The Last Days of California: A Novel

by Miller, Mary

  I looked at my mother, smiling at her phone. I wanted to go to her, curl up in her arms. I missed her and wanted to tell her I missed her. At home, we shared bowls of popcorn, sat close to each other on the couch to watch movies. When we were finished eating, we’d scratch each other’s backs. I want to put you in my pocket, she’d say, so I can pull you out whenever I want. I would imagine myself small, pocket-sized, nestled against the warmth of her leg. I was afraid she would die without knowing how much I loved her, and it made me want to tell her things, let her get to know me, but I didn’t think she’d be able to love me if she knew me.

  Our father came out of the bathroom smelling like Colgate and Barbasol, same as always. He sat on the bed and opened his Bible.

  “You won last night, didn’t you?” Elise said.

  He grinned, the kind of grin we only saw when he returned from the casino with a wallet full of money. That hadn’t happened in a long time. I couldn’t remember the last time it had happened.

  “How much?” I asked.

  He raised his eyebrows at us, and his hand moved to his wallet as if to check and make sure it was still there.

  “Did you get your picture taken?” I asked.

  Years ago, when he first started gambling, he’d won big. He was given balloons and an oversized check and had his picture taken; the photo was hidden in his underwear drawer. Winning was the worst thing that had ever happened to him, he’d said once, in a rare moment of reflection.

  “Don’t give them any of it back,” Elise said.

  “I’m not going to,” he said, “don’t worry,” and then he began to read as if it were any other morning, only he started at the beginning: “ ‘The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.’ ”

  I closed my eyes and listened, trying to picture the earth without form, the water with a face. I thought I could see the water’s face. It was happy. Elise got up and went to the bathroom. Our father kept reading: God rested, man took his first breath, God planted a garden.

  My phone beeped. I hoped it was Gabe, but it was Elise: Come in here.

  She let me in and sat on the floor, pressed her knees to her chest. “I think I’m having a miscarriage,” she said.

  “How come?”

  “Because I’m bleeding a lot and it hurts really bad.” She looked at me like I’d know what to do, but I didn’t know what to do. I caught my eye in the mirror.

  “Maybe we should go to the hospital,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Maybe you’re just spotting. I’ve heard that happens.”

  Our father raised his voice. “ ‘Then the man said, This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.’ ”

  “It hurts so bad,” she said. “Do you think you could go get me some ibuprofen?”

  “Did you check to see if she has any?” I asked, sorting through our mother’s makeup bag: POND’S Cold Cream, Q-tips, thick pads wrapped in pink and green, a tube of brownish lipstick in the shade she’d worn forever.

  “I saw it,” she said, “it was a big clot of blood. Clottier than the usual clots.”

  I stood there for a moment, looking down at her, and said I’d be back. Then I closed the door and slipped on my flip-flops, thinking about the baby in the toilet, a big clot of blood.

  “Elise is sick,” I said, interrupting my father, who was coming to the part where the woman screws everything up, bringing curses upon the ground, turning everybody to dirt.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “She has a stomachache.”

  He took out his wallet and handed me a bunch of ones, said he thought we’d already bought Pepto-Bismol.

  At the sundries shop, the only medicine came in envelopes with two to a package. I counted the money my father had given me—seven dollars—and then counted my own—thirteen. I wanted to spend it all, felt the need to get down to zero. There was no one else in the store so I started setting things on the counter: three packages of Advil, a Diet Coke, a big bag of peanut M&M’s, which were Elise’s favorite, and an OK! magazine with Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson on the cover. I took the elevator back up, walking faster as I neared our room. I didn’t know how to feel about what was happening. On the one hand, it would be over, everything fixed. On the other hand—I wasn’t sure, exactly, what was on the other hand, but I knew there was something. And maybe she wasn’t having a miscarriage at all. What did she know about having a miscarriage?

  I knocked and my mother answered. “Is everything okay?” she asked, leaning in. I wondered if she could smell alcohol on me. “Elise said she only wanted you.”

  “She just has cramps.”

  “Oh,” she said, her eyes searching my face. She stepped back and opened the door wider. She knew Elise didn’t have her period; she was the one who was always running out to buy tampons and pads and panty liners, Midol and ibuprofen. Among the three of us, we couldn’t keep these things in the house. My period came at the tail end of my mother’s, would be starting any day now, at any moment, but Elise’s wasn’t due for another two weeks. I wasn’t sure why I had said this and wished I hadn’t.

  Elise opened the door to the bathroom and I handed her the medicine; she ripped open a couple of packets and swallowed the pills. “It knew I didn’t want it,” she said. “It could feel it.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I said, though I didn’t know if it was her fault or not. Maybe the baby had known, maybe it had felt everything she felt. I thought of Rachel, with her half-hideous, half-normal face, and fingered my ring, running it back and forth along the chain so it made a nice zip noise.

  We sat on the floor and watched TV. It was nighttime and the women were in a circle, sewing by candlelight. One woman was talking about dropping out of the project, saying she didn’t know why she’d signed up for it in the first place, what the point of it was, while the others tried to talk her out of it. The more they tried to explain the purpose of the experiment, though, the less sure they sounded. And then they were all talking themselves out of it—they were hungry and hot and might even go blind. Didn’t the girl from Little House on the Prairie go blind, like for real, in real life?

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “I’m fine,” she said, looking at me so miserably I felt like I’d lost something, too. It could be terrible having a family—you had to suffer their pains and disappointments along with your own—but the good stuff couldn’t be shared, at least not in the same way.

  “Maybe it’s not a miscarriage. Maybe it’s just a little blood.”

  “I know my body,” she said.

  I know my body, I thought. I know my body. I wanted to know my body. We ate M&M’s and watched commercials for cleaning products and lunch meat, and then it was morning and the women were back at work, feeding the animals and washing clothes and there was no more talk of abandoning the project. Elise sorted the M&Ms by color; she ate the red ones and the brown ones and the blue ones in twos and threes. I bit into one that didn’t have a peanut, which was lucky, like finding a four-leaf clover in a field.

  When we’d finished the bag, I took her hand and held it. I held it until both of our hands were sweaty and I wanted to let go but didn’t. I wanted her to know I would always be there for her, that I would never leave her.

  “I have to change this pad,” she said finally, and I stood and closed the door behind me.

  As soon as Elise came out, the food arrived—plates of scrambled eggs and bacon, fruit salad, pancakes, a carafe of coffee.

  “Are you feeling better?” our mother asked.

  “A little,” she said. She sat on the bed with us and I reached out and touched her hair. She smiled at me and poured herself a cup of coffee, stirred in cream and a packet of sugar. She put a spoonful of eggs on her plate, a scoop of fruit salad.

  Our father popped the needle out of his case and pinched h
is belly, but stopped before shoving it in. “I think I’m going to go on that hospital diet Woo’s been trying to get me on,” he said.

  “That’s a great idea,” our mother said, handing me a roll of silverware.

  “I could do it,” he said.

  “Of course you could.”

  “You don’t think I could do it,” he said.

  “You can do anything you put your mind to,” she said in a cheerful voice that confirmed his suspicions.

  “I think you can do it,” I said.

  “I do, too,” Elise said. “You’re the most stubborn man we know.”

  He chuckled and pushed the needle in, saying perhaps it would be one of the last times he’d have to stick himself. Then he bowed his head. “Thank you, Lord,” he said. “These are simple words but they come from simple hearts that overflow with the realization of your goodness. We ask you to bless us as we eat, bless this food and bless the hands that prepared it. May the words of our lips spring forth from hearts of gratitude and may we bless others as we fellowship today.” He paused and we waited for him to say something else, something more. “Thank you for our family,” he said. There was another pause and he said, “Amen.”

  “Thank you for our family,” our mother repeated.

  I put a single pancake on my plate, a piece of bacon.

  Elise turned it to The Price Is Right and we watched while we ate. In the Showcase Showdown, a woman won a trip around the world. Her friends rushed the stage and they ran around looking at the pictures of the places she would go. It was better when they all got to pile in a car and wave through the windows. They might actually get to cruise around in that car but they weren’t going around the world. I thought about the dusty flea market with the saddest lady I’d ever seen, the camel in the parking lot of the dollar store, the old man pushing his lawnmower across the highway. They were all things I wouldn’t have seen in Montgomery. I wondered if the Las Vegas girl made it to Las Vegas. I hoped she had and that her life would be better there. I imagined she’d kept the dog, calling to him at the last minute.

  And then The Young and the Restless was on and I asked questions, trying to catch up with who was with who, what was happening. We were finished eating but no one moved. Once we moved, we’d have to keep moving. We’d have to get in our car and drive home and that would feel like failure but it didn’t feel like failure now. It felt like all sorts of things were still possible.

  “Are you going to eat that?” I asked my mother.

  She handed me her last piece of bacon, soft and floppy like all restaurant bacon.

  “Give me half,” Elise said.

  I gave her the whole thing and she ate it like she’d never stopped eating meat. And just like that, she wasn’t a vegetarian anymore. It was strange how you could be something and then not be that something so easily. Last night, I’d been a virgin. Elise had been a vegetarian. Last night, not being those things had seemed impossible. I eyed the remaining biscuit, an unopened jar of jelly. I picked up the jar and peeled off the thin black strip that said it hadn’t been tampered with, took a clean spoon and held it up to my face.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am indebted to the Michener Center for Writers. It was my dream to be a Michener Fellow and I still can’t quite believe it came true. Thanks to my professors, Michael Adams and Elizabeth McCracken, who were incredibly generous with their time and expertise. I couldn’t have done it without you. A number of friends also read early drafts: Melissa Ginsburg, Ethel Rohan, Elizabeth Ellen, Aaron Burch, Derek Asuan-O’Brien, Dolores Ulmer, Nick Ulmer, Claudia Smith, Jane Collins, and Lee Durkee. Thank you. Thank you, Katie Adams, for taking a chance. Lastly, thanks to Sarah Bridgins, who wanted to represent a woman who said she would always and only be a short story writer.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Mary Miller is the author of the story collection Big World. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly, New Stories from the South, Oxford American, and American Short Fiction. A former Michener Fellow in Fiction at the University of Texas, she will serve as the John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi for the academic year 2014–15.

  COPYRIGHT

  Copyright © 2014 by Mary Miller

  All rights reserved

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