Elsewhere, California

by Dana Johnson

  Tourist! April yells in my ear so hard that it hurts, like she stuck a needle in it. She’s got to yell so I can hear her, but it still hurts. I left and you didn’t even know it, she says and she hands me a clear plastic cup with something in it. Your mouth is open, I swear to God it is, she says.

  I hold it up to my nose and smell it. It’s orange juice and something else. What’s this? I yell. I don’t drink!

  Yeah you do! Tonight you do! April says. She taps my cup. Cheers! She tugs on her torn fishnets and pulls her cutoff Levi’s up on her hips. Her uniform, I swear. But she looks good. Tonight her mohawk is slicked down on one side of her head. At least she left some hair on her head, not like that other crazy girl. April looks like something. I’ve tried to look like something tonight, with my striped tights and loafers and pink Day-Glo shirt. A black beret to cover my crazy hair that’s half straight and half nappy because I haven’t had anything done to it in a while. Why does everybody look like something and I look like nothing? I pull at my clothes and beret. I look dumb, I yell over New Order. I look confused! No dude! April says. You look eclectic! Eclectic man!

  And then I get scared because there’s a roar out of nowhere and then this guitar that sounds like blues and rock and funk all at the same time and then this mohawked black guy wearing a brown suit and red bowtie is running on the stage screaming, Hello motherfuckers! The whole band starts to play and then this dude just has a fit on stage. A serious fit like a seizure, singing his song. The crowd is moving all together but wild in different directions like ants that got stomped by some invisible giant’s foot. I’m being pushed and slammed and bumped and kicked and the singer jumps from the stage into the crowd like a crazy person because how does he know that anybody is going to catch him? And I get kicked in the face somehow and the crowd is roaring Fishbone! Fishbone! Angelo! Angelo! And my face hurts and I smell like the alcohol that I spilled all over myself and I don’t know where April is and the singer has stopped singing and is asking everybody, Who don’t give a fuck, y’all? Who don’t give a fuck!

  This is mostly what I remember. The longest night of my life. I’m so glad to get back to my room and I don’t think the underground is for me, except I keep hearing that dude asking me if I don’t give a fuck, but I don’t know what he means, exactly. About what? About who? Because I might answer, Yes. I do give a fuck, too much of a fuck. Or I might have to answer, Not enough. I don’t give enough of one. And anyway it’s a weird question coming from a weird black dude in a suit and a bowtie and crazy hair sticking up like he’s being electrocuted. Keith would have liked it, all the noise and the fits and the chaos, and he would have yelled straight out, Me! Me! I don’t give a fuck, motherfucker! Ain’t nothing in my way!

  You wouldn’t be confused about how he meant it, either.

  23

  MASSIMO IS LEANING in the doorway of the bedroom. He says nothing. He hangs his head, as if staring at his crossed arms. He is thinking and thinking. My eyes glide over him, the graying hair, the white oxford, still crisp after travel and lying down with me. His bare feet are crossed over each other. He clears his throat and lifts his head, levels his eyes at me. “So?”

  “He might come tonight.”

  “What? Ma-donna,” he says. I hear his accent, his way of speaking, acutely in this moment. It sounds like Ma-done-na, a long O in the middle. When we first met, I thought he was talking about our iconic Madonna. Madonna from Detroit, who now sounds as though she is from England. I had said, “Why do you keep saying her name?” He had looked at me with the same bewildered eyes as now.

  When I say nothing, he asks me again. “Why? How did that happen?”

  But I don’t know why. It’s an impossible question, the real why. Massimo scratches underneath his arm. “No,” he says slowly. “This is all very bad. This is a bad idea, Avery. You need to tell him to stay away. You need to tell him, the next time he comes into my fucking house?” Massimo brushes his hands together, and then holds them up, clean of imaginary debris. “He will see,” he says.

  I go to Massimo in the doorway. Pull his arms apart and hold his hands in mine. “You love me.”

  “Yes,” Massimo says, frowning, as though I am asking him a trick question.

  “You have been good to me, even when I have not been good to you.”

  He says nothing, but does not allow his eyes to meet mine. He’s trying to decide between angry and impassive, the two emotions that have enabled him to cope with me throughout the years.

  “You have to let me deal with this the best way for me.” I put his arms around me and let them go after he holds me without my help. But now, I say again, “I don’t need your help.”

  “No?” Massimo is finally smiling. He laughs. “You need my help often.”

  We have been talking in the dark, save for the sliver of light that has traveled down the hallway into the bedroom. “I’m tired,” I say, pulling Massimo to the bed again. “You are up, you are down. You’re trying to sleep, and then you’re not. You are already dressed to go. Decide what you want. You are running out of time.” He rubs the back of my head. I smell lemon and the spicy scent of his deodorant. Cigarette smoke. In the muted light, I watch him undress. This is what we do. He holds my gaze while he unbuttons his shirt. He pulls on his belt and it jangles. He lets his jeans fall to the floor and then he steps out of them. Then his underwear. Black underwear that clings to his thighs. He never looks away. He stands in front of me, naked, waiting for me to do the same. First my white tank top. Then my jeans. My bra. My underwear that looks like the kind worn by little boys. He does not look at my body all this time. Only my eyes. I see you, we say to each other with our eyes. I see you. And when Massimo is on top of me, I can hear his sounds, murmurs and heavy breath. My name. God’s name. The slickness of sweat is between us, but I don’t know if it has come from me or from him, from his hard work. When we were together for the first time, I could not look at him and I did not want him to look at me. Yet, I wondered. What is he looking at? What does he see? What kind of woman? Please, I thought. Let me be the thing that he wants to see. “Please,” he said. “Please look at me, Avery.”

  24

  ON THE WAY to the gallery, Massimo cuts his eyes back and forth from me to the road, as if checking my temperature with his eyes. “Are you nervous?” he keeps asking. “You don’t look nervous.”

  “Do you think I should be?”

  “Don’t you?” he asks, frowning. “I do.”

  “About the show or about Keith?”

  He doesn’t answer. He turns up the Levon Helm he’s letting me play because it’s my night. He usually makes fun of Helm, singing in an exaggerated twang, “The poor old dirt farmer he’s lost all his corn-orn-orn.” He yodels until I tell him to stop ruining such beautiful music. I was going to call Brenna on the way to the gallery, but now the phone rings and it’s her—not the first time we have been thinking of each other. I turn down the music and tell Brenna that much is the same. She is uneasy that nothing, absolutely nothing, has changed since she left earlier this afternoon. “What’s going to happen,” she wants to know. “He must be the worst he’s ever been, breaking into houses and stealing from people. What are we supposed to do?” None of us knows the answer. All Brenna knows is that she’s glad that she will not be there to see him.

  When we were just children, Brenna gave up her baby the way she told me she was going to have it. As if it were nothing. At least, this is how I thought about it when I was that girl in high school. “I’m knocked up,” she’d said. “My ass is grass.” And I was furious, as if I truly understood what was at stake. “We’ve been watching those lame cartoon sex ed things since the fifth grade,” I hollered. “It’s not that hard. Just don’t let any sperm get anywhere near you. The end.” But, of course. Now I know that there is, sometimes, an extraordinary difference between how someone appears, how they may act, and what is truly the matter, the person, at hand.

  “Are you really glad that you won’t b
e seeing him? You could have come. You could have seen him and talked to him.”

  “For what?” There’s a muffled sound and coughing. She’s tilted the phone away from her mouth so that she doesn’t cough into my ear. I can see her doing that. “Plus I’m already home. I’d have to drive all the way back.”

  Stores and restaurants speed past my passenger window in a blur of colors, shapes, and light. “What do you mean for what? Just to see him, of course.”

  “It wouldn’t be him, though. I don’t know who that would be. And it’s weird, him there with all those people we don’t know. If I ever see him again, I want it to be some place where we both can be ourselves and not be worried about the people around us.”

  I almost say that she doesn’t have to worry about that, but I’m not certain of it, myself. She keeps talking, asking me if I’m sure I don’t mind that she’s not coming, and I don’t. I see her all the time, she has always seen my work, and so I don’t need her to stand in a room with me if she doesn’t want to. This is just letting Brenna be who she is, what everyone around her has done all her life.

  My mind wanders as Brenna talks. I imagine her and Keith in a simple white room, talking quietly, middle-aged people with a binding history. She and Keith were never friends again, not after he was sent away and she had the baby. When the baby came, a girl, Brenna simply wasn’t at school one day, and the next day, my mother told me she’d had her baby, and just like that it wasn’t hers anymore. I felt sad for Brenna and for Keith and for the baby, I thought. But I had so much catching up to do. It was as if when Brenna had her baby, she and Keith went somewhere I could never go. There was no way for me to get to this place, and so for a long time, I pretended this place did not exist. Sad is not the word for this condition. Lost and looking seem to be better words.

  “Honest to God, Ave,” Brenna says, suddenly very loud on the other end. “I’m pissed. I’m pissed at him, that’s why I don’t want to see him. I’ll want to slap him. He just fucking gave up. Why’d he have to give up? We fucked up. We were kids. But pull it together. He could have gotten his shit together. He has to believe whatever people say about him? He’s got to go turn into an addict? What a waste. It’s such a waste, man. If he could have just pulled it together we could have done something different. Both of us. But no, you guys were always believing some shit somebody said about you.”

  I know better than to get into it with Brenna when she’s on a roll. And anyway, I understand everything she’s saying and not saying. Keith and I were the same. She’s right. And yes, Keith did quit, as if what he was fighting for was already over. But she doesn’t understand that she had a luxury, as little as she and her family had. She had the luxury of not having to listen to all the voices Keith and I had to. I didn’t think I could afford to ignore the voices. They were everywhere, all the time, but I found help, a place to put the voices, a way to turn them into something I was saying back. Maybe Keith tried to ignore the voices but couldn’t. He needed help from something stronger.

  When we hang up, Massimo says nothing. He just looks at me and turns up Levon Helm. He hums quietly and sounds good, actually, now that he’s respecting the song and the story being told. Brenna stays with me. She said that she and Keith could have done something different. She means that they could have been together, still, even without that baby. They could have made new ones. I remember once, when Brenna visited me at USC, she teased me about being there. “I need to come in here and fuck up this place,” she had said, rolling around on Anika’s bed and messing up her expensive cloudlike comforter.

  I see her smooth face. It’s raining outside. She pulls on the sweatshirt I loan her. It’s red with “Trojans” blazed across it in deep yellow. “Oh my God you guys,” she says. “Oh my total God. This makes me look so fat! What’s Doogie going to say? Will he give me his pin now that I’m such a fat fucking cow? Oh, I hate my mother!”

  “That’s what I need to do,” Brenna says. She turns to face the mirror. She stares at herself for a long time. She says, “I need to marry one of these rich fuckers around here. Move to Orange County or Malibu and have some kids and sit on my ass.”

  “You’d last two seconds,” I say.

  “You’re right.” Brenna raises an eyebrow at herself in the mirror like, You joker. And then her eyes settle into the wide, expectant gaze of someone listening and waiting, already anticipating someone or something that she can’t yet see.

  From the car, I survey people on the street or in cars passing us by. Strangers I will never meet, who I nevertheless wonder about. Every day, I know that she and Keith imagine their child out walking the world somewhere, an endless possibility. But what if she ever meets them? What will her eyes tell her? Her father’s qualities will be impossible to discern, so faint they will be invisible. She won’t know he was funny and tough like her mother. Smart. That when he was a child he was on his way to being anything. There was nothing in his way. At least, none of us saw anything at the time.

  Massimo and I have arrived at the gallery. It’s a lovely space. Simple white walls and the exhibit name in black on glass. From the car, I look around, outside and through the glass into the gallery, but don’t see the one person we all have been looking over our shoulders for.

  I’M JUST THINKING commencement is synonymous with graduation. I think graduation ceremonies mean the same as commencement ceremonies while I’m standing around with everybody. Mom, Dad, Dad’s girlfriend Theresa. Owen, Brenna. They’re all so proud of me, asking me, What’s next? What are you going to do with your life? And I still don’t know. I have a degree in business and I don’t care about business. After graduation, I’ll quit my work-study job answering phones in the art department and work as an administrative assistant at an educational testing service, grading tests. It was the first job I saw advertised and I applied, just to be making some kind of money.

  Dad holds my graduation cap in his hands and fingers the tassels. I shift my weight, negotiating black pumps that Dad bought me for interviews and an eventual job. Underneath my black graduation robe is a black suit, a skirt and blazer with shoulder pads that remind me of the made-for-TV Frankenstein, Herman Munster. This is the last fight I have with my father that I really want to win, a fight over what I need to be wearing. You have to dress the part, he had said, nodding and pleased with the way I looked coming out of the dressing room. Very professional, he said. But I felt strange in the clothes. I was in costume. Instead I wanted something loose, something that I could turn into my own with accessories, jewelry, shoes. No, he said, no. You need at least one suit. But it wasn’t even a real suit. It was made out of some kind of polyester that didn’t look too tacky because it was black. But still, in four years at USC, I had learned the difference between items of worth and items that signified one’s worth. My father was trying to help me signify to the world how valuable, how worthy I was. I watched him pull out his wallet and carefully count four ten-dollar bills and saw that there was only twenty dollars left in the wallet. The saddest twenty-dollar bill I have ever seen. And that is why he won, why I am wearing a black polyester suit under a heavy black robe with black hose and black pumps in eighty degrees.

  Who died, Brenna asks. She hugs me and her voice tickles my ear. Or is it you who’s dead, dude? She steps back and takes a picture but I don’t smile, I just stare back at the eye of the camera. Jeez, she says, at least look happy. It’s commencement. She points at the program and grins. Mom and Dad knew that Brenna would be here and have tolerated her after polite hellos and how have you beens, but she reminds them of something that they don’t want to be reminded of, of mistakes and decisions made that may have been the wrong thing to do. This is their happy day. Brenna doesn’t care, though. She jokes with Owen and both of them make fun of the way I speak. She sounds like she writes it down in her head before she says it, Brenna says. Doesn’t she? Sound like one of them shrinks on TV, don’t she? Owen says, laughing. Still, no matter who’s not talking to whom, and who
is making fun of whom, everyone is here for me. Proud.

  In the crowd of robes and tassels and leis around necks, I see a mohawk walking toward me. April. Still. She hasn’t changed after these years. I’ve taken off my robe because I can’t take the heat anymore. I drape it over my arm, like a waiter holding a long, black napkin. Hey, she says, and hugs me. Her nose ring glistens in the sun when she pulls back to look at me. Whoa, she says. Who died? And Brenna laughs. Brenna keeps staring at April with a big grin on her face. I can tell she gets a kick out of her. She winks at me and says, Hey. Let me take everybody’s picture. All of you together. My family looks at April as if they could look at her forever and still not be able to name what in the world she is. Hi, she says, thrusting her hand out to Mom and Dad. You must be Ave’s parents. I’m April. Where do you want me to stand? Mom and Dad look at her as if she’s not quite speaking English. Mom’s face says, Now I know this crazy-looking girl is not getting ready to mess up our picture with that hair, looking like some Indian, a earring hanging from her nose like some kind a African.