I said something that was supposed to be normal but came out weird: “A pleasure,” maybe, or, “Pleasure’s all mine.”
I already knew about her. I knew about her car with its Oregon plates, parked there outside Joel’s and my old apartment, first thing in the morning. I didn’t want to see it there, I told myself, but the truth was that I did want to see the car, or else why would I have felt that it was necessary to walk down that particular street, past that particular apartment that had been ours, every chance I had, but especially in the mornings, before work? It had to be that something inside me wanted to confirm that it would be there. It always was.
Davy cried when I said goodbye—as though he knew the finality in it—and that was the hardest part, about Franklin. What makes it okay, though, is that there’s no way he remembers me now.
You know what else is unfair, about Joel? That I loosened the jar lid, so somebody else could open him.
February 23
“UP! UP! UP!” says the woman in this exercise tape, about our buttocks. As it turns out, Mom’s old workout clothes fit me, so I have on her leggings and her tank top and same-size sports bra. And hot pink terry wristbands. I’d unearthed our VCR from the attic to watch them. Mom used these tapes to get back into shape after I was born, which makes me feel I don’t know how. She was twenty-five, in her prime childbearing years.
I don’t know how I got to be thirty. I don’t feel thirty, the way I felt so definitely nine, and thirteen, and twenty-one.
This woman has us run, run, run in place. Then she has us do a series of impossible things with our arms.
Now I clean the toilet FASTER, FASTER, FASTER! and flip the pancakes STRONGER, STRONGER, STRONGER!
“Why are you shouting?” Mom asks.
February 24
The moon, tonight, looks like a cut zucchini coin. I’m filling up on gas at the cheaper station, when somebody says “Ruth.” At a different pump, my old friend Reggie is waving enthusiastically. He’s immediately recognizable: he looks exactly the same. In high school, we were in a band together. I sang backup vocals and played the guitar. We would practice in his parents’ garage. We called ourselves Bambi Mama and our hit song, meaning the song we played constantly, was “The Best Things in Life.” It went: “The best things in life The best things in life are free The best things in life are Fritos.” We had a good time.
Inside the gas station, Reggie buys an Almond Joy for me and a cup of decaf for himself and we sit together on the curb, near the air and water pumps, each of us catching the other up. He’d moved away and moved back recently. First he lived in New York and then he lived in Miami. For a year and a half now he’s been teaching drama at our old high school.
There is an animal in the parking lot with us. It looks like a stray dog, but something about it seems different, seems wrong. The creature doesn’t have any of that modesty that dogs have. It doesn’t seem tentative. It doesn’t seem like it wants us to tell it what to do.
“Coyote,” Reggie says. “They’re getting bolder because of the drought. They’re looking for water.”
When Reggie says water, the thing comes right up to us, as if summoned. It looks at Reggie first and then it stares at me. Over us, the moon is emitting its yellow zucchini light. Reggie reaches into his pocket and pulls out something small and shiny: a whistle. He blows on it, it makes a shrill noise, and that’s all it takes. The coyote runs away.
“It works on mountain lions, too,” he says.
He offers his hand to help me up. I notice the new tattoos on his arms, and a scar on his jaw that’s unfamiliar.
He walks me to my car. He says I can get a whistle of my own at the police department, or at city hall.
“For free?” I ask.
“For free. Like the best things in life,” Reggie says, grinning. “Like Fritos.”
February 25
At three in the morning, I find Dad in front of the TV, watching Ron Popeil sell a Ronco Showtime rotisserie. Dad pushes the loaf of bread that he’s sharing the couch with to the side, and pats the seat beside him. I take it.
We fix ourselves peanut butter sandwiches. He cuts his into rectangles; I go triangles.
I remember I used to command him, “Make me a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich!” And my dad would say, “Poof! You’re a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.”
We watch the rotating chickens, mesmerized.
“We could just set it and forget it,” Dad repeats softly.
“For a low, low price,” I agree. “Just four easy installments.”
“Fetch my credit card,” Dad says, and we call the 1-800 number to order it.
February 26
I’m getting re-used to these things. The trash trucks. The eucalyptus smell. The quiet and cold mornings during which, unlike in San Francisco, you hardly ever hear any sirens. On a walk this morning I notice a lacquered chopstick in the gutter, its twin down the road. A waitress outside the diner with the $1.99 eggs and sausage, shaking the ashes of her cigarette into a Big Gulp cup. A kid jumping over a line of traffic cones. A bunch of Great Danes being walked that move like horses.
In the park, a woman says SIT to her thin dog. The dog squats but never lets its rear end touch the ground. The woman says SIT to her other dog, and it does the same. That’s just how they were raised, I guess.
“Why doesn’t somebody get the mail?” Mom says, dramatically carrying in an armful of envelopes.
February 27
Grooms, over the phone, is telling me that she has been reading Kevin Paradise Lost. Except that, being a baby, he hasn’t seemed very interested. Finally she put Scotch tape on his forehead and it was obvious that he preferred the tape.
“Don’t be too hard on him,” I’m advising. “Remember he’s a baby.”
At the store, there are potatoes in a bin with this big sign above them that says FRESHLY DUG. They’re the size of feet.
Above the avocadoes it says TOUCH ME TENDER.
A woman is stroking a portobello.
“Wow!” she says to me, a complete stranger. “Would you look at the gills on that mushroom!” It endears her to me completely.
Also, while I’m staring at the oils, an alert employee informs me that canola oil is made from rapeseeds! Do I need any help?
At home there are two boxes on the doorstep: two boxes. One is full of loofahs: twelve colorful mesh poufs. Why, we don’t know. Dad claims all the pinks.
The other is our Ronco rotisserie that we’ve forgotten we bought.
I drive back to the store to fetch a chicken. Back at home, we put it in the machine. We set it, but we don’t forget it. We watch the chicken turn over and over and over.
“You should definitely buy one,” I call Bonnie to tell, breathy with excitement.
February 28
Is this a thing? Lately I’m more forgiving. I used to be very quick to judge the old men who don’t know that when you walk past them on the sidewalk where they’re sweeping leaves, they should stop sweeping. But now it occurs to me that maybe these old men have maladies—diseases that affect their manners—and should be pardoned.