I think it first began with Omar when we ended up sharing a cab back to Costa Mesa after the pastry chef’s wedding. We were both holding glass cylinders bursting up and out with flowers and fronds. The centerpieces had not looked so big on the tables at the reception, but now, in the cab, the flora seemed to engulf the entire backseat. I had poured out some of the water from mine, but he had not poured any out of his, and now these aggressive life forms were precariously balanced on our respective laps as the car careened through the streets. My skirt was riding up, and I pulled it down. He glanced down at me as I adjusted the skirt, and then looked back out the window on his side. When I think about this cab ride later on, I mostly remember a moment when I semi-drunkenly and mock-indignantly asked loudly into his face, what you don’t trust me?! and though I don’t recall what words led up to this or what words came after, I do distinctly recall his expression of bemusement, and my feeling that his failure to immediately cede ground was some sort of challenge.
Our first hangout after I quit the restaurant, I met Omar at The Quiet Woman, a bar on PCH in Corona del Mar. What am I doing here, I had laughed when I found him at the bar, already mid-drink. I pawed the area beneath the counter, feeling for a hook, and finally bent over to peer into the darkness.
He shrugged and smiled wide at me. Just hanging out, he said. It was one a.m. I had quit the restaurant four months ago. He’d already had two whiskeys. He bought me a drink, then another. We argued over who was paying. There was a lot of pushing back and forth of credit cards, but it was creating a scene, so I stopped. I owe you, come on, he said. What? What do you owe me for, I asked. You’ll see, he said. I laughed and snorted so hard whiskey sputtered out both my nose and my mouth, sting tearing through my entire nasal cavity, my eyes burning. The sunblock and sweat on my eyelids must have been melting into my eyes.
We moved to one of the booths in the back. We sat next to each other in the booth. I swallowed. I breathed in and out. I could tell that he was looking at me. We were sitting next to each other, but not touching, but as close as it’s possible to be next to another person without touching. It’s possible to be very close and still not touch. He leaned in. I sat stock-still. Possums do this. Other animals do this. Play dead. Deer in headlights. Possums get run over all the time. Once, in my parents’ backyard, they found a dead possum, but it was really dead. But inside it, were babies that were alive. Animal control came and picked all of them up, they reassured me that the babies would be okay.
Why would they be okay? Why would a life of resorting to playing dead be okay? Still I did not move. I could feel his breath on my left ear and cheek. He started to say something, but stopped, and instead moved his mouth to behind my ear. Still I think, we were not touching. But I could feel his breath and now, the humidity of his breath. Warm. A cloud misted just inside the entrance of my vagina. It was creating its own cloud. Cumulus-pulse. When a cloud gets too heavy, it must dispel all its liquid. I squeeze my legs closer together. My hands are clenched together, in a prayer position, squeezed into the space between my thighs. Keep it the fuck together, I think to myself. The tip of his tongue, is touching me now, just behind my ear lobe. One of his hands is at the nape of my neck, a firm clarifying massage. The other hand is lightly running up my bare arm. I feel his breath and the tongue, relaxed, slowly licking at my neck. His nose is pressed into the edge of my hairline. He inhales.
*
After Omar ended, I couldn’t help feeling that I’d had my heart fucked over. I wondered if I’d ever feel as seen, as understood, as resonant, with another person as I did with Omar. This is a classic, time-tested feeling—it’s basically the premise of all rom-coms and rom-drams. The certainty that in this lifetime, I will only ever have that one window of time, one spring and summer in my life, to be perfectly clear, and all other times before and after I will only be a blur, hazy, half out the door. Nobody would be able to see me. Not all of me. Only a leg here, a profile there. A swatch of skin.
*
On the phone, my mother brings up again the Chinese boy who was forced at gunpoint to drive the Boston marathon terrorist bombers around for a while. My mother is obsessed with the fact that the boy’s roommate was worried that he hadn’t come home. See, she says, it’s really good to have someone like that. I worry about you. You don’t have a boyfriend or husband. Back when you lived with your friend, she would notice if you didn’t come home one night, right? Right, I think, but Holly also betrayed me in a love triangle situation you know nothing about and now we are barely even friends anymore. I just worry, she continues. That you don’t have that now. What would happen? Would your coworkers notice? Do you have neighbors or friends or people who would notice if you disappeared? How long would it take for people to notice that you’re gone? Well, I say to my mother, you would notice. I am unable to peel away a thick nasty feeling as I say this.
While becoming a ghost, you begin to understand what it’s like to almost feel nothing—if you’re in just the right place, the right position, and stayed perfectly still. No breeze over the skin from moving through time and space. Just a river slipping by before your eyes that doesn’t even really register. Background, wallpaper.
Now that I am no longer solid, now that I am slippery and borderless, if I stay still like that, I become a secret. Perhaps only one person ever invented me, and I’ve been forgotten. Perhaps I never was there at all, and am not there now. I shift, in overlapping circle motions, to pay a ghastly visit to Holly. Or Omar. Same thing now. Holly was the former roommate, my flighty friend, full of blonde hair and squawky ideas. Holly’s ideas leapt out of her fully formed, like Athena out of Zeus’s head. She animated them into being, and people gawked, were flabbergasted, blown away, they bought into it hook, line, and sinker. She opened her eyes wide and fluttered her dark lashes and chewed on her own lips while she presented her incisive mind to the world, and we all prostrated ourselves before her feet. She wore all the time those black cloth Mary Jane slippers, she would wear them down, and then go buy another pair in Chinatown for five bucks.
Holly wasn’t home, but most likely Omar was home, and so I slipped through room after room until I found him in the back of the house. He was arranging pieces of paper on a big table, they looked like poems, one poem per sheet. As the Secret Ghost, I couldn’t really see very well from a distance. Anyone could see right through me, but my own senses had been fogged up, and my memory too. I could barely make out the words two feet away.
I stood next to Omar. I tested my inconsequentiality, overlapping with him a little and then a lot. I felt nothing. But this was a good thing. I try to touch my mouth to his neck, to press my body lightly against his. But there is only air. I tell myself this is okay too. This new me, this Secret Ghost me, has no ability—and subsequently, no need—for old modes of contact: squeezing and clenching, pushing and pressing, pulling and skimming, grasping and clutching. There was no need to keep it the fuck together, there was nothing to keep together, everything was apart, like the coldly distant light of stars pricking a dark sky, all separate, all from a different time, all out of arm’s reach.
A Golden State
Given the option, I will stand at the kitchen counter, in the late afternoon, in April, or September, and eat marinated artichoke hearts out of the can, while staring out the kitchen window, for all time. Given the option, I will stare until I become a statue, the seasons passing in the reflections of my eyes, and no other movement.
At the moment, I was staring out the window of my parents’ car. As a kid, I had clocked thousands of hours staring out very similar backseat windows on family road trips to San Diego, to Sequoia, to Yellowstone, to Lake Tahoe, to Mammoth, to Lake Arrowhead, Big Bear, Cedar Lake. Even a drive to the San Gabriel Valley felt like a road trip then. Picture this: an ivory-colored station wagon. The mother with a plastic sun visor on her head, permed hair, glitter puffy paint in a smattering of decorative daubs on the top
of the visor. The father, also with a sun visor, but his is cloth, with a terrycloth interior, and an anchor or golfing logo or insignia of some kind on the top. In the backseat, one sister a teenager. That is enough, that is everything about that sister, at this moment in time. The other, younger sister, sits on the other side of the backseat. She faces out the window at her side, eyes skimming barely, lightly, just on the surface of the passing hillsides, the gray blur of highway asphalt and fences, orange and almond tree groves. The occasional bright silver fluttering of reflective mylar ribbons, keeping the birds away.
Twenty years later. I might as well be in that same car, isolated backseat statuette, staring out the window, friendly only with the flat hills, the flat line of the sky, the unseeing, impenetrable cerulean blue of the sky. The sky that gave nothing of itself. Thousands of hours spent watching, sullenly, angst-ridden, not speaking, the pale peach and white stucco buildings streak by, the tans, and dusty greens, and sandy browns, the sharp skinny angles of palm trees, the patches of wild sagebrush. Thousands of hours passively absorbing the rows and rows of orange and almond tree groves—they would appear like just another random swath of trees, and then a magical moment: click, shift, at the right second, the one moment as the car aligned, and you saw that it wasn’t a random scattering at all, they were all in perfectly straight rows, line, after line, after line.
The city of Irvine had only been around for ten years when my parents moved there; it was just now celebrating its thirty-fifth birthday. It was the paradigm of sterile, new, clean, safe, planned suburb: sprawling California ranch homes, California schools (outdoor picnic benches instead of an indoor cafeteria?! Blew people’s minds! You always ate outside? Yes. What if it’s cold? It’s not ever. What if it rains? It doesn’t ever.) set against a landscape that still had a bit of a feel of the frontier, still held seemingly infinite expanses of chaparral hills, tumbleweeds, golden poppies, coyotes, quails, and roadrunners. Hawks perched on lamp posts. Mostly I remember liking being out in our mild southern California nature. It was a break from my sister, from my completely uncomprehending parents, it was quiet and let me be quiet, it asked nothing of me. My grandfather had given my sister and me these National Geographic children’s pop-up books one Christmas. I remember in particular, Creatures of the Desert World: rabbits, lizards, coyotes, rattlesnakes. It looked like my home, the same distinct color palette, the same rough textures.
The house my parents lived in now they had moved into after I finished high school, a house in Newport Ridge North, a gated community developed by the fine colorless folks at Pelican Hill Real Estate. A house, AKA a “luxury property.” Newport Ridge North was Provençal-themed, meaning nobody could pronounce any of the street names (Fayence, Musset, Nerval, Seyne, Reiz, Bandol, Tarascon, Ferrand, Ronsard, Lemans, Vincennes, Jarden, Sommet), and you were given a list of trees you were allowed to plant in your front yard, and recommended groundcover and flowers and shrubs. You were fined if you (or, more realistically, your gardener) didn’t keep your grass green and mowed, though in times of drought watering schedules were put into place. Every time I entered the community, the huge gold letters of Newport Ridge North set against a wall of stone slabs, the gatehouse where the security guard waved, the agonizing slowness of the clanking gate as it rolled open, I ogled the smooth spotless blackness of the asphalt inside this Newport Ridge North, so freshly black I always thought it had just been raining, when really, the homeowners’ association fees must have been funneled into the very urgent task of constantly paving and repaving the streets.
The house I had grown up in was about fifteen minutes away, across the street from my elementary and middle schools: Bonita Canyon, and Rancho (mascot: the Conquistador!). The edge of the school grounds abutted Chaparral Park, which led into several miles of unpaved trails, and some hills of decent elevation, upon which we gathered to watch fireworks on the Fourth of July. From there, an open view of Orange County, the Santa Ana mountains, Catalina Island. About 500 meters south of my house lay the northern border of Bommer Canyon, 16,000 acres of, well, canyon. We did a lot of school projects focused on the American West: I built a miniature replica of Anasazi cliff dwellings out of brown paper grocery bags. I wrote extensive reports on ranching, Cochise, cattle-branding (we designed our own branding iron symbols), the California missions. We took field trips to Mission San Juan Capistrano and Knott’s Berry Farm, a kind of western-wilderness-gold-mining-ghost-town type of theme park. We had extensive units on the Gold Rush, and various mining techniques.
At that house on Flintridge Street, I did my homework at the breakfast nook every afternoon. I would stare out the window. The curtains were white with an orange floral, vinelike motif at once bright and faded. I would watch the slight slant of the hills in the distance, almost always a beige-tan color, sometimes with a few scattered dark blips—“Oh, cows,” my sister and I would say, and turn back to our homework.
Once, two decades earlier, flames came over the top of the hills we looked at from that breakfast nook. We could see from the upstairs windows, people on their roofs in the Sierras (what we called the group of homes sandwiched between Turtle Rock Drive and Bonita Canyon Drive, all the street names started with Sierra—Sierra Luna, Sierra Noche, Sierra Siena, Sierra Nuevo) hosing their roofs down, inky smoke rising up over the ridges. We evacuated in the evening, up toward the northern part of the city, packed my mother’s ivory-colored diesel station wagon.
Up in the front of the car, my parents began arguing over the air conditioning. Right now, the car was making its way down Barranca, or Culver, where a new row of ready-made storefronts and restaurants had popped up like movie lot facades: top shops that form the generic nucleus of any city in the U.S.—California Pizza Kitchen, The Cheesecake Factory, K-Mart, Sprinkles, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Fleming’s Steakhouse, Barnes & Noble, a flashing multi-shoppertainment-movieplex, Starbucks or Coffee Bean, Houston’s.
I think back to New York. These days. These days, those past tense days. I hadn’t known that in a new city, on a new coast, that my body would be different, would feel like somebody else’s object, a horror movie alien.
In the winter, in the locker room in a ceramics studio in the Village, I was rolling up my shirtsleeves, and could not recognize the pale forearms that appeared. They were not mine. In the summer, in a used bookstore near Union Square, I saw a book that reminded me of the golden boy. I tilted the book out of the bookshelf. It wasn’t too hard, to pull it out, the bookstore’s foreign language poetry section was small, the books stood loosely. And yet, the book gave a crack when I flipped it open. A bug flew out, and towards my face. I jerked my head back, fingers brushing instinctively in front of my eyes. Had it flown into my eye, gotten caught in my eyelashes? This would be a fear of mine. I quickly slid the book back into its place on the shelf. It all depends on whether or not you choose to believe in omens. Whether or not you choose to assign meaning.
From the front of the car, my parents pointed out that we were on the Grapevine. They were referring to an incident from my past. Once, here, in the beating dry heat of late summer, I sat twisted around in the passenger side seat of my gold sedan, watching my boyfriend of seven months getting arrested through the dusty rear window. He was being slammed against the hood of the highway patrol car, he was being handcuffed. We were on the Grapevine, this very same stretch of it, in Bakersfield. We had been headed to Morro Bay for a short camping trip. The officers claimed to have clocked him with a radar gun going 120 miles per hour. I ended up spending a night camped out on a bench in the waiting room of the Kern County Jail, waiting for him to be released. The backseat and trunk of my gold car which was parked in the empty jail parking lot was full of camping food and whiskey. I sat there on the bench that night thinking about the beef jerky in the car. The parking lot was empty. Sand all around. Ghosts everywhere.
He had been from the Twin Cities. I wrote pages and pages of poetry about how much I despised
the Midwest, even though my on-the-ground knowledge of it consisted solely of two days in Chicago. I wrote that I hated how they pronounced “bags” and how the cities looked, and how uncynical and white and happy and protected the people I had met were. I never told him any of that. I shared with him what I thought was somewhat harmless, things like how I could not wrap my head around what a casserole was or why meatloaf existed. Actually I didn’t even say that second one, that might have been too aggressive, too leading. He was proud of his hometown; it’s actually very diverse, he told me, we have the second biggest Hmong population there.
I smiled and said something unintelligible to my parents, something about how long ago it was, when that had all happened. I could say these generic phrases, all day long. I could talk about things that didn’t matter, that weren’t secrets, for all time. Here in the southland, I was more able to keep myself secret. Sometimes, during the day, I walked through the brush. I slipped my fingers into the chaparral, tips brushing the dry brittle tips, the tender thorns. The browns and brown greens coated my eyes, slicked them, licked them, affectionate tongues, rough and hot and damp. It suddenly felt like all my life I had been needing to get back to this, the gray browns, the tan browns, the sand browns, beige browns of sharp rocks scattered like hazards on sand. All these dry bits on one plane, a flat photograph of desiccation. But that was the trick. These things were alive. Their camouflaged lives soothed me in a way that the alien green abundance of the deciduous woods back around New York could not dare touch.
I had been living in a quasi-converted loft in Bushwick in those years. In the mornings, I would walk through the quiet living room space into the bathroom. The bathroom sink had been not draining well for at least half a year. There was a lot of gunk in there. A lot of saliva, and old rotting food bits, and mucous, and phlegm, and soap residue, and bits and pieces of hair, and dead skin flakes, and bugs, and it was all coagulated into a very dank, foul, almost edible stench. Gooily coating the pipes. Gooily accumulating, layer upon bumpy layer. As a result, there were tiny flies, gnats, that hovered around the openings of the sink. I would walk back to my bedroom.
All Roads Lead to Blood Page 15
