The Last Days of California: A Novel

by Miller, Mary

  “I’m sorry you feel that way,” my mother said. “It isn’t true.”

  Elise was clutching her stomach. It occurred to me that I had no idea when the baby had been conceived; she could be a couple of weeks pregnant or several months. She might even be far enough along that she couldn’t have an abortion, and then what would we do? I imagined taking her to a clinic set up in somebody’s house, a woman bustling her inside before closing the door in my face, which was something I’d seen in a documentary. I didn’t know anything except what I’d seen on TV and I never retained the information I learned. When I watched those outdoor programs, I didn’t actually consider that one day I might be lost in the wild and need that stuff in order to survive. I thought about it, trying to recall something, and remembered the fat hippie saying I shouldn’t eat brightly colored things, that brightly colored things are usually poisonous. If I was ever hungry and found a neon green insect under a log, I wouldn’t make the mistake of eating it.

  Our father got back in the car. “I got y’all your own room,” he said, handing us key cards. “Might as well enjoy ourselves on our last night.”

  “That’s what the 9/11 hijackers thought,” Elise said. “They drank and got lap dances and then left a copy of the Qur’an on the bar.”

  “I hope you’ll be with us,” our father said, buckling his seatbelt.

  “I’ll be with you.”

  “I sincerely hope.”

  He drove through a maze of empty lots and parked, but a sign said no overnight parking so he backed out and kept winding around. It reminded me of that scene in National Lampoon’s Vacation when Chevy Chase and his family arrived at Walley-World. There wasn’t a single car in the lot and they parked so far away and Chevy Chase kept saying “First ones here!”

  In the hotel lobby, there was a water wall behind the check-in desk, the casino floor only steps away, dinging with bells and whistles. We walked past a coffee shop and an ice-cream parlor, stores selling dreamcatchers and turquoise jewelry, quilted bags in paisley prints. We passed a Mexican restaurant and a sundries shop. I thought I’d buy a postcard and mail it to Gabe—it occurred to me that I’d never bought a postcard before. I had never been far enough from home. You didn’t send someone a postcard from an adjoining state.

  A man held the elevator and we got on. His wife was with him but he stared openly at Elise, and for the first time ever I was glad to be the unattractive sister. Who wanted to be stared at by ugly old men all the time? I wanted to kill him for her, wanted to kill all of them so she could live in peace.

  Our parents got off at the sixth floor, followed by the man and his wife.

  “We’re in 610,” our mother said, and the doors closed.

  “Mom’s as miserable as we are,” I said, though I wasn’t feeling miserable at all. I was excited, nearly thrilled. We had our own room in a nice hotel. There was a pool and room service and I had enough money to buy a dreamcatcher if I wanted.

  “Catholics don’t go in for this kind of stuff.”

  “Uncle Albert does,” I said.

  “Uncle Albert doesn’t count—if he wasn’t building a doomsday bunker, he’d be investing all his money in the Iraqi dinar or some other scheme. Don’t you remember when he tried to get Dad to invest in that black apartment complex?”

  “No,” I said. “When was that?”

  “A couple of years ago. It was a falling-apart slum.”

  “Nobody tells me anything.”

  “Mom tells me all sorts of things I don’t want to know,” she said. “Consider yourself lucky.”

  “When?”

  “At night after y’all go to sleep, we watch The Young and the Restless and she tells me everything. It’s terrible.”

  “You should go to your room and read like I do.”

  We turned a corner and walked a ways and then turned another corner and I knew I was going to have trouble finding my way back to the elevator. A cleaning lady stuck her head out of a room and we exchanged hellos. She was foreign but her hello had been perfected. I checked her cart for soaps and shampoos, but all of the best stuff had been hidden away somewhere.

  We came to our room just as a tiny, severe woman opened the door across from ours and deposited a room service tray outside. She looked at me without any expression whatsoever. Her face was tight and smooth; it reminded me of a stone.

  “Good afternoon,” I said. I liked saying “good morning” so much better.

  She made a humph sound and closed her door.

  “Real friendly around here,” I said, loudly.

  Elise slid her key in, opened the door. Our room smelled like carpet cleaner, something that might be called Mountain Fresh or Ocean Breeze. We stood there with our bags, looking at an enormous whirlpool tub next to the king-sized bed.

  “What is this?” she said. She stepped into the tub with her shoes on while I went into the bathroom. There was a shower and two sinks and a little TV, everything cool and white. I wanted to feel my bare feet on the tiles.

  I flushed and washed my hands, walked around checking everything out. I opened drawers and closets, peeled the spread off the bed. Above it, there was a painting of two empty chairs on a beach. The picture bothered me—I didn’t like it when places pretended to be other places; if people had wanted to go to those other places, they would have gone to them. Why go to Las Vegas to be in Paris? If you wanted to go to Paris, go to Paris.

  Elise stepped up and down like she was walking in some kind of muck. “Let’s put on our suits and get in.”

  I opened the curtains. Our room faced a parking garage that gave off a ghostly blue light. “Check out this view.”

  “You know the creepiest sound ever? A man whistling in a parking garage,” she said. “And they never whistle anything in particular, it’s just this random no-song whistling. They do it to creep people out—they know it creeps everybody out.”

  I picked up the phone and called our parents. Our mother answered on the fourth ring. I asked if they had a whirlpool next to their bed, and she said that they did. I asked if they had a view of the parking garage and she said they had a view of the pool and then she said to come down to their room at six-thirty for supper and hung up.

  Elise got in bed and tested out the pillows to see how high they were, if she was likely to get a crick. Then she went to the bathroom and peed with the door open.

  “There’s a TV in here!” she called. “It looks like it’s from 1989.”

  “I saw it.”

  We didn’t know anything about 1989 but we referenced it a lot. It represented all of the movies we loved. It represented a time when the captain of the football team might actually fall in love with the homely red-haired girl, when they could make us believe it. I got in bed and Elise continued to talk to me from the bathroom. Maybe we wouldn’t have to drive tomorrow and we could just stay here. And what if the rapture actually happened and we got to watch it on TV? Wouldn’t that be kind of amazing? There were Aveda products! She loved Aveda products! I got out of bed and turned on the water in the tub. The pressure was bad—it was going to take forever to fill up. I kept turning the knob but the water didn’t come out any faster. We could go down to the pool for an hour and come back and it still wouldn’t be filled.

  “I’m going to get ice,” she said, clutching the bucket to her stomach.

  “Okay, Dad.”

  “Come here,” Elise said, setting the bucket on the table.

  “What?”

  “Just come.”

  I followed her to a room catty-corner from ours where a fat lady was sprawled on a king-sized bed, her purple dress bunched up like a tablecloth between her legs. Against one wall, there were four cages stacked on top of each other with two birds in each. Some of the birds were white and some were a pale, lovely pink.

  “Mourning doves,” Elise said.

  The woman sat up, excited to have visitors. “Hey, hon,” she said. “Come on in, make yourself at home.” She was truly massive, wonderfully
enormous, but her face was oddly thin. “Have some cheese and fruit, if you want. We were just about to have a snack.”

  “How’d you get the birds up here?” Elise asked.

  “I tip people,” the woman said. “Whenever I go to hotels, I carry a lot of small bills. You give people a handful and they don’t even care if they’re all ones.”

  The toilet flushed and a man came out of the bathroom. He was fat but not enormous, just normal fat, with a patchy beard.

  “That’s my son, Luke,” the woman said, lighting a cigarette. “Luke and I travel everywhere together, don’t we?” She leaned over the bed and produced an ashtray, set it on her stomach. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. She was magnetic, strangely beautiful, and had long strawberry blond hair. I imagined her at the beauty salon, having it highlighted, talking to people and laughing like she was just as good as anybody.

  Luke stood there watching us, scratching his beard. His feet were planted shoulder-width apart.

  “There’s a male and female in each,” Elise said, squatting to look in the cages. I knelt next to her.

  “Did you know that mourning doves are monogamous?” the woman asked, waving her cigarette around. “They mate for life.”

  “I love monogamous animals,” Elise said.

  Luke laughed and my sister turned to look at him, her ponytail flying. He had the kind of eyes that couldn’t look at you straight on—they were always slightly to the left or right, as if you were standing next to yourself.

  “How can you tell which are male and which are female?” I asked.

  “You put two together and see if they try to kill each other,” the woman said. “That’s why I stack ’em like that—if the males even see each other, they go berserk. Beat their wings and puff out their chests.”

  Elise stood and said, “Thanks for letting us look at them.”

  “Let’s let ’em fly around,” the woman said.

  “Maybe later?” my sister said. “We just got here and we have to unpack and stuff.”

  “I trained them in the bathroom and now I can let ’em fly wherever. Even if I leave the door open, they don’t fly away. If I’m not feeling well, they land on my chest and look at me like, Dodo, you okay in there, Dodo? They’re very intuitive animals.”

  “Maybe later,” Elise said.

  “We’ll be here,” the woman said. “We’re not going anywhere, are we, Luke? We were just about to have a snack.”

  Elise thanked her about fourteen more times and we went back to our room. I remembered my horoscope from a few days ago, how I was supposed to be asking questions and I’d hardly asked anybody anything. I should have asked the woman why she chose birds, or about the mating process—did the male and female always like each other, or was it a matter of trial and error? Or I could have asked where they were from, where they were going. It seemed silly that we were all moving around the world for no other reason than we could—cars and planes and boats taking people from one location to another as if we weren’t all going to die.

  Elise stood at the desk and flipped open the binder.

  “How come you didn’t want to see them fly?” I asked.

  “Because that guy was creeping me out,” she said. “Wasn’t he creeping you out?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He was a fucking creep.”

  “Probably a parking garage whistler,” I said.

  She picked up the phone and ordered a veggie burger with onion rings, a Diet Coke, and a piece of apple pie. If she hadn’t asked for the pie, I might have believed she’d actually spoken to someone. She never ate pie.

  “You didn’t order anything,” I said.

  “What I really want is a cheeseburger. Actually, I think it’s the baby who wants a cheeseburger.” She stood in front of the mirror and looked around to see if there was enough space to do her jumps. “I’m going to call room service for real in a minute. What’re you having?”

  “Ice cream,” I said.

  She did a herkie and then three more in quick succession; they seemed so effortless, so easy, it made me think I could do them.

  “Have you ever noticed how skinny people get vanilla and fat people get chocolate? And really skinny people get strawberry. I should probably start ordering strawberry, then I’ll be skinny.”

  “I don’t think it works that way,” she said.

  “It would be a start,” I said. “It would be something.”

  “And you’re not fat, you’re just a little plump.”

  “I don’t want to be plump, that’s an awful word, don’t ever say that to me again.” I put my bag on the bed and started going through it. I missed the rest of my stuff. I missed our house, my bed. If we were at home, Elise and I would be outside on the trampoline. She’d insist I do a back handspring and spot me, taking her hands away at the last minute so she could tell me I’d done it on my own. The baby would already be a bad dream and I’d never mention it again, even when we were old, even if I was really pissed off.

  She dialed room service and ordered a veggie burger and fries. “Strawberry?” she asked.

  “A hot fudge sundae and a Diet Coke.”

  “And two hot fudge sundaes and two Diet Cokes,” she said. She hung up and climbed into bed, spread out in the middle.

  “You know how you said you never feel anything in church?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t feel anything, either,” I said.

  “What about when you were saved?”

  I shook my head. “It never even occurred to me to think about whether I was feeling something, or if I believed or not. Do you think I’m stupid?”

  “No,” she said. “I think you’re a kid.”

  “I want to believe,” I said.

  “I know you do.”

  “Maybe I should talk to Brother Jessie.”

  “Call him,” she said. “I’m sure he’ll talk to you.”

  I took the Bible into the bathroom and sat on the cool tile, opened it and read: “. . . many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other, and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people . . . the love of most will grow cold, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved.” Did standing firm mean believing in the rapture or not believing in it? Was Marshall a false prophet or a man trying to instill faith? Everything had become confusing all of a sudden. Was Elise betraying me or was I betraying her? I went back into the room and climbed in bed next to her, closed my eyes and opened the Bible to a random page.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “ ‘Jesus said to him, The foxes have holes, and the birds of the sky have nests, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head.’ ”

  Elise took the Bible, opened the drawer, and dropped it in. “We’re not playing Bible 8-Ball right now,” she said. She was watching the hotel’s station, jazzy music and a smooth-talking man telling us about the hotel’s amenities. We watched pretty women laugh with their mouths open wide, lightly touching the shoulders of their handsome men. We toured each of the restaurants—the Mexican cantina, the steakhouse, the burger stand, the Irish pub—before moving on to the casino floor. We learned how many slot machines there were, how many table games. Craps lessons were held every afternoon at two o’clock and the annual poker tournament was at the end of the month. We toured the hotel rooms and the pool with its outdoor bars, the gym and spa, and then we were back at the pretty laughing women. We watched it all the way through a second time.

  After our third trip through the restaurants, I asked her how many times we were going to watch it.

  “Forever,” she said.

  “How come you’re not calling Dan? You’re not even Googling anything.”

  “Dan? Who cares about Dan?”

  “You do.”

  “It’s not like I love him.”

  “Why would you date someone you didn’t love?”
/>   She looked at me like she couldn’t believe I’d asked that. “You’ll see,” she said ominously.

  “I’m not going to ever be with someone I don’t love.”

  “You will,” she said. “You won’t believe the things you’ll do.” She handed me the remote control and got out of bed, picked up her suitcase. “When the food comes, just sign your name, the tip’s already been added.” She closed the door to the bathroom.

  I changed the channels. On Wheel of Fortune, three nervous college students in their big college sweatshirts took turns spinning the wheel. As usual, they weren’t attractive or charming and I wondered how they’d been selected. I hadn’t watched it in a long time, but quickly remembered how all of the puzzles seemed so obvious once they were revealed, how stupid it made me feel.

  At the bonus round, there was a knock. I opened the door and the guy walked past me with a tray, asked where he should put it.

  “The bed.” He set it down and handed me the bill in a black book and I added another three dollars on top of all the tips and fees that had already been figured. He let himself out and I sat on the bed. I dug a spoon into my sundae, the ice cream still solid.

  I muted the TV to listen for Elise, and then turned it to Anderson Cooper to try and lure her out.

  “Anderson’s talking about the Eurozone again,” I called.

  “Fuck the Eurozone,” she called back.

  A few minutes later, she came out of the bathroom with her hair in a towel and got in bed next to me. We ate our hot fudge sundaes and drank our Diet Cokes and then she cut her veggie burger in half and everything felt right and good.

  Elise slingshotted a pair of yellow bikini bottoms at me. She had at least eight swimsuits, which I considered an excessive number, but when you were beautiful you could insist on needing more, requiring more, and people would provide.

  She put on her white one, the ruffles on top to make her chest look bigger. She hardly ever wore the white one because she didn’t want to get it dirty. She let her hair down and stood sideways in front of the mirror. There was a long pause while we assessed her stomach. She touched it, ran her hand over its smooth, flat surface. Her belly button was so deep you couldn’t see the bottom of it, but it was going to turn inside out.