Desert Boys (14 page)

*   *   *

When my mom was a girl in Armenia, she'd eat apples until she grew sick. She and her older brother Gaspar practically lived in the apple tree outside their farmhouse in Kirovakan. The other brothers and sisters would leave them up there all day, until Raffy, the eldest, went out after sunset to talk them down. My mom blamed all her current dental trouble on those early days eating apple after apple after apple in the twilight.

She moved to New York at twenty-three, the first of her immediate family to emigrate. Nights she took English courses in Brooklyn. She feared the people in the subway, clutching the railings like weapons, until one day she didn't. Nothing happened to signify the change—only time. Time replaced her fear with an immense loneliness. She missed her family and her country. In the Big Apple she missed her apple tree, and on the subway she cried and cried.

Eventually the rest of her family came to America, and she moved with them to Glendale, California. She worked in retail at the local mall. The mall security guard, a Midwestern transplant hoping to break into the movies, asked her to meet him for coffee. Jean and I knew this part of the story well. Our dad—the security guard with a head shot folded up in his back pocket.

While my mom and dad started dating, there was another man involved. An Armenian, a friend of Uncle Gaspar's, named Armen. This was the first time Jean and I had heard about this other man. My mom said Armen definitely sold and probably used inordinate amounts of drugs. “Which drugs?” we asked. “Just drugs,” she said. “The bad kind.”

In any case, Armen—even though he'd never spoken to her, had seen her on only a handful of occasions—kept telling my uncle Gaspar how badly he wanted to marry my mom, how it was destined, how he'd do anything, anything, anything for her. My uncle, being of a certain generation of Armenian men, obliged. He told my mom to stop dating the white security guard so he could introduce her to his friend. It's destined, he said, and it's better that he's one of us.

A few years earlier, my mom would have buckled. But remember: she'd lived in New York for two years by herself. She was not the same person she'd been before she left home. She wasn't the girl her brother remembered, lounging in the limbs of an apple tree.

No, she said. I love Ed—my dad's name—and I don't want to meet anyone else.

My uncle must have hated her for making him return to his friend, tail between his legs, with a no. What kind of man lets his younger sister tell him what's what? But they were in America now. The rules were different. What could he do?

On that topic, Armen—dealer of unspecified drugs—had an idea. Late one night, he drove to the apartment my mom shared with her parents. He brought a shotgun. Probably it rode in the empty passenger seat like a child. He was so high, it was a wonder he'd driven the whole way, but when he arrived, he removed the gun from the car and walked along the gravel parking lot to my mom's first-floor apartment window.

My sister and I had a hard time swallowing the next part of the story. According to my mom, two angels appeared in her dream and told her to leave her bedroom—which faced the parking lot—and head into her parents' bedroom, where she'd be safe. So she did. Less than a minute later, the blasts from the shotgun shattered her bedroom window, glass and buckshot splattering the walls like water from a shook, wet hand.

The next day, my uncle made an anonymous phone call to the LAPD, and his friend Armen was arrested for possession with intent to sell. He was deported to the Soviet Union, and even after that log of a country broke into its splintered parts, my mom never heard from him again.

*   *   *

We drank the last of our coffee. My mom kept saying, “Are you sure I haven't told you this before? I'm sure I've told you this before.”

“We're sure,” Jean said, and I agreed. “We'd remember the time you were visited by angels and almost murdered.”

“Oh, well,” my mom said. “That's it, really. Not a story. Not really. More like an anecdote. Nothing changed because of it. I would have married your dad even if this crazy man never existed.”

We all fell quiet. We had nothing to say about her story. I was amazed at learning something new about her, amazed at the fact of a person's unknowability, but this was a feeling more than a statement to proclaim. Eventually the silence was broken when Jean asked Mom to read our fortunes in our coffee grounds.

As millions of Armenian women had done before her, my mom set each cup upside down over its saucer with care and with grace. Then she crossed herself. For Mom, the possible contradictions between a soothsaying tradition and a devout faith in the Bible were nonexistent. I'd heard her say many times that Armenians were the first Christians. “For us,” she would explain, “there is no difference between religion and culture.” I'd argued with her on that point in the past, but now was different. Now I just stared at the gold-rimmed bottom of my overturned cup, half-seriously willing my future to read a certain way. I felt nervous, to be honest, and restless. I was sweating.

“Patience is the biggest thing,” she said, noticing. She reminded us not to peek until the sludge had dried on the inside of the cup. A few minutes passed, and we were all so curious as to our futures that no one dared start a conversation. At one point, Jean giggled, and I laughed at her for enjoying this so childishly. My mom said there was nothing wrong with enjoying this like a child, because no matter how old you were, you were always a child when people talked about your future.

Jean said, “Please don't say anything about Patrick. Promise?”

“I can't promise anything,” my mom said. “His face might appear in the coffee, and I'm supposed to ignore that?”

She turned over my sister's cup first. Jean and I were rationalists. We knew how silly we were being, how superstitious. Still, we also knew this might be the last time, so we studied our mother's face as she inspected the patterns against the porcelain walls of the cup. As she read the lines and waves and peaks and dips of the coffee grounds, we read the crannies along her forehead and the cracks in her painted lips, the bluing, beautiful pouches beneath her eyes, flanking the bridge of her long, arched nose.

“Interesting,” my mom said, and Jean couldn't help scooting forward on her seat. “Very interesting.”

“What does it say?”

“Do you see these?” My mom tipped the cup toward Jean to point out a number of circular blots near the lip. “These are very rare.”

“What do they mean?”

“Children,” my mom said. “One, two, three, four—four children in your future.”

“Oh, come on,” Jean said.

“I'm only the messenger,” my mom said.

“What else?” Jean said. “Tell me there's something besides kids.”

“Let me see,” my mom said. “Daley, go get my magnifying glass out of the computer room.”

I found it easily in a drawer. The handle was white porcelain like our cups, painted blue in a paisley pattern. The circle of glass was the size of our saucers.

“Okay,” my mom said, taking the magnifying glass. “Let me see.” She adjusted the distance between the glass and the cup like a trombone player in a game of charades.

“Well?”

“Well,” my mom said. “This is amazing.” Again she tipped the cup so that Jean could see her future. “You see these ripples, how they start far apart from each other and then get close together? That means you will be rewarded for your good work. It will take time, but your good work will be widely recognized.”

Jean liked this, but I pointed out how arbitrary it was to read the ripples as getting closer together. “Why isn't it the other way around?” I asked. “Why don't you say they start close together and drift apart?”

“How many years have I been doing this,” my mom said. “I know a start from a finish, okay?”

“My turn,” I said, preferring to be a nonbelieving participant over an enlightened spectator.

“Okay,” my mom said, and began to read my grounds. Jean turned her own cup over in her hands as if she could check her results for errors.

“Look at this splash mark,” my mom said, holding my cup. “This is your first book! It will be a big splash.”

“Yeah, the splash thing,” I said. “I get it. But, Mom, I write for the internet.”

“Shut up,” Jean said. “At least it's not children.”

My mom ignored this and kept reading my fortune. “First book,” she said again, “and what's this?” She reached for the magnifying glass on the table and took a closer look. “It's like a little star you see in books,” she said. “What do you call it?”

“An asterisk,” I said, and the tiny mark on the cup did, surprisingly, look just like an asterisk. “What does it mean?”

For a minute, I thought my mom had finally been stumped. She'd never seen this particular accident, and she was taking a long time to come up with some wishful thinking to pass off as a fortune.

“Well?”

My mom looked at me. For the first time in a long time, we met eyes without saying anything.

“Well?” I said again. And then I was struck with fear, convinced she could see it—my life in San Francisco with Lloyd.

“You're going to live a very long life,” my mom said, looking back into the cup. “One hundred, one hundred ten years.”

“That's not what it says.” I could tell by her hesitation that something rotten lay in my future.

The sound of bare feet kissing the hardwood floor came from the hallway, followed by the unmistakable drawl of my dad's yawn.

“Hey,” he said, meeting us in the kitchen. “What are you guys up to?”

“Reading fortunes,” Jean said, lifting her cup.

“Anything good?”

“Yeah,” Jean said, “if you like children, old age, and successful careers.”

“Children, check. Old age, check. Two out of three ain't bad,” said my dad.

“And what about you?” he asked my mom, hands on her shoulders from behind her chair. He kissed the top of her bald head.

“We haven't done hers yet,” Jean said. “Mom, let's make Dad his own cup so we can do his, too.”

“Nah,” my dad said. “I just want regular coffee. Our fortunes are tied together anyway. Read your mom's, and you'll read mine, too.”

“Daley,” Jean said. “Help me out.” I scooted my chair over to my sister and leaned into her. She flipped my mom's cup, and we began our inspection.

I could hear my dad at the counter, running water for his Folgers.

My sister and I conferred. A black wiggle draped one side of the cup. Two smudges intertwined near the lip. I pointed to this and told Jean I saw an infinity sign. She saw it, too.

“We've got it,” I said. “Mom, Dad: you'll both live forever. You are the first people in the world who will never die.”

My mother slapped the table, startling everyone to silence. “You're not taking it seriously,” she said, as angry as I'd ever seen her. After a minute, she reached across the table to touch my wrist with her fingers. They were cold. They had thinned so much that she couldn't wear a ring. “You'll never have a child,” she said. “That's what I saw. I'll put it that way, Daley, that you'll never have a child.”

“He can have one of mine,” Jean said, and this got everyone, even Mom, to laugh a bit.

“God knows what I'm trying to say,” Mom said, letting go of my wrist with a little pat.

God's not the only one, I wanted to tell her; Jean and Dad knew what she was trying to say, too, and had for years. But God would have known more, wouldn't he? He would have known how much I loved my mother and how much I resented her, how desperately I needed her and how urgently I needed to rid myself of her, how impossible it was for me to imagine my life after her death and how many times I already had. Among a million things, her death meant that I would never have to introduce her to the man I loved. In equal parts, this liberated and devastated me.

“At least,” my mom said, “read my fortune seriously. At least you could do that.”

And to some extent, I could. What I knew about her future was this: that she would not sprout wings and ascend to heaven, that she would not, in a time of danger or despair, come to my aid. But the more closely I examined her cup—the coffee grounds, yes, but also the cracked, orange prints of her lipstick at the rim, the ghosts of her—the more I couldn't be sure.

 

THE STARS ARE FAGGOTS, AND OTHER REASONS TO LEAVE

1.
No word, in the desert's language, for “moderate.” For months, the heat clocked in at three digits until, for months more, the temperature dropped below freezing. The surrounding San Gabriel and Tehachapi Mountains acted as perfect curtains behind which we could either hide or misbehave. Most preferred the latter. In the Antelope Valley, even the plants—Joshua trees and cacti—were ugly and mean, and the Santa Ana winds conspired with the tumbleweeds, compelling them to dart through traffic like suicide bombers. From the Bic'd and Doc Marten'd skinheads to the howling and hungry coyotes, from the braided, defensive leaves of the California juniper to the resentful and resented black and brown teenagers dragged there from Los Angeles—in a place where toughness and tribalism permeated everything living and everything dead, it was not the best thing to be a sentimental, thin-skinned fag like me.

2.
You wouldn't know by looking at me, but my mother was raised in another country and spoke with an accent. One effect of the accent was that she pronounced
p
's as
b
's. When I was a child, this seemed inconsequential to me—my sister and I heard the correct pronunciations from our dad, and were rarely thrown by Mom ordering
bineabble
on the pizza, or asking if we'd prefer black, green, or
bebbermint
tea.