of a broad sandy lot, which she realizes is meant to be this very restaurant before the whole area was developed—she can see the tablecloths through the painted building’s windows, and the flags hanging across the window frames, and even, in a kind of mind-bending move, a corner of this very mural on the inside of the painted building. She captions it “improv road-trip mindfuck” and posts it.
A few friends from St. Louis have texted her—Simon from work, asking her if she’ll be coming to Friday night happy hour tomorrow; memes and pictures in the years-long shit-posting group text she has going with Allison, Micah, Harper, and Blair; and a clearly very drunk booty call message from Jolie. Oops, Maggie thinks, she hasn’t told Jolie she has a girlfriend. It all seems so far, so foreign to where she is now. Only her work crew knows she’s gone, and they probably just think she’s sick, because she asked her boss to keep the whole my-mom-died thing quiet. There’s nothing from Peter or Ariel yet. Must still be asleep or clueless that she’s left, she supposes. It’s not like they’re used to having her in the house anymore.
