Flyover States, page 16
“Nobody,” I said, and teared up again, because it was true. “Nobody knows me better than you.” More evidence that I was an idiot who’d made the biggest mistake of her life.
Sammy put his chopsticks down and reached across the table. He grabbed one of my hands. “Then you’ll trust me when I say that you didn’t make a mistake. I think you need to do this, Ron.”
“But I’m not even writing anymore,” I whined. “All I do is work and drink and waste time on weird guys. I’m a goddamn Movie of the Week.”
He laughed. “Sorry,” he said, tightening his lips to get rid of the smile. “What you said is funny but it’s not true. This is just a chapter in your life, that’s it.”
“Chapter” made me think of La Varian, and Nigel, and whoever else lay ahead. I sighed and poked at my lunch with my free hand.
Sammy let go and went back to the rice. “You can’t know how sad I was for you to leave, and you can’t know how I know this is right for you. So what, you’re not writing now,” he said. “You will.”
I shook my head. Sammy made everything seem simple. “But I’m not even sure I’m interested in creative writing anymore. Lacan is actually more interesting these days.”
“So?” Sammy asked. “Write about that.”
“You don’t understand,” I said. “Things keep changing. What I want keeps changing, and I don’t want to make bad choices. And Mom and Dad are getting older… I should be here. I should be home.” I’d never forgive myself if something happened to my family while I was in the Midwest, nose deep in Derrida.
Sammy scraped the rest of the rice grains off his banana leaf. “Look. Remember when you first got to Langsdale and you were looking for an apartment?”
“’Course I do.”
“You called me from a pay phone, freaked out because you saw some clowns waving a Confederate flag from the back of their truck.”
“Insane.”
“Right.” Sammy held his hands up in front of him, as if he was getting held up. It was his don’t-get-me-started pose. “But the point is, even though you wanted to get in your car and drive straight back to L.A., you took the time to get used to some things and you made an okay life for yourself. You made a choice, and it’s still playing itself out. Let it. You can’t make decisions about life based on anticipating something that may or may not happen. Let your life unfold.”
Let it, I thought. Just the kind of hippy shit Sammy was prone to say.
“So.” Sammy had finished, crumpling his napkin and putting it on top of his plate. “Let’s hit MOCA. They’re exhibiting Miró.”
Bita, Charlie and I are walking around South Pasadena after dinner, and I’m not in a good mood, not even close. I’m not looking forward to getting on a plane tomorrow morning and going straight to Valtek after I land. On top of that, Charlie got on this riff about tobacco-chewing hicks and the Klan in Indiana, while we ate a two-hundred-dollar dinner. All I could think about was Mona and Ray. And Earl. It’s always entertaining to make fun of a type until you realize you actually know someone who’s supposed to be so hilarious, just because they exist. It’s everything, though. The weather, the sunshine, all of that, I still love, but the woman who bumps into me because she’s talking on her cell, the cars, cars everywhere big and shiny, stores lined up on both sides of the street with people going in and out like ants, ten-year-olds dressed like hookers, it depresses me. I know, though, that the minute I’m in Langsdale, I’ll be complaining about the Midwest, so I make myself take all of it in, because I do miss it all: the suburban track homes, the obscenely big houses in the distance of Hollywood Hills, Echo Park and Chinatown, Santa Monica Pier, South Pasadena in its elegant tackiness. It’s a city, though Doris, the true New Yorker, says it’s not. I don’t care. I’m glad for it, I’m glad that I fit, and I’m mad that I’m letting Annoying L.A. get in the way of Fabulous L.A. But it can’t be helped.
“Here’s the bookstore,” Bita says. She’s had a gift certificate from Charlie that she’s been wanting to cash in. He gave it to her on Valentine’s Day. We wander around while Bita tries to find something, and as I’m flipping through a book on post-colonial theory, I feel a tap on my shoulder. It’s Charlie.
“Here’s something for you, Ronnie,” he says in what he thinks is a hick accent. He runs a hand through his black hair and squints those green eyes that Bita adores. “For you and that Earl fella a yourn.” He holds up a book. It’s a cookbook by Ted Nugent and his wife “Shemane.” I laugh, because it is kind of funny.
“‘Kill It and Grill It,’” Charlie reads aloud. “‘A guide to preparing and cooking wild game and fish.’”
“Look at him,” I say, pointing to Ted Nugent in his shirt with the arms cut out. “He’s totally crazy.” He’s holding a rifle (kill it), and his wife is holding a knife and spatula (grill it).
“‘Includes recipes for deer, elk, wild boar, rabbit, bear, wild turkey, duck and more,’” Charlie reads. “Better fire up that grill, Becky Sue,” he says to me.
“Charlie!”
We both turn around when we hear Bita’s voice. She’s shaking.
“What’s wrong with you?” he asks.
“This bitch at the counter won’t redeem my gift certificate. She says it looks forged and she won’t take it.”
I frown.
“What?” Charlie puts Kill It and Grill It on the shelf next to a book on narrative theory. “Where?” he asks, following Bita.
In the end, it was a young, cream-faced, self-assured woman who said she was sorry and that it was all a big misunderstanding because when Charlie showed up demanding to know why his wife couldn’t get what she wanted, suddenly she and her boss, Pat Boone’s double, agreed to redeem the certificate. Charlie even shook hands with Pat Boone’s double after joking with him to smooth things over. And that was all. We left.
We’re driving up the hill to their house, and I can’t wait to take a nap, but Bita keeps going over what happened, turning it over and over in her head. “You should have seen how she shoved that certificate back at me like I was a criminal,” Bita spits out, fuming mad. From the back seat, I can’t see her until she flips down the sun visor and checks her makeup. “I even asked to see the manager, and he came, said he agreed with her and left. That’s not even good business.” She stares at her image in the mirror, wipes away a smudge of eyeliner with her finger. When Charlie tries to stroke her hair and call her “honey,” she knocks his hand away.
“Geez, Bita,” he says. He puts both hands on the steering wheel and grips it tight. He looks hurt. “Why are you getting shitty with me? It’s not my fault. I didn’t do anything.”
“Exactly,” Bita says, and says it again. “Exactly.”
Doris
Poetry is full of meditations on absence, how a person is constructed not only in relation to those around her, but in opposition, as well. Flying out to my sister’s wedding, that’s sort of how I feel, identitywise. In Indiana, I am the absence of the East Coast, but when I go back East, I suddenly find myself becoming vaguely, self-righteously hickified. I take actual offense when my sister’s lawyer, husband-to-be, Marvin, asks me when I’m leaving the “flyover” states. Traffic irritates me. Everything seems dirty and overpriced. The fact that a double bourbon at a nice bar can run me twenty dollars becomes a harbinger of capitalist apocalypse—the literal height of insanity. I don’t even want to get into discussions of how much my sister will spend on new shoes or a nice hand-bag—let’s just say that it’s close to my rent. Also, while trendy fashion knockoffs may fly in the absence of actual designerwear, once I hit New York, I feel self-consciously cheap and a little dumpy. My Target flip-flops are no longer the height of kitschy-cute, they are merely $7.99 pieces of Taiwanese plastic which look to be exactly that. And everyone’s wearing stilettos, or Adidas slides, or whatever style is the height of “now” and at the same time decidedly “six months from now” in my actual world. In the presence of style, I am the absence of style. I arrive to make everyone feel that much hipper. Because the thing is, all of my sister’s friends notice. I almost miss the academic hippies.
Marvin picks me up from the airport because my sister is getting her nails and toes done, and all her personals waxed and buffed like some spiffed-up automobile. And I, the hygienic equivalent of a dirt bike, with chipped nails and a Miss Clairol dye job that has left me looking like heat-miser from the Christmas special, am stuck making chitchat with Marvin, who has gelled-back blond hair and a deep caramel tan, like he’s been lounging at the beach and auditioning for a swimsuit ad. Once in the car, he two-fists the cell phone and drives like a meth freak. I try not to think about the fact that his Cadillac SUV is nicer than my apartment.
“Doris,” he says, looking at me closely, “didn’t you get my package?”
“I got your package.”
“And?” he asks, pointing at my fleshy, pale arms.
“I’m not into that chemical stuff on the body,” I explain. “I’m not totally convinced that it won’t give you cancer in ten years, or twenty, or whenever people have been wearing it long enough to see what goes wrong. And even if it doesn’t give me cancer, I can pretty much guarantee it would give me acne, since everything on the planet gives me acne.”
“You’re not going to match,” he says, grouchy but resigned.
“No,” I say. “I’m not.”
I’m tempted to play with his newfangled Global Positioning System (since rich people evidently can’t even read their own maps anymore), but am afraid I’d get my hands slapped. Marvin stews a few more minutes.
“Doris,” he starts, “so how much longer you gonna be out there?”
This is the question all Ph.D. students dread. The well-intended yet slightly patronizing inquiry into our wellbeing, a tsk-tsk for daring to absent ourselves of the race for Versace suits and summer homes. Beneath it: a veiled “screw you” for all the leisure time they fancy graduate students have. I know that Marvin imagines me lounging on my couch, eating bonbons and composing sonnets between episodes of The View and All My Children. Trying to convince him that teaching is hard work, that research and writing is exhausting, and that relative poverty gets less cute with each passing year: utterly useless. His question does hit that deep-seated fear every dissertating human being hides from, even me: Oh, my God, I might never get out.
“Next year,” I say.
I’ve said that for the past two years. I don’t even know whether to believe me anymore, but my unmitigated loathing of J.J. has given me a certain devil-may-care insouciance. As TROOPS porn-guru-cum-potty-mouth, heck, I might even be done next week.
“Thought you were going to be done this year,” he says.
God, I hate this guy. Of course, if I said to him, “Yeah, and I thought you’d be a partner by now at your silly-ass law firm,” I would be the bad guy. Since it is my sister’s wedding, and this is the life-form she’s chosen to unite with, I bite my tongue.
“Your family all here yet?” I ask.
“No,” he replies. Then the cell phone squawks again, and I’m back where I started—bottom of the list of the least of his priorities. Three phone calls later, I’m almost impressed with Marvin, listening to him on the phone is almost like riding with Sybil, maven of the multiple personalities. Marvin has perfected his important voice: That’s right—have it tomorrow. At the latest and his lovey-dovey voice: I got her, honey, wuv you, too. And his oh-God-I-have-to-endure Lisa’s troll sister voice: “So you dating anyone?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I say, because it’s the truth. Explaining Chris or Luis? I’d rather explain semicolon usage to Claus and Will.
Marvin snickers, a little half snicker. I would pay actual money, yeah, I would add two months to the completion of my degree to get out of this car right now. My only glimpse of New York City was from flying into it, and I felt a bit like Moses—granted a vision of the promised land but given no chance of entry. Now we’re headed an hour and a half upstate to chez Marvin’s clan. They’re the “dueling cellos” sort of hill people, not like my parents, who are a teacher and guidance counselor at the same school in Brooklyn, to this day. My parents are like me: educated, but not even remotely moneyed. Lisa’s a different story. We all knew she’d get herself a rich ’un, and she most certainly has. Even as kids, she wouldn’t use Barbie clothes that my mother made for her; she had to see the outfit come out of the pink cardboard and plastic box to deem it worthy of her doll. I love my sister, but she’s cut from a different cloth than the rest of us. Expensive, high-thread-count cloth.
Fortunately, Marvin’s on the phone most of the way to his parents’ place, and I lean my head against the window and pretend to sleep. There’s hardly any traffic on the road, and Marvin’s SUV doing eighty is as smooth as my Toyota doing thirty. A violin piece is playing at a low volume on the car stereo, which has better sound quality than my actual stereo. When I close my eyes, all I can think about is J.J.’s slaw-riddled jaw and the fact that I might not have a job. No job.
“Pull over,” I say.
Marvin glares at me, but then looks worried.
“Jesus,” he says. “You’re green.”
One hour outside of New York, I hold the guardrail for dear life and lose the half ounce of pretzels and six ounces of cranberry juice I’d forced down on the plane ride. Marvin gets out of the car and makes a halfhearted attempt at patting my back, whispering it’s okay until I can force myself back into the vehicle.
“Lisa’s going to freak,” he says, turning off the cell phone that’s ringing beside him. “She’ll freak out. How can you be sick? Please don’t be sick.”
“I’m not sick,” I insist. “I’m airsick and carsick but not real sick. I swear. I’ll be fine by the time we get there.”
Marvin turns and looks at me harder than he has in his entire life.
“I think you’re right,” he concedes. “You look better already. You look good.”
I know, as unspoken fact, that Marvin finds me categorically and canonically repulsive, so far am I from the Upper West Side vision of beauty that he had bought into: the is-she-or-isn’t-she anorexic thing, with a dose of Betsy Bloomingdale and Jackie O, and whatever über-WASP super-twig is passing for Jesus at the moment. This, I must add, is one other thing that I like about the Midwest. I don’t worry all the time about my person. If I even slip into “I’m so fat” mode, Ronnie (who proudly and automatically goes for thirds at any meal) will say “You’re stupid.” Not “No, Doris, you look great,” but “You. Are. Stupid.” I’ve lived in Langsdale long enough that I don’t really think so much about my body. That given, I know what effort it takes for Marvin to compliment me and keep a straight face.
I feel decidedly better by the time we reach the Marvin Mansion, a tasteful estate with beautiful woods and rolling hills surrounding it on all sides. Nothing nouveau riche about Marvin’s family, this is old, old money: money that’s so rich you have to know what you’re looking for to see it. I’m guessing that nothing in the house is less than two hundred years old, except, perhaps, the Chagall hanging in the entryway. It doesn’t take Antiques Roadshow to know that said painting is not a print. An actual Chagall of three birds adrift in a sea of otherworldly blue. I would almost marry Marvin myself to look at that painting every day. He doesn’t seem to notice it’s there.
“You look better,” Marvin repeats. “Really.”
He puts my bags down in the foyer.
“That,” I say, pointing at the painting, “is so, so beautiful.”
“That,” he says, still not looking at the painting, “is real.”
He shows me to my room, then points me in the direction of Lisa’s. I can hear my parents’ voices downstairs, mingled with Marvin’s extended family. My dad, of course, is louder than all of them put together. I give myself the once-over in the full-length mirror in the hallway before going in to see my sister. I do look better. Good, even. I have enough hubris to get me down the hall, head held high—that is, until I am faced with the super-fit, super-tan, super-slender twin visions of my sister and her best friend, Theresa. They’re holed up in Marvin’s sister’s old room, chattering like wildfire.
And it’s not even about how fat they look.
It’s about how old they look.
Following semipoetic logic, I wonder if her marriage isn’t just the absence of being single: an arbitrary but temporarily preferable state. My sister got engaged all but seconds after her twenty-ninth birthday. When I walk in on her and Theresa, they’re comparing engagement rings and joking about how they’re happy they “snagged one” before their looks ran out.
“I’m doing Botox,” Theresa says, pulling at the skin around her eyes. “Just a touch, to take the edge off.”
They talk about aging like it’s a nervous breakdown.
“Hey, bridal lady,” I call out, entering the room and pretending that I love Marvin and think that he and Lisa will be the happiest couple on planet Earth. I do want my sister to be happy.
“Look at you,” Lisa says, gesturing for me to spin around. I rotate my Target flip-flops, sarong and white tank top a full 360 degrees before stopping, flipping my hair for emphasis. “So cute.”
I love my sister. She looks the best I’ve ever seen her, and she’s always been a knockout. Her hair is dyed a rich chocolate brown that’s almost black, maybe two shades darker than natural, and she has it swept into a practice updo for the big day. She and Theresa both have on tan cotton shorts and light blue pin-striped sleeveless blouses, and the same style of shoes: petite heel with an elegant sandal that makes their feet look like they’re floating. My feet look anchored. They’re redoing their nails, since Marvin didn’t like the finish that the manicurist used, and they remind me of a couple of kids playing dress-up, the way Lisa and I used to do.
“Mom and Dad are driving me nuts,” Lisa announces. “They’re in one of those holier-than-thou modes where everything at our wedding is, like, getting mentally translated into the equivalent of school lunches for poor kids. And don’t even get me started on Marvin. He’s like the opposite, bleeding money. Did he talk you to death on the ride up?”
