Mary Miller - The Last Days of California

“She was in here, but she’s gone,” she said.

“Where’d she go?”

“She left with someone. He doesn’t know him.”

“I bet he knows him,” I said. “I bet they all know each other.”

“Maybe he’s just passing through.”

We went outside and looked up and down the street. I felt sorry for my mother. She probably wished she was still Catholic, that she didn’t have to kneel on prayer rugs or talk about the end of the world all the time.

I sat on the curb and stretched out my legs. I hadn’t shaved since we’d left Montgomery, and my legs were hairy, especially around the knees and ankles, spots I always missed.

“The barstools were toilets,” she said.

“Toilets?”

“Raised up on a little platform.”

“I didn’t notice,” I said.

The door opened and we were joined by the couple that had been playing pool. I was conscious of my breasts again. I had large breasts for my frame, which I found humiliating because the boys in my class had decided large breasts weren’t attractive, that more than a mouthful’s a waste. The man lit two cigarettes and handed one to the woman. She had terrible skin, her hair in a sad ponytail.

“We’re looking for my daughter,” my mother said, stepping toward them.

“Good-lookin’ girl?” the man said, but then he seemed embarrassed.

“About five-foot-seven, I think her hair was in a ponytail. Was it in a ponytail?” my mother asked me.

“She had it down. She was wearing a tank top with candy canes on it,” I said, thinking about how pretty she looked in her tiny shorts and tiny shirt, her long arms and legs.

“She was here,” he said.

“Do you know where she went?” my mother asked.

“She left with Jimmy,” the woman said.

“Who’s Jimmy?” I asked.

There was a pause and she said, “What do you want to know about him?”

“They should be back any minute,” the man said. I looked at his arms, which were littered with tattoos—small, individual drawings like someone had doodled them in the margins of a notebook. I wanted to sit with him, have him go through them one by one. I was sure each of them meant something. Trashy people had tattoos that meant things.

“The bartender wouldn’t serve her,” the woman said.

“Why didn’t they get beer there?” I asked, pointing to the gas station. The woman shrugged. I fake yawned, hoping she’d catch it, but she didn’t. It worked best if you yawned just as you were passing someone, if the person hardly noticed you at all. I liked the idea that I could pass it to someone and they would pass it to someone else and my yawn could travel, cross state lines.

My mother started breathing heavily, like she was going to hyperventilate, and I thought I should go get my father, that he’d know what to do, but he hadn’t known what to do. He’d just gotten in bed and opted out of the whole thing. She kept getting more and more upset, and the man tried to comfort her, calling her “ma’am,” reassuring her that Elise would be back any minute. He told her he knew Jimmy and Jimmy was a fine guy, a good guy.

“Sit down, Mom,” I said, taking her hand and pulling her down. She sat next to me, so close her legs and arms touched mine. She was unhappy with us and I wanted to do everything I could to make her stay, to keep her. There was a part of me that had always been afraid she would leave. If I behaved badly, if I wasn’t good enough, she might decide we weren’t worth the trouble. I felt like I had to compensate for my father and sister’s behavior. I didn’t know why this burden had fallen to me, why I was the one who was unable to be herself, but it had always been this way.

The couple eyed us as they smoked their cigarettes and talked about a woman named Tammy. We learned all about Tammy. Tammy had two kids and two boyfriends: one bad, one good. She’d been in rehab, prison, and, most recently, the mental hospital. Now she was out and the cycle was repeating itself. She was with the bad boyfriend, wasn’t answering their calls. Her kids were going to be taken away for good. I’d always thought that bad luck turned, but some peoples’ lives seemed to be one bad-luck story after another with no turn. I picked up my mother’s hand. I didn’t know what to do with it once I had it, so I examined it for signs of aging. It didn’t look too old. The bones felt nice under the skin. I turned it over and traced her head line, her heart line; her life line was weak, tapering off mid-palm.

“Do you miss being Catholic?” I asked.

“God doesn’t care where you worship him as long as you go to church.”

“But Catholics are different.”

“They’re Christians,” she said, “same as us.”

“Dad doesn’t think so.”

“I know,” she said, putting her arm around me.

“I love you.”

“I love you, too,” she said. We said “I love you” a lot, and it hadn’t seemed like a big deal until my mother told me she’d grown up in a family that never said it. When her father died, she hadn’t heard those words come out of his mouth.

I was about to go get my father when we saw the car. We watched the headlights come closer and closer and then Jimmy pulled up right in front of us and my sister got out. The man looked at us through the windshield. He was old, at least forty, and didn’t look like anyone Elise would have voluntarily gone off with.

While our mother stood there with her hands at her sides, my sister dragged me into the bar; she led me to the bathroom and locked the door. The bathroom was one room with two toilets and no dividers between them. There was writing all over the walls: sketches of women’s faces, penises and liquor bottles, cats and rainbows and balloons. A sentence in blue marker caught my eye: IF YOU’RE READING THIS, YOU SHOULD GO HOME NOW. And then, underneath it in big block letters, LOVE ONE ANOTHER. This struck me as hugely profound— love one another . It seemed so simple. I was hardly ever even nice to people because I was afraid of them. It seemed ridiculous that people might need or want my love.

A red lightbulb over the sink gave the room a creepy feel, like we were being filmed, the camera’s eye turning slowly to follow our movements. It reminded me of a TV show I’d seen where seven people had been kidnapped and drugged. They awoke in separate hotel rooms on the same floor and couldn’t get out of their rooms until they’d found their keys, which were taped inside their Bibles. They had to kill the other six people in order to survive.

“I just wanted to see how pissed mom is,” she said.

“She’s really pissed,” I said. “She’s really upset. Why do you have to do stuff like this?”

She pulled down her shorts and sat on one of the toilets. “Like what?”

“You’re being an idiot.”

“Don’t call me an idiot,” she said. “I’m not an idiot. You’re an idiot.”

“Mom was crying in front of those people,” I said.

She was so drunk her face was taking on different shapes, the muscles bunching and flattening beneath the skin. As soon as she’d gotten her shorts up, I opened the door. The bartender was standing there with our mother behind him.

“Get out,” he said, and Elise started screaming that we were leaving.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“What are you sorry for?” Elise said. “You’re always apologizing for things that have nothing to do with you. Nothing has anything to do with you.”

Our mother grabbed her by the arm and jerked her around, hair flying. Everyone was looking at us. They were still and quiet except for the jukebox, which was loud. It was weird, all of these trashy people looking at us like we were the trashy ones. We were solidly middle class. Our parents were college-educated.