Valley of Ashes

by Cornelia Read

  “Say fromage,” she said, focusing in.

  Mom and I smiled and the kids tried to pull away from us.

  Ellis said, “Parrish, look at the camera, honey!”

  I knelt down.

  “Parrish, over here, pretty girl!” said Ellis.

  “Pretty!” said India.

  Ellis started waving her free hand. “Parrish, sweetie. Look look look.”

  I put my arm around my little blond child, gently cupping her cheek with my hand to turn her face forward.

  “Got it!” Ellis said, then set the timer and raced over to stand next to me for a full-cast shot.

  She pressed her arm against mine, shivering.

  “Your lips are blue now,” I said, having a sudden flashback to Mom telling me that same thing when I was little and she thought it was time to come out of the water.

  “I don’t mean to be a wuss, but would you guys mind if we went home?” Ellis asked.

  “Not at all,” said Mom. “Want me to drive?”

  Ellis shook her head. “Actually, I’d love to be up front. Closer to the heater.”

  When the kids were locked down in the car, Ellis leaned in toward my ear. “Don’t tell Seamus, okay? I’m so sick of getting yelled at.”

  The last time I’d stayed at the monstrous junior-executive house he’d insisted they have built in a soulless cookie-cutter development outside Cincinnati (“great rooms,” granite countertops, sad little fledgling trees held upright by guy wires), Ellis’s flabby, assless, nepotism-anointed corporate-cog lizard-princeling of a husband had spent twenty minutes shrieking at her for buying a bottle of Elmer’s Glue.

  “You bought glue?” he’d said, shaking his head. “Jesus Christ, Ellis, what kind of idiot are you? The kids’ll have that smeared into each other’s hair and all over our furniture in a heartbeat.”

  She didn’t say a word as he continued berating her. Neither did I.

  I’d endured enough spousal tantrums in my own household to know full well that if Ellis hadn’t bought glue, he would’ve attacked her for buying Brussels sprouts, or vitamins, or Scotch tape.

  Seamus took my silence as complicity.

  “Madeline, you gotta admit the bitch is incredibly stupid,” the shithead said, lipless grin fueled with certainty that I’d consider his scathing, entirely baseless abuse of my dearest friend proof of swoon-inducing virility on his part.

  Then he’d fucking winked at me.

  I turned my back on the shattered Colorado pond and hooked elbows with Ellis. “Seamus who?”

  I made tortellini with a side of hummus for the kids’ lunch and peeled some apples to slice.

  When Ellis had changed into dry clothes, she and I washed all four pairs of sticky little hands and got our offspring strapped into their respective mealtime restraint devices.

  Mom had gone out to her camper to lie down for a bit, saying she’d be happy to take second shift.

  As the kids dug in, Ellis and I leaned back against the orange Formica, winded.

  “What would the grown-ups like for lunch?” I asked.

  “Tequila.”

  “I’d lapse into a coma.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  “After crying for an hour.”

  Ellis punched me in the shoulder. “Pussy.”

  I shrugged. “Could be worse.”

  “How?”

  “Could be Mormons.”

  “Twenty kids, no booze?” Ellis shuddered with horror.

  “Or caffeine,” I said, handing her a cold can of Diet Coke and opening one for myself. “Plus they’d make us refer to Jell-O as ‘salad.’ ”

  “Fuck me gently with a chain saw,” she whispered, voice pitched only the slightest hair above inaudibility.

  “Chain saw!” chortled India.

  I raised my eyes heavenward. “Do we really have to give up swearing, on top of everything else? It’s the only vice I have left.”

  “You forgot sloth,” said Ellis, eyeing my laundry pile.

  Peregrine upended his tortellini bowl over Hadley’s head.

  His sister took a deep breath and held it, her face amping brighter and brighter crimson as lukewarm butter-and-Parmesan trickled down toward her pale eyebrows.

  Ellis gestured balletically toward this tableau with her soda can. “You ever notice how the longer they don’t breathe, the louder they end up screaming?”

  “Daily,” I replied.

  We knocked back bracing slugs of beverage.

  Hadley’s blue eyes went wider, and then she shrieked like an entire mill-town’s worth of lunch-hour steam whistles—all playing at 78 rpm.

  “That girl’s got a future in Chinese opera,” I said, when she paused to inhale.

  “You’d think the asthma would slow her down.”

  Hadley screamed again, louder this time. I figured the neighbors would be trying to remember whether Boulder had fallout shelters.

  I swallowed more Diet Coke. “Please tell me your son still naps.”

  “Of course he does. I brought duct tape.”

  I clinked her soda can with my own. “There is a God.”

  “Yeah.” Ellis laughed. “Too bad he’s such a vindictive asshole.”

  We ran the kids around the backyard for another half hour so they’d be exhausted enough to sleep—worked like a charm.

  Back down in the kitchen with Ellis, I held up two tablespoons and pointed them at the half-Cuisinart-ful of leftover hummus. “Sloppy seconds?”

  “Perfect.”

  “They always say we’re supposed to sleep when the kids do.” I said, handing her a spoon.

  “Fuck that. My brain’s already atrophied beyond repair.”

  “Yeah, me neither.”

  We were scraping the sides of the bowl when Mom breezed in.

  “I went for a little walk,” she said. “They’re having a graduation fair at the psychic academy. Ten bucks for fifteen minutes. Why don’t I watch the kids while you two go, my treat?”

  “Constance,” said Ellis, hugging my mother, “have I told you lately that I love you?”

  6

  Free at last, free at last,” said Ellis, as we escaped at a lope toward Pearl Street.

  I chimed in with a “Thank God Almighty.”

  We were so goofy with liberty that we grabbed hands and started skipping down the sidewalk.

  “Have you met anyone cool here yet?” she asked when we’d run out of breath and lapsed back into a walk.

  “I’m pretty certain I will never have friends again,” I said. “I’ll just die alone, unknelled, uncoffined, and surrounded by twenty-seven cats.”

  “Oh, please,” she said. “Our problem has never been making friends. The hard part’s liking them.”

  “You know, I actually enjoy moving—finding the new drugstore, figuring out where to get a decent baguette. But I kind of freeze up about people. It’s like the abyss opens up and I don’t know whether I’m going to be a complete reject geek like I was as a kid in California—”

  “Or queen of the universe like you’ve been every fucking place you’ve lived since?”

  “Thank you.”

  “So, join a mothers’ group or something. Tiny children—the great equalizer. You’re never short of small talk.”

  “Tried it,” I said.

  “So what happened?”

  “Well, I went in the first week—it was at this community center—and they had a facilitator chick. The kids are all bonking each other over the heads with plastic shovels and shit, and meanwhile she wants us to sit in a circle on the floor and have a ‘sharing’ session about some parenting question of the week, or whatever.”

  “Not liking the sound of this so far…”

  “No shit,” I said. “And the question that first week was, ‘What is your bedtime ritual,’ which, you know, right away—”

  “Gag.”

  “Exactly, right? So they start going around the circle, and all these women are talking about ho
w the kid picks out three storybooks, and then they have a warmed mug of soy milk, and then they sing lullabies in French and Mandarin, and then they all sleep ‘in the family bed’ and shit—on and fucking on—and I’m starting to freak out.”

  “And then they get to you,” she said.

  “And then they get to me.”

  “So what’d you say?”

  “I told the truth: I take my kids upstairs, tuck them into their cribs, say good night, and then shut the door most of the way and drink a goddamn beer in my kitchen.”

  “Bet that went over like a lead balloon,” said Ellis.

  “Plutonium, more like.” I hopped over a crack in the sidewalk. “I mean, there are some nice people here, but I don’t even know who I am anymore. I know who I used to be—a writer, a survivor, this chick who could think on her feet and stand up for people. I mean, shit… you know, better than anyone.”

  “You saved my life,” she said.

  “You saved mine.”

  We weren’t speaking figuratively.

  “So what the hell am I now?” I asked. “A failing housewife? A crappy mother? And we’re the fucking lucky ones—I know this is a life of goddamn privilege. I mean, we have health insurance, I don’t have to waitress at some all-night truckstop diner to feed my kids—”

  “Good thing, too, because you were the suckiest waitress who ever lived.”

  “Don’t I know it,” I said.

  “You’re still you.”

  “God help us all.”

  “You’re going to make friends here, we’re both going to survive the toddler years. Hey, our marriages might even improve. And someday, we’ll get to become ourselves again.”

  I closed my eyes. “That is just so hard for me to believe, right now.”

  “You know it’s true,” she said. “I mean, you’re smart, you’re funny, and you’re a total babe.”

  “I’m fucking fat.”

  “Which has never mattered,” she was kindly quick to say.

  “Says the bitch with the body of a Parisian cheerleader. You’re like a twelve-year-old boy with a Mighty Rack, dude.”

  “And you’re the only woman I know who still looks hot even when she’s twenty pounds over.”

  “Thirty,” I said. “Probably. I’m too scared to get on a scale.”

  “I fucking hate you. You could still crook your little finger in any bar in America and have three guys clamoring to fuck you—in a heartbeat.”

  “Sure, right after the full-frontal plastic surgery.”

  “So you’re a quart low on mojo. You need to get laid.”

  I jumped into the air, tapping my hand against a high overhead branch, the way I used to when I was out walking in the woods as a kid. “I imagine that will happen when my Intrepid Spouse gets home. Not that our fucking’s been entirely mojo-building of late.”

  “At least your husband doesn’t look like a lizard. Swear to God, I’m tempted to put a bag over my own head just so I don’t have to see Seamus’s reptilian countenance pulling closer at night.”

  “So? Screw in the dark.”

  “Doesn’t help his technique.”

  “Technique,” I said. “I have vague memories of that… lost somewhere back in the mists of prehistory, along with any pretense of foreplay.”

  “That bad?” She shook her head in sympathy.

  “We’re talking thirty seconds of ass-pawing on his part, max. The rest of it might as well be drive-through. I’m completely on my own in the getting-off department.”

  “At least Dean knew how at some point. Swear to God, Lizard Boy is unteachable—not to mention he thinks cunnilingus is an Irish airline.”

  “You need a nice thick Lanz nightie.”

  “I need a pool boy,” she said.

  “Oh, come on, sturdy ramparts of flannel, rendered in a sickeningly twee calico? Nothing puts a man off like preppy sleepwear.”

  “Yeah, that’d work. With a Taser.”

  “She’s holding out for the pool boy,” I said. “I know that look.”

  “Preferably a well-hung seventeen-year-old to give me a good solid thrashing every afternoon, before I have to go cook dinner while watching my husband snatch flies from midair with the otherwise-useless tip of his tongue.”

  “Remind me why you married Seamus, again?”

  Ellis shrugged. “Health insurance. And dental.”

  I burst out laughing.

  She cracked up, too. “Thank God the kids look like me, right?”

  “Yea,” I said, “verily.”

  She threw her arm across my shoulder. “Why couldn’t God have made us dykes, instead of this bullshit?”

  “Because he’s a vindictive asshole, remember?”

  We were standing in the entryway of the local psychic academy, which resembled the cheapest available Holiday Inn banquet room somewhere outside Indianapolis: bad “fruitwood” paneling, wagon-wheel ceiling fixtures, and giant versions of those plastic chairs we’d had in California grade school—the kind with splayed aluminum Jetson legs and three parallel slots cut down the middle of their injection-molded backs.

  “Are we sure we want to do this?” asked Ellis.

  I shrugged. “It’s Boulder. You can’t really escape: Every fucking day’s the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, ad aeternum.”

  “I’d prefer the Age of Scorpio,” she replied. “Suckbags and all.”

  There were pairs of people scattered around the room, seated to face each other.

  A woman with a mass of Pre-Raphaelite red-blond curls approached, wearing a tie-dyed caftan.

  “Five bucks she’s wearing pentacle earrings,” whispered Ellis.

  “We are so evil. And I have nothing against Wiccans, per se.”

  “Not even that bitch in your dorm senior year?” whispered Ellis. “The one who kept leaving bloody feathers outside your room, after you snaked the hot Irish dude right out from under her at the Spinning Wheel on kamikaze night?”

  “Not my fault. You’re the one who pulled him over to the table and told me, ‘I brought you a present.’ ”

  “Welcome, ladies,” said She-of-the-Caftan, raising her slender arms as she drew nigh. “Blessed be.”

  “Back atcha,” said Ellis.

  “I’m Becca Tay.” The Caftan Lady smiled. “Are you here for readings?”

  Ellis shot me a “psychic” my ass eyebrow.

  I kicked her in the ankle. Discreetly.

  Not like I didn’t think it was complete horseshit, too, but just for courtesy.

  “We are indeed, Becca,” I told the woman. “Thank you.”

  She turned to survey the room. “Anthony and Willow are just finishing up. Let me get you squared away,” she said, turning to lead us toward the cashier.

  I wanted to make fun of it all, but there was something calming about this lady’s presence. Plus she had amazing hair.

  Okay, I really didn’t want to make fun of it. I wanted it to work—all of it.

  I was so tired, so bereft, so hungry for comfort that I wanted to believe: in the New Age, in wheatgrass, in something. Pick a card, any card… Kali, Vishnu, Batman-and-Robin.

  Was there anything that could relax me enough so I could let go of the wheel for thirty seconds?

  No. Of course not. I had long since become utterly fucking incapable of trusting anything beyond the confines of my own tiny black heart.

  Too much risk out there. Too much downside. Too much certainty of pain.

  I pulled Mom’s twenty from my pocket and fell in line behind Becca Tay as she started across the room, dragging Ellis by the wrist in my wake.

  Ellis was placed with Anthony, well across the room from me.

  Willow turned out to be a guy—young, with black curly hair and a twitchy Adam’s apple. I sat down on my highly inorganic chair and surveyed the fields and pastures of wrinkled hemp in which he was arrayed.

  He lifted his wrists toward me, palms up. “Your hands atop mine, please.”

  German. Which
explains the black socks and sandals. Which are not really helping me with the whole willing-suspension-of-disbelief thing here.

  I laid my palms lightly across his, and he closed his eyes.

  Let me just say here that I don’t dismiss all fortune-telling out of hand.

  A very kind old man once did a reading of my face, peering into my future and reporting back some deeply scary auguries, all of which proved true in the end. But he’d been taught the knack for it by an old Gypsy woman in the cattle car bearing them both toward Auschwitz—her dying gift, as it shortly turned out.

  I’d always figured you couldn’t tap into this stuff without having survived a plunge so deep into the magma of the world’s black depths that everything else was burned away.

  But young Herr Willow, no doubt named Helmut or Rolf at birth and now holding my hands in his, looked pretty damn unscathed. Like maybe the worst tragedy he’d ever endured was discovering that his midmorning soy latte had been tainted with an actual dairy product.

  I glanced over at Ellis.

  Anthony was checking out her tits and she was trying not to smirk. Well, sort of trying.

  Willow swallowed audibly, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a cork in winter surf.

  I felt a wave of compassion for him. He couldn’t have been more than nineteen, and no one would ever mistake him for a well-endowed pool boy.

  He yanked his hands out from under mine and shot to his feet, knocking his chair backward to the floor.

  “I need grounding! I need grounding!” he screamed, the whites of his eyes showing all the way around each iris.

  With that he sprinted for the door, sandals flapping.

  Becca the Caftan Lady blocked his egress and gathered him in her arms, pillowing his head against her shoulder.

  “Shhh, Willow… shhhhh… it’s all right,” she said, leading him from the room. “Let’s get you some water. You’ve had a long day.”

  Jesus, now he was crying. I guess I still had enough Manhattan snark to short out a psychic. Or maybe he’d just sensed my inborn fondness for bacon cheeseburgers.

  Oh fucking well.

  A tall, thinly bearded brunette guy came in moments later, heading directly for me.