My birthday slipped by without so much as a nod. I got home from John’s studio and found Cici sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee steaming in front of her. “Hey,” I say, setting my purse on the counter.
“Hey,” she says, cringing a bit at the sound of my voice.
I slide into the chair beside her. “You okay?”
“Headache.” She folds her hands up through her hair, pressing, as if she is trying to keep her head from exploding.
“I didn’t hear you get home last night.” I had left the party in Escondido around nine, taking Cici’s car and leaving her to get home as she could. She was lit by then, and I was tired, still not recovered from my drive. They had started talking about going to a bar, and I had begged out.
“I don’t remember getting home last night.” She groans and lifts one eyelid to look at me. “Where you been?”
“Nowhere,” I say, shy to tell her that I was at John’s studio letting him take pictures of me. I trace the grain in the table, watching my finger move over the smooth surface.
“Hmm,” she sighs. “I think I need food. Join me?” I nod and she takes her coffee and heads up to take a shower. I pour some coffee for myself and wait.
When she comes back, she is sleeked and shined. Her hair still damp but gelled into submission, and her makeup is fully in place. She looks like a different person.
“Feel better?”
She nods, but still squints with the motion. “Getting there.”
The restaurant she directs me to, because her car is nearly out of gas, is called La Cocina and it is the end cap of one of the million strip malls around here. We sit in the screened patio, and Cici orders a margarita “on the rocks, no salt” when the waitress comes to give us menus. She flashes a pristine new California driver’s license, but the waitress barely glances at it. Legal age to drink is twenty-one, and my own driver’s license, which is still from Illinois, is blazoned in red because I’m still under age. I reach for her license, and she passes it to me with a small quirk of a smile. I take in the picture and study her details. I take in the birthdate that puts her just three months past twenty-one.
“How did you manage that?” I ask, handing it back.
“John is a good man to know,” she whispers, then winks. The server brings her drink, my water, and a bowl of chips with salsa.
“Apparently.” A small flush rises up my cheeks, and I wonder why I’m so nervous to tell her about this morning, about the studio time and John’s confidence that he can get me work for the Dillard’s ad. I feel guilty, which doesn’t make any sense at all. I think she’ll be angry. I don’t know if she can see the little tumult I’m in, but she doesn’t mention it, stirring her drink. Why would she be angry?
We’re late for lunch, and the people inside are mostly finishing up, leaning back in their seats, digesting, waiting for their checks.
“What did you think of everybody?” she asks.
“I like them. They’re great. They are all so beautiful.”
“Looked like you had a good chat with John.” She cocks an eyebrow, looking devilish.
“Yeah. I did. Seems like a nice guy.”
“He’s all right.” She shrugs, looking toward the restaurant, licking her lips. “A bit of a player.”
“How long have they been together?”
“Sage and John?” she asks, wrinkling her nose. “I don’t know that they are, really. I mean, they see each other, I think, but he’s married.”
“Oh,” I hadn’t picked up on that at all. “I just assumed,” I admit as Cici takes a long pull on her straw, draining the liquid.
“John lives in Penasquitas, overlooking the canyon. It’s the Taj Mahal.” She smiles at some joke inside her head.
“What’s his wife like?”
“She’s nice. Got her own life, you know.” I nod, but don’t really. She quirks an eyebrow and lets the words drop out on the table, going for nonchalance, I know, but thrilled to be sharing the juicy tidbit.
“What does that mean though?” I ask, I try to tone it down, seeing the laughter in her eyes. Sage and John had chemistry, yet he has a wife.
She shrugs. “They’re just open.”
“Like they see other people?” I ask and Cici nods. “That’s gross,” I say, annoyed, thinking about Mitch and Theresa when they were together and he was still with Mom. That was a sleazy thing to do, and even though I liked Mitch—he was the best of the men my mother ever brought home—after that, I didn’t respect him.
“Not really. Monogamy is dead.” She flashes a smile, then goes on to tell me, “It’s a forced institution. People are animals; they aren’t meant to mate for life.”
I take a drink from my water, not wanting to argue with her. All the evidence in my own life suggests she is right—we aren’t meant to mate for life. “So why get married at all?” I ask, feeling sick to my stomach. I want to get married, someday. I want to have a family, with a husband and kids, I want everything that I gave Emily up for. I want Meredith’s life.
She shrugs an extravagant sweep of her shoulders and cocks an eyebrow. “Well, I won’t.” She glances around the patio then back to me, nodding toward a couple sitting in a booth. “You think they’re married?”
“I don’t know.” I glance at them as they hold hands across the table, the easy comfort of conversation passing between them.
“They’re not,” Cici says, and I wonder if she knows them.
“How do you know?”
“Because married people don’t talk.” She says this as if it is a well-known fact.
“That’s not true,” I insist. But I look around the room, and of the couples who are sitting in booths together there are some who are talking and others who are just sitting, looking around the room, and I can tell which she would think are married and which are not.
“It is. You can’t be with the same person forever and not run out of shit to say.” Cici nods, satisfied that she has cleared up my confusion and flags down our server, waving to her half empty glass for a refill. “That’s what John and Cheryl say.”
“Cheryl is . . .?” She looks at me like I am not keeping up. “John’s wife?” I add.
“That’s what they say. They don’t feel like they have to own each other, you know?”
“Does Cheryl know about Sage?”
“Of course. They’re open; they know about everybody.” I watch her down her drink. “She has her own boyfriends.”
“Why are they married, then?” I ask, feeling frustrated. At least my mother was offended when her men slept around. “You know that’s not normal. It’s so cynical,” I say, even though it’s clear she feels enlightened to think so.
She shrugs and rolls her eyes. The waiter comes over then and replaces her glass with a fresh one. She smiles up at him and actually bats her eyelashes. I shake my head. She is shameless and proud of it. “What is normal?” she asks when the waiter has gone.
“Well, that’s not.” I sound like a prude.
“You are such a Mildred,” she says with a certain level of disdain. Her breath puffing out in a sticky-sweet cloud of vaporized margarita.
I feel insulted and am not sure that I should. “What does that mean?”
Our food arrives, and the steam rises from the fajitas set in the center of the table. “Thank you, Robbie,” she says, as he places beans and rice and all the fixings on the table between us.
How pathetic is it that I’ve never eaten fajitas before? Cici had ordered for both of us, because even though the menu was in English, it was entirely foreign to me.
“Do you know him?” I ask when he walks away.
“No,” she laughs. “He has a name tag. You are so unobservant, Alison.” She unfolds the tortillas and begins adding the steaming vegetables and meat into the fold. I follow her lead. “A Mildred,” she says, by way of explanation, “is an old person.” She takes a bite, letting her mouth hang open to clear the heat before taking a drink. “And you are seriously the oldest person I know.” I don’t bother to mention that it is my birthday. I get it; she’s not actually talking about my age.
“Well, I don’t think I’m old, and I don’t think it’s bad to run out of things to say. I want to get married someday.”
“That’s sweet,” but what she means is “stupid,” I can tell. “I hope you do then. It’s not for me, though.”
“Don’t you think there is something really wonderful about being with somebody who already knows everything about you?” I wish I hadn’t said it as soon as the words were out of my mouth. She looks at me with such contempt that I know she will never understand.
It is true that in my life I have seen more of how marriages don’t work than how they do. My own mother married only once, but had a series of boyfriends and live-ins who were always on the verge of being “the one” until they weren’t. My mom’s best friend, Faye, was married three times and seemed to operate pretty much on the same revolving-door policy as my mother. But then I think about Leslie and Mr. McGill and the peaceful, quiet evenings I spent in their company, with long stretches where nobody said a word. When they did talk, though, it was about the world and events and what was happening around them. They didn’t have to keep talking about each other, because they already knew all that. Dylan’s parents have been married forever and seem perfect, even if there were some rough years along the way. They didn’t give up, and they still have things to say. My grandparents, Will and Barb—granted, he is her second husband—will be together forever. I have a flash of memory, of Will wrapping his arms around Barb’s waist in the kitchen while she is cooking at the stove, and I miss them so much all of a sudden that I have to swallow hard around a lump. That’s what I want—a man who is still thrilled to see me wiggle after thirty or forty years.
It’s clearly not what Cici wants, and I wonder if it’s because she isn’t looking forty years down the road and I am. She’s right. I really am the oldest person here.