How to Get Into the Twin Palms (13 page)

“Well, think about it. No one wants any of you here.”

I thought about it.

“And all that kindling up there? Poof. You bastards don’t even make it easy on yourselves.
Just clear it.
”

I didn’t know him well enough for him to yell at me like that. But he was making sense. All of us, roaming, maybe Los Angeles didn’t want us here either. She was trying to shake us free, scorch us out and start over.

But… he seemed somewhat nihilistic.

He was staring at the persistent ash, but not going underneath it. Maybe that would make him feel better. I told him so,
but he just shook his head. I asked him to tell me more about the fires, the worst ones he’d seen. How they started.

He looked at me strangely. “Your hair’s different. I didn’t recognize you at first.”

“Box color.”

“Whatever it is, it’s nice. Suits you.”

I nodded like I knew it was true. I noticed the change of subject on his part and knew he wasn’t going to tell me more. I would have to find out for myself.

“They’re moving me tomorrow. I have to go tell him.” He pointed at Jason, the desk clerk.

“Where?” I said it with too much urgency and rushed out of the water.

“Simi Valley, I think. Closer. There’s no point me being here, if it’s over there.”

“Maybe it’ll get closer.”

“Doubtful.”

“But then it’d make sense for you to be here.”

He thought about it for a moment.

Then he mouthed something like
catastrophic
. He held the last bit. The
-phic
, really drawing it out.

He was going closer to the fire and I wanted to go too.

He started getting up to talk to Jason. I put a towel around myself and looked up at room 214. I didn’t want him to forget me so I ran up the stairs and grabbed the railing hard as I went. He had left the door ajar.

His room had a thin brown carpet, floral comforter from a shiny kind of synthetic material. It didn’t look like it had ever been washed. He had a bag in the corner. It looked jocky, childish. Like a giant gym bag. I went over quickly and peered inside. Underwear. Pants. A pile of white cotton undershirts getting wrinkled. I had an urge to fold them but there was no time. I had to make a list. I found a pad of paper. Downtowner in
atomic black lettering across the top. A pen in the drawer, the end chewed to a nub. I didn’t care.

I scrawled:

 

(I underlined for effect)

go to the beach. zuma beach. trancas market. salty tortilla chips – greasy ← so what.

top of laurel canyon, left at mulholland, right into the park. stand there until it gets dark. Longer.

Top of building. A roof somewhere. Just look.

Go to chinatown. late. Full House. orange chicken. Go sit in the square. Digest. Listen to the mah jong through the door.

 

I was worried he was coming and I was running out of things. Jamba juice? Everything was gone.

 

Snow white cottages

take the curves around the reservoir.

Tommy’s. It’s near.

Then Galcos. It’s far.

Observatory. Crawl down the side to the Greek. There’s a path.

 

I thought I heard voices. I threw the pen, and my wet fingertips rippled the cheap paper as I put the notepad neatly on his clothes and peeked out the window. He was still talking to Jason by the glass-squared office. I quietly ran out the door. And away. I hoped he would follow my directions.

I WOKE UP ON MY BLANK MATTRESS TO THE
phone ringing. My hair was still damp, but the underwear I had swam in were dry. Flakes of ash dotted them, and they were crinkled and uncomfortable.

“Hello?”

“Zosia.”

I exhaled. I couldn’t do this right now. “Mother.”

“Zosia, where have you been? You don’t answer.”

I didn’t want to open my eyes and wake up.

“Answer me.”

“Working a lot.”

“You could call. I’m lonely.”

She tried to hide her accent or maybe I was used to it and couldn’t hear it anymore.

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you sleeping?”

“Yeah, I was.”

She informed me that it was 11 o’clock on a Monday. Work time. I hated lying to her and was bad at it. I backpedaled and told her I was sick, just today but I’d be back to work for the entire week. She asked me how the unemployment service was, how it felt to be helping people. I lied and told her it was the best work I had done in a long time, the sense of pride I felt helping people. I was living the American dream.

“You are getting people off welfare. That is the worst you can be in this country. Taking handouts.”

I didn’t want to tell her that I had been taking handouts for months. It would only depress her. Her immigrant guilt was too much for me.

“We only took handouts once. And not money. Just clothes. Nothing else.”

“I know, Mother, I know.”

“Did you go to church?”

I was silent. I thought about telling her about the Holy Virgin, converting bingo nights into 3-hour church service, me on the pulpit, calling numbers, helping the wounded widows of the Holy Virgin forget about their deceased husbands.

“What kind of woman do you hope to be if you don’t go to church?” she asked.

“Are you there?”

“I feel dizzy,” I said.

“Church. One hour each Sunday is not a lot to ask, Zosia. And yet you can’t even do that.”

We have been through this before. Every Sunday. It was Monday and she caught me. I hadn’t talked to her in weeks after she had told me I was failing as a woman. Unable to bring religion into the home, that was why I couldn’t find a husband. That is why I was a failure as a woman. I tried not to think about all of these things as I rolled from one side of my mattress to the other, trying to catch a passing hint of Lev. Trying to get the smell of chlorine off of me. I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t taken a shower last night. It was unlike me.

“You will never be happy.”

I started listening again. I liked listening to what she had to say about the happiness-is-religion equation. It was always ridiculous to me, but she believed it wholeheartedly.

“Who says I’m unhappy?” I asked.

“You don’t go to church, how can you be happy? You are just a user. You give nothing back.”

“You just said how happy you were about my giving unemployed people a job.”

“It’s not the same, you’re empty without God. No one can do anything themselves. And you choose to go alone. You’ll never make it.”

“I will.”

“It’s too hard,” she said.

“I know.”

“See. You prove it,” she said. But that wasn’t what I meant.

“I’ll go this week.”

“Don’t do it for me.”

“You usually call on Sunday mornings,” I said.

“Your grandfather’s anniversary is today.”

This is why I kept away from her, why I didn’t like talking to her. She would never give him peace.

I thought about my grandfather. He was dead, a few years dead. She still celebrated his death every year at the same time. A day in August I could and could not forget.
Celebrate
isn’t the right word. Held vigil, something religious and sacred.

She wasn’t even there. I was. She had spent his last few days in Poland “collecting herself.” When my grandfather had to be restrained I had to tie his arms down. He was incoherent and moaning. There was terrycloth fabric on the inside of the restraints, to “add comfort.” He would have pulled out his catheter otherwise; there was evidence of this on the ceiling of his room. Nantucket beadboard covered in blood and urine, caked on thick and in a snake-like shape. I always tried not to look up at it. I was afraid it would drip down on me, even though it’d been dry up there for weeks. Why hadn’t anyone cleaned it? He continued to moan in Polish. He wasn’t even forming words anymore and I wasn’t sure what to do. I undid the restraints and he stopped moaning. He stopped looking at me like I was his
tormenter. The silver teeth that had been glinting in the hallway light closed shut in his mouth.

I backed away from the bed and went into the living room, onto the sofa and waited for silence. For the small moans to subside, for the snores to begin, for him to stop mumbling in Polish and begging for my dead grandmother. I fell asleep after there was silence in his room and woke up abruptly when I heard a low growl. I was scared to look but forced myself.

He was sitting on the edge of his bed. Colostomy bag open and shit on the floor and covering his hands. He looked at me and offered it to me like a gift, held out his shit-covered hands and smiled his hollow-mouth smile. He couldn’t understand English so I had to yell at him in Polish.

“
Co ty robisz?
” was all I could say, over and over again. I took it all from him and threw it in the sink. She wasn’t there to help me and I wouldn’t be able to get that smell off my hands for weeks. I kept them in my pockets whenever I could.

THE POLISH CHURCH WAS ON WEST ADAMS
and was nothing like the cathedral in Częstochowa. The church had cheap beams criss-crossing the ceiling, a cramped, hot interior. Only their copy of the Black Madonna stood out. Her black face, gold bejeweled crown, ornate robe, the scar on her face, her wound. I liked to look at it. I liked to think about seeing the real thing in Poland and the pebbles eating into my knees as I crawled around the altar in prayer like everyone else who had made the pilgrimage to this holy place, passing the face of the Black Madonna, chanting and praying for forgiveness. This church had a fading, framed poster of Pope John Paul II beside The Black Madonna and old women bent over their rosaries, praying in Polish, moaning the words of Our Father. It reminded me of the women in the graveyards in Poland, the grave cleaners, the tombstone washers. They had lace
chustki
on their heads, some black, some white. They clutched each bead on their rosary and went through the words.

Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

I remember the words in Polish from church as a child; they were numbing. I liked to hear them and not add in my English version. I liked to stumble along in Polish.
Winy
sounded like veen-eh, like
vino
, like wine, but were trespasses. Sins. I prayed for my grandfather’s soul. I prayed that he wasn’t seeing what I was doing but I wondered if he could. I wanted to stop thinking about it so I started praying harder.

WHEN I LEFT THE CHURCH I HAD A MISSED CALL
on my phone. It was Mary. The gutters. They needed to be cleaned and she didn’t know what to do about it. I didn’t know either. I wasn’t sure if I knew how to get back to her house. I only knew it passed the Downtowner motel and so I took a different route. Down Franklin with palm trees buckling over and high-rise apartments built in the ’70s where I heard women who had sex for money lived. They had the nicest views and wall-to-wall Berber carpeting. I liked knowing where the sex workers lived in Los Angeles. I felt like it gave me cache, let me know secrets other people didn’t know. I don’t even know how I knew this fact, but I knew it was a fact. There were prostitutes living on North Fuller and Hillside, there were prostitutes living on North Gramercy and Garfield Place. I saw them walking into their houses late at night as I drove, holding a man’s hand behind them, buzzing people up from their windows. I knew about them but they didn’t know about me.

 

Mary was waiting outside for me. She told me the ladder was in the garage. I told her I had never done this before. She said it was okay, her husband always used to do it and it was just a matter of getting up the ladder and balancing while you took out the leaves. Anyone could do it, really. The old man down the street, if she wanted him to, he’d do anything for her, she
said. Anything. But, she wanted
me
to do it. I asked her if she preferred if I vacuum her rug inside. She thought about it for a moment and decided I could do that too.

“I like your hair but I looked better in it.”

I looked at her white. She didn’t look better than me anymore. I continued to climb up the ladder I had found in the garage, graying wood and water-damaged. I wasn’t sure if it would hold me.

“Should I wear gloves or something, Mary?”

“I don’t have any,” she called up to me.

There were shards of sharp, dry leaves in the gutters, dead bugs, sticks, candy wrappers, things I couldn’t even name. At first I took them in between my thumb and forefinger, dropping them slowly below me, on top of her, into her eyes.

“Watch it,” she screamed, and went inside.

She left before I could say sorry. I stared down the length of the gutter and knew taking pinches of the debris would keep me up here all day long. The sun was hot and burning on my neck and I leaned over to look deep into the gutters. Didn’t she have someone to hire?

“I’ve got some Indian nickels for you!” She stared up at me, smile wide, holding the faded nickels up at me. I thought about sending a pinch down into her eyes again and decided not to.

When I finished cleaning out the gutters I felt an itch on my arms and decided to ignore it. I climbed down the ladder and focused more on the burning on my neck and back.

Mary let me into her house. Her vacuum was already out, waiting for me.

“I gotta sit down, Mary. I need a drink.”

She shuffled into the kitchen and returned with a scotch on the rocks. “I didn’t know if you took one cube or two.”

I stared at her. Water is what I wanted, but scotch seemed to be the only thing she had.