And now she’s forwarding me e-mails at an impressive clip.
One says: “If you are ever thrown into the trunk of a car, kick out the back taillights and stick your arm out the hole and start waving like crazy. The driver won’t see you, but everybody else will. This has saved lives.”
“How to lose 2000 Calories!!!!” and then a video of a chicken dancing.
Also “THE MOST DANGEROUS CHOCOLATE CAKE IN THE WORLD.” I click on this.
“Why, you ask??? Well, from the moment you decide to make it until you sit down to eat is about 5 minutes! So, now chocolate cake is no more than five minutes away at any time!” And then there’s a list of ingredients you’re supposed to mix in a microwave-proof mug, and nuke.
April 11
In an ancient National Geographic I find in the bathroom magazine stack, I read that jellyfish synthesize a special protein that helps with dementia. When elderly people are given jellyfish to eat twice a week, they are less likely to develop dementia or other age-related diseases. Another fact: most jellyfish have one opening that serves as both mouth and anus. (Except the box jellyfish: 64 anuses!)
Now I’m calling all the stores. None carry jellyfish.
April 12
I peel myself a hard-boiled egg, but in the unsatisfying way: the shell comes off in small shards but also with large chunks of white attached. I drink coffee. I don’t feel like washing the coffeepot. I walk to the living room, where my father is spread out on the length of the couch. Dad moves his feet, one after another, so I can take a seat next to him.
Now and then I’m tempted to shake him.
What were you thinking? I want to scream sometimes, on behalf of my mother. Or, What is wrong with you?
One of Dad’s socks falls off in the process of moving his feet for me. He shrugs and, using his foot, pulls the other one off, too.
I make us THE MOST DANGEROUS CHOCOLATE CAKE IN THE WORLD. Two dangerous chocolate cakes, each containing three tablespoons of chocolate chips. They look like beautiful soufflés fresh out of the microwave. I e-mail Deb a picture.
April 13
There are four more classes for this semester, and then it will be time for final papers. Theo and I are out of ideas for relevant venues. We’re out of ideas for irrelevant ones, too. How about class at Disneyland—we’ll talk about the role of the entertainment industry in California?—Theo suggests, and Dad complies, happily.
At Disneyland, we meet Mickey and Minnie Mouse. We eat Popsicles. We stand in a lot of lines, and Dad uses them as opportunities to lecture. We get our photo taken on Splash Mountain, looking like the strangest family. On the spinning teacups, Dad is totally gleeful.
“This was a good idea,” I whisper to Theo, during the fireworks over the Magic Castle.
“It was Joan’s,” Theo says quietly back.
Later, at home, a urinal cake falls out of Dad’s pocket.
“Why do you have this, Dad?”
“I don’t know,” he says, troubled.
April 14
Going out to get the mail today, I run into the mailman at the mailbox. But it turns out not to be so bad! It’s overcast outside, though the actual rain hasn’t started, and the mailman is wearing blue shorts and a poncho. He has a white bandage wound around his calf. There is the one normal calf, and the other one, which looks like a snake that had swallowed a soft-ball.
“That dogs hate mailmen,” he tells me, “is true.”
“Is it bad?” I ask.
“It was a German shepherd.” He shrugs. “It could’ve been worse.”
“What’s worse than a German shepherd?”
He hands the mail to me. There’s a bright Band-Aid on his thumb.
“Was that a dog, too?”
“That was an orange,” he says. “That was when I hurt my thumb opening an orange.”
April 15
Today there are four goldfish in bags on our countertop. They look unhappy.
“A troubling,” Dad tells me. “That’s what you call a group of goldfish.”
April 16
Bonnie is babysitting in Thousand Oaks and I’m here to help. The children belong to Bonnie’s boss at the art gallery, and the babysitting is expected of her; she isn’t paid overtime. They are seven and five, and their names are Ralph and Lou Jr.
Their mother is on a date, at the ice-skating rink with a banker. While they are skating, the four of us sit at the elegant dining-room table, eating reheated chicken tetrazzini.
“Chickens are the cousins of the dinosaurs,” Ralph informs us.
“Not any dinosaur,” Lou Jr. corrects, “the Tyrannosaurus Rex!”
“If dinosaurs still roamed the earth, I’d sic one on Lou,” Ralph says.
“That’s not very nice,” Bonnie says.
“Not this Lou,” Ralph says. “I just mean my dad.”
There is a pause.
“Well, that’s not very nice, either,” Bonnie says.
After putting the kids to bed, we dismantle a pomegranate from the tree in the yard, careful not to crush the seeds into the carpet. Bonnie shows me, on her phone, photos of what she’s been working on lately: full-length cutouts of herself, stretched to different heights, and Photoshopped to different widths, like paper dolls. There are big and small and fat and skinny Bonnies. She’s tiny in comparison to the tallest cutout—it’s maybe nine feet tall, towering over her.
“Help me with my statement,” she says.
“Bonnie Nazaryan is interested in possibility”—I clear my throat, use my art-critic voice—“in the infinity of lives unlived.”
“Bonnie Nazaryan,” she says, “is terrified of amounting to nothing, terrified of having lived on Earth without leaving a trace—trying to announce to anyone who will listen—her best friend mostly—I exist! Pathetic. Here I am!”
We browse Ralph and Lou’s mother’s movie collection. Her ex-husband, Lou Sr., is in the entertainment industry, and very famous.
I see Eight O’Clock Coffee and hold it up.
“What’s that?”
“My dad’s in this,” I say.
I’ve never seen it—it’s impossible to find a copy. I’ve only ever read the script. What I don’t remember is that the story begins with suicide, the same way I always forget that all Jimmy Stewart wants, for a good part of It’s a Wonderful Life, is to kill himself.
The premise, in my father’s movie, is kind of nutty. It takes place in this woman’s afterlife, which looks a lot like an old California ghost town: dirt roads, horse-drawn carriages, saloons with swinging doors. The population, all the dead people, are literally hollow. They have no bones or internal organs. On windy days they have to wear heavy coats or else risk being blown away.
In the movie, the main character—an actress who later played a murder victim on an episode of Law & Order—is meeting an old flame of hers. My father is sitting behind them, at the bar, eating an olive from a toothpick. His hair is wavy and he’s maybe my age. He looks just like Linus.
“Wow,” Bonnie says. “He was smoking hot.”
On the way home I stop in Alhambra, at the Chinese grocery store, to look for jellyfish, which they have. I buy six packets of frozen jellyfish and six packets of dried.
I linger to watch an employee gently pressing avocados, adhering “RIPE” stickers to the ripe ones.