When my big brother calls me up and tells me to do something, I do it. That’s all. He couldn’t drive mama to do her errand today because of his double-shift at the sprinkler factory, but somebody ought to, because it’s one of the hottest days on California record, and our Mama ain’t got no business standing around waiting for a bus on a day like this, and could I drive out and do it? he asked. Told.
Driving with my mother, I’m imagining all the things I will have to do when I get back home to Max, who will be there waiting to loudly tick off all the items I will have inevitably forgotten. All the tomatoes I’ve chosen that are too firm or too soft, asking me why did I buy the cheeses at the cheap local market, disgusting, when I should have gone to the gourmet market where, any idiot knows, they have the best cheeses, Avery, he’ll say. And then he will start on how late I am, where have I been? What have I been doing all this time? All that time just to run an errand with my mother? But because he and my mother don’t know each other so well, not even after four years, he will have no idea how these things can take so much time, how maddening it can be that my mother doesn’t know where she is going.
She never knows, because in all her fifty-six years she’s never learned how to drive. She relies on markers, like they used to when she lived in Arkansas, I guess. When you see the tree stump down the road, turn right. That kind of stuff. My visits with her turn into taking her here or there, around and around, looking for a place, only to end up where we left off, nowhere near where we need to be.
It’s 102 degrees and my Jaguar has no air-conditioning. The car’s old—1975—and hasn’t got much else going for it, really, except several dents in the body and expensive engine problems. This car was one of those Max ideas that seemed like a good one at the time. He was tired of getting phone calls from me, broken down, whining to be saved from odd places at odd times. I couldn’t afford a new car, so he bought me this one. One thing I could afford was to paint over the dull, peeling brown, so I did. Red. Because if I’m going to have a classy car, I want it to look good, at least.
“You need to keep it clean. That’s what you need to do,” my mother always says. “You got all kinds of Wendy’s and Burger King papers and whatnot, talking about painting it. You throwing bad money after bad!” she said after I told her about my paint job.
She doesn’t get it, my mother. She thinks sparkling clean-on-the-inside makes the same statement as clean on the outside, the kind of thinking that’s the most frustrating thing about her. She thinks either/or, and is always saying why don’t you just.
“Why don’t you just make a right here?” she says.
We’ve done that, turned right, turned here so many times that there’s no number for it. Still, I turn right. We’re driving the San Gabriel Valley, somewhere in parched Pomona. I’m anxious. I’m not comfortable in these broken-down neighborhoods. They bother me, like not being able to rest until you figure out a forgotten name, reminding me of when I was a little girl and lived in South Central L.A.
It’s painfully hot in my car. The heat and the smog are too much. Something bad and unhealthy must be happening to me and to my mother. Because what is it in the air that makes our eyes water and burn so much? And yet, my mother doesn’t say anything about the heat. I actually whimper, but she wipes her brow with a wrinkled tissue in silence.
The heat waves above the pavement make everything seem like I’m looking at it through an orange, smoggy film. For reasons that I haven’t been able to afford to find out all summer, and because I won’t overcome my stubbornness to ask Max for money to help me fix it, heat blows out of my car’s vents, though the heater is off. As we pass the same Boys Market for the third time, I feel the irritating tickle of a bead of sweat traveling between my breasts.
I yell at my mother. “How could you not know where this place is, Mom? How many times have you been here? You always do this.” I flip down my sun visor because it gives me something to do, like counting to ten before you say or do something you’ll be sorry for later. I drive hunched over the steering wheel, gripping it, as if somehow the intensity of these actions will help us find the food stamp office. I hear my words long after I’ve said them. Ten years ago, when I felt like I was the kid and she was the parent, my mother would have popped me. But at twenty-eight, I’m too old for that.
“The bus route is different from the way we came. I don’t usually get a ride here,” she says, and I look at her, expecting a face of accusation and instead her face is full of gratitude. “There,” my mother says, pointing to a mini-mall on our right that looks like twelve others we’ve passed in an hour.
“We’ve been here,” I say, “passed it about five times.”
“Well,” my mother says, getting her paperwork together, “sorry, Love, but this is it.”
As I pull into the parking lot I’m almost sorry that we’ve found the place, though ten minutes ago all I wanted out of life was to be here. The mini-mall lot is crammed with people trying to get food stamps, checks cashed, bus passes, and junk from the ninety-nine-cent store. I can’t take hot and people, not this kind of hot, not so many people, and all I can think of is how, on top of everything, this is going to make me even later than I already am to help Max with his dinner party.
“This is awful,” I say. We crawl slowly through the lot in search of a spot. “How long do you think this is going to take?” Before my mother can answer, I cut her off.
“Bitch,” I say, and give the finger to a young woman in a rusted-out Oldsmobile who has taken my parking space. When I was living in my parents’ house, I could never swear, and I feel funny but don’t apologize for it, because that doesn’t seem right, either, as though I’ve passed that point of little-girl concessions. I end up parking next to the woman who has taken my spot, and when I get out I glare at her. She looks at me coolly and glassy-eyed. She takes her time walking to me, like she’s bored with the fact that she’s got to be bothered. She’s inches from my face.
“Watch. Who. You. Mess. With.” She states each word deliberately, each one digging a deep hole for me to get thrown into with the dirt packed tight. She’s Tootsie Roll-colored, with dark brown irises surrounded by blue-white hair pulled back tightly in a bun, and except for her stubby height, looks just like me. But I’m afraid of her.
I glance at my mother, who has gotten out of the car but says nothing. She looks at me with raised eyebrows. I know that she won’t say anything to help me. It’s not her way.
In the lifetime of two seconds it takes me to decide what to do, I back down.
“Let’s go, Mom.” I turn my back on the woman, and my mother and I find our way to the line moving post-office slow. The loudness of this hole-in-the-wall is unbearable—little kids running all over the place screaming and crawling across the floor, parents screaming at their kids just as loudly.
“Look at these little bad-ass kids.” My mother shakes her head. “I would have wore you out, running around acting crazy.”
I cough out a quick laugh and my mother laughs with me. I realize it’s been a long time since we’ve laughed together. It embarrasses me.
“Nicky!” a young woman calls out. “I’ma beat your ass if you don’t get over here right now! I told you to stick close to me!”
“Look here.” My mother taps my shoulder. “I need to go to that ninty-nine-cent store after we done here.”
I stand on my toes a bit out of line to see how many people are ahead of us. Two, which could very well take two hours. “Why do you need to go there?” I ask, and before my mother can answer I say, “I may not have time because I’m having some people over tonight. Besides, the stuff in there is cheap, it’s junk, Mom.”
“Same reason I need to come here.”
“What?” I’ve forgotten I even asked her a question and I’m distracted because as we approach the bullet-proof glass of the clerk I see it’s the Oldsmobile woman. She looks through me.
“How you doing today?” my mother asks her, slipping her plastic food stamp card and identification under the window. The woman ignores my mother. “Hot today, ain’t it?” my mother tries again. I want to say, Mom, don’t waste your time, and that’s another thing about her: being nice to people who treat her like crap. I want to pull her aside and tell her this in hushed tones, like mothers do to their kids when they’re setting them straight.
“I like your nails,” my mother says to the clerk. The nails are hideous orange fake claws, probably done at the nail salon three doors down.
“Where’s your other green ID card?” the woman states flatly, as though she hasn’t heard a word my mother has said.
My mother’s mouth forms an O and her eyes widen. “Don’t you know I left it at home. I can’t believe I did that.”
I take off my sunglasses to see better. I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I’ve driven from Santa Monica, one hour, for nothing.
“Can you take information from my other card, anyway? It’s kind of hard for me to get here,” my mother says politely. It’s agonizing, like she’s begging. The woman shoves my mother’s cards back at us. I’m realizing that if my mother can’t get her food stamps now, we’ll have to drive the half hour back to her house in West Covina and come back. I don’t want to come back here.
“You’ll have to come back,” the clerk says as if programmed.
“But—”
“You’ll have to come back. That’s all to it. Next.”
I panic. “My mother needs these stamps today. We can’t come back.”
The clerk leans towards the dull, silver-colored speaker hanging in the middle of the glass partition. “Miss Fancy Car,” she says, real low. I can barely hear her. “I think you can wait another day for your food stamps, OK? Now collect your shit and move on before I go off on your ass.” Her eyes are on my mother when she says this, and my mother looks shaken. I want her to fight the clerk, to let her know who she’s talking to. But I know she won’t.
I grab my mother’s cards from underneath the glass and before I turn to leave I say, “My car and I have nothing to do with my mother.”
I hurry to my car, leaving my mother behind. I can barely get my key in the door because I’m so impatient to get out of here and take my mother home so I can go home. I remember she wants to go to the store. “You still want to go to the store?” I ask, but the way I ask it, it sounds like You better not want to go to the damn store. My mother shakes her head.
“No. Take me home.”
She’s quiet on the way back to her house. A bad habit I learned from my father, who could hardly find the words to talk at any given time and place, who found it especially painful in the closed-in space of a car, is to turn on the radio immediately—turn it up and only turn it down if somebody is saying something to me, or me to them. I particularly don’t like to talk much when I’m driving the freeway because I can’t do both at the same time.
So the radio’s playing an oldie by the Platters. “Only You.” But my mother’s quiet makes me uneasy, so I talk.
I ask her about her job search, which isn’t going well. She thinks that she can’t find work because of bad luck or because she isn’t looking hard enough. She thinks simply working hard will get her somewhere, like when she was a girl and could just sew people’s clothes to make a living. She’s old-fashioned. I don’t tell her what I know: that she’s a fifty-six-year-old woman with an eighth-grade education, that all the hard work in the world won’t change the fact that that’s not enough anymore. This is difficult to know. So instead I say something easy, something that I halfway believe—“Mom, everything will turn out OK”—and drive on down the Pomona freeway.
When we first moved to the suburbs, my father of course had a job. He was a factory worker in L.A. commuting back and forth. But my mother had to work two jobs so that we could afford the house. Our new house had a lawn. There were no gunshots at night. We didn’t even lock the doors. That summer before school started, before I started looking at myself with different eyes, these things were good enough.
In the motel rooms cleaned by my mother, I would stay out of her way and do homework in a corner. But I would sometimes leave slips of paper with her initials written on them, like a signature. Sometimes I left them under the beds or in between the folds of a towel hardened by the water and chemicals it was washed in. Sometimes I’d leave the paper under a lamp with gold-colored, peeling plastic.
One day, watching my mother clean is when I first got the idea of cards. I said, “Mama, I’m making you business cards.”
“Do what now?” She had sprayed some ammonia on a window and turned her back to me. I watched her behind wiggle as she cleaned the window like she was rubbing a hole in it.
“I said I’m making you up some business cards so you can leave them around when you done.”
“Girl, don’t nobody want my business on a card,” she said, turning to see what I was talking about. I had written a curly R and A for Ruby Arlington on my notebook paper in red ink. “Gone mess around and get me fired talking about some cards. This room is suppose to be clean when I leave it. When people pay for this room and come in, they see that it’s clean. As clean a room as they ever gone get. That’s my business card. Now keep your head in that book you brought and stop worrying me so I can finish and we can get home.”
I had put the scraps away and started reading my American history book. But I was still thinking that my mother should get credit for her work. So I sometimes left scraps of paper, even though she told me not to. I thought she should be known and envisioned her becoming famous for her work, like maybe on the TV show “Real People.”
When I started to my new school in the sixth grade, I bragged that my mama was the best motel room cleaner there was because I knew they’d be impressed and then I’d make a lot of friends.
“So what? Your mother’s a maid,” said one kid who was always trying to spit on the other kids and getting in trouble for it.
Lisa, this girl whose blonde hair was always greasy, and who usually smelled like pee, thought it was kind of interesting. So did Melvin, who I secretly loved. All his clothes were studded like a superstar’s. Nobody liked Lisa, even though she was always trying to buy people, because she was trashy. Nobody liked Melvin because he was new, and nobody liked me because I was black and new. But after a while, I wasn’t new anymore, and eventually they tolerated my blackness.
I was only eleven, and when I think back, when I remember, I can’t believe how good-hearted I was, how young. I can’t believe my mother was so young, just in her thirties, when she seemed so old to me.
I steal glances at my mother as I’m driving. She looks somber, not peaceful like she usually does. Her expression triggers a memory: I’m leaving for college, USC, on scholarship. It’s two years after Owen, my brother, has moved out and already started his own family, one year before my father leaves my mother, and we’re still a family. I’m crying because I’m afraid to leave home. I’m only seventeen, but I know that the next time I see her I’ll be even more of a stranger. She’ll be the same and I’ll be different, and home won’t be home. I can’t say all this to her. I just say, “Mama,” and hug her good-bye. She holds my face in her hands and says, “Ain’t no need of crying. You going now.”
I can never leave my mother’s house quickly. I’m always in a hurry, and she’s always keeping me with small talk and questions. This time she’s asking about my trip to Tuscany that Max paid for, even though I’m sure she doesn’t know where Tuscany is. Max wanted me to meet his family, see where he came from, but it could have been to Tuscany, Iowa, it wouldn’t have made any difference. And Max, I don’t even like to talk about him to my mother, who doesn’t like him but tries not to show it. And Max, he doesn’t dislike my mother, but neither has he ever said that he really liked her.
The first time she met Max was at a family gathering, my Aunt Ruthie’s sixtieth birthday, which nobody who was alive and around could miss and show their faces ever again. Max and I were late, so when we walked through my Aunt Ruthie’s door everybody was already drinking and dancing to Eddie Cleanhead Vinson singing Homeboy, homeboy, looks like you drunk again. Playing spades at one table and dominoes at another, talking trash at both.
Owen put his cards down long enough to rise and say, “Hey.” All my female relatives thought Max was handsome, gathered around him and told him, “You so fine,” which made him turn red, and my mother was shy and polite and quiet. So Max stuck with my brother and Uncle Ra Ra, who shoved a glass of brandy in his hand and immediately nicknamed him “Mass” before Massimo got to tell him he could call him Max. Owen slapped Max on the back and told me between brags and talking trash at the card table that any dude who had money and treated me right was all right with him.
Still, I worried all night, about who was thinking what about whom. What did Max think of all my loud drunk relatives? What did they all think of me for bringing in this, this Mass? You know propertalkin Avery would turn up with some white boy. Later that night in bed with Max, in his own house which would become mine in a matter of weeks, he said that my mother was nice but kind of boring. I was angry, at the time, that he would call my mother boring, but I allowed myself to believe he didn’t know how to say best in English what he actually meant, because he was Italian.
And so, I can still to this day be angry at Max about calling my mother boring, but I can never stay in her house long myself. I’m always antsy to leave it. I don’t know if it’s because I’m bored or because every time I’m in my mother’s house, the house I grew up in, everything in it is a reminder, like the swap-meet prints of Jesus hanging everywhere, which my father would have never allowed when he was living here. I’m always begging her to stop buying all these tacky things and spend her money on things that she needs.
“Why don’t you just cut it out, Mom?” I’ve said it forty times.
She used to have a couple of pictures of my father around, but those seem to be gone. He left her for another woman, and she’s taken care of herself with little education while he started a new life. When my mother and father were together, they had terrible fights over money, other women, my mother’s crazy, stubborn ways. There were loud voices, hitting, shoving. I wanted my mother to be quiet, stop arguing. She would never back down, not until my father left the house to get away from the fighting. I always blamed her for chasing Daddy away—for never shutting up, just once. But now that she’s more like the woman I thought I wanted her to be, just a tiny bit more weak, I’ve figured out there are many different ways to be weak.
“Mom,” I used to say, “it’s not too late to go back to school.” But I don’t say that anymore. What good, I often wonder, did a degree in art do for me? Make me completely unemployable. All those motel rooms so that I could “create,” throw paint on canvases, and give her nothing in return.
Now we are sitting at the glass dining room table fanning ourselves and drinking water. Even though I really do have to be going, I ask her if she wants to go back to get her food stamps today. I only ask because I can see the tiredness on her face and I know she’ll say no.
“No. I’m not messing around with them anymore today. Tomorrow, if it cools down, I’m a get over there then.”
“OK, Mom,” I say. “I should get going, then.”
“Wait.” My mother goes to her refrigerator and pulls out three bunches of mustard greens. “For your dinner.” She smiles. “And let me give you this ham hock.” She puts all of it in two plastic grocery bags and holds them out to me.
Greens are my favorite, and these are a rich, lush green, like a neon crayon. They don’t go with what I’m serving, though: four courses of food with pronunciation that never rolls off my tongue like it does Max’s. Italian food. I tell my mother this.
“What kind of dinner don’t go with greens?” She frowns. “I never heard tell of that before. You must be having Max’s friends over. All them Euro-peeans.”
“Mom,” I say. “Please.” But what she says is true.
I first met one of Max’s best friends—Christian the Austrian, I call him—at a dinner party thick with Germans, Austrians, and Italians. Christian served roast duck for ten of us and told stories of his exploits in Naples. I’d never had duck before, and I thought it was greasy and fleshy. I preferred chicken.
“That’s a bit south of Rome, Avery,” he informed me about Naples parenthetically. I knew exactly where it was because I had been there.
“She knows where it is, you asshole,” Max said. He drunkenly flicked ashes from his Dunhill on the white tablecloth. And later he yelled at me for not sticking up for myself. “I have seen you strong. When you want. But you fall into yourself around these, these jokers. You become a mouse. They intimate you. Why Avie?”
“Intimidate,” I said sullenly. Max was right, but how did I explain that sometimes I felt as though I was in grade school, but older and still not wiser? He was furiously mixing tumeric, cumin, and chili pepper for a paste. “That is what I said. Intimate. They already think I am only with you for your ass and you are with me for my wallet.”
“What do you care what people think?” I had asked another time, one of the biggest fights we’ve ever had. When we first met, I considered being a cleaning woman for a short time, set my own hours, have some flexibility—until I could find another job. Max is well-off and older and free with his money. I wanted to be free with mine, too. But I had a degree in one pocket and no money in the other.
Max, lying beside me in bed, threw up his hands in frustration. “What will people think, Avie? I can take care of you.”
“I want to take care of myself,” I said.
“Have some respect for yourself. Don’t clean people’s toilets. You were educated at a university. You are smarter than all the idiots I know. It’s stupid, this idea. Look.” He pointed at the large oil painting I had done a few years ago, inspired by friends. There were three women’s torsos, in different shades of brown, dancing. Max loved the painting and insisted we hang it, even though I wasn’t sure about it myself. “See that, Avie? You did that. It’s beautiful. I am so proud.” He took my hands and massaged them. “These hands are for painting, not toilets. Definitely not for cooking. No.” He grinned at me, and I smiled at him, even though we had been fighting like cobras just minutes before. “So.” He punched a pillow and turned over on his side, his back to me. “I won’t let you do it.”
I never did do it. But I’ve always meant to argue the point of respect with Max, exactly the point of the job. Maybe I should stick up for myself more, but he doesn’t give me the chance. The words are always out of his mouth first. And anyway, since then, Max and I have let each other down so many times that we’ve lost what we used to have. It’s turned out that they were all right, about the ass and the wallet.
But here I am now, still, rushing away from my mother to run to Max. “Avery, I want you to have these greens,” my mother says, holding them out to me.
“You should spend your money on you, Mom. You shouldn’t be throwing it away like this.”
“Money spent on you was never thrown away. Now, here,” she says. “I ain’t going to tell you again.” So I take them and offer her some cash until she can get her food stamps.
“Mom, does it matter?”
“It’s Max’s money,” she says, her arms crossed. I put it away.
She walks me to the door and stands at the top of the driveway as I go to my car. “I sure wish you could spend more time,” she says.
“Next time,” I call up to her. I drive off and can see her waving, getting smaller and smaller in my rearview mirror. I know she won’t go into the house until I’m out of sight. When I realize I don’t deserve this, it fills me with sorrow.
“Farsumaura, polenta with Bolognese meat sauce, and a salad with radicchieto leaves …” Max ticks off the courses, all his fingers splayed except the pinky tucked into his palm. He jerks his head back to subdue a blue-black strand of hair that has fallen into his eyes. “What am I forgetting?”
“La Zuppa di Ceci del Corsi,” I recite dutifully. Max’s best friend, who he loves like a brother, Silvio Corsi, the man who taught him how to cook in Rome, made up this soup of thick chickpeas, but we can never simply say, “Silvio’s soup.” I’ve tried. Zuppa di! … Max will prompt. Di Ce-ci del Corsi, I’ll finish in my most exaggerated Italian.
“Yes,” Max says, grinning. “Good girl.” He pats me on the ass, rubs it. When he’s grinning like this, boyish and mischievous, touching me like he still wants only me, he seems kind. These moments remind me of all the times we’ve invested in each other, through deaths and the births of people in our families. I forget how mean and demanding he can be, but only lately so demanding because I don’t feel like fighting. He likes to give orders, likes things to be done his way, insisted on dinner this evening when he knew I had to drive to the suburbs to help my mother, would maybe like to stay. But when he grins at me, the squint of his right eyes still charms me, and I can almost forget that he’s fucking the hostess at the restaurant he chefs at. Two shades darker than me, she is, which is sometimes all it takes to catch Max’s eye.
“So you take the polenta and the salad.” Max’s sharp blue eyes scan the ceiling. “I do the rest.” He swats my ass for emphasis. “Is OK?”
I suppose. But either way, because Max isn’t really expecting me to say no, I don’t answer. He won’t ever let me cook food he thinks is too complicated for me. Not in three years of living together. He even checks to see how I boil water.
“We don’t have a vegetable,” I say. I remember my mother’s greens. I go to the refrigerator and pull them out. “We could cook these.”
I’m picking a fight, that’s all. Max planned the dinner a week ago and will not want to serve these with his other courses, I already know. Or maybe I’m not picking a fight. Maybe I’m giving him the chance to indulge me in the smallest thing, like when we first met and everything I said was endearing and every minute he told me I was beautiful.
“Avie, those don’t go.” He brushes past me and buries his head in the refrigerator. “There is spinaci,” he says muffled, far away. He pulls his head out. Bottles clink and rattle when he slams the door. “A little olive oil and garlic. It will be fine.”
“I think mustard greens will go just as well with polenta.”
“Too heavy. Spinaci is better.”
“You could let people decide, Massimo. We could cook both.”
He stares at me with his hands on his waist. I don’t even want the greens, not that badly. I just want the final word this time.
“You are whining like a kid.”
“What’s wrong with my mother’s greens?” I still have them in my hands. I shake them at him.
“My head,” Max mutters. “With them, nothing is wrong.” He holds his head in his hands and massages his temples. “But you. You are another matter.”
This dinner tonight will be a disaster, if not for Silvio. Pretty candles and nice presentation doesn’t clear the air. Max’s old friends and coworkers from his first restaurant—Lucky, Sanchez, and Sanchez’s girlfriend—will come. “It has been too long,” Max said when planning the dinner. Silvio will come, too, and I like him best of all Max’s friends. He’s warm. He’s truly kind. He teases me, calls me Black Beauty.
“Black Beauty is a horse,” I said, the first time he called me that.
“But, ah, Bellisima,” he teased, “you are just as beautiful as the horse.” He’s the only one I want to talk to tonight.
Max is not speaking to me because I ruined the polenta. It should have been thick and firm enough to quiver when I shook it.
“What have you done to the polenta!” he yelled as if I had cut off his right arm. It was thin and runny as soup when I spooned it into one of our best serving bowls.
“Massimo,” Silvio said gently, trying to smooth things. “It’s only cornmeal. Right, Avery?” He kissed me on the forehead and I appreciated the scratchiness of his gray beard. He stuck his finger in the mess and tried not to make a face after he tasted it.
So we’re getting by without it and Max looks at everyone but me. There are eight of us, and the rest are doing their best to pretend they’re not uncomfortable because the hosts are not speaking to each other. It’s the worst thing Max can do to me, ignore me, look through me. I’d rather he throw a plate across the room, which is what he usually does when he’s most furious.
To cope, everybody’s getting drunk from the several bottles of wine the guests have brought for dinner. Max sulks and chain-smokes. I pour wine like water and think about how I don’t like Sanchez’s date, Cookie, beautiful and caramel colored, dressed like a hooker. Fishnet stockings. I don’t know who wears those anymore. They brought a friend, Theresa, who seems distant and snotty, probably because she’s one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen, with hair for days and eyes the color of emeralds. Max somehow met her and thought I’d like her because she reminded him of me, which is mind-boggling. Because Sanchez, who is handsome, only seems to be interested in catching his reflection in the window and watching Theresa’s every move, I like Lucky and Silvio the best tonight. They fight good-naturedly and are a study in opposites, enormous Lucky, near 300 pounds, and lanky Silvio. They keep my mind off of Max.
While Leonard Cohen sings in monotone from the CD player, Theresa decides to tell a story that she heard earlier, she says, about a parrot who was fed laxatives at the last party she went to. “And so this bird, it shits all over everything. I was dying! It was quite funny,” she says. We all laugh politely and keep drinking, and Leonard Cohen gets more and more on my nerves. Max loves him for some reason, but I hate him; to me he sings like he’s at a funeral that never ends. Parties aren’t supposed to be reminiscent of funerals. I think about the last time I really had fun at a gathering, four years ago when my family first met Max. At the end of the night, Uncle Ra Ra said he was tired of me watching everybody else dance. He dragged me out into his living room to dance with him to the Ohio Players, Roller coaster! Of love, say what? And then Max cut in on us and we danced close and slow, even though it was a fast song.
All day worrying and worrying about getting to where I needed to be and this is it. A dinner funeral.
“Jesus,” Lucky says, finally tired of sparring with Silvio. “What the fuck?” He motions toward the stereo. “What are you trying to do? Depress us?”
I look around at all the people in our house. In Max’s house. I want to be somewhere else. “That story? About the uh, the uh, bird?” I stutter. Theresa looks at me expectantly. I turn up a wine bottle and drink from it. I think I’m getting sick drunk. I can’t tell yet. “That is the stupidest shit I ever heard.”
Silvio’s brought me outside to look at the stars because he thinks I need some air. “Silvio, I’m not so drunk that I don’t know you can’t see stars in L.A.” I lean on him, wrap my arms around him. He’s so tall that my face rests just below his chest.
“Yes, you can see them,” he says. “Just squint like this.” He takes off his tiny round silver glasses that make him look like he belongs in the 1920s. His eyes, syrupy brown, aren’t as enormous without them. “Do the face like this.” He crunches up his face and chuckles after he makes sure I imitate him. I do, but I still can’t see anything.
“Ah, is OK. You can keep trying,” he says, resting his head on top of my cropped, fuzzy head. I like that Silvio lets me lean into him. I like how his deep voice vibrates through his chest into my ear. He’s warm and I feel so cold.
I rub his back, and he even lets me pull the shirttail from his pants, but this may only be because he’s surprised. He doesn’t stop me until my hands touch the bare skin on the small of his back, underneath the waist of his khakis.
“Bella, you are drunk. And I am old enough to be your father.” He pulls my hand from his pants and traps it between his own large hands. Silvio looks at me as if I’m an amusing but incorrigible child.
And then I’m startled by Max’s voice behind us. “Those things, yes,” he says from a place in the yard I can’t see. “And the third thing is that you are like a fucking father to me.”
In the house, everyone puts on their jackets in a hurry and Silvio tries to calm Max down, but Max refuses. Silvio tries to pry my arms from around his waist, but I won’t let go. I might fall down. “Massimo,” he says, “we are all very drunk and tired, that is all. Avie meant nothing, no harm.”
“Why are you speaking for her!” Max shouts after snatching a cigarette from his lips. He’s failed to light it three times now. “Let me hear what she has got to say about it all.”
Nothing. I have nothing to say. It’s all I can do to make it to the bathroom to vomit.
Not until everyone leaves the house does Max smash half the dishes in the house and call me twenty different kinds of whores—in English and Italian.
“But what about the whore at the restaurant!” I’ve been saving this bombshell for maximum strength. He didn’t know that I knew until now.
“That is different!” Max shoots back after a moment of shock. “She is not family!”
I’m much too drunk and much too sad and tired to argue that point, unlike my mother years and years ago.
We leave everything broken and I imagine that tomorrow Max will say this just isn’t working anymore. And if he does, what will I do? I haven’t had a job in three years, not since living with Max. How easily I was had. A tiramisu, compliments of Massimo the chef, and soon I was in his bed and living in his house, both of us stricken by the foreignness of the other. And how easily I had let Max down, faking a strength to match his, strength that’s harder and harder to find.
I try to get to sleep on the couch in the living room, fighting waves of nausea and listening for sounds of Max tossing and turning in bed. It’s so sad, how much he used to love me in that bed. How he used to marvel at the contrast between our skin. We used to lie side by side on our backs, my dark arm against his nearly translucent one, reaching toward the ceiling.
“How beautiful, Avie,” he would say. “How beautiful is the skin.” And I would laugh at his bad syntax that was so charming.
Everything’s swervy and wavy and I just want to fall asleep. I barely know where I am. I might be dying. I truly think I might be dying. Mama help me, like when I was a child and you rubbed Vicks salve all over my body. Or when you rubbed away the cramps in my leg that hurt so badly I screamed myself to sleep.
If I weren’t so ill, I’d get in my car and drive to you. Tomorrow? Maybe tomorrow. But if it were now, and if I knew where I was, I’d get on the 101 freeway, then take the 10 to the 60. I’d make a right and go down Montana, where my elementary, junior high, and high school are all in a row. At the four-way stop I’d make a left onto Arboles, where I used to play with Ashley in the seventh grade. I’d make another left on Verdugo, to your house, Mama, in the center of all the houses on the dead end. When I got to your house I’d ring the doorbell, even though I have a key. Maybe you’d be surprised to see me, stand in the doorway and forget to let me in. The happiness on your face would shame me. You’d say, “What?” Pull your nightgown tight across your chest. “Did you forget something? Is everything OK?”
“Mama,” I’d say finally. “I’m lost.”