This Is Where We Live

by Janelle Brown

  Giving in to an impetuous impulse, she flees the chaos of her occupied home and goes on a spending spree. She starts at Bloomingdale’s and buys herself new clothes for the first time in nearly a year, squandering $2,000 on a leather trench coat that she will never wear. She books a day at a Beverly Hills spa, has her back massaged with hot stones and her face steamed with eucalyptus and her feet entombed in paraffin, and then finishes it out with a $400 cut-and-color from Jennifer Aniston’s hairdresser. She has a leisurely lunch at an obscenely trendy restaurant, ordering $40 lobster salad because it’s the most expensive thing on the menu, even though she doesn’t particularly like shellfish. Every time she slaps down her bank card, she experiences a sort of fury-fueled high, as if each dollar wasted is a fuck-you gesture to the man who has just tried to bribe her not to hate him. As if Aoki herself were paying Claudia’s bills. It almost obliterates the pain.

  By the end of the day, she looks better than she has in years, which is supposed to be its own form of revenge, if you go by the lessons taught by chick flicks and bad paperback romance novels. Not surprisingly, though, she doesn’t actually feel better. Lying on the massage table having her scalp rubbed, or sitting in the salon chair drinking organic mint tea, or ringing the dressing room bell to have a different size dress brought to her, she feels instead as if she has become a stranger to herself. She is escaping Claudia and trying on a completely new identity: a self-indulgent person living a life of pampered indolence, someone who cares nothing about the world around her and what it might think of her.

  She decides she doesn’t like this person very much, either.

  Day Eighteen

  It’s nearly midnight and she has just bought herself a plane ticket to Paris, leaving the following morning. She is drunk, blunted by a $119 bottle of Pinot Blanc that she and Jeremy bought during an anniversary trip to the wine country of Santa Barbara, a bottle they’d been saving for a special occasion. In her inebriation, she has had the following epiphany: Jeremy wants you to try to get him back, even if he doesn’t know it yet. It is exactly the kind of impulsive, extravagant gesture that he won’t expect from you, and that’s exactly why you should do it.

  She opens another bottle and reserves a car service pickup for 10 A.M. I will fly to France and retrieve him from Aoki! she thinks, wobbling as she stands up from the computer. She trips over a pile of tile that the contractor has left in the middle of her living room and lands on her knee. It’s bleeding but it doesn’t hurt at all—she is strong, invincible! I will show up in Paris and he will realize what a horrible mistake he made!

  A third bottle, and she passes out on the couch.

  Day Nineteen

  Someone is pressing the doorbell, over and over again. Claudia wakes up on the couch, fuzz-tongued and lead-headed, and for a moment she can’t imagine who could possibly be at the door. And then she hears the idling town car out front.

  She thinks she’s going to die, right here, in this construction zone of a living room, with plastic sheeting over the windows and the smell of roofing tar making her stomach churn unhappily. What was she thinking? Jeremy is gone of his own free will; he has left her for someone else he loves more than her. Buying a plane ticket to France will change none of these intrinsic facts.

  The phone starts to ring, and the car service dispatcher leaves a peeved message on her answering machine. The chauffeur bangs on the door one last time before finally departing. She hears his town car rolling slowly down the hill, bumping over the potholes. Only then does she rise from the couch, take two aspirin, and go back to sleep.

  And that is where she will stay for the next few weeks: deep in a fugue state, motionless and depleted. To rise from a prone position is unthinkable; to wash and dry her new haircut, impossible; to move Jeremy’s belongings from their resting place on the floor of the closet, absurd. So how could she possibly even consider what to do with the rest of her life?

  Day Twenty-three

  A sign has appeared on Dolores’s front door; a binder-paper-sized official notice affixed there with a strip of blue painter’s tape. It’s been flapping there, yellowing, for nearly a week. From her vantage point in the living room window, using a pair of binoculars, Claudia can make out the largest type: NOTICE OF INTENT TO FORECLOSE, it reads. Has Dolores even seen it? From what Claudia has seen (and she’s been sitting here, doing not much of anything, all week), Dolores hasn’t exited her house since the notice was posted there, nor have any visitors—not Mary, not Luz—come by to take it down. In this, she feels a strange kinship with her neighbor, both of them cloistered in their own homes, growing increasingly out of touch with the world outside their front doors.

  Claudia hasn’t changed clothes since Thursday. When she wants to eat, she orders pizza. Mostly, she sleeps and stares out the window into the street.

  Thanksgiving is just days away. Despite the apparent acceptance of her heartfelt apology to Esme about the whole Ennis Gates fiasco, an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner has yet to be issued; but there’s always RC, who is hosting a catered meal for thirty at her house. Claudia’s mother has informed her that it’s “unhealthy” to be by herself on the holiday, but Claudia can’t bear the thought of being with anyone, either. She can just see those limpid, sympathetic smiles, highlighting the fact that someone is notably not in the room this year.

  The wildfires have returned, just twenty-five miles away this time, and today the stinging winds are blowing across the canyon, whipping the chaparral into a chattering frenzy and spackling the top of Claudia’s car with pallid ash. That’s someone’s home, she thinks, as she watches the particles rain down on the road, reduced to a dirty smear on the top of my hood. The sunlight is thick and golden and magical through the smoke, beautiful with terrible destruction.

  On television, the local newscasters report winds of eighty-two miles an hour in Sylmar. Claudia watches videos of the fire being propelled along by this invisible force, devouring entire neighborhoods in a matter of minutes. It makes her weep inconsolably.

  By the end of the day, the notice of intent has blown away.

  Day Thirty-nine

  There is a new sign in front of Dolores’s house. This one appears on a frigid Sunday in December, a signpost plopped into the parched earth like just another pinwheel. MOTIVATED SELLER, it says. OPEN HOUSE TODAY! MAKE YOUR BEST OFFER. The listing belongs to RE/MAX, the fourth one on this street alone. The sign is faded and coated with a thin layer of grime; it sags as if overcome by exhaustion, having put in too much time this winter already.

  Claudia watches from her living room window as the real estate agent—a middle-aged blond woman in a purple suit with green lizard-print pumps—parks her car in the driveway at promptly one o’clock. She heaves a second OPEN HOUSE signboard out of the trunk of her Honda CR-V and props it open on the curb. She ties three helium balloons to the mailbox. Then she lets herself into Dolores’s house and closes the door behind her.

  Claudia sits in the window watching the house across the street, idly waiting for the first buyers to arrive. Around two-fifteen, Dale—the violinist from up the street—drives by in his dented Volvo, but no other cars appear on the hill. By three o’clock, it is growing clear that no one is coming.

  She isn’t sure if it is pity for the real estate agent, curiosity about Dolores’s fate, or the realization that her legs are falling asleep from being stationary for so long that finally propels her to tie on her tennis shoes and put a jacket on over her wrinkled T. By three-fifteen she is standing on the doorstep of the beige stucco cottage. The sign out front is, of course, an invitation: Come right on in! Make yourself at home! This house could be yours! But old habits die hard; it just seems rude to barge in on her neighbor’s home without knocking. Finally Claudia hedges her bets by rapping with her knuckle twice before opening the door and letting herself in.

  At first she thinks the door is stuck; it won’t quite open all the way. Claudia peers around the entrance, quickly realizing that the problem isn
’t the door itself, but a pile of indeterminate stuff—FedEx boxes, Spanish-language newspapers, dusty baby clothes—that is lodged behind it. The door leads into a short hallway, and Claudia’s first impression is of a bat-infested cave, shadowy and musty and claustrophobic. As her eyes adjust, she begins to understand why. The hallway is lined on both sides, from floor to ceiling, with mountains of yet more stuff. Mexican dolls in ceremonial garb, staring out from plastic boxes. Religious cartoon pamphlets. Used manila envelopes, addressed to Dolores and Mario Hernandez, dating back thirty years. Men’s underwear folded in piles. Unpopped bubble wrap. Years of the Mount Washington Monthly—the same free newspaper that Claudia often moves to Dolores’s front doorstep—still tied in blue rubber bands. Stuffed animals missing critical limbs, spilling cotton entrails across the mostly obscured carpet. The precarious edifices wobble as Claudia squeezes past, drawn toward a faint light at the end of the hallway.

  She peers into the first doorway—a kid’s bedroom, though the twin beds, stacked four feet high with detritus, have clearly not been used in years—and then turns to see the real estate agent rushing down the hallway toward her with a hand extended. In the other hand, she clutches a cellphone.

  “Marcie Carson,” she says breathlessly. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Claudia.” She accepts the real estate agent’s dry palm, squeezing it encouragingly. When she takes her hand away, there is a business card nestled there: MARCIE CARSON, YOUR REAL ESTATE PROFESSIONAL FOR TWO DECADES!

  “So,” the real estate agent begins. She gestures vaguely at the mess surrounding them. “As you can see, this is a house that requires a little bit of …. imagination. But I guarantee you that once you remove the previous owner’s belongings you’ll see that the house is structurally quite sound. It’s not a issue of maintenance so much as housekeeping.”

  “I understand completely,” Claudia says.

  “Can you tell me what you’re looking for?”

  This is the moment to tell the real estate agent that she isn’t looking for a house at all, but why ruin Marcie’s day? “Oh, you know,” she says. “Someplace that speaks to me.”

  Marcie ushers her into the living room, judging by the plastic-covered velour sofa, which cowers beneath a mountain of storage boxes. The room reeks of stale smoke, ineffectually masked by lemon air freshener. “Well, this neighborhood is exceptional,” Marcie says. “Very up-and-coming. Lots of young professionals like yourself. And this house is an absolute bargain. Worth well over four but we’re listing it for three-seventy-five. You know, the owner’s been here for thirty-two years and never remodeled, so the home still has all its original period details. That’s very rare these days.”

  A mound of junk by the window has collapsed, and the ensuing landslide of expired coupon books and Christmas tree ornaments and dog-eared board games clears a space through which Claudia can see across to her own house. It is strange to look at it from this perspective, as if she were a stranger observing someone else’s life. From inside this dingy lair, her newly remodeled home—the fire-retardant synthetic shingles as yet unfaded, the gray-and-red paint job still fresh from the work that the contractor finished just two days before—looks like a bright beacon of logic and order. How long would it take for her own house to fall into similar disrepair? How many months of failing to throw away the supermarket circulars or take out the garbage? At what point on this road she is already on will she officially become a housebound hermit too?

  Your life could get so much worse, it dawns on her. You could be Dolores.

  “What happened?” she asks, fingering the business card.

  Marcie lowers her voice. “It’s a foreclosure,” she says.

  “Was it the lupus?” Claudia asks.

  Marcie looks confused. “I’m just representing the bank,” she says. “I didn’t even know she had lupus. But sure. I see that all the time these days. These older single women with no real income and depleted savings, they were told they could basically get free money out of their house. They have medical problems, so they take out a second mortgage or a home equity line and use the money to pay their bills. And then it’s gone and the payments balloon and they can’t afford to stay.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  The phone in Marcie’s hand begins to vibrate. Marcie glances at it, growing distressed. “Well, it’s certainly leaving an opportunity for the right person.”

  “Where will she go?”

  “I have no idea,” Marcie says. “I’m sorry, but I have to take this call. Why don’t you look around for a bit and I’ll be right back?” She flips open her phone and rushes out of the living room, talking in a hushed voice.

  Claudia follows her out to the hall. She wants to leave, but Marcie is in conference by the front door, preventing a stealthy escape. Instead, Claudia turns right, delving deeper into the house. There isn’t much room to maneuver, but there isn’t much to see anyway: The house, only slightly smaller than Claudia’s, has been reduced to a postage stamp by the presence of so much detritus. In the three years that they’ve been neighbors, Claudia has never once imagined what Dolores’s home might look like inside; even if she had, she would never have envisioned this. Claudia can’t help but push on farther, mordantly curious to see how bad things could possibly get.

  There are photographs on the wall in the hallway. The biggest is a framed black-and-white photo of a grandly mustachioed Mexican man: her husband? Claudia wonders. Portraits of assorted babies taken over the last few decades, one of them undoubtedly Luz. A framed watercolor of Jesus. And a seventh-grade school photo of a gap-toothed girl with twin black ponytails, her starched white shirt and stiff back slightly too formal for a class portrait, as if she has far grander ambitions than surviving junior high: Mary Hernandez.

  Looking at the picture, Claudia recalls the college recommendation she never wrote—it’s far too late now—and hates herself even more. Only now that she has lost her Ennis Gates job does she see how woefully she squandered that opportunity. Teaching could have been a great career. It might even have brought her fulfillment, if she had let it. Instead, Mary, too, is probably better off without her.

  She squeezes into the kitchen, which bears a marked resemblance to her own—the same avocado-colored linoleum, the same vintage stove, the same wooden cabinets splintering at the corners—except for its dismal state of repair. Dusty flats of canned frijoles sit in the corner. Crayon children’s drawings are stuck to the fridge with yellowing tape. The sink drips yellow water from a water-stained faucet. The light in the room is dim; when Claudia looks up, she realizes that this is because the overhead fixture is filled with a layer of dead bugs.

  From the back door, Claudia gazes out into the garden. A path lined with colored glass bottle bottoms leads up the hill, vanishing into a tangle of dust-strangled ivy and thorny succulents and overgrown thistle. Buried deep within the ivy is a prefab children’s play set, spotted with rust. Claudia steps out the back door, drawn toward the one patch of sunshine.

  When she looks to the left, she stops. In that little beacon of sun, Dolores has staked her final claim—a folding lounge chair missing two plastic slats, a withered pot of petunias, an overflowing ashtray. She sits there now, clad in a floral housecoat, fanning herself with a PennySaver and smoking a foul-smelling cigarette. Both activities come to an abrupt halt when she sees Claudia standing in her backyard.

  “You,” she says.

  “Me,” Claudia agrees.

  The cigarette resumes its trajectory toward Dolores’s mouth. The ash collapses under its own weight en route, landing in her formidable cleavage. Claudia imagines Dolores sitting here by herself every day, a lonely old woman with nothing to keep her company but some dusty piles of junk, the skunks skittering about under the house, and the occasional obligatory visit from her children and grandchildren. The sadness of this small empty life makes Claudia want to weep.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I was just leaving.”

  But
Dolores is heaving in the chair. Her bosom bounces from her failed attempt to lift her mass upright. She gives up and settles back, looking up at Claudia. “You buy my house?” She jabs the cigarette for emphasis.

  “I already have a house,” Claudia says.

  “This house ees good house,” Dolores continues, her sandpapered voice rasping. “I leeve here thirty-two years. Three kids.”

  She bares her teeth at Claudia, revealing nicotine-stained teeth. It is the first time that Claudia has ever seen her smile, and it seems to hurt her; the muscles of her upper lip tremble with the effort of lifting her mouth into an upward curve. It appears that she is trying not to cry.

  “I don’t want two houses,” Claudia says, once again feeling like she is supposed to apologize. She sees what she must look like to the old woman: the vulture from across the street, swooping in to pick over her ailing carcass. Does Dolores mistakenly think she is rich, Claudia wonders? Is that why she has always hated them? But you are rich, she realizes suddenly. You have over half a million in the bank. And you were still rich, comparatively speaking, even when you didn’t.

  “There you are!” The real estate agent bursts out the back door, still wielding the cell phone. She grips Claudia’s jacket, tugging her gently back toward the door. “I see you’ve met Mrs. Hernandez. Don’t worry, she knows she has to vacate before the property goes into escrow.”

  Dolores takes another drag of her cigarette. Her face collapses, her bushy gray brows beetling toward her nose, the corners of her mouth curling toward her chin. She looks up the hill, as if absorbed by something in the ivy, determined to ignore the interlopers in her garden. Claudia lets Marcie Carson steer her back to the dark interior of the house, leaving the old lady alone in the garden.

  Once inside, Claudia makes a beeline for the front door. The hand falls from her elbow as the dismayed real estate agent watches her flee. “You have my number!” Marcie calls after her. “Think about it. The bank is very motivated to move this house. We’re willing to be flexible on price.”