I feel I am too old to be trusted as an expert.
Too old.
And at times it makes things difficult at work. Work for me is scouting the mall for talent.
My title, which is pinned to my t-shirt, reads: Talent Scout. What I’m scouting for is girls. Moreso: girls who are pretty enough to be models but not really because we’re at a mall in Idaho.
Another thing is when I scout for talent my throat sometimes burns.
I don’t know why.
I smile more than I probably should, to make up from the burning throat that sometimes keeps me too quiet. And all of this would be fine if my smile was just a little bit better. But my smile is my smile and I’ve been told that my smile is that of someone accepting or having just accepted a draw.
Stalemate, my smile says just by smiling.
Tic-tac-toe.
Go Fish.
My smile is down to a king and two pawns.
There’s a bishop in there, somewhere.
And my smile just says: this could take a little while. This could take some time.
See.
I try to be trustworthy when I scout, but it doesn’t always go. And that’s the old thing working against me. I do feel very strongly that me being too old makes the optics suboptimal. Bad. I think sometimes the girls see me as a gargoyle. A stone granny. Some old wannabe running her ancient metal detector up and down the ancient beachhead. Now: I’m only fifty-two. But to these girls that means death. Or near death.
No. It means death.
Okay. I’m dead to them. Yes. Sure. But I’m also their chance out. Their golden tick–
“You’re amazing,” I say, pointing at the girl with both my pointer fingers. “Way too pretty to just be another girl, hanging around this dump.”
“I don’t know,” says the girl. A harelipped girl with a tiny waist and hopeful smile.
“You just need headshots and you’ll be on your way. I can sign you up today! Right now!”
“No,” says the girl’s father. He takes his daughter by the wrist. “I know a scam when I see one and this is a scam, lady. Shame on you. Big shame on you and this whole crappy set up.”
Dads are most often the worst and do not want their daughters to be famous models. Moms can be like that but are much more susceptible to my charms, my excitements. They want their daughters who look like them to be thought of as beautiful. When I tell them–woman to woman–that I believe their little beanstalk has what it takes to make it at the next level, well, they believe me. And, even if they don’t believe me, they believe me. Really. It’s really like that. Fathers don’t believe.
No matter.
The mall is a fine place to be. The mall has an eggnog cart near Santa’s house. The mall has a skateboard shop. And a store where they sell incense and mortar and pestle kits and Pink Floyd posters and Bob Marley posters and fancy colored pencils for people who want to try drawing their own Pink Floyd and Bob Marley posters. The mall also has a fountain with no water. The fountain has a sculpture at the top of a heron with a fish in its beak where the water should be shooting out of but doesn’t because the mall is closing next year.
Yes, the mall is closing. It doesn’t matter.
209 more girls signed up and we’ll have enough to leave, per the budget Simon and I have written out. Then it will be me and Simon and Simon’s brother, Arlen, out west. We’ll all be near the ocean and happy about it.
But that’s later. We still need more cash. Better cash. More bank.
So it’s a good thing that today I signed up six girls: Alex, Alex, Sabrina, Kaylie, Lana, Alex; all with mothers willing to pay for headshots. All fifteen to seventeen years old: that perfect age when fat is hitting their bodies in just the right way. Filling them in. Giving them confidence, boldness. Allowing them to imagine a world where the rules are what they decide them to be. A life where they get all they’ve wanted. Maybe, let’s say, the life of a model? A million followers. A brand deal. Followed by bit acting roles, perhaps? And then it’s midnight at the Chateau Marmont and they’ve just signed on the dotted line using the very famous studio president’s Montblanc pen. A three-picture deal. They’ll be playing an immortal witch hunter damned to hunt other immortal witches for eternity, until they meet Jackson: an immortal witch trying to save other immortal witches from a different, worse, immortal witch hunter–or something like that. I don’t know. I just need the five-hundred dollar check to clear for the headshots; the check that their parents will write to me, smiling as they fill in the zeros; because if the children succeed the family will follow not far behind; because we all want perfect things for ourselves, our children. We do all want to be near the ocean. Any ocean. And we’re all looking for that great shortcut that might wholly redeem us from what we have accidently become.
Losers, okay?
Six girls today.
My manager Jon comes by the VVA kiosk as the metal gate comes down on the Pacific Sun. More gates follow suit. I give him my slips and he says something while holding the kind smile of a compliment but his voice is drowned out by the speaker: The Karcher Mall will be closing in 10 minutes. Take your final purchases to the checkout of your choosing. And please, please remember…we love you all at The Karcher Mall.
Six girls scouted by the Number One Talent Scout in the Idaho Karcher Mall.
Sad: only 5 people came to my birthday party last year.
Funny but sad.
Six girls.
209 girls minus 6 girls equals 203 girls.
203 is now the number.
◆
Walking across the parking lot I have this plump sense of accomplishment. 203. Knowing the number makes me feel good. Good. So good. But then the wind blows and my VVA Models t-shirt sticks to my belly. It’s a cold thing that’s happening. Cold. I realize just how close Christmas really is as I walk beneath the colored bulbs the maintenance department has strung from the edge of Macy’s and out to the vapor lamps in the parking lot. A few of the bulbs have gone out, I notice. Or never worked to begin with. It doesn’t matter much, there will barely be Christmas for us this year. We have no money for presents. No. Simon and I have saved whenever and whatever we can. Any luxury that can be forfeited has been. We have tattoos of wedding rings where our wedding rings should be. We do not have wedding rings. Not yet. Those will come when we finally get to the coast. It’s all in the plan, and the plan is the budget, and the budget is sound.
Black birds drop from the roof of the bank next door and disappear behind a dumpster.
I’m imagining my money when Regina and Regina Jr. jump out of their car and run up to me. They’re homeless but not super homeless. As usual they’re selling roses by the dozen and DVDs by the pound. I take a copy of a superhero movie and give them a dollar in quarters.
“Keep easy, Lani,” says Regina. She starts counting coins on the hood of her car. “Enjoy.”
The wind blows again. The t-shirt sticks again.
I get in my car and wonder if Simon is hungry, if he’s eaten.
I wonder if, again, he’s fed Arlen and not himself.
The drive home is fifteen minutes. About 900 seconds. I drive fast, quickly passing the supermarket and the Wendy’s with the bulletproof glass over the ordering window; I pass the high school Simon and I graduated from way back when and then the dentist’s office that keeps calling us about a past due payment; I breathe deep, stopped at the red light that takes forever on Fort Street.
I turn my head slow like an oil tanker.
And out above the hills.
There they are way out there.
Those crazy little bats we heard about on the news, the ones that have left the cave too early and have nowhere to go but the big empty sky.
◆
Simon and I didn’t know each other, really, in high school. He sometimes teases that he knew me–that everyone knew me, but I don’t really believe him. No. Our first date was almost twenty years ago. Italian from that place with no parking lot. We were both in our early thirties and shaving off what nerve endings we had left before adulthood was meant to take hold. Simon was working at an auto-body shop and playing bass guitar in Too Funky, and I was sweeping hair at one of the downtown salons, pretending that one day I might open a place of my own.
On that first date I wore a dress.
A black thing.
Simon wore a black beanie and didn’t judge me for not making more out of my life.
He was simple and kind and listened and maybe was a little bored by me but still he listened.
We laughed a bit.
Drank. And drank.
Simon drank too much and got a DUI driving me home.
The cop was fine enough.
He called Simon a twerp or a junkie, something minor.
He did cuff us from the front so we could smoke while we waited for a second officer to arrive. And that’s not nothing. That’s something. In the back of the patrol car I smiled at Simon like we were still having a good time. He smiled but was crying a little when the cop picked up his radio and said, “Picked up another one at the checkpoint on Salle. We’re taking the passenger home and then we’ll be in.” Simon squeezed my hand tight. He laced his fingers in mine, thinking right then he might wholly redeem, maybe even make worthwhile the trouble he was about to be in. He needed the night to be worth it. And that’s what I wanted for him. We were already looking past one another’s missteps. Our bad fortunes.
I smiled again because I needed him to know it really was okay.
The cop turned off his lights and let me off on a corner not far away from my sister’s house. So, I was home. I was home and fine. Drunk but fine.
It was three weeks later I moved in with Simon.
◆
Let me say here: we love Arlen. I love Arlen. I maybe do not love him as much as Simon loves him but that’s to be expected. Yes. Arlen and Simon are bound by blood and stuff. Brotherly love. And that’s a different devotion. Okay. I will admit that there have been times since Simon’s parents passed when the heaviness of Arlen on our lives has seemed…untenable. Yes. I may have even once called him Arlen the Anvil at Gena Bresson’s Holiday Party. And yes, Simon, squirrel eyed, may have poked his head around the corner from the kitchen and pointed his plastic candy cane filled with M&Ms in it at me like: Lani, you can think that about Arlen, sometimes, because I think that about Arlen, sometimes, but to say it out loud! To say it at Gena’s party where everyone can hear you! Come on! But no one heard me besides my sister and Simon. And my sister didn’t care, not back then. So, I gave Simon my drunk eyes–these drunk eyes of contrition I’d gotten good at giving people when I’d upset them–and then I bit my tongue like I didn’t mean to say what I did, and Simon forgave me quick, lowering his candy-filled candy cane. He smiled, because he knew I loved Arlen. That I always would. That I do. I do love him. I really, really do.
◆
“Have you eaten?” I yell opening the door. I unclip my hair and let everything fall everywhere. The shoes come off in front of the family portrait. The house smells of magazines, of the Ashton Smalls his father smoked in the basement, of bouillon cubes and bones boiled until even that yellow jelly comes off them. It’s always been this way. There’s too much of Simon’s parents still in Simon’s parents’ house: the smell, the souvenir spoons in the glass cabinet, the knitted placemats above the microwave, and that framed poster in the living room of Shields and Yarnell on the White House lawn performing for Jimmy Carter. Everything is where everything has always been. Untouched. Untouched after death. We never touched it after they died because to touch it would be to claim it as our own. And it’s not ours. It’s the bank’s house now; the bank will have keys made and throw away the knitted placemats; the bank will pull the weeds from where the dirt meets the lattice. And for our part: we will be gone, way gone, car packed, having launched ourselves towards the west coast and the future we’ve too long deferred.
I find Simon and Arlen in Arlen’s bedroom.
“We had chili and rice,” says Simon in his simple and cheerful way. Like he’s happy about it. Not upset. As though chili and rice is a thing like lemongrass tenderloin or a veal cheek cooked slowly. “We left half a pot in the fridge for you.” He stands over Arlen stretching his thin legs towards the bottom of the bed. Arlen is wearing the shirt Simon ordered him from a joke website for his 30th birthday. Muscular Dystrophy Is A Bitch, it reads.
“Hiiiiii Laannii,” says Arlen with that voice. Like a floating-away balloon.
“Big day,” says Simon to both of us. He holds up a coffee mug with a straw poking out of it so Arlen can finish his medicine before bed. “We’re tired. We walked the whole park.”
Simon slides a second pillow behind Arlen’s head.
Then he kisses Arlen on the forehead and I think maybe smells the top of his head too.
It’s sweet. Yes. It is the right thing, this thing that we’re doing.
It is.
And Simon’s a good man for carrying all this: providing endlessly, tirelessly and without complaint for Arlen, who will never get better and only get worse. And I am a good wife, with a tattoo of a wedding ring where a real wedding ring will someday be and who’s agreed to help carry whatever it is I can help carry for as long as it takes for us to get there.
And together we’ve almost saved enough to get the three of us there.
To Oregon,
Or.
To California.
Or.
To anywhere, per the budget.
And we’ve done that.
We’ve almost done that.
We’re so close to doing that. 203 more girls, depending on what work Simon can pick up at the auto body shop. Or if the speaker store has any home installations he can assist on. Or if the junior high needs a substitute for P.E. or Western History. If Simon can do it, he’ll be there. On time and clear-eyed. No funny business. He’s done with the drinking. Not a sip in over a year. He shakes sometimes, but we think that’s nerve damage from a motorcycle mishap. Yes. But he can hold a hammer and a nail. And he’ll do anything; fix spoilers and exhaust pipes; trim wire and check for currents; he’ll talk loudly, his hands wide and expressive as he explains to a class of funky teenagers the harsh conditions faced by the early settlers of the Oregon Trail. He’ll teach them hard. He’ll get involved. He’ll jump up and down, painting a picture of the oxen falling sideways off the mountainside. He’ll act as though a cough has taken his chest while he explains the cracked lips and yellow eyes that accompany mountain fever. He’ll stomp his feet to show the thunderstorms of the Great Plains. He might even bring himself to tears explaining how the union soldiers attacked the natives at nightfall. He’ll do the battle sounds. The pistol fingers. He’ll fall to his knees as they set fire to carriages and horses in equal measure. He’s done drinking, okay?
He’ll do what he can.
When he can.
And he’s been trying.
We’ve been trying.
And we’re so close to what we want.
Simon and me. And Arlen.
“Beeuudd,” says Arlen. “IM saooooo tiiiired.”
He closes his eyes.
Simon removes his glasses and turns out the light.
I stare in from the doorway. I stare at the room, shut off.
And in the dark, for a moment, Arlen looks like something disassembled. I forget how tall he is until he’s laid out like this; his long, lean bones spread to all corners of the bed. It is as though he is all the separate parts of a body, staged carefully and laid out to be worn the next day.
Arlen, the church suit. Or Arlen, the boy scout uniform in repose.
“I’m starved,” I say.
“Good,” says Simon, walking out from the darkness.
He holds my hand as we close Arlen’s door.
◆
We are beneath the clouds on our dying lawn, sharing just a cup of decaf tea. It’s the cheap kind that Simon takes from the waiting room at the tire shop. We watch the breath rise from each other’s mouths and talk about how many girls I signed and how Arlen’s wheelchair performed on the new asphalt track at the park. We start yawning.
Simon squeezes my hand in his soft-hard way.
In bed I get on top of Simon.
We leave our shirts on normally but tonight I take mine off because we are so close to leaving this place that I no longer care what my body looks like.
Simon looks up at me in the blue dark and I can tell he’s tired. And he should be. Arlen’s hard. And on Thursday Arlen’s even harder. Because Thursday is the day every week that Simon makes a point to rub out Arlen’s back and butt and the underside of his legs; all the places he could potentially develop bed sores, which could potentially develop into cellulitis, which had in fact happened once, about three years ago, and had been very painful for Arlen. Simon then vowed: never again. Simon also cleaned Arlen’s ears, anus, taint, testicles and the bottom of his feet on Thursdays, before walking around the neighborhood and getting his wheelchair stuck on every stick that lay in their path.
I smile softly.
And I climb off of Simon.
“I got a movie we can fall asleep to,” I say. “A Spiderman movie.”
“Is it a bootleg?” asks Simon, rolling towards the bathroom to brush his teeth.
He brushes his teeth at night now since he stopped drinking.
“It has to be,” I say. “This one is still in the theaters.”
◆
When Simon’s parents were both still alive and Arlen could talk a little better, we went to dinner at a steakhouse downtown. I ordered a lamb chop even though Steak Au Poivre was the special. Simon wore a suit that was tight on his shoulders and had a flask of whiskey next to his heart that we kept sneaking away and pulling from in the bathroom. His parents looked at us like we were runaways they’d taken in for a Thanksgiving meal. I can say they didn’t care for me much back then. To them I was Lani The Party Girl, keeping their son a partying boy.
We must’ve been forty, together for ten years.
It doesn’t matter.
“Arlen has started tutoring people on the computer,” his mother said. Then she took Arlen’s hand in her own like it was a tennis ball. Or like it was a checkbook. Or a family heirloom. “He’s teaching English to foreign students right on the computer. It’s so fancy. He’s got the brains.”
Arlen squeezed his mother’s hand. His grip was stronger in those days.
It really doesn’t matter.
What does matter is: between dinner and dessert, Simon, drunk by then, leaned over and moved the hair off my shoulder. I could smell him for real, like the liquor was in a punch bowl sitting on the table right in front of us. My throat started burning like it sometimes does.
“My parents want to ask you something but are too scared,” slurred Simon, his mouth overrun with spit and whiskey. His voice got low as he continued. “They want someone to bring Arlen to sexual completion. Climax. He’s stuffed up…okay…just your hand, no mouth stuff.”
I waited for him to laugh.
Soon he did. And I laughed too, a bit. Because I was drunk but not as drunk as him and I didn’t want to start a fight right then. “You’re fucked up,” I giggled.
“What...” he said. “If it’s good enough for me it’s good enough for him.”
Simon’s mother stood up like she was going to march out of the restaurant.
His father grabbed his mother’s wrist like: these kids are kids, they know not what they say.
Simon’s mother sat back down. Arlen did his teeth grit thing, a look like cold water had been dropped on his head. And then dessert came.
◆
Today I sign only two girls.
When I ask the first girl what kind of things she likes to do, she says she likes eating barbeque chips and getting foot rubs. Her boyfriend shakes his head yes, confirming she does in fact like those things. When I ask the first girl if she’ll have a problem getting the funds together for headshots she shakes her head: no, she will not. The boyfriend just blinks as I ask for a billing address. The second girl that I sign, Lilly Anne, is actually beautiful. She looks like one of those mermaids from the movies that wishes from the shallow part of the ocean to have human legs and then gets them. She’s salty and windy and free and my throat burns when I ask her how tall she is.
“Five-ten,” she says, looking down at me.
“Perfect height,” I say.
“You know,” she says, sucking her lower lip, “you’re too fat to have been a model.”
That takes me back for a second.
Yes it does.
“I know it seems like that,” I say. Then I lie, “But I once was almost as pretty as you are. And VVA sent me around the world to shoot, Madagascar and Berlin and Saint-Tropez, I’ve seen them all and you can too.”
Lilly Anne’s mother writes a check right then and there.
She knows her daughter’s beauty.
She doesn’t know I’m a scam.
Her handwriting is not great so I ask her to sign the back of the check too.
All the while: winter birds that have snuck into the mall chirp loudly from the rafters that hang beneath the atrium.
2 is not 0.
Two is not zero.
My throat burns but it’s been an okay day.
Because the number is now 201.
◆
I drive home imagining Arlen’s body like one of those Midwest factories that’s always on the CNN homepage. Bad working conditions. No vents. The machines are not good, they’re dangerous. Now the plant workers have gone on strike.
There’s a picket line.
A megaphone.
And imagining a megaphone makes me imagine Arlen and Simon’s parents on the day the doctor tells them that something is amiss, that Arlen does not seem the way a baby should seem while in the womb. I imagine the doctor with a gray beard, calmly speaking into a microphone from the room next door as he examines the x-rays: this happens–this happens/ the science and care for children with muscular dystrophy has come a long way/he’ll be smart as a tack/ I find children with physical disabilities to often test mentally & emotionally above their able-bodied counterparts/ don’t cry Simon’s mom/ nothing to cry about/ your life will change certainly/ certainly yes it will/ but normal is as normal does/ you will be fine/ happy and fine with your–
I pull into the driveway and the car bumps a little. I look for Simon in the open windows.
Because sometimes he looks so happy when he’s alone. Alone with Arlen. Home without me, I guess is what I’m saying. But he’s not in the windows.
No. The windows are just empty windows.
I call Simon from the car and continue to scan the darkened house.
I ask where he is, and he says that he and Arlen are in Arlen’s bedroom looking at his new girlfriend’s profile on the computer. I tell him I didn’t know Arlen was talking to anyone and he says he didn’t know either but it’s a welcomed surprise. I tell Simon I’m coming inside and then I say hey–hey I love you and I cannot wait to start our new life together. He says nothing and hangs up. I’m thrown for a moment but then I look down at my screen: a red dot. And I feel stupid for having let my fat cheek hit the mute button on the very sweet, very last part of our conversation.
◆
We flank both sides of Arlen in the bed.
With the hand that is better than the other hand he scrolls slowly through the girl’s pictures. The trackball on the side of his mouse clicks quietly as he moves down the page. Arlen breathes these deep resuscitative breaths; he sounds the way a distance swimmer sounds when they’re climbing out of the pool. It’s still unsettling to me after all these years: the rise and fall of his chest.
“Sheeee haas goooone skydiving,” says Arlen in his lost balloon way.
“She’s very cute,” I say.
Arlen scrolls over a picture of the woman in a treehouse, her face painted and smiling wide.
The three of us sit in the light of the computer screen.
There’s a brown light coming from the lamp in the corner too.
“And she knows about you…that you’re in a wheelchair and stuff?” asks Simon.
“Yeeeaas,”
“Really?”
“…”
“Is Arlen lying to us?”
“Does she, Arlen?” I ask.
“Yeeuuuussss.”
Simon holds my hand over the top of Arlen’s head. We lock our fingers around the bedpost.
“Good enough for me,” I say. “When’s the first date?”
Simon laughs. Arlen does one of his pleasure squeals and then turns his head as best he can.
“Simoooooon that’s why I Loooooove Laaannniii the most.”
◆
We take Arlen to the tree lighting at the city square for his first date with the brunette woman who likes tree houses, music festivals and skydiving. We wait beside the bronze sculpture of children playing marbles against the ground. In the distance the sun falls behind the mountains and for a time everything is blue. And then it is gray. And then it is dark and the woman with brown hair and a tattoo of a hummingbird on her shoulder who told Arlen she finds disabled people to be very sexy because she likes being the one in control still has not shown up for the tree lighting and her first date with Arlen.
The tree lights up.
Lights of red and blue and yellow and green shine high-up in the pines.
A woman and her two sons pass in front of us, scarves wrapped up to their ears. The boys stare at Arlen and the mother quickly turns their heads forward. She hisses when they turn back for a second look. Soon she walks away, her backpack slinking up and down with shame. For a moment I imagine the backpack is filled with beer and drugs and other contraband. Yes. All the worst things a mother could have. Then I correct myself: that backpack is probably filled with extra layers and extra hats and carrot sticks and wet wipes for the boys.
It doesn’t matter what’s in the backpack.
People start dancing along with the string quartet.
Someone next to us says loudly that Harmon Killebrew’s son and widow are here. And that they’re lighting the star that goes on top of the tree. And that they own a house here. And that property values are on the rise. And oh, it’s an honor to be the star tree lighter and related to such a great man, a great hitter, 573 homers and a street named after him, a hero like Harmon Killebrew.
I check my cellphone. Arlen’s date is over an hour late.
I grab Simon’s shoulder and tell him we should go. He looks down at Arlen who, unbeknownst to us, has been sweating for the last half-hour. He’s shivering wildly now, squirming around in his chair, his hair soaked and leaving trails of sweat against his headrest. The reindeer ears fall off the back of his chair and land against the bricks.
We push through the crowd, Simon swaddling Arlen like he’s the last boy on earth and me walking the empty wheelchair behind them, saying excuse us for a time and soon just trying to keep up as Simon begins to run towards the car.
Then we have the trunk open and Arlen sitting on the bumper.
“Fuck this,” says Simon. He scratches his beard and clears his sniffling nose. “What a freak.”
“Soooorrrry.”
“Don’t say that!” yells Simon. His voice breaks in the smallest way, “You don’t say that. Okay. That is just some freaky-ass pill-head wasting your time. Some freak! Wasting your time!”
We start the car and wait for the heat.
I take a VVA shirt out of the box in the back seat and peel off Arlen’s jacket and sweater, his narrow body steaming in the cold air. He looks like he’s something too hot to touch, something fresh out of the oven. “It’s all good,” I say, drying his hair with the beach towel I use to wipe snow off the car. Simon kicks the light pole next to the car like it’s responsible for something. Then he looks at me like he made a mistake, limping. We are too old to take our frustrations out on the inanimate but I’m barely paying attention.
No, I’m looking at Arlen.
His eyes closed and his tongue pressed out of the corner of his mouth, lips dry, cracked. I pull the VVA shirt over his head and begin to rub my hands up and down his body. I can feel the shuddering of his lungs. The bad beat of his heart. The tightness of muscles in contraction.
“It’s all good,” I repeat softly, slowly.
◆
The P.E. teacher at the junior high injures himself in a skiing accident and Simon is able to substitute for five weeks straight, checking in on Arlen during his lunch period. “He’s pretty much just hanging out on his computer,” he tells me. “He’s so fine without us.”
I sign 96 girls in January. Yes. In terms of our budget: things have progressed in a real and rapid way. To celebrate, Simon and Arlen and I go to the lithium hot springs and wait for a sign from God telling us our next move. Of course, we are in fact just waiting for the three of us to be imagining the same bit of coast in our minds. The pockets of Arlen’s swim trunks fill with air and look like exploded car airbags bobbing across the water’s surface. Simon jokes the Gods want us to try San Francisco first. It’s expensive, certainly, but lots of money just means higher pay, he reasons.
“The suuulfur,” says Arlen, he bends his head down as best he can at the water, “It’ss smeeellly.”
“Good smelly,” I say.
“I like the smell,” says Simon, his thinned hair sticking to his forehead.
“VVA has an office in San Francisco,” I say. “And with my numbers I’m sure they’d be happy to have me at any location.”
“Absolutely,” says Simon, slapping his hand against the water, making a pancake sound.
I look down at my own body beneath the clear water. I vow to myself to eat better in a new place; I will eat better in San Francisco. Yes. San Francisco has beaches. It has better, more organic foods. San Francisco sounds good. And in terms of the budget, it will work for a while.
◆
On my last day I tell my manager, Jon, that I will always be thankful for the opportunity.
“You’re maybe the best I’ve had,” he says, adjusting his glasses on his nose.
Jon received ten percent of every girl I signed, so I have no doubt he’s truly sad to see me go. I take a sip from the iced coffee he’s bought me as a goodbye present. We stand in silence for a moment as the rabble of shoppers returning holiday gifts in the wrong size or wrong color or wrong brand pass all around us.
“I don’t want to be a mall rat forever,” I say, wishing I had not. For a second, I imagine myself as a rat and Simon and Arlen as rats. Because we are in little ways like rats, at times. The way we eat and the way we huddle against each other for warmth. But still, I wish I had not told Jon I saw myself as a mall rat–and, by extension– see him as some type of mall rat. Because I really do not see Jon that way. I don’t.
Jon adjusts his glasses again and looks towards Santa’s house in mid-disassembly.
I suspect I may be too late.
I suspect I may have offended and cannot undo my offense.
Jon takes a step back and pats down his shiny black hair.
“I liked working here,” I force out, sincereish. “I always–”
“You’re more of a mall mouse,” says Jon. “A mouse…not a rat.” And he says it in this way that’s supposed to be funny but it can’t help but feel like a correction.
“Yes,” I say. “I like that more.”
“Mouses are better than rats.”
“Yes,” I say again. “Yes, I believe that.”
◆
The day before we leave for California, I go see my sister. I tell her we’ll talk once a week and I say goodbye to her son who is not good at baseball; I do not see her son who is good at baseball because he–as my sisters explains–is at a very nice baseball camp for children who show a real acumen for America’s Pastime.
My sister holds onto me tightly in her kitchen and I can smell the sweat on her neck.
She asks if I remember that last time we saw Mom. And she says we didn’t know then that that would be the last time we would see her. And that this kind of feels like that.
And I say this is not like that.
“Do you remember that, Lani?” she asks. “You remember that day.”
I shake my head like I don’t remember even though I do remember: our mom walking us around the city, though it was more like a town then. Crosswalk buttons had just been installed on every traffic light in town, and as a game, me and my sister were pressing every button with the tips of our noses and keeping score of how many we were able to turn into walk signals. There was a woman from the state there with a notepad, following the three of us around with a happy and plaintive and sometimes tired look on her face. Our mother kept checking in with this woman like we were all going to be in trouble for playing the nose-crosswalk game. I know now–I understand now that we never really stood a chance.
She’d already lost us to the state.
And it takes a lot to get something back that you lose to a state.
More than most have to give. Yes.
We walked across Chinden to the Lowes and escaped the summer heat.
Our mother bought me and my sister each a hot dog.
The woman with the notepad drank a Diet Coke.
We looked at siding options for a house we would never live in.
Then we sat with our legs dangling on a pallet of stained lumber.
The smell of sod and caramel corn and bulk pesticide, all around us.
The bend in my mother’s brow when she said, “There are times I feel overwhelmed in the world…and when I get to feeling like that…Well, I try to imagine a pop star in a private jet flying way above, way high-up above me. I think of them sipping champagne and holding hands with their boyfriend, or girlfriend, while flying a thousand-miles-an-hour towards their next tour stop. So…If you ever feel crazy or feel like there’s too much craziness around you, I’d suggest just thinking of Diana Ross, or Barbra Streisand, or Linda Ronstadt way up overhead and moving fast towards their next stop. Imagine all the amazing things that happen on the private jet. The little bit of turbulence and fancy amuse-bouche. Caviar. Unopened decks of playing cards. That’s what I do and it seems to work okay. Yes. It’s a little cheat for you two to use.” Me and my sister both nodded while the woman with the notepad finished her soda. My mother hung her head and waited quietly for our time to be up. And then our time was up. And me and my sister were picked up with the notepad woman in the parking lot of the Lowes on Victory Lane.
But now: things are different. I tell my sister I’ll make the time. I tell her I will call even more than I probably should. And she’ll grow tired of my calls.
At this she laughs a little. A little. And smiles for a moment.
I help her unload the silverware from the dishwasher. And play music on my cell phone that fills up the kitchen. My sister tells me that California is a better place for Arlen because all the buildings have ramps next to the staircases. We hold each other some more, me and my sister. We stay soft, quiet. Then, after some time, we smell smoke coming from the backyard. Together we run outside to see her son who is no good at baseball is burning a wet log in the fire pit.
“Goddammit,” she says to her son. “You scared me there for a minute.”
◆
Every week we try and do something special.
Last week we went up to Pacific Heights and looked at the famous houses.
The week before we took the ferry out to Alcatraz and amazed ourselves with how many seagulls we were able to count in a single watchtower. We’ve already eaten chowder down at Fisherman’s Wharf, walked across the Golden Gate Bridge, seen the Palace of Fine Arts, and stood in the middle of Ashbury Street where a policeman took our photo. We’ve tried dim sum in China Town. Hiked Pioneer Park. And watched dozens of shirtless men do Tai Chi in Washington Square. I would say Arlen enjoys Madame Tussauds best. We have a picture of him sitting between the waxed Steven Spielberg and the waxed Jerry Garcia, holding up a peace sign and wearing sunglasses that Simon picked up from a hawker down on Shotwell Street.
I would say that for me: I like Seal Beach best.
It’s near the apartment and free, which works well with our new budget.
I like to curl my feet where the water finishes its break and play with the sand between my toes. Yes. And there never seem to be any seals at Seal Beach, but there are huddles of real homeless women who don’t have Spiderman DVDs, but always have plenty of stories about the good and lucky days back when there were hundreds of seals, maybe thousands of fat seals all barking and lurching along the slick sand, whiskered and sunning themselves, smiling.
I like those stories.
I like those women, as they raise their brown paper sacks filled with brown glass bottles and call Arlen over to their picnic table; it feels like an honor, as we follow Arlen across the spotty, prickly grass, and he tries his best to wave hello and they all wave hello back. Most of the women are older. All of them sun-loved. Blue eyed. I think how it is likely that nobody ever offered them a deal on headshots at the mall. Or maybe someone did. Maybe. Someone like me, who needed to hit a number, their quota.
I think of how in the end it doesn’t matter either way because here we all are.
Arlen always asks these women about the missing seals of Seal Beach: where’ve they gone, why they ever went away in the first place, and what it sounded like back then with all those creatures filling the sea and the sand beneath the cold wet air. The women shrug. They murmur, who can ever really say. They spin one story or another about the ghosts of all those seals and how they hear them in their sleep some nights, or some afternoons when they nod off beneath the pier.
Then they stare at Arlen and smile.
And we stare at Arlen and smile, as these women begin barking and laughing, laughing and barking, and Arlen, Simon, and me, the three of us, we start up with them. We bark, laugh, bark. Or we just laugh, laugh, laugh. It very rarely is just the barking, but it’s happened once or twice. And on those few occasions when it’s been only the barking, sad barking–maybe because one of their own has gone missing or was not able to wake from their afternoon nap–well, we try our best to just do the sad barking with them, no laughing, no trouble. Because in the end we do what they do, these women. Yes. We join their chorus for a little while; we sing with them for a time.