The End of Eve Page 10

  I didn’t think that was my problem exactly, but I was going along with it because she was cute and the way she’d always flirted with me on the commuter train made me feel like everything that was wrong with me and Sol was just wrong with Sol.

  I’d missed the 5:34 evening train on purpose because I’d glanced behind me and knew she was going to miss it. We were at the bottom of the cement stairs on Central Avenue, cold wind against my face.

  The girl in Albuquerque. Girl/woman. She must have been at least 35, but she dressed like a skater boy in her baggy jeans and faded black T-shirt. I wanted to know her name. She had coffee-colored skin, wore silver stud earrings, her eyebrows plucked into thin arches.

  That’s all I asked – her name – and she didn’t answer me and that’s when she pulled out the blindfold and said, “May I?” and turned me around and told me what she thought my problem was. Trust. Not trusting anybody.

  Now the girl in Albuquerque was pushing me down Central Avenue and I was blind-tripping forward. She turned me against the wind and then turned me around, pushed my back against a cold brick wall and nudged the blindfold off and leaned in to kiss me, her breath hot on my cheek. She had the prettiest brown eyes.

  “I can’t,” I whispered.

  “Can’t?” she raised those thin eyebrows. “You think I didn’t just see you miss that train on purpose?”

  It hadn’t occurred to me that she might have seen me. Trust. “I have a girlfriend who wouldn’t like it.”

  The girl in Albuquerque smiled at me. Her teeth were bright white and crooked. “And does your girlfriend still kiss you?”

  I wished I was 21 or a bigger liar or somehow otherwise only partially responsible for my actions – for what might happen on a windy night in an alleyway in Albuquerque. I wished it badly.

  The girl in Albuquerque was still close to me, still held me against the bricks. “Your girlfriend just owns you like that? Outright? It’s a waste.” She pushed me just a little harder against the wall. “I’m stronger than you,” she whispered.

  I glanced at the curve of her bicep. “I can see that.”

  “But I can take no for an answer.”

  And I said, “Thank you.”

  But now the girl in Albuquerque looked like she might cry. Thin, arched eyebrows. She said, “Why you got to thank somebody for acting right?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Don’t ever do that again. Thank me for doing something sweet for you.” She let go of me. “Don’t ever thank anybody for acting right.”

  “Okay.”

  She stared at me for a long time. “Promise.”

  And I said, “All right. I promise.”

  The wind and the bricks. All that cold felt like elation and I didn’t know what it meant, but something in my life had broken open. I trusted the girl in Albuquerque completely.

  Strangers in alleyways had never really been my problem.

  I GOT HOME to the shop late. The smell of onions and garlic frying on the camping stove. Maxito already asleep. Sol had made vegan tacos with Soyrizo and kept them warm.

  She lit a candle.

  “I got paid,” I told her. Enough to cover first, last and deposit on a cheap rental.

  I knew it wasn’t illegal or neglectful to have a kid and share a bathroom with a bunch of Buddhists, but days in the shop had become all anxiety, waiting to see if Protective Services would come and investigate, waiting for a process server to appear with family court papers. Or maybe it would be my mother in the doorway waving her giant kitchen knife.

  I would have just as soon moved back to Portland, but Sol wouldn’t hear of it. “The only good that’s come of all this is we got to New Mexico,” she whined.

  So I sat with my plate of Soyrizo tacos, scrolled through rentals on Craigslist. Apartments in Santa Fe, houses in Albuquerque, trailers in the old mining town out Highway 14 and this: Rural and private. Click. A little adobe with its iron gate and turquoise-painted window sills. Nine hundred dollars a month. Twenty minutes out of town. A third of an acre. Room for the trailer and a trampoline and chickens if we wanted them. A place to hide and mend. A place to make macaroni and cheese and green chile stew. I already knew we would live there.

  Saturday morning we drove out to the place, south on the freeway and a mile down the kind of road no one would drive down unless they lived there. Inside the house was all thick walls and tiles, vigas and skylights. Yes, thanks, we’ll take it. I handed over my first month’s visiting professor’s pay.

  I CHANGED MY phone number and texted Leslie: If you talk to Mom, tell her I got a job at Lewis and Clark and moved back to Portland.

  I updated my Facebook profile to show that I lived in Los Angeles.

  When our acid-dropping live/work landlord asked where we were going, I told him, “New York.”

  I felt like a fugitive on the lam.

  Was I really doing all this to avoid my 90-pound dying mother?

  Well, yes. Yes I was.

  18.

  A Place to Hide

  I’D UNLOADED A COUPLE OF BOXES AT OUR NEW LITTLE adobe when a tall tie-dyed fellow in a cowboy hat sauntered into our yard wanting to know where I’d come from and why.

  “Just need to lay low for a while,” I told him.

  He nodded. Evidently, that was the right answer around here. “I live up the road,” he said. “You can call me Tex.” He had an underground bunker, he said, “For when the shit hits the fan.” He scratched his beard. “I have a kind of a sixth sense about people. I can tell if somebody’s friend or foe and you’re friend, I can sense that, so you just scramble on up to my place and I’ll hide you in my bunker if it comes to that.” He winked at me. “Just because you’re paranoid don’t mean they’re not comin’ after you.”

  Yes. This was the place for us.

  THE SINGLE MOTHER who lived around the corner took a few more days to appear, skittish, on my porch. She wore an Adidas running suit, said she’d noticed Sol building a chicken coop in the backyard and did we have chickens?

  “Not yet,” I told her, “but we have chicken dreams.”

  She squinted at me. “Are you Ariel Gore?”

  I felt a sudden panic at being found. “Yes?”

  But she wasn’t a process server. “Oh my God-Ariel Gore. I’ve read all your books. You look just like your author photos. I thought you lived in Los Angeles.”

  “No,” I confessed. “I live here right now. But, you know, I’m trying to lay low.”

  She nodded, held my gaze. “Me, too,” she whispered. “An ex-husband situation.”

  “I understand,” I promised. “Say no more.”

  INSIDE, I TOOK a random book from the shelf. I needed a new oracle. All Things Are Labor by Katherine Arnoldi. I fingered the gray cover and asked, “What am I doing here?” I opened to a random page, pointed to the middle and read, “What we are looking for is something small that we can use. This is all we need, a little bit, something that happened by chance, something common like a broken piece of glass, some string, a book of matches: just a small thing where there is nothing but what is here to find.”

  My oracle. I didn’t know what it meant, exactly. Except that I should pay attention.

  THE LOCAL NEWSPAPERS called that winter mild even though it was the coldest of my life. Cold and easy. The snow glittered, dusting our little adobe as we settled in.

  The first dawn of spring came and Sol bought baby chicks from San Marcos Feed Store out on Highway 14.

  Maxito squealed as he fed them under their heat lamp. “My chickies getting so big.”

  Sol drove me to the train station every morning and Maxito to preschool.

  The girl I’d let blindfold me in Albuquerque winked at me from her seat across the aisle.

  I winked back. But I never missed the 5:34 train again.

  In my advanced fiction workshop at the university, we discussed the elements of story. Alexandre Dumas said that to make a novel, you need a passion and four walls. To
make a passion, Wallace Stegner added, “you need people in a bind, a situation full of love, hate, ambition, longing, some tension that cries out to be resolved.”

  What cried out to be resolved here?

  This was supposed to be a book about a typical caregiver – a daughter with children of her own trying to help her terminal if eccentric widow-mother through a final year. But now here we were mid-narrative, more than a year gone by, and no one had died and I didn’t have a mother anymore and the semester was wrapping up.

  Soon I wouldn’t have a job.

  SOL BROUGHT MY coffee out onto the front porch at sunrise, set it on the low table. “Do you think you’ll ever see your mother again?”

  I leaned back into the big equipale chair and it creaked the way it did. It seemed like a crass question, but maybe a reasonable one. “I guess not,” I said.

  Sol sipped her coffee. “How do you think we’ll find out when she’s dead?”

  I didn’t know how we’d find out. “We’ll find out,” I said. “Everyone loves to spread news of death.”

  My cellphone buzzed just then and I cringed the way I always cringed then, but it was just Abra, a 20-something acquaintance from Portland, texting to say I’m moving to Santa Fe to go to the Native Arts College, If you still have that trailer, can I rent it?

  I texted Abra back: Sure.

  SO ABRA MOVED into the six-by-ten turquoise trailer. She was just a few days out of the hospital with a new type 1 diabetes diagnosis, but she smiled bright like any kid getting ready to start college. Over coffee on the dusty porch, she pushed her hair out of her face, looked at us and around, out across the high-desert street and beyond to the naked hills and she said, “Aren’t we the Californian, Dominican, Native Alaskan diabetic, gay-straight alliance? I hope there aren’t any neo-Nazis out here.”

  So many people to hide from.

  19.

  The Fires

  THE WILDFIRES CAME MEAN THAT YEAR. THEY STARTED in May and burned into summer. We watched the mountains and the hills around us catch and blaze. The smoke billowed, held heavy in the air. We coughed and bled. More than a hundred thousand acres burned, were still burning. I dreamed of lungs without bodies that glowed red like the fire-season moon and I woke to mornings covered in layers of white ash.

  Brown bears and bobcats from the burned out wilderness wandered the streets near our little adobe and we had to keep our chickens inside the house.

  The fires tore through pueblos and towns and national monuments. We listened to the radio and TV news reports online. The fires were within ten miles of Los Alamos National Labs.

  Within five miles.

  Within a mile.

  Within yards.

  How many yards?

  The laboratory PR guy wore a yellow tie and promised, “No threat to public safety,” but the professors on NPR warned of nuclear disaster and 30,000 above-ground barrels of plutonium-contaminated waste that would soon catch fire and burst, sending plumes of radioactive smoke into the winds.

  As the birds flew, we lived twelve miles from Los Alamos National Labs.

  I wanted to evacuate. I packed the car with enough water and canned food and tortillas for a week; packed all our passports and birth certificates. But which way would we drive? The horizon burned in every direction.

  THAT NIGHT, SOL and I invited all the lesbians and trans guys we knew in Santa Fe to come out to our place in the country for vegan tacos. We wanted to pretend we were building community here instead of waiting for all that smoke to bleed radioactivity. And they came – the brave ones came – miles closer to the fires and miles closer to the labs. We fed them tacos and fennel salad and we made small talk and Sol put on a Dolly Parton CD and without announcement all the lesbians whipped off their shirts and they ran outside and the trans guys ran after them and Sol looked surprised, but she whipped off her shirt too and she ran after them all and they chanted for rain.

  I watched from my kitchen window and rolled my eyes. It was just so California circa 1970 to 1999. I mean, I didn’t know any trans guys back then – but the rest of it.

  Abra watched, too, bewildered from her trailer.

  They ran unembarrassed, ran the circumference of our property, all those lesbians in their bouncing red bras and the trans guys in their white muscle T-shirts, and they chanted “Rain goddesses! Rain goddesses!” until Maxito couldn’t contain himself and despite my obvious disdain, ran with them chanting, “Rain goddesses! Rain goddesses!” and they ran and chanted and ran and chanted until of course the desert winds shifted and the smoky sky crowded itself with monsoon clouds and “Rain goddesses! Rain goddesses!” those clouds opened and the lesbians and the trans guys and Maxito cheered, “Rain goddesses!” and they laughed as the downpour drenched their hair and there would be no nuclear disaster in New Mexico that summer.

  No.

  There would be rain.

  20.

  Mime Wave

  “CAN I ASK YOU SOMETHING?”

  Sol looked up from the Walter Mosley mystery she was reading in bed. “What?”

  “When we moved to New Mexico, did you know that Bipa lived here?”

  Sol blinked, looked down at her book. “Sure. I knew she’d moved back.”

  I fiddled with my Gammie’s ruby engagement ring I wore on my right hand. “Are you pursuing her? Bipa?”

  Sol closed her book “What kind of question is that? That’s completely irrational.”

  I climbed into bed next to her. “Sorry.”

  She rolled over, curled her back to me. “I’ve been completely honest with you about Bipa,” she said to the wall. “Bipa broke my heart a long time ago. I’m over her.”

  I SPENT THE balance of the summer and the tip of autumn baking pies in my adobe kitchen, building Lego sets with Maxito and catching flights between Albuquerque and Los Angeles. I’d found work as a ghostwriter. I slept on the leopard-print couch in Maia’s studio apartment in Pasadena. I’d bought that couch when I was her age, a single mom with a toddler. Now the two of us stayed up nights eating ramen and drinking strong tea, Maia doing her graphic design homework and me writing in voices not my own. It reminded me of being in my 20s, when we were an easy family of two.

  At home with Sol in New Mexico, things teetered between silent irritation and resigned tolerance. This was my life. A little adobe. It wasn’t so bad. Make the best of it, Ariel.

  I was rushing to a departure gate at LAX on my way back to that life when my phone buzzed with a text message from Vivian in Portland: Just broke up with my girlfriend.

  I texted her right back: Jealous.

  But then I felt like a cad. Maybe I could fix this thing with Sol after all. I was good at fixing things. We’d been together for ten years. Ten years wasn’t nothing. We got along all right when she wasn’t mad at me for being three minutes late or for not properly pre-sorting the recycling. She’d never waved a knife at me in the middle of the night or kicked me as I slept. I’d buy her a cake at the Chocolate Maven when I got home. I’d pick a bouquet of wildflowers. I’d find cheap tickets online for a wintertime week in New Orleans. Right before Mardi Gras – when all the bands are practicing in the streets, but before the drunk boys arrive for the party.

  She texted to say she had to make a few house calls that night. She’d be home late. Would I pick up Maxito?

  Of course.

  The Chocolate Maven and Maxito and wildflowers and New Orleans.

  I stopped at home to feed the chickens and grab everyone’s dirty clothes to take to the laundromat. Picking up jeans and T-shirts and sweat pants and Spider-Man underwear, I screamed like a child when I saw the snake coiled on the tile floor at the foot of my bed. Beige and black, fat and archaic, I jumped back as the thing slithered away.

  What was it?

  “Did it have a pattern?” the guy who answered the phone at animal control wanted to know.

  “Yes?”

  “More like diamonds, or stripes?”

  I didn’t know. “I
t was fat and archaic,” I whispered.

  “It just darted away?”

  “Yes.” It had. Where was it now? Under the refrigerator?

  “I wouldn’t worry, ma’am,” he said. “A rattler would’ve held its ground. Probably just a garter. It’ll slither out the same way it came in.”

  I texted Abra: Snake in the house. What does it mean?

  Surely a snake in the house was an omen.

  She texted right back: I guess it means we live in rural New Mexico?

  Yes. Maybe that’s all it meant. We lived in rural New Mexico. Snakes needed a place to hide, too.

  Abra texted again: Probably because no one’s been home for a few days.

  I texted right back: Why hasn’t anyone been home?

  But she didn’t answer me.

  Relax, Ariel. It’ll slither out the same way it came in. I had errands to run. Laundry and the Chocolate Maven and Maxito and wildflowers and New Orleans.

  I drove the 20 minutes into Santa Fe, read Dashiell Hammett at the laundromat.

  When I pulled into the parking lot of the Chocolate Maven, I was thinking Belgian chocolate torte or coconut cream cake?

  I scored a parking place right in front of the place, turned off the ignition.

  The Chocolate Maven and Maxito and wildflowers and New Orleans. Yes. I could fix this. Café Du Monde in the French Quarter. All those Mardi Gras bands. It would be so romantic.

  But when I pushed open the glass door to the café, I froze at the sight of them: Sitting across from each other at a little rectangular bistro table, Sol and Bipa, faces painted in full mime white and black, gloved hands open and moving together in synchronized pantomime.

  Bipa moved one hand in a clockwise circular motion and Sol followed. Bipa moved her other hand counterclockwise and Sol followed.

  My body felt like it was shrinking in on itself. I stepped back. They hadn’t seen me yet. I could still just recede into my humiliation.

  But just then the hostess chirped, “Joining us for dinner?” and Sol and Bipa looked up, two startled mimes in their grease-white make-up and their black berets.