The End of Eve (8 page)

BACK IN JOURNALISM
school they taught me that every story needs a “nut graf” – a paragraph that contains those nutshell statistics that will give a universal context to a personal story. Maybe it's a little late in the narrative now, but here's the nut-graf: In any given year, almost 30% of the U. S. population will be caring for an ill, disabled, or aging friend or family member. The caregiver will offer an average of 20 hours a week in unpaid labor and over $5,000 a year in out-of-pocket expenditures. According to some researchers, all these numbers are higher in queer communities. The typical caregiver, it turns out, is me: An adult female with children of her own caring for her widowed mother.

At Powell's City of Books downtown, I picked up a hardcover about “the transformative journey of the caregiver.” I scanned a few early passages and learned that the stress of this whole project could take ten years off my life and yet, for some reason, the advice offered at this juncture was to “buy zany gifts” for my mother.

I bought no zany gifts.

Instead I Googled “take ten years off your life” and learned that there are actually lots of ways to do it: smoking, drinking, raiding the fridge, not exercising, eating too many eggs, general pessimism, and motherhood, to name a few. At least I'd be in good company.

IT WAS DEEP
winter and the sky dumped frozen rain. Sol and I packed up my mother's apartment on 82nd Avenue, packed up our own house by the railyard and sent everything off with a cut-rate moving service.

I pawned my two cats off onto an aging metrosexual Ken doll look-alike who said he could communicate with them telepathically and would transition them from the lousy generic
food I'd been feeding them to an organic raw diet. We'd called them Ricky and Lula since they were kittens, but the Ken doll would call them Atlantis and Lhasa.

“All right,” I shrugged.

“They'll be very happy,” he promised.

NEWLY CAT-FREE, I
sat in my car outside the Ken doll's house. My phone buzzed: Maia. It had been a few days since I'd talked to her. “Hello?”

“Mama? The movers are here.” Maia's voice was steady on the phone.

The movers. In Santa Fe already. I fiddled with the radio dial.
KBOO
was broadcasting an indie music festival.

“Um,” Maia said. “Nonna is throwing away your furniture.”

I clicked the radio off. “What?”

I could hear my mother screaming in the background: “Don't tell her I'm throwing this crap away, tell her I'm
burning
it.”

Maia cleared her throat. “Actually, Mom? She says she's going to burn it. She's piling it all in the backyard. She's making a bonfire.”

It occurred to me that my daughter would make a good crisis counselor. Still, I felt something hot in my chest, just under my heart and I thought I might really lose it right then. Break my windshield with my fist at least, let my hand bleed into the drizzle. But I'd been reading my Pema Chödrön books like a good half-Buddhist, so I took a breath instead, focused on the crack in my dashboard. “Why is Nonna burning my furniture?”

“I don't know,” Maia sighed. “She says it's all crap. The blue bookshelf, the pink bookshelf, the nightstands. All your stuff, really.”

There was a quick rustling sound and now my mother was on the phone, screaming and shaky. “I told you only to bring good things,” she coughed. “Just cut me some slack,” she said, softly now, like she might be crying. “I have cancer. I have stage four lung cancer.”

“Don't worry,” I said in the best soothing mama-voice I could manage. “Can you put Maia back on the phone?”

“Hey,” Maia whispered.

“Listen. If there's nothing you can do about the furniture, that's fine, but call me back if Nonna starts opening my boxes.”

“Okay,” Maia promised. “I can make sure that doesn't happen.”

Live with me for a year. Then you may ask questions.

I was going to have a lot of questions.

Book Two

Cities of the Interior

8.

Water in the Desert

ON THE MAP IT WAS JUST A PALE BLUE EGG BETWEEN
two Nevada towns we'd never heard of, but when we veered off the access road and onto the graveled shoreline, the silvery water glowed like some giant gasoline rainbow, poisonous and beautiful.

How long had we driven in that hazy heat
?

A black and red sign at the water's edge warned of unexploded munitions.
DANGER: COULD CAUSE SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH
.

Maxito cried, “I want swimming –” He'd been promised swimming.

How do you explain to a two-year-old that some people thought it was a good idea to spend decades testing weapons on a rare desert lake?

Looking out over that poisoned water, it seemed like such a scam of anti-earth abuser culture to teach people that they cause their own cancer with negative thinking.
Maybe this desert lake had been guilty of negative thinking
? I sighed at the meanness of it all. Like lime juice in your eyes to better resemble your colonizer.

WE
'
D LEFT PORTLAND
on a rainy morning. All that lush green and damp gray. Maxito cried from his carseat when the turquoise trailer came off its hitch two blocks from home – the ruthless sound of metal scraping asphalt. But Portland magic appeared
in the form of a sleepy hipster who tumbled out of a corner café, calling, “Hey, my grandparents used to have a trailer like that,” and “I know just how to hitch it.”

We rolled out of town then like every cliché, Sol waxing romantic about the life we'd finally have. Some perfect queer family under the sun.

Driving with Sol, we only listened to her music – to Bowie or Dylan or Freakwater or Steely Dan. The first year we were together she simply pushed eject whenever I chose the
CD
, so I'd given up. I liked Sol's music well enough, but I wondered what kind of music I might listen to these days if I hadn't spent eight years deferring. It made me sad to think I didn't know what I liked anymore, didn't know what I'd choose.

We drove a couple hundred miles, then spent a snowy night camped at the edge of a little town full of scruffy mullets, Wrangler jeans, and old hippies waiting for the
UFO
s.

Morning and a couple hundred miles of dotted yellow lines and green highway signs. Portobello mushroom burgers with friends in a Sierra mountain town that smelled of pine. We swam in a river and Sol cried on the rocky bank. Sol always cried at clean water. Her father was on trial for his oil company's genocidal pollution in Latin America. She'd gone to college and veterinary school on the profits of destruction. It was part of the reason she felt morally obliged not to charge people much for her services. Like she was repaying some of her father's karmic debt by tending parakeet wounds.

A couple hundred miles then of cowboy bars and neon-lit brothels and here we were now at this glowing lake and clean water had become a precious thing.

We had to keep going.

IN A CREEPY
motel office in a town of old miners' graveyards, there was a napkin-lined basket full of muffins and a Post-It note that read “Martha made these.
FREE
.”

Free muffins, Maxito decided, could almost make up for a
long and waterless day driving. “Muffins,” he hummed, swaying in his fuzzy blue pajamas. “I love agua and muffins.”

Our room smelled like cigarettes.

Sol read to Maxito from a book about unpolluted rivers and lonely rabbits and the two of them fell asleep on the queen-sized bed. I sat on the toilet because that's where the wi-fi worked. “Dear Nevada,” I status-updated on Facebook. “I'm lost.” I checked my email.

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Subject:
Santa Fe

Tiniest,

I've been trying to call you all day. You're either out of range or you're avoiding me. It is urgent that you contact me.
DO NOT COME TO SANTA FE
. If you do come,
DO NOT PARK YOUR TRAILER ON THE PROPERTY
.

Love,

Mom

I READ THE
email a couple of times. Surely she was kidding.
Do not come to Santa Fe?
She had to be kidding. She used to call me on April Fools' Day mornings to tell me she'd adopted a giant frog she had to walk on a leash or that she was unexpectedly pregnant with Anderson Cooper's baby. But it was too late for April Fools.

I crept out of the motel room. The warm night smelled like truck exhaust. I stepped back into the free muffin office and asked the man behind the desk to point me to the nearest bar, but he shook his head.

“Nothing like that in this town.” He looked like an aging Anthony Perkins from
Psycho
with those dark little eyes and cleft chin.

Do not come to Santa Fe. Sure. Who needed Santa Fe? Why
would we come to Santa Fe? Maybe we could just settle here in this weird little barless town on the edge of a nuclear test site.

I turned to leave the office, but Anthony Perkins called after me. “I'll give you a night cap, little lady.” He poured a couple of shots of tequila into two Styrofoam cups, pushed mine across the desk.

I wasn't going to refuse. “Thanks.” The drink was warm and rough, but it soothed my throat.

Anthony Perkins winked at me, lit a menthol cigarette. “You know there's a whole army base under that lake, don't you? Yes, Ma'am. You came from the lake didn't you?” He knocked back his tequila, poured us each another Styrofoam shot. “It's a submarine naval training station under there. Good one, huh? The Russians or the Chinese or nobody never gonna suspect a
submarine
base in the middle of the desert, are they? Submarine training in the desert.” Anthony Perkins kind of squinted and laughed at the same time. “Is that your sister you're traveling with?” He gestured toward our room with that chin.

“Yeah. My sister.” I nodded. “I better get back to my sister.”

Anthony Perkins lifted his Styrofoam cup and smiled at me. “To family,” he said.

I tapped the edge of my cup against his. “To family.”

A couple hundred miles then down the 95 in the already-hot morning, the odd ghost town rising up from the brown-green sand and shrub. Nevada.

I studied my map. Lake Mead wasn't so far.
Surely this blue hawk-shaped thing on the map just outside Vegas would be swimmable.

AS SOL AND
Maxito splashed in Lake Mead, I collected garbage on the shore and dialed Maia's number.

“Hey, Mama,” she breathed into the phone.

“Hey, Mai Mai. So, I got this email from Nonna?”

Maia sighed. “Yeah. We were staying at this hotel in Santa
Fe, but we got kicked out. I don't know what Nonna did to them, but the cops came and kicked us out.”

In the lake, kids threw their plastic balls and squealed and splashed while their parents drank beer and yelled at them from their beach chairs on the shore.

“What's wrong with the duplex, Mai Mai?”

“Well, Nonna kind of had the house, like, gutted. See, she doesn't want it to be a duplex, so – and, well, she didn't get a building permit or anything, right? So she doesn't want the trailer on the land. Because it might draw attention. Then she'll get fined ten thousand dollars which she doesn't have because, you know, she gave the rest of her money to the contractor and, should I go get her?”

“Yeah, put her on the phone.”

I looked across the lake's surface, out past the kids and all the motorboats and water skiers, the brown-red rocks and mountains beyond.

A cool two billion years ago, this was the Western coastline of North America. California and Oregon hadn't yet come crashing in. I thought about continental collisions and inland sea floods, volcanic eruptions and the ash and lava flow that would seal this rock and land together for a while. Now the earth's rift crust stretched to pull itself back apart here, separate continents still desperate to diverge.

“Finally,” my mother said by way of
hello.

“Where I am I supposed to go, Mom? I sold my house. I'm traveling with a toddler here. I can't just
not
come to Santa Fe.”

My mother kind of groaned an exhale into the phone. “Ariel, don't get hysterical. I'm going to build us a beautiful home. In the meantime I'm going to rent us a beautiful little guest house. I've just found something on Craigslist. It's small. One room. It sleeps five. The migrant workers of the world would certainly consider it quite luxurious. But, honestly, Ariel, if it's not good enough for you, get your own place. I can't take care of
everyone.
I have cancer.”