Try not to feel too shitty, was her main piece of advice. Stop, always, at 2.5 drinks. Make a list of good things—however small. I did everything she said. Granted, I would have tried anything.
I often wrote 2.5 in Sharpie, on the back of my hand, nights before I went out—a reminder.
I bought a notebook and started keeping a list.
? Found a ten-dollar bill in the back pocket of jeans from the thrift store.
? Found a parrot-shaped leaf.
? Watched a woman reach her arms overhead and stretch in a satisfying way.
“I didn’t want to show you this,” Grooms says, “because I didn’t want to jinx it. But it’s really, really happening.” She pulls a photo from her wallet: the baby boy she’s been in the process of adopting. He’s a miniature Michelin Man. His name is Kevin.
Soon I’m asking Grooms: “Do I say goodbye to Joel?”
“You’ve said goodbye to Joel,” she says. Annoyed. Like, what’s your problem—have you learned nothing? I’m ashamed to have chased her news with this.
We say goodbye. Or I say goodbye, and Grooms grunts her disapproval, affectionately.
I drive to Santa Cruz, where Linus lives—not bothering to call ahead. He’s between semesters, which I know means he’ll be home, trying to write his dissertation but more likely watching DVDs borrowed from the library, and cursing when he has to skip over the damaged parts, which inevitably there are.
At the exact moment I pull up my brother is standing at his mailbox. He peers at me, like he’s trying to focus on something through the bottom of a glass.
I roll my window down. “Need a lift?”
“Nope,” Linus says, not skipping any beat. “No thanks.”
“You’re going to leave me all alone,” I say, “down there? With those people?”
He takes a good long look at his mail.
Ten years ago—Linus was a junior in high school, and I was away at college—our father took up with another professor at the school. She taught physics. It had gone on for six months when our mother found out—they were never very scrupulous—after which there were apologies and there was counseling. The professor moved away, and that was the end of that.
My parents never broached the subject with me. Over the phone, they kept conversation light. It was Linus who relayed the goings-on—how strained their relationship had become, how miserable my mother seemed, how helpless. He chose her side easily. The whole thing caught me by surprise—still surprises me.
Anyway, the point is: Linus sees things differently.
Inside his apartment, on his couch, sit neat towers of clean, folded laundry; Linus moves them.
His girlfriend, Rita, is a flight attendant. She’s often gone, and isn’t home now, either.
“Alaska,” Linus says, without my asking. Also without my asking, he hands me a beer and deftly fashions a trail mix out of little airplane pretzel and peanut packets. He empties them into a bowl.
He makes the bed for me with a flat sheet and airplane pillows; he brings me a blanket. He opens the medicine cabinet, where there are sample sticks of deodorant and spare toothbrushes and flat, dehydrated sponges for taking on trips: the sponges save luggage space. They expand on contact with water. He says I’m welcome to use anything, which moves me.
“How is he?” Linus says, finally. This is after three beers. He’s put his library DVD of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest on TV. He asks the question while juggling the socks he’s rolled into balls. I know it’s a hard question for Linus to ask. The socks mean he can’t ask me straight. I want to dignify it with a response befitting the courage he’s mustered, but all I can manage is, “He’s fine.” Linus knows what I mean: that he’s his stubborn self—unwilling to accept help.
After the movie ends, we change the channels. On one, a woman has buried herself beneath her belongings. All around her there are cartons of expired things she can’t bear to throw away, and a flattened cat.
“Can’t you come home?” I say finally.
“I’ve been home,” is what he says.
And we let the silence hang there between us—not uncomfortably. He refills the pretzel-and-peanut bowl.
At some point we fall asleep, the both of us, children nestled among the laundry.
January 7
Linus makes us thermoses of coffee in the morning and we take them to the beach, where the sky is gray and the ocean is gray and it feels like being wrapped in a newspaper. Seagulls are squawking; the gutsy ones come close and give us piercing stares. They look like Jack Nicholson.
“He’s our dad, though,” I say.
“And I don’t give a shit,” he says.
He sends me off with peanut packets. I get on the I-5 and keep the window mostly rolled down and try to breathe deeply, like Grooms always says I should. But all I can smell is hamburgers, or cows on their way to becoming hamburgers. America.
My car is completely flush with belongings. I can’t see anything in the rearview mirror and this is causing some distress. I cut west, to the 101.
I pull over often. I buy a bag of oranges from a man under a rainbow umbrella. I buy lemons from another man a few miles down. I pocket some rocks at Moonstone Beach, and a couple there asks, in French accents, if I have a steady hand. After I tell them, “Not really,” they hand me their camera anyway.
A truck is carrying a wind turbine that looks immense, like a whale.
Another truck, all black, says eat more endive. It pulls over to let me pass, and the trucker gives me a small wave as I do.
At a rest-stop gift shop, I buy a pencil topped with an eraser shaped like an orange and ask the employee how California came to be known as the Golden State. Was it because of the gold rush, or because of the sunshine, or because of the oranges?
“I’ll have to ask my manager,” the employee says, hurrying off. I don’t stay to learn the answer.
I pull over to get a coffee at a Chevron in San Luis Obispo. The endive truck is parked there, and the trucker is outside, sitting on the curb, eating a waxed paper–wrapped apple pie. He has wavy gray hair and is wearing a Harley-Davidson shirt.
After taking a sip, I cough the coffee onto the sidewalk. My standards for coffee I consider the lowest of low. Meaning this stuff is impossible.
“I meant to warn you about that,” he says, finishing the pie.
He tosses me a tiny bottle containing, it says, five hours of energy and an astonishing amount of B vitamins. He says the feeling you got from it was like the sun coming up in your head.
“That sounds nice,” I say.
“Nice,” he says, “is the goal.”
I used to have scruples about accepting drinks from strangers. Not so much anymore. I take a seat on the curb next to him.
“They’re a trippy little veggie,” he says, about endives. “You grow them in the dark.” He pronounces endives “ON-DEEV.”
There is a couple also outside the Chevron, standing by the trash can: the woman is voluptuous and the man is ruler thin and they are in their forties or early fifties. They talk quietly together. He is leaning into her, and only their stomachs are touching.
“Vegetable jokes,” he says. “It’s all I’m good for anymore.”
“What do you mean?” I say.