Elsewhere, California

by Dana Johnson

  Stop saying that! God! I say, and I don’t know what I’m feeling. This feels like something about me. This is what I start thinking: I’m fat. I look like a boy. I got nappy hair and I don’t even know what to do with it. And nothing I wear is ever cool and nothing Brenna steals for me looks good on me. She lies when she says I look rad. She’s a liar. Didn’t even tell me about Keith.

  I turn the TV up even more. A Mustang commercial is on. I say, Mom and Dad bet not find out.

  How they going to find out? I pull down my shirt because it always rides up over my stomach. I say, I don’t know. They just can, that’s all.

  You bet not say anything or I will beat your monkey ass, Keith says. I will too. I don’t care.

  Like I care, I say.

  He looks at me for a long time and then stands up. I can’t stand this shit you watching, he says. And Aunt Vicky won’t let you hang out with Brenna if you go run and tell like a big old baby. He shove the back of my head real hard but I jerk it back straight like, So? You pushed my head but it’s right back where it was. Fast. Like a ball you’re trying to push underwater. It’s always going to pop right back up, so there.

  THE NEXT DAY, I walk to Brenna’s house and her dad comes to the door in his boxers. I woke him up or something. I stare at his chest hair like a moron. I ask his chest, Is Brenna home? He yawns and runs his hands through his hair and it just stays up. He points to Brenna’s room and leaves me standing there. Close the door, he tells me over his shoulder. I stand there staring at Brenna’s door. I can hear Rod Stewart singing If you want my body and you think I’m sexy. It’s too loud so I have to knock hard.

  What’s the password? Brenna yells.

  It’s Avery, I try to yell and whisper at the same time. I wait there, waiting for her to tell me to come in, even though she always just walks into my room like it’s hers.

  Come in dumbass, she yells.

  She’s sitting on the floor, drinking an Orange Crush with albums and 45s all around her. I get on my knees and look through all the records until I can’t stand the loud music. Turn it down! So loud! You deaf?

  She turns it down and whispers. My mom and dad were going at it and I had to turn it up to keep from barfing up my ramen. Who wants to hear that crap? I think of Brenna’s dad all sweaty and making out with me and my hands are running through all that red hair on his chest. Yeah, I say. That’s pretty gross.

  I want to give Brenna a chance to tell me about Keith. If she’s my best friend, why isn’t she telling me everything that’s happening? Nobody ever tells me what’s going on. I say, I talked to Keith about something.

  So? Want a biscuit? You live together, you must talk to him about something like a thousand times a day.

  Why can’t you have a normal conversation without being a smartass all the time? I bite my lips and I swear I want to punch her all of a sudden. She makes me so sick sometimes. She says whatever she wants and does whatever she wants and nobody ever tells her anything. The first thing I do, everybody’s got something to say about it.

  What was that all about when I was babysitting yesterday?

  What? Brenna scratches Rod Stewart when she takes him off the record player.

  So you’re not even going to tell me.

  What? she says like she’s talking to some little kid. Spit it the fuck out already.

  You made out with Keith and you weren’t even going to tell me about any of it.

  What’s there to tell? I did it cause I wanted to and I didn’t want to tell you because I knew you’d go all crybaby on me.

  It? Just kissing, right?

  Ave. Brenna bends her neck and tightens her halter top string. Keith’s right. She says. You’re half retarded, if not 90 percent retarded, I swear to God.

  So it’s even worse. They totally got down. I wonder. When did they do it? How did they do it? How many times? And where was I? Sitting with a baby.

  I ask Brenna. When did you do it?

  Where are my normal records, Brenna says. She shuffles all the records like giant cards. Van fucking Halen, she says. Aww yeah. She pulls out the record and looks at the sleeve like she’s reading the words to the song but she knows the words. She always knows the words before me. She doesn’t even like music as much as I do, because she can take it or leave it. She gets bored easy with it. But not me. Every time I hear something, even if it’s a dumb song to everybody else, I keep it and it’s like I pull it out of my pocket like it’s a little medicine telling me it’s cool, Avery. Like, Ray, a drop of golden sun, me a name I call myself, far a long long way to run. Don’t you worry about a thing mama cause I’ll be standing on the side when you check it out.

  I ask Brenna. Have you and Keith been doing this all the time? I’m pissed. I’m so pissed just thinking about them knowing something that I don’t know. Liars.

  She sings, What a sweet talking honey with a little bit of money can turn your head around.

  I ask Brenna, How does it even feel?

  God. Brenna frowns at me. I don’t even know, Ave. What kind of question is that, even?

  I want to hit her so bad. Just sock her hard in the face. I make myself calm down by talking very, very slowly. I say, It’s a normal question, Brenna. A fucking. Normal. Question. How. Does. It. Feel. To. Have. A. Dick. Inside. You.

  Brenna pays attention to me finally. She has a weird smile on her face. You should be like this all the time, Avie baby. Brenna still has that crazy smile on her face.

  Why? Is that what whores are like?

  That hurts, Brenna says. I’m crying. Can’t you see these huge-ass tears running down my face? She lies down on her back with her hands behind her head and then she crosses her leg over her knee. She jiggles her foot like we’re lying somewhere else, on a beach in Tahiti or our personal island, staring up at the sky instead of lying on her dirty green carpet. I like it, she says. I like Keith. So what? What did I even do to you? She sits up all of a sudden and puts her face in her hands. We stare at each other and out of nowhere I think, That’s a nice picture, her face in her hands like that, like her hands are frames. White frames with brown dots all over them like cinnamon sprinkled over some milk with a little bit of Strawberry Quik mixed in. That’s the kind of white Brenna’s skin is, the kind of white that is not the same as any other white. She squints at me and all I can see are slits of green. Her red hair is all the way to her waist. But it’s not red, either. It’s brown and orange and blonde all mixed in so we’re all calling it red but that’s not right. It’s not even specific enough.

  Hey. Brenna kicks me. I asked you a question stoner. What did I even do to you?

  It feels like she and Keith did something to me. It does. But I don’t know what. There’s nothing I can say and I guess I’m not that mad anymore.

  You could have told me about it, I say. That’s all. You always tell me everything.

  Okay, then, she says. All right. I hear you. Sorry. Next time you will get all the blow-by-blow details, if you know what I mean.

  Gross. Not what I mean, Brenn.

  Okay. So we’re solid then.

  Yeah, I say. I stand up. Brenna reaches her hand out to me and wiggles her fingers. Pull me, she says. Pull me up. I do and she throws her arms around me. I love you, I love, I love you, she says and makes wet kissing sounds.

  I push her away. Stop it. That’s not funny. She laughs and then looks at me dead serious. I’m not kidding, Ave. It’s not supposed to be funny. You always think I’m fucking around, man. Even when I’m not.

  18

  I CAN’T SLEEP. I get up. Massimo is lying in bed and I think, Call Brenna. Don’t worry about Keith. She thinks of him all the time, I know, though she pretends not to think of anything that would trouble her. She thinks of a family even I, myself, have not imagined. Tones and hues and surprising colors popping up in hair and eyes. From people and places no one has remembered or imagined. When I try, I see this family in abstract, geometric shapes and patches of brilliant colors that allow us to see each a
spect of these children, without the specifics of what they are made of obscured or melted into a pot. Each fragment of the collage is conspicuous and astonishing, as valuable as the other, pulsating on the canvas with its own little song.

  I stand in the bathroom, having forgotten for the moment what it is I meant to do once I entered the room. I look at myself in the mirror, a mirror I love. It’s large, wooden, and white, with the paint chipping off of it, revealing the brown wood underneath. It’s half gone, and Massimo is frustrated with it. “Either we start with a new one,” he says, “or paint over this one,” but it’s antique, remnants of someone else’s life, and I think we should let the paint run its course. And anyway, it’s lovely, this weathered combination of brown and white.

  Always, since I’ve traveled the long distance, the half hour from Los Angeles to West Covina, Brenna and I have been together, or, I should say, friends, except for a brief time in high school when I didn’t know what to do with all that had happened. I had decided that, whatever had happened to her did not happen to me. Therefore, it was my right to ignore it. Me and my rights, my freedom, as if such liberties have anything to do with how one should treat another person. And besides, I had reasoned at the time, my parents told me to stay away from her.

  Brenna has two jobs. She works at her mother’s day care center during the day, and at night, she waitresses at Chili’s. She has been working like this for years. Jobs in pairs that don’t go together. Truck driver/mechanic, short-order cook/saleswoman, barista of impossibly finicky orders with varying degrees of foam, milk fat, and temperatures by day, mixer of cheap vodka at the local dive bar at night. Sometimes she keeps these jobs for a very long time, and sometimes, almost right away, she ends up inviting someone to go fuck themselves. I begged her to apply to college—junior college—but she said the notion of school bored the turds out of her. No one could ever tell her anything, especially me. Now, whenever I tell her it’s not too late, she says, “Thanks, cheerleader Muffy. Besides,” she says, “you went to college and studied something totally useless to you and ended up broke. Until Massimo.”

  I have argued this point with her, that education is simply synonymous with opportunity. Brenna, though, calls bullshit. She says that sometimes opportunity is synonymous with, “So what? I’m too fucked up to take advantage of any of your precious opportunity.” This may be true of some people, but Brenna—Brenna is just some bewildering combination of stubborn and disdainful. “It’s America, man,” she always used to say whenever I would try to tell her something. “It’s a free country and I’m free, so shut the fuck up.”

  Back when I was painting more instead of doing found art and collages, one of the last things I painted was a portrait of Brenna and me. Brenna is on my left. Her image is reminiscent of the whimsical Pippi Longstocking, who I adored when I was a child and who, of course, Brenna hates. If you didn’t know Brenna, you’d make the mistake of thinking that was who she was, just by looking at her. Pippi. Some funny little girl. Big eyes, freckles, a gap-toothed grin, and errant red ponytails jutting crookedly from the sides of her head like portending weathervanes. In the painting, Brenna’s eyes are crossed and her middle finger is extended. My face has the chubby cheeks of a child, circles of pink on my cheeks like a circus clown. My two braids are stiff and pointed down and away from my face, but my eyes—I was more careful with my eyes. They don’t commit to anything. They look toward Brenna’s middle finger with a hint of worry. My hand is wrapped around her wrist as if I mean to pull her hand down. But why is the corner of my lip turned up in a grin?

  Now I stare at myself in the mirror. I try to duplicate the grin of the portrait. I think, after all these years, finally, that the woman in the mirror looks okay. There is nothing to fix about the face. The lips are good. Big and fat and in style now that white women are buying them. The hair is at long last inconsequential. Not of value to me, not of interest. It is simply short. It is simply there. Breasts that are large and heavy. Belly and thighs that feel good to me. To Massimo. This realization is both sudden and expected. But satisfying. Like a middle finger. Though I’m not sure when, exactly, I first began to extend that finger.

  From the bathroom doorway, I can see Massimo lying on his side. His long eyelashes flutter slightly as if he’s dreaming, but his eyes are open when I thought they were closed. “What are you grinning at?” He reaches out to me and I go to him, take his soft hand, and he pulls me closer.

  “Nothing. I don’t know. I was just thinking that some people are brave, or stupid and brave. Some people just lie down and die.”

  “Which are you, my love?”

  “Not so brave, for sure. A little stupid. But I don’t want to lie down and die.”

  Massimo frowns. Traces my lips with his fingers. “What’s this? Why are you talking in riddles?”

  I sit on the bed and run my fingers through Massimo’s curls. Stroke his gray temples. “My grays,” he says. “I should dye it, no?” He takes my hand and kisses my palm. “I am getting too old for you, I know. I will be old and alone.” He sighs, squeezes my hand and grins at me, but it is a sad grin. He thinks that what he’s saying might be true one day, even if he will never ever be alone, because he has money. He can always get a girl, because rich men can. A girl who loves him or a girl who is hungry or a girl who is both. But now I know, in spite of everything, all he truly only ever wanted was me. I tell him something that is a truth I have never said out loud. I lie down next to Massimo. I make my body fit into his and pull his arm across my belly. I tell him what I am thinking at this moment. I say, “I’m afraid of Keith.”

  I first became afraid of Keith many years ago, when he had called me from his mother’s house. Before that, I had not heard from him in a very long time. It had been ten years. I had graduated from the University of Southern California, and he had called from prison to congratulate me. “You a fancy motherfucker now, ain’t you?” he said. “Good for you, Ave. Good for you.” I had been happy to hear from him because it had been such a long, long time. It was early in the morning, hours before I would leave for the gallery where I taught. It was the kind of day I love, the kind of day you can’t find anywhere else. Bright, windy, the Santa Ana winds blowing through and making the air crisp and full of static. Clean. The sky was a sharp blue with no clouds. And I was thinking that there was no place more beautiful than here. California.

  I keep talking to Massimo fast, like a confession I’m trying to be free of. “I should have visited him. I should have called him, but I don’t want him in my life. I don’t want to take care of him. He’s going to pull me down into his shit, and there is Brenna not saying but thinking that I need to do better by him since my life is good in a big house on a hill with a swimming pool, and I just don’t want to deal with any of it. I want to think only of myself. That is what I want. To think only of myself.”

  “Yes,” Massimo says, his breath warm on my neck. “I understand this.”

  “I mean, we were supposed to let him come in here and lay around doing drugs and God knows what else? I could just see it. Brenna and Keith and his buddies sitting on our couch, eating our food, being loud, telling me, ‘Chill out, Ave. Relax.’ This is a nice home. I mean, how are we supposed to control them?” I sound terrible to myself, but I mean it as I say it. There is us, and there is them.

  “Avie,” Massimo says calmly. “Already you have moved everybody in. That will not happen. We know this, so you just have to make it all right in your head. That it is not because of me that you didn’t want family in this house. It is because of you.” He keeps talking to the back of my head. “In any case, there is only so much you can do, and you better start thinking about how dangerous this person can be. Family or not.”

  But that’s the thing. So much I can do. But what have I done, exactly?

  “How is it in there,” I had asked Keith, already wanting to get off the phone that day. “Aw, you know,” he said. “Bullshit. They be sweating a nigga for real.” After a long s
ilence, he said, “Member the time we put hot sauce on Joe and Tina’s sugar toast? Shit was hilarious.” I recalled this, something I hadn’t thought of in years.

  “The hot sauce was your idea,” I said. “But we both got the belt.” Our cousins were happy when we sweetly offered them sugar toast—two pieces of bread like a sandwich—but when they took their bites, their tongues caught fire. “We were mean,” I said. “What little assholes.”

  “Sugar toast!” Keith laughed. “They ate that shit up. But that’s your problem if you just gone eat any shit a motherfucker gone hand you.” And then, he was saying that he had to go, that he would see me when he saw me.

  Back then, Keith was new to prison, but he had done his time and now he was out, after a second stint for armed robbery. He was out, and he was here.

  SUMMER WAY SUCKS if you’re working. But at least I have some money saved. I haven’t spent that much of it. I only saw The Blue Lagoon, Fame, and My Bodyguard, and then I bought a pair of black Dickies and some red jellies. Still, though, if you’re not working and after you’ve bought a bunch of stuff and saw some movies, it gets to be boring. You end up just staring out the window sometimes. Dad’s mowing the lawn. Come here, Ave, he says. You want to go to a game tomorrow? Double-header on Sunday? He says, You and Keith been working hard. Me too. Everybody needs a break. He’s got five tickets. One for him, and then tickets for me, Brenna, and Keith. Mom won’t go. She never goes. And she’s not talking to Dad anyhow. There’s some other woman calling the house and hanging up now. So there’s one more left. Carlos. I want to bring Carlos.

  Dad stops pushing the mower and leans on it. Who is Carlos?

  I can tell by the way he’s asking me that he thinks Carlos is somebody who wants to make out with me or something. I wish. Yeah Dad. Carlos has ulterior motives. I drive him mad with desire. I go, He’s just a friend at school. He’s nice.

  He Mexican?

  Yeah, I say. He’s Mexican.