This Is Where We Live (36 page)

When she looks to the left, she stops. In that little beacon of sun, Dolores has staked her final claim—a folding lounge chair missing two plastic slats, a withered pot of petunias, an overflowing ashtray. She sits there now, clad in a floral housecoat, fanning herself with a PennySaver and smoking a foul-smelling cigarette. Both activities come to an abrupt halt when she sees Claudia standing in her backyard.

“You,” she says.

“Me,” Claudia agrees.

The cigarette resumes its trajectory toward Dolores’s mouth. The ash collapses under its own weight en route, landing in her formidable cleavage. Claudia imagines Dolores sitting here by herself every day, a lonely old woman with nothing to keep her company but some dusty piles of junk, the skunks skittering about under the house, and the occasional obligatory visit from her children and grandchildren. The sadness of this small empty life makes Claudia want to weep.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I was just leaving.”

But Dolores is heaving in the chair. Her bosom bounces from her failed attempt to lift her mass upright. She gives up and settles back, looking up at Claudia. “You buy my house?” She jabs the cigarette for emphasis.

“I already have a house,” Claudia says.

“This house ees good house,” Dolores continues, her sandpapered voice rasping. “I leeve here
thirty-two
years. Three kids.”

She bares her teeth at Claudia, revealing nicotine-stained teeth. It is the first time that Claudia has ever seen her smile, and it seems to hurt her; the muscles of her upper lip tremble with the effort of lifting her mouth into an upward curve. It appears that she is trying not to cry.

“I don’t want two houses,” Claudia says, once again feeling like she is supposed to apologize. She sees what she must look like to the old woman: the vulture from across the street, swooping in to pick over her ailing carcass. Does Dolores mistakenly think she is rich, Claudia wonders? Is that why she has always hated them?
But you
are
rich
, she realizes suddenly.
You have over half a million in the bank. And you were still rich, comparatively speaking, even when you didn’t
.

“There you are!” The real estate agent bursts out the back door, still wielding the cell phone. She grips Claudia’s jacket, tugging her gently back toward the door. “I see you’ve met Mrs. Hernandez. Don’t worry, she knows she has to vacate before the property goes into escrow.”

Dolores takes another drag of her cigarette. Her face collapses, her bushy gray brows beetling toward her nose, the corners of her mouth curling toward her chin. She looks up the hill, as if absorbed by something in the ivy, determined to ignore the interlopers in her garden. Claudia lets Marcie Carson steer her back to the dark interior of the house, leaving the old lady alone in the garden.

Once inside, Claudia makes a beeline for the front door. The hand falls from her elbow as the dismayed real estate agent watches her flee. “You have my number!” Marcie calls after her. “Think about it. The bank is very motivated to move this house. We’re willing to be flexible on price.”

Claudia turns to wave goodbye without breaking her stride, careening sideways as she dodges piles of junk. Her hip knocks into one of the teetering pillars, sending its contents sliding to the floor. Claudia stares down at Dolores’s belongings as Marcie crouches besides her, struggling to upright a stack of tattered
People en Espanol
magazines dating back to 1998. A cardboard box full of curling family photographs cascades across the hallway floor, and Claudia bends to pick one up.

It’s a faded snapshot of Dolores and the mustachioed man with three teenage children, standing in front of this house in the 1980s. Dolores is almost unrecognizable: a trim woman in a plaid dress, her long hair woven up in braids, radiantly smiling as her husband tucks his arm around her waist. The house behind her is painted yellow—the same paint job that will eventually fade into its current colorless beige—and the first of the garden gnomes is already positioned amid the begonias in the front yard. One of the teenage girls (possibly Luz, though it’s hard to tell) holds a pinwheel, caught in the act of blowing into it to make it spin. The family looks happy, confident in the permanence of their surroundings, secure in their belief that their future will be like this one perfect frozen moment.

What happened to that family? Claudia wonders. What other seemingly flawless moments happened here, in this decaying house? She looks at the squalor surrounding her, and suddenly understands that this isn’t
junk
after all. To Dolores, these odds and ends are memories she is unwilling to separate from, no matter how seemingly inconsequential. She is preserving the comfort of continuity.

Claudia swallows hard and stuffs the photo back in the box before hurrying back home.

Day Forty-five

“Weren’t we supposed to be living in paradise? What happened to our weather?” Esme shivers and pulls her cardigan around her shoulders, moving closer to the heat lamp that is irradiating them with propane. The twinkling fairy lights, strung in the overhead olive trees, shiver as arctic fog blasts across the patio. Despite the chilly December evening, the outdoor tables surrounding Esme and Claudia are all packed with bar patrons, everyone pointedly ignoring the fact that LA’s celebrated balmy winters have apparently migrated south with the birds this year.

“It’s the middle of winter, Esme.” It is so cold the ice in Claudia’s gin and tonic isn’t melting. The marine layer overhead traps the light from the city, illuminating the patio with a ghostly luminescence. It is only six o’clock but it feels like midnight.

“Technically, winter doesn’t start for one week. Anyway, we’re not
supposed
to have winter in Los Angeles.”

“We could always go inside,” Claudia observes.

“That’s not the point,” Esme says. “The point is that we moved here so we wouldn’t have to make that choice.”

“You didn’t move here,” Claudia points out. “You were born here.”

“Maybe we should go on a trip together,” Esme says. “Someplace warm and beachy and restorative. Tulum? Hawaii? Interested?”

Claudia shrugs and fishes an ice cube out of her glass, wishing she had stayed home. But Esme has been pestering her about a “girls’ night” for weeks, and Claudia has run out of excuses. A “girls’ night,” as far as Claudia can tell, mostly involves Claudia listening to Esme’s upbeat chatter—anecdotes about her job, the men she is dating, the condo she is decorating, lightweight subjects that seem expressly designed to take Claudia’s mind off her seeping melancholy. Or perhaps her friend’s just dancing around the awkward fact that Claudia managed to completely sabotage the opportunity that Esme’s mother gave her? Regardless, while Claudia appreciates the intention behind this gathering, she would have preferred to be at home, watching reality show reruns on standard cable (movies are just too painful these days) or staring blankly out through her newly installed double-paned windows into the depths of the canyon. And yet she knows it is time to start facing the world again; it’s been six weeks since Jeremy’s departure, and it’s occurred to her (in the abstract, but still) that she can’t stay in her house forever.

She feels like an amputee learning how to walk again.

Esme’s babble grows more frantic by the minute, as if she were a depth finder charting the fathomless bottoms of Claudia’s depression. Esme’s face flickers with concern as it registers Claudia’s misery, her friend’s forehead corkscrewing tightly as she musters up a new round of false cheer. It’s clear that whatever anger Esme might still feel about the Ennis Gates debacle, it’s been trumped by pity. Not that Claudia finds the latter emotion any more bearable.

“So, anyway, I’m thinking mint, for the living room,” Esme says, abruptly returning to a previous conversation. “With coral and ivy as accent colors. I’m basing it on this wallpaper that I found on sale at a design store on Beverly. A kind of fern pattern. The big conundrum is, Do I go for a kind of contemporary beach-house feel? Or try for more of a Miami deco aesthetic? What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” Claudia said. The ice cube melts painfully on her tongue. “Neither sounds particularly natural for a fourteenth-floor condo in downtown LA, if you ask me.”

“You think it’s stupid for me to be worrying about this kind of stuff.” Esme deflates. “It
is
stupid of me to be worrying about this. I’m sorry. I’ll shut up.”

“It’s not you. It’s me. I’m bad company tonight.” Now she feels even worse—her friend is at least
trying
to be cheerful.

But Esme already looks equally morose. “I used to read fashion magazines and spend my weekends buying shoes. Now I obsess over design blogs and furniture reproductions on eBay and eco-friendly rugs,” she says. “I guess by your midthirties you’ve realized the limitations of your own body. The new frontier to decorate is the home. Not that it’s any less shallow.”

Claudia nods, wishing she could muster the same enthusiasm for her own newly redone home. The two women sit in silence, examining the other customers of the bar. A few feet away, a group of men their age are staring at them. The men splay out at their table, leaning back in their chairs, legs positioned open in greater-than wedges that sign directly to their crotches. Cocktail waitresses weave between the tables, pints of beer slopping pools of froth across their trays. This bar is usually empty until the dinner hour; Claudia wonders if business is up because people are unemployed and have nothing better to do than get drunk before dark, or because Happy Hour beer is five dollars cheaper.

Esme shivers and peels the label off her beer bottle. “So,” she says, her words measured and cautious. “Have you heard from Jeremy at all?”

“No.” Claudia isn’t at all sure that this is an improvement on the previous conversation. “I’m not sure I really want to talk about him.”

“You need to talk about him with
someone
,” Esme says. She picks at the sticky label residue with a ragged fingernail. “You’d tell me if you were getting divorced, right?”

It’s the first time Claudia has heard this word spoken out loud, let alone let herself think it, and the harsh resonance of its syllables jolt her alert.
Divorce
. It sounds like something that happens to people much older than they are. Only now, hearing that word coming from her friend’s mouth, does Claudia realize that she’s never really felt
married
in that way she’d always assumed one did. That if certain benchmarks are the classic markers of middle-class adulthood—marriage, kids, mortgage, all maintained by a financially stable career—she came close but ultimately fell too far from the mark to really feel like a grown-up.

But
divorce?
It just seems like she’s moving farther and farther away from life’s golden ring. She is on the verge of having to start at the beginning again, on all fronts of her life, at an age when her own parents were celebrating their twelfth anniversary, with two kids in school and the jobs they’d have for the rest of their lives. For a moment, she wishes she’d never known that a life outside of Mantanka was even possible: She could have stayed, married an accountant, become a stay-at-home mom, and lived in a modest, affordable tract home near her parents. Everything would have been so much easier if she’d never known about the other sort of happiness available to her. Then she would never have had to lose it.

“I haven’t even heard from him,” she tells Esme. “I don’t know what’s going on. With anything, honestly.”

“Oh.” Esme considers this. “What about the money? Have you decided what to do with it yet?”

Claudia shrugs. “Maybe I’ll give it to charity.”

“What charity?”

The wind blows a stack of cocktail napkins off their table, scattering them across the patio. “I’m not sure,” she says. “Maybe a breast cancer charity.”

Esme watches her. “Why breast cancer?”

For a moment, even Claudia isn’t sure why she’s said this until she remembers:
Jeremy’s mom died of breast cancer
. His grip on her seems inescapable, even from thousands of miles away. This has to stop. “Or maybe I’ll just save it and live off it for a few years. Take a sabbatical from life.”

Esme stares at her. “So you’d just do … nothing?”

“Got a better idea?”

Esme finishes peeling the beer label off and tries, unsuccessfully, to affix it to the paper tablecloth. “Why don’t you do something fun to take your mind off everything? Go travel. You never did that after college. Train around Europe. Get stoned on the beach in Thailand. Go on safari.”

The very thought of this—of packing a suitcase and getting on a plane, of talking to strangers and scouring travel guides, of taking tours for one and eating dinner at restaurants by herself—exhausts her. “I’m thirty-four, Esme. I’d look ridiculous camping out on the beach in Thailand.”

“Book a hotel room, then.” Esme flags down the waiter, pointing to their empty drinks. “Maybe you’re just not ready yet, but
I
think you should take advantage of the situation you’re in. The sooner the better.”

“The situation I’m in? You mean, having destroyed two careers and my marriage on the same day?” She glances at Esme. “It’s worth repeating, by the way, how sorry I am about that. The whole mess with your mom. I really screwed that one up.”

“No need to apologize again. You weren’t yourself. I get it.” Esme punctuates her words with a stiff shrug, then smiles beneficently. “The point is, you can do anything you want now. You have the financial freedom to try anything that crosses your mind. Right now, that’s a pretty rare opportunity.”

Her words painfully mirror Jeremy’s parting shot:
You can do anything you want
. And they are both right. But Claudia can’t think of anything to
want
right now, except for something that is completely intangible and unattainable: What she really wants is to be
wanted
.

She leans forward, bracing her head in her hands, her elbows on her knees. “You know what I think? I think we just know too much now. We all got too much too fast, and then we lost it even faster, and now the only thing that’s clear is that we never had any control over anything in the first place. Our generation was supposed to be young and optimistic and full of pioneering ideas about the future, right? Well, life’s scraped that right out of me. All I feel these days is jaded.” She scratches at her forehead with a fingernail. “The truth is, we’re older than we’ve been willing to accept.”