Beneath the overalls he was bare-chested except for bead necklaces and body hair. He wiped his dirty hands on his knees.
“I’m sorry, sisters…I was just doing some screaming. Getting out some mother stuff, you know. Heide’s been driving me nuts and it’s always related: wife stuff, mother stuff. It’s all the same.”
“She seemed pretty upset. Said to tell you you’re an asshole,” Deva ventured, turning to me for support.
“Yes. Definitely upset,” I added. “It was your turn to bring Brunhilda to school.”
The veins on Bob’s forehead began to pulsate again with rage.
“She’s just jealous because I get more—” He made a raspberry sound with his lips and did a freestyle dance to shake anger off his legs. “Well I’ve been luckier in our open-relationship deal. It’s because I’m friendlier and better-looking.”
Whether he was better-looking was questionable. Certainly friendlier.
“Thing is, I don’t think she knows about the open-relationship part of it,” Deva said.
Bob let out a full-bodied laugh and opened his arms wide. He wrapped himself around Deva’s small torso with an intense hug and hummed.
“Mmmm. Good to see you, soul sister.”
Deva laughed awkwardly, muffled by his embrace.
Bob turned to me as she made her way out of his arms.
“This is Eugenia, my Italian friend from school.”
“Italian? Wow, that’s far-out. What brings you out here?”
“Umm…my parents.”
“Whoa! Crazy.”
His reaction puzzled me. He seemed baffled, as if I had just told him I was a wandering orphan. Or maybe that would have surprised him less.
“Yeah I know. Crazy.” I went along with it.
“It’s awesome to meet you.” He sighed, staring into my eyes, trying to gauge the amount of past lives we had shared. Then he hugged me tight and I was enveloped by a potent aroma of sage and armpits. One of his bejeweled dreadlocks pushed into my mouth. It tasted bitter.
“Mmmm.” He sighed again, stroking my back. “You’re an old soul, I can tell.”
I let out an awkward giggle and looked over at Deva, who rolled her eyes, signaling that I shouldn’t mind him.
“I guess I am…from ancient Rome.”
“That’s right, man. The fucking Otto-Roman Empire.”
Deva didn’t flinch, so I didn’t correct him.
Bob was the founder of the commune—one of the longest-standing co-op experiments in Topanga. His place had been around since the seventies. Originally it had been a kind of playground for Deva and her twin brother. Their father was always hanging out there, but when the kids grew up he had a falling-out with Bob and stopped coming around. Not that it mattered. “Everyone has their journey,” Bob explained. At his commune people came and went. Everyone brought with them a learning experience and left anything from musical instruments to spaceship installations to “their virginity.” Bob roared laughing when he said that.
We walked back to the purple “mother house.” It looked like a lurid squat with mattresses on the floor. The dining-room window opened onto a terrace that was held together by a mud-and-cement paste. A baby-elephant-size statue of Ganesh with a giant crystal in his lap overlooked the commune grounds below. Rusty bicycles, Buddha and Saint Francis statues, and generators spread out to the far end of the terrace. The back wall was decorated with Osho meditation posters and a psychedelic mural of a baby emerging from an alien’s womb.
“This is the children’s play area,” Bob explained.
He offered us hot chai, then packed a bubbler pipe with weed.
“Are you still working with your dad?” he asked Deva, exhaling in her face.
She looked away and shrugged her shoulders. “On and off on music stuff.”
Bob nodded his head like an old sage. “So much anger in his heart…”
Deva sipped on her tea and didn’t reply.
“He should come and do some screaming. I’d rather him scream in a safe place than at home with you—”
Deva’s neck burst into red patches. “We came to get weed,” she cut him short, then batted her eyelashes. “Can I get some of that Vicodin too? It helps with the pain.”
She pointed to the cast around her elbow.
“It’s your second cast this year. You need to start watching your step, you skinny girl, or you’ll crack all your bones,” Bob said. He furrowed his brow and went to a cabinet on the terrace. He opened a drawer and extracted pills and weed. Deva snatched them from his hand, gave him a crumpled twenty-dollar bill, and kissed his cheek.
In that moment a little girl with dirty hair and wearing an extra-large T-shirt covered in paint peeked her head out the kitchen window.
“Da-ad!” she whined. “I’m hungry. There’s nothing to eat.”
“It was Mom’s grocery day. She was supposed to go to the farmers’ market. We have to get food for the main house!”
“She said you had funny friendships with the fruit sellers and she doesn’t want to go. She said to tell you.”
We left father and daughter to their arguing and took off through the sheds. The commune thinned out as we headed into the woods, the shiny tin homes disappearing behind us. We entered the forest and headed down to the opposite bank of a small stream. A string of Christmas lights hung between oak branches. They turned on and off like summer fireflies. It was suddenly warm again after the cool sunset moment. The sea breeze stopped blowing and everything ceased from its day’s work. The riverbank was fringed with tangled blackberry shrubs that blocked our path, but Deva pushed them away until we reached an open meadow. In the middle of the tall grass stood an isolated stone cabin with an outdoor bathtub and firewood stacked by its side.
It was Bob’s eco-cabin, Deva explained. He rented it to European tourists who wanted to live like hippies. “You get to sleep with mice in darkness and have to pay for it too.” She laughed. We leaned against the door and went inside. There was a table with one leg shorter than the others; bookshelves stacked with canned food, wine, and meditation manuals; a cot and a ladder to an upper-level bed area. I pulled a bottle of cheap Merlot from the shelf. We opened a pack of Doritos and drank gulps of wine.
“Gross!” Deva laughed, spitting out the last sip. Outside we lit candles and filled up the bathtub. The air was crisp. Creatures scuttled through the woods, but we were not afraid because we were already drunk and Deva was a country girl from Topanga who knew how to battle beasts, she said. She took off her sweatshirt and the thin cotton tank top beneath it. Her breasts were small and covered in freckles like the rest of her body. Her nipples were hard and bright red like small apples. I took my clothes off too, revealing my summer tan and brown breasts. She looked at them.
“Nudist,” she said. “How scandalous.”
We left our underwear on and dipped our toes in the hot water, shivering and giggling at the unlikely domestic scene. A normal bathtub in the middle of a field. We lowered ourselves gingerly in the boiling water, screamed ouch at our burning asses.