My Escapee: Stories

Privations

129 Privations / Los Angeles The lily pads are gone, gone, and this is less a worry than a verdict :sad.They’ve all died on the lake in Echo Park.Or is it lotus leaves?Ican’tremember.Ireadaboutitinthenewspaper,aneighborhood ’s minor tragedy, but it feels larger to me. Pollution to blame, probably. I don’t remember that part either, just the fact of flora, which I suppose I read as possibility, being replaced by the absence of flora.The blossoms,in pictures,like silken briefly crumpled handkerchiefs.They used to be the pride of Echo Park. Soon our planet will be full of the dead habits of people. Places of Origin “I’m nearly hysterical with tiredness,” I say to Alexis, and by her silence on the other end of the line I know this was a mistake . She does not want to hear it. Her father sits in front of his computer all day, composing his op-eds (“The Olympics Must Return To Their Hellenic Birthplace,” “The Disappearance ofAfrican Grains and Pulses”),but still she does not want to hear about how I have to do every little thing. She lives in Portland and thinks her life began last year, the correct mani- Privations 130 / festation of her life.A dark woman with inflexible eyes,a body winnowed to long and balanced bones by mountain bike rides. I start to tell her a story about something Leo did, just a little anecdote, but she interrupts me.“Divorce him,” she says. Her brusqueness a gate barring people like me from more varied parts of her personality.I can’t divorce Leo.He’d drown without me, in American exigencies, in automated telephone systems and police charity fundraisers and the other kinds of transactions that require a diplomacy and patience the boy from the Greek village came unequipped with. I am the girl from the Ohioan village. I am, like I said, nearly hysterical. Gridlock Considering the automobile: gleaming steel, tires from which air may be constantly leaching . . . How will our roads accommodate us? I listen to the traffic report on the radio and the woman’s voice says,“SIG alert on the 405,”and I do not need to know what “SIG” stands for to know it’s bad. Sudden Illogical Gap?ShitInGroves?Mycartriestotellmewhatitneeds.Lights and signs flash to life on the dashboard. Fluid low. Door ajar. Airbags off again (a suicidal impulse).Stop and go.Slow and go. There’s a coziness to its interior,the kind of coziness one might attribute to a dog house.Pal loves it in his little plastic igloo! Pal would feel lost without his wet-cardboard-sweaty-baby-shoesuper -glue-smelling igloo. (Hoping it’s not cruel, hoping he’s not lonely.)The faces of my fellow commuters as expressionless as cheese,for who can admit to being themselves caught in such ridiculous traffic? I try making eye contact with the fellow next to me: middle-aged, hand on steering wheel hairy and heavily Privations / 131 ringed, the hair sprouting from between and beneath the rings like a paw or a claw or a talon banded to be counted by wildlife officials. His coincidental proximity, the miniature hula dancer vibrating on his dashboard . . . I am suddenly irrevocably attracted to him. He thinks I want to merge, and waves me in. Barricade My brother won’t let me inside his house. He’s always been private,butIsuspectsomethingworse.Anadolescentboywearing a loincloth tied up in a bamboo pen. Piles of pornography and ancient drugs.I don’t know.Teddy’s smart—he taught himself Old English, the sitar, hydroponics. Took the interesting things from the world for himself.Then came a subtle change. Cartons of heavy cream in his recycling container.He started to smoke again, and his little dog lost her fur and had to go on a diet of kangaroo meat. Kangaroo meat was the only thing she could eat. Anyway, when I used to be allowed inside, I’d rest uneasily on the edge of some soiled chair and wonder how one person could be so messy.It was like an orphanage of reprobates in there.Yet an element of jealousy clung to my condemnation, becauseTeddy lived wholly for himself and maybe for the idea of himself that fluttered about him like a wide-girthed angel. Or, even more possibly, for the idea of extricating himself from everything. Rolling in the...