I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness

by Claire Vaye Watkins

  The diner side of the Crowbar was open, but the bar wasn’t yet. Still I begged my waitress to make me a Bloody Mary. After some hemming and hawing she made it a double. I slurped it down with a pair of runny fried eggs, two flaccid strips of bacon, coffee and toast. The waitress—a salty mother of four from Amargosa Junction—suggested I visit the museum next door. I downed another Bloody first.

  “Can I help you?” An old lady docent propped up on a stool behind the cash register at the museum eyed me.

  I glanced in the back to make sure the mammoth was still there. “I’m fine,” I said. “Just looking around.”

  I could see what she saw: a day drunk in brand-new Uggs. The soak had cleansed my soul but the rest of me was filthy, ripeness radiating from my crotch and armpits, my hair gathered into a single unforgivable white girl dread. She parted the shades of the window by the register and peered out to the parking lot, to the cube with no food or water inside it. She tried to figure me out and did: tourist with a purse full of rocks.

  “We have maps,” she offered. “Do you have a map? They’re free. You’ll need a map.” Emphasis mine, probably.

  “I pretty much already know where everything is,” I said. “I used to live here. My mom used to run this place.”

  She asked my mother’s name. I told her.

  “Yep,” she said. “I know who you are.”

  I can’t tell you how good it felt to hear that. I bought a rock and one of the books by the cash register, a new copy of Caruthers. He’s in all the gift shops out here. The docent rang me up and then an idea struck across her face. She sprang up from her stool. “I was in the archive the other day and found something your mom wrote.”

  She stepped into the back office. “You can share it with your big sister,” she called, “wherever she ended up.” She thought I was Lise.

  She returned with a purple mimeograph. I glimpsed the title of the short-lived newspaper my parents put out. She folded the page and slipped it into Caruthers.

  “How’s she doing, your sister?”

  “Honestly she’s kind of a mess,” I said. “Walked out on her husband and baby.”

  Dottie, her name tag read.

  “Yep, well.” Dottie shrugged. “It’s a messy business being alive.”

  * * *

  —

  Back in the Crowbar, the bar was open and dark as a cave. I sat at the bar and read the obituary my mother wrote for my father. The picture accompanying it was darkened by ditto ink, but I knew it by heart. My father standing beside the road sign at the Tecopa turnoff. Lise and me barefoot, her in his arms, me in the dirt. We look like tourists but we are the very opposite. This is the only place we’ve ever known. The ground is strewn with hazards: stickers and goatheads, mesquite thorns. Scorpions. Rattlesnakes. You can almost see them. My mother took the photo, told us where to stand and how. She kept the original in her jewelry box under her chips. Was it so much to ask, to walk beside them one more time in the place where the Family gave way to our family?

  * * *

  —

  It was. I drove back over the mountains to Vegas, returned the Cube to the rental car center and dragged myself and my belongings toward the line for the airport shuttle. Waiting there, I received another sign. This Way to Rideshare Pick Up Zone.

  As the poet says, I could have made it mean most anything. What I made it mean was: get an Uber and have it, them, take me to Red Rock, the off-Strip casino themed after the ecosystem it paved.

  My sister Lise was right where I left her, weaving through slots in a sexy-referee outfit, tray balanced on her hand as if a part of her. She looked me up and down like one of her tiresome regulars. “Make sure you’re playing or I’m fucked,” she said when she came back with my free drink, nodding to the security camera overhead. She knew where they all were and where they were was everywhere.

  I played—Vegas for spending money—and Lise brought me drinks. I thought what a sad marvel it was that casinos had rebounded so well, given how most of us now walked around with little casinos in our pockets. I drank until I thought, Good for you, casinos! Thanks for having me! I drank until the end of Lise’s shift, telling her my big gnar in what fits and fragments the corporate surveillance allowed.

  She was tender and pitying as one can be while remembering a dozen slot junkies’ drink orders, said finally, “I’m sorry you blew up your marriage for an overeducated JewBu who didn’t love you back.”

  “It wasn’t for him,” I tried.

  “I get it.” She hugged me with her free arm. “JewBus are hot. Leonard Cohen, Goldie Hawn. You always had a hard-on for the dead Beastie Boy.”

  “I liked him before he died.”

  “But you liked him more after. They’re easier to love, the dead ones.”

  At that she had to scoot.

  * * *

  —

  I didn’t mention the likely demolition of the Tecopa house, not during Lise’s shift or on the drive home. Her apartment building was built in a Las Vegas vernacular best described as rooms-by-the-hour meets doomsday prepper, the complex encircled by a high cinder-block wall lined with crispy obelisks of dying juniper doing a bad job of masking the barbed wire on top. I was reminded how expensive it was to be poor. Lise’s thin-walled, roach-infested apartment cost more than I paid for my four-bedroom foursquare in Ann Arbor. For what she paid in rent she could have gotten her own house, or at least rented a place that was clean. But she had debt, student loans and bad credit, and a more affordable place would not have her. “I just don’t make food here,” she said as she flipped on the kitchen light and the cockroaches scuttled under the fridge, annoyed.

  I showered, which took forever, filthy as I was, then dressed in some of Lise’s clothes and joined her for a smoke on her balcony. She’d changed out of her uniform but still had her makeup on. Her feet were propped on the balcony’s flimsy railing in my Uggs.

  “So this is what brand-name Uggs feel like,” she said, her toes wiggling approvingly.

  She’d arranged for us to have dinner that night with Lyn and their joyfriends Dre and T.

  Lyn arrived at the restaurant fully baked, ordered platter upon platter of vegan meze. I cried and stuffed my face with grape leaves while Lyn gave me a pep talk. “I love you, Claire, but all this bullshit, all this pain, for what? ‘The American West?’ Marriage? To be chattel? No way, José! Oh em gee, what a racket! Marriage should be abolished. It’s a trap! It’s property law, as in you are the property. Adults can love adults! We can share property with whoever. That’s why we have contracts—hello! No bosses, no masters, no husbands! Read Lucifer the Lightbearer! Read Emma Goldman. Read The Ethical Slut. Marriage is a church!” I detected our mother’s disgust in that word.

  I told Lyn I’d read The Ethical Slut.

  Lise said, “Read it? She’s living it!”

  “I’m living The Awakening,” I corrected. “And a little bit of Charlotte’s Web.”

  Lyn said, “You know, I hope you get free, Claire Bear. As you know, I was mindfully single for a long time. Slutting it up, like you. But I was still insisting on vulnerability and intimacy and honesty and porousness from myself, none of this”—their hand circled the sad clock of my face—“pioneer girl bullshit.”

  “Don’t be dumb,” said T. “We’re getting married. We’re going to have a Wiccan ceremony for the whole polycule.”

  Dre nodded avidly. “It’s going to be dark and it’s going to be divine!” Dre was my favorite, their gorgeous equine face, their long Jesse fingers with nails painted robin’s-egg blue. The three of them cuddled in the booth, Lyn basking in the love-light beaming at them from both sides, conceding that they’d wear medieval garb and do a three-way Celtic hand binding.

  That reminded me. Lyn’s father, Ron, had died in a motorcycle crash outside Denton, Texas, in the fall. On his way to Florida. Probably quick, the Texa
s cops had told Lyn.

  “I’m sorry,” I told them.

  “Fucking Texas,” Lyn said. “Fucking Florida.”

  We were quiet for a time, then Lise held up her phone, the portal from whence all bad news springs. “Darren says G-ma wants to see us tomorrow.”

  “Fuck that,” said Lyn. “I’ve got plans.” They were going with T and Dre to Dre’s parents’ for Christmas Eve dinner, then to T’s parents’ to open presents, then home for sex and a good night’s sleep before they went up to Mount Charleston on Christmas morning to eat mushrooms. “You’re welcome to come to the mountains,” Lyn said.

  “We have to see G-ma,” Lise demurred.

  I said, “Who’s we?”

  G-ma, our grandmother Mary Lou Van Osbree Orlando Frehler (“Grapes Grandma” to Ruth), still lived on Fairway Drive. My aunt Monica’s house had been foreclosed, so she and her son, my cousin Darren, lived in the Fairway house, too. Both were addicts, but G-ma refused to live anywhere else.

  “I get it,” Lise said on the drive home from dinner, “she only has one daughter left.” Aunt Mo had been prescribed opiates for her Crohn’s disease around the same time our mother got hers for her Lyme disease. Soon enough they were snorting it, their sisterhood invigorated by their shared commitment to getting high. People think addicts are dumb because being high makes you seem dumb, from the outside, but from inside you’re brilliant because you had the ingenuity to get high no matter what and the courage to leave everyone else behind. Well, not everyone. They got my cousin Darren hooked on that shit when he was fifteen.

  I admit these were the broad strokes. Truthfully, I didn’t know what all horrors had gone down in the house on Fairway Drive since I’d moved away, what all horrors continued to go down. I didn’t want to know.

  “It’ll be grim,” Lise admitted. “Worse than last time. Darren’s on bad meds. Every time I go over there I have to go straight to an Al-Anon meeting after. But . . . it’s Christmas!” This was a decades-long private joke referring to our favorite bad movie of all time, a holiday rom-com starring Keira Knightley’s midriff in which “It’s Christmas!” is offered as rationale for all kinds of bonkers and borderline sociopathic decisions. We watched the movie that night, our tradition, after which Lise called and asked Darren to tell his mom and G-ma that we’d be coming by the Fairway house tomorrow.

  We spent the morning before the visit shopping for them at WinCo. SlimFast, milk, Kix, eggs, ground beef, Hamburger Help Me, a pallet of Diet Pepsi, cinnamon-scented pine cones and chocolate oranges for their stockings.

  “I’m kidding,” Lise said, tossing the chocolate oranges back on the shelf. “There are no stockings.”

  I schlepped the groceries up G-ma’s driveway, where the Datsun 280Z Lise had been born in sat balanced on a rusty jack. Yard art, trash, flower beds full of beach glass and seashells, crab grass overtaken by cane and sprinkled with shards from a busted window patched with cardboard. Lise knocked, and a brigade of little yappy dogs sounded the alarm. Scraggly terriers and a one-eyed Chihuahua climbed the couch to the front window and snarled at us through the cardboard.

  We stood there with them barking at us for a long, long time. I peered into the porthole in the front door where a doorknob might’ve been, were the entire scene not a menacing, surreal extravaganza of poverty, pain and neglect. Instead of a doorknob the door was held closed by a blue satin ribbon. The dogs yapping away. I peered in the window, saw movement, somewhere, blinding flashes. Then the face of a corpse filled the window, its skin ashen, yellow-gray, sunken eyes rolling, smacking lips collapsing in on toothless gums.

  I staggered back, stopped myself from crying out. The skull face smiled, knew me.

  Aunt Mo opened the door, bewildered in her bathrobe, colostomy bag bulging at her hip. I stepped through this doomed threshold uninvited. The dogs snarled. The smell.

  Darren had told no one we were coming. “Karma’s a bitch!” he shrieked, taking the cube of diet soda into his bedroom and slamming the door.

  Lise shrugged, hugged G-ma and ghastly Aunt Mo. I could not bring myself to follow suit. Mo retreated behind the shredded comforter nailed up to replace the door someone—Darren?—had ripped off its hinges. Every surface in the room, I knew, was covered with pill bottles, ashtrays, stoma bags, unread newspapers and unopened mail. When I was a kid it had been art supplies, sewing, decoupage during Oprah. I missed Oprah, missed my aunt, there in her house.

  G-ma showed me where she slept, an alcove off the kitchen that had been Aunt Mo’s sewing zone when she worked as a seamstress for the casinos. I remembered her working late into the night embroidering uniforms with logos, stitching the names of high rollers on satin jackets. Now they give out plastic swipe cards.

  G-ma showed us her current project, a mess of doilies crocheted with obscenities. Shit happens. Life’s a bitch and then you die. “The little old ladies on Death Row won’t sell them,” she said.

  “She means the senior center,” Lise explained, “on Decatur. G-ma was ‘disinvited’ from the craft fair over there. But I’m gonna get her set up online once I get my new phone. WE’LL SHOW THOSE UPTIGHT OLD BIDDIES, G-MA! YOU’RE GOING TO MAKE A MILLION DOLLARS ON ETSY!”

  “I don’t do it for the money,” said G-ma smugly.

  Aunt Mo’s embroidery spools were still on the pegboard on the wall, lustrous cones of thread in rainbow rows. The rhinestones of G-ma’s Willie Nelson pin winked in the light of the TV. Something else flashed, two prisms in the windows throwing rainbows on the walls. My aunt Mo taught us to sew in this room, me and Lise and Darren. I remembered the hum and chug of the sewing machine, how it tried to lurch away when I pressed the pedal. I looked around for the trunk bursting with bolts of fabric, but it was gone. The sewing machine, too.

  “He pawned it,” said Lise, reading my gaze.

  The house was freezing. “Is the swamp cooler on?” I asked. G-ma couldn’t hear me. I went around the corner into the kitchen to investigate and found a hole in the ceiling where the swamp cooler had been. Beneath it, the oven was open and on. I sat with G-ma under her electric blanket and watched a show she loved about murder. I held one of her hands, skin soft as suede with blue veins traversing ridges of bone, each witchy finger weighted with sterling silver. I wondered if my dad had made any of her rings, touched his lapis between my collarbones.

  Darren didn’t come out of his room for the rest of the visit, except to take a shower. “Be fair to him, Claire Vaye,” G-ma said at a commercial break, the pipes screeching.

  “To Darren?” I shouted. “You mean in my book?”

  G-ma shook her head. “To my buffalo.”

  “She means Theo,” said Lise. “This is her nickname for him. Really for all large, dark, hairy men.”

  G-ma raised her eyebrows, making her appetites known.

  “She calls Grandpa Joe a buffalo too,” Lise said. Grandpa Joe was my G-ma’s abusive fourth husband.

  Darren emerged from the bathroom, soaked. He’d apparently showered with his clothes on. He looked at me with scorn, then stomped back to his room. His room had been my mom’s. Before he slammed the door I saw briefly inside it, saw the guitar chords she’d drawn on the wall, a bed with no bedding and a horse blanket over the window, the only light the anemic glow of Darren’s phone.

  I said, “I can’t be fair, G-ma. I don’t even know what that means.”

  G-ma said, “Eh?”

  “SHE SAID SHE CAN’T BE FAIR!” Lise shouted.

  G-ma said, “Why the hell not?”

  “I hurt too much,” I said.

  “Eh?”

  “SHE HURTS TOO MUCH!” Lise shouted.

  G-ma considered this, tapped her lips with her index fingernail painted pearly amethyst and brittle as a beak. She rose slowly and beckoned me into the bathroom with her. I thought she had to pee and needed help, but she swatted me when I tried. She wore
head-to-toe denim every day, jean jacket, jean skirt, because, she said, Neil Young had once complimented this very ensemble. He had put his hand in her pocket, she was saying now, showing me the pocket, putting my hand in it. She shakily raised one booted foot up onto the closed toilet and with much effort lifted her heavy denim skirt. She showed me her fishnet stockings and the adult diaper beneath. “Beauty must suffer,” she said. She had, she said. She’d been smacked around quite a bit in her day, not just by Grandpa Joe, who’d used a knife just once. I said thank God he was an ex-con and not allowed to have a gun. She said we girls could be shocked all we wanted but she was of the opinion that she had deserved a smack here and there, since she’d been stepping out. I tried to disagree—“We’re not doing that anymore, G-ma”—but she kept on peeling her fishnets down, then tugging her diaper, by some witchy dexterity not snagging her rings. In Nebraska, she said, her father had been a preacher. Did I know that? Yes, he’d been a preacher and yes this was the Dust Bowl times when she was a little girl and yes daddy had let the men in his congregation have their way with us, with me and my sister. My great-grandfather offered this, I gathered there in the bathroom with Law & Order blaring in, as a type of therapy for adulterers and would-be adulterers in his congregation. Considered it his calling to invite men to rape the younger two of his four daughters. That’s why the sisters didn’t get along, G-ma said. She moved through all this quickly, far more quickly even than I have put it here, as if she was annoyed to have to catch me up, there, straddling the wobbly toilet with her denim skirt hiked up and her fishnets around her ankles, peeing standing up the way she’d taught me in Zion, her piss golden brown and mighty. “And that’s how I came to Las Vegas.”