by Abbi Waxman
“So, what’s tonight?” asked Liz. “Delicate Ladies Book Club? Transgender Support Bridge Night? Decoupage Devils?”
“You think you’re very funny,” replied Nina, “but truthfully, you’re just jealous I have a wide variety of activities to keep my mind alive.”
“My mind needs no encouragement,” said Liz. “In fact, I’m taking up hard drugs in the hope of killing off some brain cells and leveling the brain/body playing field.”
This was actually true for Nina, too. Not the hard drugs, but the part about her mind needing no encouragement. As a child she’d been told she had ADD, or ADHD, or some other acronym, but her school librarian had simply clicked her tongue and told her she was imaginative and creative and couldn’t be expected to wait for everyone else to catch up. She’d started giving Nina extra books to read and encyclopedias to gnaw on. This approach, Nina now realized, was in no way medically recommended, and didn’t do anything at all for her math skills, but it did mean she arrived in high school having read more than anyone else, including the teachers. It also meant she thought of books as medication and sanctuary and the source of all good things. Nothing yet had proven her wrong.
Nina eyed her boss. “Tonight is Trivia Night.” She knew Liz wanted to join her trivia team but couldn’t work up the energy for the required late nights and weekly study sessions.
“They didn’t ban you yet? I thought they were going to ban you for winning all the time.”
“They did ban us from one place, but there are plenty of bars where they’ve never heard of us.”
Liz raised her eyebrows. “You’re a trivia hustler?”
Nina shrugged. “Living the gangster dream.”
Liz looked at her. “Go on. Do it.”
Nina shook her head.
“Please.”
Nina sighed. “You have to give me a category.”
“Marine life.”
“Too easy. A hundred-pound octopus can squeeze through a hole the size of a cherry tomato.”
“Kurt Vonnegut.”
“He opened one of the first Saab dealerships in America.”
“Jupiter.”
“Has the shortest day of all the planets. Can I stop now?”
“Does it hurt your head? Do you see auras around things?”
“No, but your expectant expression is low key stressing me out.”
Liz cackled and walked away. “You have no idea how amusing that party trick is,” she added over her shoulder. “Don’t forget to dress nice tomorrow. Mephistopheles is coming in.”
“OK.” Nina frowned after her, then tried to remember how long Jupiter’s day actually was. She couldn’t help it; it was . . . 9 hours and 55 minutes. Thank God for that. Not being able to remember something was, for Nina, torture. It was like an itch on the roof of your mouth, or when you get a bug bite between your toes. You have to go after it, even though it’s almost too much sensation to deal with. Liz thought all the clubs and activities Nina did were a way to be social, but she was totally wrong. Left undistracted, her brain tended to fly off the rails and drive her insane with endless meandering rivers of thought, or constant badgering questions she needed to look up answers to. The trivia, the reading, the book club . . . they were simply weapons of self-defense.
Two
In which we learn a few things that irritate Nina.
Nina walked home in the golden light of her evening neighborhood, the magical hour beloved of lighting directors and single people dreaming their plans for the night. Around her, people walked their dogs after work, talking on their phones, oblivious to the slanting sun glinting on windows and door knockers, the colors of the pastel sky as gauzy as any red-carpet lineup. Nina often reflected that LA was not a pretty city, architecturally speaking, but the sky made it beautiful several times a day. As with all things Hollywood, the lighting guy is God.
For example, at this time of day the sun made a great deal of her dark red hair. Had Nina known how pretty it looked, she would have taken a photo of herself, but sadly, she was thinking about pickles—sliced, whole, or relish, discuss—and missed the opportunity. In general, she wasn’t the kind of woman who turned casual heads; her looks were an acquired taste, and her resting expression suggested you weren’t going to be given much chance to acquire it. She was small and slender and gave the overall impression of a baby deer, until she spoke and you realized you’d been looking at a fox all along. As her good friend Leah once said, she wasn’t mean; she was painfully accurate.
Nina rented the guesthouse of one of the larger houses on Windsor Boulevard. It was a charming little place, completely separate from the main house, with its own entrance. Absolutely perfect for Nina. The owners were friends of Nina’s mother, and when Nina finished college had miraculously just finished renovating their guesthouse. They generously offered to rent it to Nina, who couldn’t have been happier to accept.
Her cat, Phil, was sitting on the gate waiting for her. Phil was a tabby of the brown and cream variety, with a black tip to his tail and white feet. He jumped down as the gate opened and preceded her up the stairs, the tip of his tail forming a jaunty accent like the marker flag on a toddler’s bicycle. Nina noticed he’d left a large but very dead worm on the doormat. He stood next to it casually, like, oh yeah, I’d almost forgotten, I brought you a worm. Nothing special, just a deadly worm I captured with my own paws and brought back for you. Thought you might fancy a little smackerel of something after work, you know. (He was apparently channeling Pooh Bear.)
Nina bent down and stroked his head. “Thanks, Phil. This is an incredible worm.” Phil rubbed against her legs, totally stoked with himself. Other cats might stay in all day, lounging around and licking their butts, but he was out and about Getting the Job Done. “I’m going to save it for later, though, if that’s all right with you.” Phil shrugged.
Nina opened the door and walked in, kicking off her shoes and surreptitiously placing the worm on the kitchen counter to be thrown away when the cat wasn’t looking. She looked up at the giant clock on the wall; still an hour before the trivia thing started. She turned on the kettle; time to chill and tidy. She loved her apartment, even if calling it an apartment was a bit of a stretch. It was basically one big room, with a tiny kitchenette and bathroom, but what it had in abundance was light and bookshelves, and really, what else does anyone need? Big double windows on the south and west walls filled the place with sun and color, and the shelves went from floor to ceiling. There was an oversize armchair near the window, where Nina could—and did—sit for hours and read her butt off. The Persian rug was all reds and oranges and tigers and birds, a souvenir of some trip of her mom’s, and had shown up a week or two after Nina had moved in her stuff (a bed, a chair, six boxes of books, a kitten, a coffee maker, and a large bulletin board). The note attached had read, Hey, had this in storage for years, thought you might like it. Let me know if you want the rest of the stuff.
Rest of the stuff? Nina had called her mom immediately. “Hey, Mom. Where are you?” This was her standard greeting.
“I’m in London right now, darling. Where are you?” Her mom was Australian, but her accent had softened over the years to the occasional hint. She said sockAH instead of soccer, or lollies instead of candy, but it wasn’t like she walked around in a hat with corks dangling from it.
Nina had smiled to hear her mother’s voice, the part of her she was most familiar with. “I’m in Dubai, Mom, at the top of the Burj Khalifa.”
“Really?” Her mom sounded excited. “How’s the view?”
Nina had sighed. “No, I’m in Los Angeles, right where you left me.”
“Oh.” Her mom was clearly disappointed Nina hadn’t inherited her wanderlust. She didn’t say it in so many words, but she didn’t have to.
“What’s with this carpet?” Nina had asked, poking the rolled-up rug with her foot.
Nina could
hear her mom sipping tea. She had probably been doing three or four things at the same time as taking Nina’s call. One thing at a time? Where’s the fun in that? “Well, I lived in LA when I was pregnant with you, remember?”
“Of course.” Nina knew her own origin story by heart, as everybody does. Her mother hadn’t been a slut, exactly, but she hadn’t been interested in romantic relationships. Nina had asked her many years earlier why she’d chosen not to have an abortion, and Candice had laughed in her usual way.
“Because I thought it would be an adventure, and it was.” AdvenchAH.
“The rug is gorgeous. What’s the rest of the stuff like?”
“Well, I think there’s all kinds of things. Go look if you want.” She’d told her where the storage unit was, and now, as Nina looked around her happy little place, she was looking at furniture she might have peed on as a baby. A small kilim sofa, an ottoman from Rajasthan, which Phil thought was his, and as much of her mom’s art collection as she could drag out of storage. The one wall that wasn’t covered with books was covered with photographs; images by Ruth Orkin, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Inge Morath and a few snapshots Nina liked that she’d taken herself; posters and magazine covers featuring the TV shows and celebrities of her childhood; her “visualization corner,” with its bulletin board and calendar (don’t mock; you only wish you were as organized as Nina); photos of Nina’s mom and Phil as a kitten. A single Malm bed from IKEA—with the optional storage drawers, please note—was tucked against a wall. By the way, the plural of Malm is just “Malm,” like deer; “Malms” sounds wrong, although it also sounds like a delicious marshmallow candy—ooh, are those chocolate malms?
Stooping to pick up the mail, Nina fed Phil and poured herself a glass of wine. Then she wandered over to her visualization corner and stood there, frowning at her bulletin board, with its inspirational images, quotes, and life hacks she never actually put into practice. She enjoyed being organized but always felt there was so much room for more. She loved having color-coordinated folders and lists and spent half an hour each morning reviewing her planner, setting her goals and intentions for the day, and generally pondering. This was time she had, of course, set aside for that purpose in her planner. She only wished there was more to actually, you know, plan. She sometimes made lists of things she’d already done solely so she could cross them off, which she couldn’t help feeling was pretty pathetic but strangely satisfying.
She’d graduated from UCLA with a useless but interesting degree (Art History, thanks for asking) and took the job at Knight’s while she worked out what she wanted to do now that she was grown up. She spent the next few years actually growing up; having short-lived love affairs and one slightly longer love affair and then some more short ones, and Getting in Shape and Being Vegan and Paleo and then Giving Up And Eating Everything Again. She took up yoga, then Spinning, then a combination yoga and Spin class she inwardly referred to as Spoga, then decoupage and knitting and a series of those evenings where you drink wine and paint, but she had a niggling suspicion she was underperforming in some way. Surely her purpose in life wasn’t simply to read as many books as possible?
Many of her friends were in long-term romantic relationships, but Nina was single. She liked sex; she enjoyed people with different points of view; she dated. But dating in LA was an Internet-enabled contact sport, and after a dozen evenings that established new lows for interpersonal behavior, she’d decided to Take a Break from Dating. It had been a lot easier than the time she’d tried to give up caffeine.
Nina worried she liked being alone too much; it was the only time she ever fully relaxed. People were . . . exhausting. They made her anxious. Leaving her apartment every morning was the turning over of a giant hourglass, the mental energy she’d stored up overnight eroding grain by grain. She refueled during the day by grabbing moments of solitude and sometimes felt her life was a long-distance swim between islands of silence. She enjoyed people—she really did—she just needed to take them in homeopathic doses; a little of the poison was the cure.
In solitude she set goals and made them, challenged herself and accepted the challenge, took up hobbies and dropped them, and if she periodically cleaned off her bulletin board and stuck up new goals and plans and dates and budgets and bought a new planner in the middle of the year and started over, so what? Nina leaned forward and crossed off that day’s date on the calendar, even though it wasn’t fully done yet.
See? One hundred percent ahead of the game.
* * *
Nina’s trivia team consisted of her and her three closest friends and was called Book ’Em, Danno, because why not? They were unassailable on books (Nina), history and geography (her friend Leah), contemporary popular culture (Carter, an ex-boyfriend of Leah’s who’d been too smart and funny to completely let go of), and current events and politics (her other friend, Lauren). All of them were equally good, in true millennial fashion, at classic popular culture (1950–1995, Lucy Ricardo to Chandler Bing) and identifying international snacks. Despite the fact that Nina was a football fan, their Achilles’ heel was still sports. In an effort to broaden her athletic knowledge, Nina had started reading Sports Illustrated, but so far all it had done was give her dirty dreams about a Norwegian snowboarder whose name she couldn’t even pronounce.
Having been thrown out of their last regular bar for never letting anyone else win, Book ’Em, Danno was now cautiously testing a new venue. Sugarlips was in Silver Lake, had been open two months, and served a vast selection of sodas (international and domestic) alongside the traditional panoply of craft beers. It was also making a name for itself by serving bowls of dry breakfast cereal as bar snacks, which presumably explained the name.
“How is it?” Lauren was watching Carter try a prickly pear soda. Lauren had dark hair, dark eyes, and a dark soul that delighted in humor other people might consider sardonic. She reminded Nina of a really good loaf of sourdough bread—crusty on the outside, with a soft and rewarding interior.
Carter shrugged. “You know, I’ve never had anything else prickly pear flavored, so I realized halfway through I didn’t have a frame of reference. But it tastes like . . . watermelon bubble gum?” He took another sip. “It’s kind of awesome, but I should probably be stoned to truly enjoy it.” He didn’t look like the kind of guy that got stoned; he looked like the kind of guy who helped old ladies across the street and regularly took Communion, but, as we all know, appearances are very deceptive. He had the symbol of the Rebel Alliance tattooed on his arm, and the Force was strong in his family.
“No.” Nina shook her head. “Keep your head in the game. You know the rules.”
“It might make me quicker.”
Lauren snorted into her beer. “Yeah, because that’s something people say all the time: We need to move with maximum speed and efficiency; break out the pot.”
The trivia contest began, and Book ’Em kicked butt for an hour or so. Then a late entry arrived to harsh their mellow.
“Oh crap,” muttered Carter. “Look who it isn’t.”
Nina craned around. “Who isn’t it?”
“Dammit,” said Leah. “It’s You’re a Quizzard, Harry.”
Nina kept a straight face, but inwardly she was vexed. Quizzard was really the only challenge they had in the East Los Angeles bar trivia world, which, admittedly, is an extremely small world, but Nina was competitive.
They watched as Quizzard, which was three guys and a girl, like the bizarro-world version of them, sat down at a table across from them. The team leader was clearly the tall guy who narrowed his eyes at Nina, and then raised his hand in mock salute.
Nina held his gaze for a second, then yawned hugely.
“Nice,” said Lauren. “Subtle.”
“He annoys me.”
“Is it his cuteness or the fact that he knows so much more about sports than you?”
“He’s not cute. And he knows mor
e about sports because he’s a dumb jock. Have you noticed he never answers a question about anything other than sports?”
“That’s not true; he answered a question about supermodels a few weeks ago.”
“Pah, swimsuit issue,” said Nina.
Lauren and Leah looked at each other over her head. “I think it’s the cuteness, personally,” said Leah. “I think you two are destined to fall in love and run off together on a trivia honeymoon.”
“Which would take place where?”
“The Culver City studio where Jeopardy! is filmed?”
“Washington DC, so you can geek out at the Library of Congress?”
“Hawaii?”
They all looked at Carter. “What has Hawaii got to do with trivia?” asked Lauren.
Carter shrugged. “I don’t know. I was focusing on the honeymoon part.”
Nina sighed. “He’s objectively attractive but subjectively repulsive, on account of his overwhelming self-confidence.”
Carter nodded. “That’s right, because women hate a confident man. That’s why Luke is so much more attractive than Han.”
Nina said, “Sarcasm gives you wrinkles.” She looked at the Quizzard team leader, surreptitiously. He had dark hair that seemed uncombed, which was good, and a bony, lean face that only just missed being traditionally handsome because he’d clearly broken his nose at some point. “Besides, he looks like he fights, and I’m a pacifist.” Neither of these things was strictly true, and Carter rolled his eyes.
The quizmaster tapped on his microphone. “OK, we have a new team joining the fray, You’re a Quizzard, Harry. The current leader, Book ’Em, Danno, is ahead by ten points, but we’ve still got three rounds to play, and, per the rules, late teams don’t get any extra credit, so, good luck, everyone.”
