Karolina Waclawiak - How to Get into the Twin Palms

Next, I slathered on layers of cream on my freshly raw skin. It felt smooth and new. The roughness washed away with the salt. When I emerged from the bathroom the steam folded off of me and I smelled the burnt smell again. In the bathroom it was gone, just the smell of water and bath products and thick creams and my grime washing away. Now the smell of the fires pulled into the house from the open sliding glass door and I ran to close it.

WITH NO CAR, I HAD TO RELY ON BUSES.There were no maps at the bus stops. No indication of where to go. I figured each bus went down each avenue, each boulevard toward downtown or off toward the beach. I pointed myself east and rode buses in a maze toward Little Armenia, toward the Church of the Holy Virgin. Toward the fires on the hill in Griffith Park, toward the firefighters coming down in stretches trying to save the white letters stabbed into the hill.

I walked three blocks past the bus stop to get to the Holy Virgin. Mary was standing in front of the church, looking perturbed. “Where you been?”

“I was away,” I said.

“You didn’t tell anyone.” She looked at me annoyed. Started walking away.

“Why aren’t you going inside?”

“Canceled. The fires,” Mary said.

She stared up at the black cloud of smoke hanging low in the distance and scowled, flicked ash from her hair, nearly pulling out her red rhinestone barrette.

“What’s your name again, honey?” she asked. I was hurt for a moment and then I remembered she was old.

“Where’s your car?” she asked me. I could only tell her the truth.

She shook her head at me.

“You need to talk to Maria Rosa.”

“Who?”

“My psychic. She’ll set you straight, tell you what’s going to happen.”

“I already know what’s going to happen,” I said.

“You don’t know shit.” She snorted and pulled at her purse. Black fabric with Betty Boop smiling, the pleather patch ironed on. “I can call us a cab with the money I was going to spend at bingo tonight.”

I thought about the money I would lose with bingo being canceled, knowing I would never get my car back at this rate. Mary went inside the rectory and came back minutes later. Her cane bobbing in front of her.

“Five minutes, they said. That means 10.” She sat down on the ledge in front of the church.

“There’s more and more Filipinos coming to bingo now. They love to gamble.”

“Since I last came?”

Mary nodded her head and made a face. “It’s an invasion. They love Jesus and they love bingo. I can’t even understand them.”

I walked over and sat down next to her on the ledge. She was sweating in the heat. Her sweatshirt too thick for the weather. She had drawn her eyebrows in black today and I wondered if she used eyeliner this time, they look arched and furious as she tugged at her cane, licking her lips.

“It ruins my chances of winning.”

“They add more money to the pot,” I said.

“They call out bingo when they don’t even win. Fuck everything up.”

“Maybe they’ll go away, Mary.”

“Eh, they’re not going anywhere.” She shook her head and looked down the road impatiently. Up and down, leaning forward and checking every few seconds. We’d run out of things to talk about.

“You have 20 dollars?” she asked.

“No. I don’t have anything,” I said.

She looked in her purse and counted. She had a lot of bills. Too many to carry around. She couldn’t fight anyone off, maybe with her cane, but I doubted it.

“This is all I have left,” she said.

I asked her what she meant but she didn’t respond.

“Where am I supposed to go now that bingo’s canceled?” she said.

“Home, Mary,” I said.

She snorted. “You have 20 dollars?” she repeated.

“Why are you asking me for money when you have so much?” I asked.

“It’s for you, not me,” she said.

She stuffed a twenty in my hand. “You can pay me back.” “What’s it for?” I asked

“Maria Rosa.”

“I don’t need to know anymore,” I said.

Mary shook her head at me, like I was all wrong.

“I don’t want to go to Maria Rosa. I want to go home,” I said.

Mary looked at me, long and hard. She gave the cab driver directions and I knew where we were going. The cab stopped at the yellow tape and Mary and I made the rest of the way to her home on foot. Her with her cane, me trying to help.

Her house was charred, but still standing.

“Oh, Mary,” I said because I didn’t know what else would fit.

“They don’t make them like they used to, not like this anymore. This is the house that Jack built,” Mary said. She looked lost, like when she was left behind at bingo.

I looked at the house. It was a shell now. The shrine to her husband gone. The saints all gone with it.

“It’s still standing though, boy. They don’t make ’em like they used to. Those new houses wouldn’t have made it,” she said.

Mary took out the one picture of her husband she had left, the good luck charm from bingo. Small-framed and silvered.

“The bricks need to be repainted. The stairs fixed,” she said.

I kept looking at the house, trying to see what she could see. There was nothing left to fix.

“Where are you going to go, Mary?” I asked.

“Go? I’m gonna stay right here. This is the house that Jack built. My father built it with his hands, his own two hands.”

I didn’t tell her that I did this to her. Maybe I shouldn’t have forced it on her. Maybe she was happy in her grief. After all, it was all she had left.

I LEFT MARY. COULDN’T LOOK AT WHAT I HADdone any longer. I walked past the yellow tape and down, away from the fires. I went alone. Los Angeles wasn’t leaving and I couldn’t make it go away.

Instead, I would have to leave it because I had failed to cleanse the desert. The city was resilient and unmoving, undaunted by the smoke clouding all around it, ash gently falling. The sun was setting in the west and it was blood red, large and balloon-like and it felt like a protection.

I started walking. Leaving however I could.

MY FATHER HAD TOLD ME THE STORY ABOUTwhen he and my mother had gotten married. A small church in my mother’s village. It was where the farmers brought their crops and covered the altar in the fall, begging for a new harvest in the spring. It was next to the graveyard where my family lay. My parents were still young, twenty or twenty-one and my mother was not pregnant. She wore a dress her mother had sewn for her and my father was even younger than my mother. Scared. He said, walking away from the church, through the rye fields, alone and together with no one following them, was the best point of their marriage. Their walk to the train, through the fields of swaying rye and over the tracks to the one train out of their village. He said it twice; this was their best moment together. With the most hope. In the distance, the farmers were already burning their potato fields after picking their crops. The smoke was thick and hung low in the air. They did it neatly, in order to prepare the soil for new growth.

NOTE ON THE COVER ARTIST

RICARDO CAVOLO was born in Salamanca, Spain, in 1982, in a painting studio. Most of his works are paintings and illustrations, but also sculpture and street art.

He has completed illustrations for Cirque du Soleil, Ogilvy, Leo Burnett, AIGA, Urban Outfitters, and magazines all over the world. His art has been exhibited in Spain, Russia, and Switzerland, as well as published in three books.