Ear to the Ground (8 page)

BEDTIME STORIES

EMMA GRANT SAT ON THE EDGE OF HER NINE-YEAR-OLD daughter Dorothy's bed, tucking the child in. It was 9:30, and Dorothy was yawning, but Emma lingered, taking her time. She had lived all her life in this house in Northridge, but lately she had begun to worry about the windows with their cheap little slats of glass, and the building's shoddy wooden frame. Now, staring at her daughter, she had a momentary flash of panic and, for the millionth time, felt a phantom rumbling in the ground.

The house was a one-family ranch, shielded from the street by a ragged spray of bougainvillea, with a postage stamp yard that was unkempt and long. When Emma's parents bought it, thirty years ago, Northridge had been on the outer rim of Los Angeles's suburbs, its wide, clean streets full of kids on bicycles and dads mowing the lawn after work. These days, the whole place looked like a construction site, with stacks of lumber and mountains of gravel piled up in driveway after driveway, the sounds of drills and hammers punctuating the air like the calls of angry birds. Only a few blocks away, condemned apartment complexes had been taken over by squatters and gangs, and the boulevards were littered with broken glass. It had gotten so Emma wouldn't let Dorothy outside alone anymore. But whenever she pestered Henry to pull up stakes, he reminded her they'd just spent a fortune rebuilding.

Emma's family had meant for it to be their starter house, but they had never moved on. Her parents had paid off the mortgage, and then died. And Emma couldn't help feeling she had taken over their lives.

Her reverie was interrupted by what sounded like the chirping of a bird. Good, she thought, birds never chirp if there's a shaker coming, but then the noise came again. It was Dorothy, sitting up in bed, eyes rheumy with exhaustion.

“Mom?”

Emma shook away her thoughts. “What?”

“Could you please let me go to sleep?”

In the living room, the Dodger game flickered across the TV. Nomo on the mound; Henry on the sofa. His big feet hung over the armrest like hams—but Emma could tell by the regular sound of his breathing that he was asleep. Sure enough, when she stepped through the doorway from the hall and came around the side, his eyes were closed, and his stomach rose and fell evenly, like a piston engine. She raised her eyes to the incomplete molding at the top of the walls. He'd been promising to finish it since January but, every night, after he drained four or five MGD Lights, he'd pass out on the couch. Molding forgotten, another promise left unkept.

“Henry.” Emma kicked the sofa, and he stirred with a groan.

“Huh?” He rubbed his eyes. “Time is it?”

“Almost ten.”

“Rough day.”

It was always a rough day for Henry, a rough week, a rough year, a rough life. Today he'd poured concrete on a job site, and hopefully tomorrow he'd be back out there again. Still …

“You gonna finish that molding, Henry?”

“I said it was a rough day.”

“The washer's still broken; you said you'd fix that, too …”

“Come on, Em. Gimme a break in my own damn house.”

“Jesus.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Say it.”

She took a deep breath and ran her hands down the front of her dress. “We'll never sell if the work's not done.”

“We're not selling.”

“If that earthquake comes …”

“Let it come.” He stood up and headed down the hall.

Emma walked around the house turning off lights. She got a beer and sat down on the couch. She flipped channels for a few minutes, before landing on the news. The top five stories were about the coming earthquake.

She sat rigid, eyes fixed on the screen. Her stomach tensed during an interview with a man who was moving his family east. In the background a minivan waited, full of children and clothes. Watching him, Emma's heart started racing, and she began to feel the way she might if she were contemplating her own death—nauseated, overwhelmed, as if everything she had, or was, was only a dream.

She clicked off the television and paced, checking the bolts that held everything to the walls. She pushed against the TV, making sure it, too, was fixed in place.

In her dreams, the television was always the first thing to go. Usually, Dorothy was still a baby, crawling around in front of it, laying her little hands across the screen. As it came crashing down, Emma could do nothing but watch. She would wake up in a cold sweat, gasping for equilibrium, as if the world had flipped inside out.

In Dorothy's room, Emma watched her daughter's gentle breathing. Then she headed to the kitchen for another beer. On the table was a stack of bills.

Oh God, she thought, and sat to keep from falling. It was going to be a long night.

THURSDAY NIGHT, PART TWO

SOME FRIDAY MORNING, TAKE SANTA MONICA BOULEVARD to work and get a load of the cars in the Formosa's parking lot. They don't serve breakfast there, but you can bet they served a whole lot of booze the night before. The place is packed Thursday nights with twentysomethings who haven't learned how to drink. Or maybe they've learned how to drink but not how to hold their drink. Maybe they have something to drink about, some sad thing, some loss. They can't find work. They work too hard. Or they work and work but don't make a dime. Then again, maybe they're worried about the earthquake.

As the waitress approached, Grace thwapped back the spittle of her Amstel Light and ordered another round.
She
wasn't worried about the earthquake, or anything else, because she knocked on Charlie's door every other night, for the latest science, the latest anything, whatever. She wanted to be near him. Kiss him. But she couldn't bring herself to make the first move. What if he'd never even considered it? It would kill her if Charlie got this shocked look on his face and suddenly stopped trusting her. She had chosen, as the object of her desire, the busiest and most preoccupied man in Southern California. Still, she imagined that, when the earthquake came, she could be in his arms. What a sap I am, Grace thought. What a romantic sap.

As far as she was concerned, Ian Marcus, former sponge, present swaggerer and future prick—who was, at the moment,
sitting across the room from her—didn't exist. He, on the other hand, glanced in Grace's direction often, surreptitiously as a millionaire can, or a six-fifty-against-a-million-millionaire, anyway.

He was different now. He looked better. He smiled more, and when he did, he smiled more truly, because suddenly he didn't need anything from anyone. He kissed the ass of nobody. And that can be a pretty important thing.

Ian sat talking to a guy he had once written a spec script with: a buddy comedy, set in a beach town, called
The Cape of Great Hope.
Ian had never thought much of his writing.

“Remember,” the guy asked Ian, “when we talked last Christmas?”

“Last Christmas?”

“Like around Christmas? I think it was Damiano's.”

“
When?
”

“We had pizza, late,” the guy said. His name was Jon. Ian didn't know what he was talking about. “And you got a stomachache.
Yes,
you got a stomachache.”

“I think I remember.”

“Do you remember what we talked about? That night you got a stomachache?”

“What?”

“We talked about
Ear to the Ground
.”

Ian took a nonchalant sip of beer. “So?”

“Do you remember spe
ci
fically what we talked about in regard to
Ear to the Ground
?”

“What are you talking about, Jon?”

“Act two was basically
constructed
that night at Damiano's.”

“What are you saying?”

“You
know
what I'm saying. You had them meeting on like page
eighty,
and I told you if you moved that up …”

“That's pretty simple stuff.”

“What about the
scene,
Ian? I gave you the whole fucking scene with the seismologist's wife!”

Jon disgustedly got up, nodded to a few people on his way to the bar, and ordered a Maker's Mark neat. He turned once toward Ian and shook his head. Then he leaned over to an attractive woman in an old-fashioned dress.

“Do you know that the guy sitting over there is like one of my closest friends? That he just sold a script for a million dollars? And that he took an idea, took part of an idea, took
all
of an idea for an important part of his script, that just sold for a million dollars, and he won't even admit we dis
cussed
it? I say this to you not wanting any
money
from him. Even if he were to offer it to me. If he said, like, ‘Here's a hundred thousand …'”

“… you wouldn't take it.” The woman smiled a little.

“No, I wouldn't.”

She smiled again. “Here it is, a hundred thousand.” She pantomimed holding a suitcase.

“Maybe I'd take fifty.” He gave her his hand. “My name's Jon, by the way.”

Grace tooks the stairs to her apartment slowly. She wasn't drunk but she had eaten too little. She was exhausted and, frankly, sad. It felt like the weekend on Thursday nights at the Formosa, but Grace knew she still had to get through Friday. Suddenly she felt old, as though the once-promising flame that was her life had dimmed. Just then, Charlie opened his door, and their eyes met through his screen.

“Hey,” she said, and blushed.

He pushed open the screen door. “You okay?”

She didn't answer.

“You want to come in?”

“No,” she said, “let's play this scene right out here on the balcony.” The minute the words came tumbling out of her mouth she couldn't believe she'd spoken them.

His eyebrows rose. He came outside, and the screen door slammed behind him. “Is this a
balcony
?” he asked. And before she lost her nerve, she leaned in and kissed him. Then,
without a word, she turned away, went inside her apartment, and went to bed.

THE CHILDREN'S HOUR

DOROTHY REMEMBERED BEING LOST SOMEWHERE BEFORE the gauzy filaments of sleep were rended by what felt like an explosion. She remembered a loud bang, and then what sounded like the thudding of horse hooves, coming closer. She remembered looking for the horses, but seeing only black; there had been a crash like thunder, and she remembered opening her eyes.

Dorothy remembered spinning, as if a tornado had picked up her entire house and cast it carelessly to the ground. She remembered how the walls seemed crooked against the black, star-swept sky. She'd wondered how the stars could be so close; how they had crept through the ceiling into her room. She remembered the pain in her arm, and not being able to move. The last thing she remembered was her mother's face, hanging over her own—a face wild as the moon, her mouth a red gash, crying, “Oh God, my little girl!”

It all seemed like a dream twenty months later, except for a small scar above Dorothy's right elbow and aches that came and went with the rain. Then, this afternoon, while she played a game called Prom, with her Barbies on the living room floor, she remembered it again. Henry had been stretched out on the couch in his pajamas, face flush with flu, when they interrupted
Ricki Lake
to announce a 5.5 near Barstow, somewhere called China Lake. Dorothy's mother had been laughing, but as she watched the news flash, her face drained of color.

“See?” she hissed at Henry.

He turned onto his side. “For God's sake, Emma. We didn't even feel it.”

“This
time.”

Dorothy took the dolls into her room. Then she came back and stood by the door. “I'm going out.”

Her mother's eyes flickered across the television screen, where a seismograph traced aftershocks in waves. “Where?”

“The park. I wanna climb a tree.”

“Be careful. And you
stay
in the park.”

Dorothy wheeled her bike into the driveway where, through the living room window, she could hear an argument revving up. She pedaled onto the sidewalk toward the park, past two abandoned buildings and another one under reconstruction.

They had spent two weeks in the park after the earthquake, living in a four-person Army tent, jumping up each time an aftershock shook the aluminum struts like so much Christmas tinsel. They ate canned food and shat in outhouses. There'd been hundreds of families, and kids running around, screaming in the mud, but Dorothy had been in a fresh cast and had missed most of the fun.

This afternoon, the park was barricaded. Dorothy watched as work crews swarmed the field; bulldozers and cranes had chewed the grass into a fine green pulp. Workmen operated a steamshovel next to a huge old sycamore, digging a trench at the root line.

A man in a hardhat and blue FEMA windbreaker materialized and spoke to Dorothy in a soft Southern twang. “Stay behind the line, honey.”

“What are you doing with that tree?”

“Bringing it down.”

“Why?”

“Clearin' the field.”

“Why?”

“Instructions.”

“You're afraid of the earthquake. Like maybe the trees'll fall down.”

“Look, little girl …”

“My whole life I played in this park.”

“Well, you can't play here now.”

Henry and Emma were still arguing when Dorothy got home, so she leaned her bike against the summer-singed bougainvillea and went around to the backyard. Her fort stood in the center of the grass.

The fort was little more than a lean-to, built of discarded materials Henry had scavenged for her from various construction sites. Inside, there was a stool and a wooden box for a table. She pretended some rusty aluminum casing was a stove, and near it an upturned milk crate served as a cradle for her favorite doll, a red-headed baby named Samantha. Dorothy sat down and rocked the cradle, leaning in and brushing the doll's hair back with her hand. Gently, she pulled a thin strip of green cloth up under her chin.

“Still sleeping, Samantha? Don't you wanna hear a story?” The doll looked up with blank glass eyes.

“Once upon a time there was a nine-year-old girl named Dorothy, who lived in Northridge, California. She had the power to move the earth.”

Dorothy got up slowly and moved to the exact center of the room. Placing her hands at the corners of the fort's patchy roof, she began to shake the structure for all it was worth.

“Earthquake! Earthquake!” she shouted. “Oh baby, cover your head!”

Dorothy flung the cradle across the room, doing a spastic dance as she pretended to keep herself from falling. Samantha ended up crumpled in a corner, arms and legs splayed.

Dorothy lunged over to where the doll lay. She picked it up and held it in her arms, pressing the plastic flesh to her own. Tears welled in her eyes.

“Oh God,” she cried. “My little girl!”