Mary Miller - The Last Days of California

“Maybe she’s just unattractive and religious and the two don’t have anything to do with each other,” I said.

“I don’t know about that.”

“I’m sure there are a lot of ugly atheists out there, too.”

“She could at least dye her hair—she’s only like fifty or something. Or maybe forty.”

“Some women don’t care about being beautiful.”

She looked at me like I was insane. “The agnostics have to be the best-looking group,” she said. “Extremists rely too much on their extremism.”

I went inside and flipped through the stations until I found Honey, I Shrunk the Kids . It was my favorite scene, the kids lost in the grass. They were so small a stream of dog pee was a river, a baby ant the size of a Volkswagen. They were so small, an oatmeal cream pie could sustain them for years. It was every kid’s dream, like finding a house made of candy in the forest. The older boy, Little Russ, was hot, even with his eighties hair, and I wanted to sleep in a Lego while he kept watch over me. No—I wanted him to forget his guard duty and climb into the Lego with me so I could run my fingers through his soft, feathered hair.

When I went to get Elise, she was gone. The lights were off in the bald man’s room and I imagined the woman straddling him while he held her hips, rocked her gently back and forth. At home, we had a set of my mother’s old encyclopedias and I would read and reread the entry for Sex: “A man and a woman lie next to each other and the man places his penis inside the woman’s vagina. This is usually pleasurable for both parties.” It was the dirtiest thing I had access to. We didn’t get the premium channels and I didn’t look at porn on my computer because I might forget to clear the history. Of course I wouldn’t forget, but it was possible, and I’d never live down the shame.

My mother looked nearly girlish with her hair loose, smiling. She gazed up at my father and he leaned down and kissed her head. Occasionally, I caught glimpses into their world and it bothered me that I could never be a part of it, that I couldn’t know them in the way they knew each other. We all knew each other completely differently, in ways that would never overlap.

“Where’s Elise?” my father asked.

“I think she went to the store,” I said.

“What are you doing out here by yourself?” my mother asked.

“The moon is nice.” We all looked up at it, big and fake-looking with clouds snaking across it. My father had a book called We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle that he liked to quote from. The book alleged that the moon landing had actually taken place in Nevada, and in between shooting footage the astronauts had visited strip clubs. Elise showed me a full-page spread of an exotic dancer as evidence that our father was an idiot. It was his thing, not believing in anything but God, as if to believe in anything else—man’s landing on the moon, global warming—would be disloyal.

My mother opened the door and I took off my shoes and got in bed. I watched my father take an envelope out of his bag. He unfolded the purple-and-orange prayer rug and knelt on it, facing the window. Before we’d left, he’d told us we each had to kneel on it at some point and circle our prayer needs and then he’d mail it to another family and they’d mail it to another family like a chain letter.

I’d knelt on it the first night and circled every single need: spiritual revival, devotion, monetary concerns, temptation, health and well-being, stress and anxiety, salvation.

On one side of the rug was a picture of Jesus’s face. His eyes were closed, but it said if you continued to look at them, they would open. They hadn’t opened for me and I wondered if they were opening for my father. I’d only glanced at them because it reminded me of standing in front of a mirror chanting Bloody Mary, something I’d done at a sleepover once that had freaked me out. It would have been horrifying if Jesus opened his eyes, same as it would have been horrifying if a Bloody Mary had appeared in the mirror. Had anyone in the history of the prayer rug seen His eyes open? And if they hadn’t, and no one was ever going to, why did it say that we would?

“Call her,” my mother said.

I liked the picture that popped up, Elise’s face in the plywood body of a meerkat at the Atlanta zoo. It rang and rang. I hung up and tried again, but there was still no answer so I left a message, trying to make it sound like she was on the other end. But then my mother asked where she was and I had to tell her I’d left a message.

“Maybe her phone’s dead,” my father said. Elise was always letting her phone die. I didn’t understand how peoples’ phones were always dying—all you had to do was plug it in at night. Who were these people who couldn’t even manage that?

“It’s not dead, it’s ringing,” I said.

“Well, try again.”

It went straight to voicemail.

My father sat at the table. “I need a pen,” he said, holding out his arm to my mother. She couldn’t find one and his arm stayed there, outstretched with his hand waving, while my mother dug around in her purse.

He looked at the prayer needs for a long time before circling one. I wondered which one. I didn’t like that our needs were going to get all mixed up, or that he knew I’d circled all of them. He left it on the table and took his robe into the bathroom, came out a few seconds later with it on.

“Turn it to the news,” he said, getting into bed.

My movie was almost over—Big Russ getting test-zapped by the machine—but I flipped around until I came to the news, the weatherman giving tomorrow’s forecast.

“I kinda miss that ole fat boy,” he said, which is what he called Brett Barry, the weatherman at home.

I plugged my phone into the charger and looked at my mother. I knew we were both thinking about last summer, in Destin, Florida, when Elise left the condo and didn’t come in until three o’clock in the morning. She’d come back to us so drunk she couldn’t stand or speak, and my mother had undressed her and put her in the bathtub.

We slipped on our shoes and went outside.

“Let’s pray real quick.” She took my hands, bowed her head, and closed her eyes. She asked for His protection and compassion and guidance. She asked Him to watch over us and keep us safe. “Mother Mary—” she said.

“Mom?”

She kept her head bowed, a tight grip on my hands. She was quiet for a moment. “Elise is too beautiful and naïve, Lord,” she said, and then she squeezed my hands once hard before releasing them. I wanted to be too beautiful and naïve. No one would ever apologize for me because I was too beautiful and naïve.

We walked slowly across the parking lot. It was quiet and the few lit-up rooms somehow felt lonelier than the dark ones.

Before entering the bar, my mother turned to me. I thought about the bottle of whiskey and how I’d put too much water in it. How I’d done it on purpose. My father would take one sip and ask what she’d done to his drink.

She opened the door and we stepped inside. The place was small, with a couple of video games on one side and a pool table on the other. I stood in the light of the cigarette machine and watched my mother approach the bartender. There were a dozen men, leaning and sitting around the bar, the kind of big, sad men who told a lot of jokes. There was only one other female in the place, a skinny woman playing pool with a short, tattooed guy. While taking aim, the guy met my eyes and I crossed my arms in front of my chest. I’d forgotten to put my bra back on. He took his shot, balls knocking into the pockets.

Though everyone else had noticed us, the bartender pretended not to. He was doing something below the bar I couldn’t see, washing glasses or drying them. When he finally acknowledged my mother, they spoke a few words and then she walked back over and stood next to me.