The Last Days of California: A Novel (3 page)

Elise and I looked at each other. We didn’t feel we were being done any disservice. We liked Taco Bell and Target.

“From here on out, we’ll be taking the highway and eating at places called Restaurant,” he said. “I want you to experience the real America before it’s too late, the places where real people live and worship.” He didn’t care if it was going to cost us time. Time would soon be made irrelevant.

“Okay,” Elise said, “but I’m not staying in any fleabag motels with a bunch of drug addicts. I want to stay at Holiday Inns.”

“We haven’t stayed at a Holiday Inn
yet
,” I said.

“We won’t be staying with drug addicts,” our mother said, taking the clip-on part of her sunglasses off. Cleaning her glasses was a nervous habit, like our father pausing to survey his surroundings, like my fake yawning.

“And I’m not going to any roadside zoos, either,” Elise said, looking at me because I’d wanted to see some Cajuns feeding alligators in Louisiana.

“What if there’s snakes?” I said. “You’d want to see snakes.”

“No, I wouldn’t. Why would I want to see snakes?”

“You used to have a snake.”

“It was a tiny little garden snake,” she said, “and I was like seven.”

“We aren’t going to any zoos,” our father said. “We don’t have the money for that kind of stuff.”

“I bet we could save some people,” I said.

“That’s the idea,” he said. “That’s the spirit!” I thought of our cousin, a blonde on his side with a haircut our mother had called a Mary Lou Retton. When I was eleven, I’d gone with him to pay for a motel room for this cousin. He’d been out of work again and we’d scraped together the money in loose change and small bills.

This woman was dead now. She had been beaten to death in a different motel room, in a different city. I remembered the name of it because it was odd—the Admiral Benbow in Jackson, Mississippi. I had no memory of her except from pictures and family reunion slide shows, though my mother said she’d babysat us when we were little, when she was just a high school girl.

Our father got out and slipped three quarters into the air machine.

Elise opened her door. “Oh my God,” she said. “It must be a hundred and ten out here.”

“Hundred and four inside the car,” our mother said. “And don’t let your father hear you say that.”

“It’s a figure of speech,” she said.

“
You
don’t mind if we say ‘oh my God?’ ” I asked, and my mother said of course she minded, it was sacrilegious. Then she took out her phone and called one of her sisters, but I couldn’t tell which one—their voices all sounded alike: loud and slow with accents we had somehow escaped. She had three sisters and one brother and they were always calling each other, even though, except for my uncle in west Alabama, they lived within a few miles of each other in Montgomery. They liked to talk about who died and who had cancer and who was getting a divorce. They liked to be the first to know so they could call each other up and relay the bad news. But whoever was on the other end got another call and had to go.

Our father often questioned her loyalty—asked whether she was with us or with them. Since he wasn’t close to his own family, his loyalty was unquestionably to us. We weren’t sure if he disliked our mother’s family because they were Catholic or if he just couldn’t stand for her affections to be split.

I found a spot of something on my t-shirt, guacamole maybe, that scratched off in flakes. The black King Jesus Returns! t-shirts did a good job of hiding sweat stains and mustard, and it made me appreciate this required uniform. Our mother was wearing one, too, a large that hung loose and shapeless over her hips. Our father had on one of his no-iron Brooks Brothers shirts; today’s was green-and-white striped. His sister gave him gift cards at Christmas. She got them for putting a lot of stuff on her credit card.

“Will we still get to eat at McDonald’s?” I asked.

“Your father won’t give up McDonald’s,” our mother assured us.

“I like McDonald’s in the morning.”

“We know you do, Jess,” Elise said, “we know.” She fanned herself with a magazine. It had the swim-suited bodies of celebrities on the cover, their eyes blacked out with rectangular boxes. My parents didn’t like Elise’s music or clothes or the TV shows she watched or the magazines she read. They didn’t like most of her friends or any of her boyfriends. They used to have long discussions with her about God’s intentions for her life, and our father would tell her she was going to hell and she’d be there all alone—she’d be in hell
all alone
—but now they pretty much let her do what she wanted as long as she maintained appearances. As long as we were all in church every Wednesday and Sunday, sitting quietly in our nice clothes.

The main difference between Elise and me was that I was a liar. I did things our parents disapproved of, but I did them quietly. I didn’t even have to be all that quiet about it because she made so much noise it was easy for them to overlook me altogether. I’d seen every episode of
Jersey Shore
and
16 and Pregnant
. I read Elise’s magazines when she was finished, and I’d once sucked the gas from a can of whipped cream and gotten high for about thirty seconds.

“I’ll be right back,” Elise said, getting out.

I opened my door and ran to catch up with her. A boy watched us from the tinted window of a pickup, a cowboy hat in the middle of the dash and two dogs scrabbling over each other to bark at us from the bed.

The doors slid open and the cold air enveloped us.

We walked straight back to the bathroom and I stopped at the weight machine, tall and blinking. I hadn’t weighed myself since we’d left home and I’d been eating everything in sight. I decided I didn’t want to know and went into a stall. It had four locks, three of them broken. I pulled the top bar across and hovered while staring at a woman’s feet in the stall next to mine. They were wide and sunburnt and her toenails were too small for her toes. They were the ugliest feet I’d ever seen, but she was wearing expensive-looking sandals and the nails were painted and I thought it was nice that she did what she could with them.

I opened the door to a girl standing in front of the mirror, singing along to “Family Tradition,” which was being pumped throughout the building. I washed my hands while she took sections of her hair and sprayed it into different shapes with a giant can of aerosol hairspray. She was wearing tight black jeans tucked into a pair of leather boots, her face a smear of pinks and purples. She was probably a prostitute and would soon be caught up in a fireball, but now she was going about her business, making her hair as big as possible. I fixed my own hair in the mirror, running my fingers through it and then patting it down. I spent a lot of time looking at myself, trying to figure out what was wrong with my face.

I took my cell phone out of my purse and held it at different angles, but I couldn’t figure out any way to take a picture without her noticing. I read a text from my mother I’d already read—“
American Idol
is starting!”—and deleted it.

Elise came out of a stall and the girl froze, can of hairspray suspended in the air. My sister smiled at her, an open friendly smile that said she was no threat at all.

“How much money do you have?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, glancing at the girl. “Fifty?”

“You have more than that.”

“You shouldn’t have given all your money to that woman.”

“Give me five.”

I gave her a ten and opened the door with my elbow. Money had become precious now that I was earning it myself. I was bad at my job, making snow cones at a candy store, and no matter how much I got paid, it didn’t seem like enough.

I walked back and forth in front of the drink cases a few times before selecting a Yoo-hoo. Then I stood in the candy aisle, trying to decide. The guy at the register was watching and I turned my back to him so it might look like I was preparing to slip something into my purse or down my shorts. I’d never stolen anything, but when people watched me so closely, it made me feel guilty, made me want to be caught and found innocent.

I chose a pack of Skittles and a King-Size Snickers, carefully considered a bag of caramel Bugles. Ever since our father had been diagnosed with diabetes, our mother had been trying to make us eat healthier—she’d stir-fry vegetables in PAM and bake chicken in corn flakes. She’d swapped the regular mayonnaise and cream cheese for low-fat versions that we immediately recognized and called her out on. And then she’d tried a different tactic. She began to make strange, foreign dishes we had no names for; the most recent had been a burnt-orange soup made with tomatoes, eggplants, and chickpeas.

“How much are these?” I asked the guy, picking a hard boiled egg out of a basket.

“Thirty-five cents,” he said. He was freakishly tall with stick arms crossed in front of his chest.

“Thirty-five cents,” I repeated.

He pushed his hair back from his face, and I placed the egg on the counter, stopped it from rolling. I paid for everything and loaded it into my purse, and he gave me sixteen cents back, which I dropped into the tray of leave-one-take-one pennies, which was maybe too much to leave in the tray of pennies.

Outside, the girl stood smoking a cigarette, a dog at her feet. In the sunlight, she wasn’t pretty at all. She had a puffy scar beneath one eye, blackheads on the sides of her nose.

“Is that your dog?” I asked.

“No.”

“What’s his name?”

“I said it’s not mine.”

“What kind is it?”

“Are you deaf?” she asked. And then, “Blue heeler.”

“Does he bite?”

“I dunno, I just found him here.” I crouched down to pet him, and she said, “I’ve known heelers to bite, not the best people dogs. This one’s okay, though, you can look at his eyes and tell.” She started to say something else and stopped, as if remembering she had no reason to talk to me. I petted the dog’s head, which was too small for its body, and thought about giving the girl some money to feed him, but I didn’t want her to buy condoms or cigarettes with it.

I tried to think of other questions for my information-gathering mission, but everything I could think to ask could be answered in one or two words:
yes, no, fuck off.

The dog looked at me and I looked at him and I had the feeling I got sometimes with dogs and babies, like they could see that I was bad, like they were waiting for me to lift my hand into the air and bring it down hard.

Elise came out eating a red, white, and blue popsicle—a rocket pop—the kind we used to buy from the ice-cream man in our neighborhood. “What’s his name?” she asked.

The girl repeated what she’d told me, that she’d just found the dog, or the dog had found her. “I’m traveling,” she added. “I can’t have a dog with me all the time.”

My sister held the popsicle out so it wouldn’t drip on her shirt, leaned over to take another bite. “Where you headed?”

“Las Vegas,” the girl said.

“Why Las Vegas?”

“Have you ever
been
to Las Vegas?”

“No.”

“Then I can’t explain it to you,” she said.

The popsicle streamed down Elise’s fist, trails of red and blue staining her hand.

“I’m going to stay at Paris,” the girl said. “At night, the stars are all over the place like a real night sky. There’s two bathrooms and a minibar with chocolate and cute little bottles of wine and you can look out and see the whole city.”

She’d probably seen the hotel on the Travel Channel, that boring show with that boring Samantha Brown woman. I had no idea why anyone would have ever put that woman on television, let alone given her her own show.

In the car,
my mother was listening to Joyce Meyer. “Repeat after me,” Joyce said. “I don’t have to bleed any more. I don’t have to bleed.” I liked the sound of it—not only the way she phrased it, but the idea that suffering was something I inflicted upon myself and I didn’t have to do it any longer. All of my suffering could stop this very minute.

My mother and I liked Joyce Meyer, but my father would make her turn it off when he got in the car. He said she didn’t consult the Bible, but I thought he disliked her because she was loud and opinionated, and worst of all, unattractive. I especially liked to watch her on TV, her matching pantsuits and careful makeup and the way she said amen over and over like it was a question.
Amen? Amen?
She couldn’t stand it when the audience was quiet. She’d talk about her husband then, tell us something Dave said, and the men would be reminded she was just a wife and the women would be reminded that we were always only wives. But still, she was the one on stage while Dave sat in the audience waiting to be talked about.

I bet she had a lot of money and hardly ever gave any of it away. I bet she ate steak every night and slept in hotel rooms with thick, white carpet.

“Where’s Dad?” I asked, taking a slug off my Yoo-hoo.

“The Waffle House didn’t sit well with his stomach,” she said.

“I guess we can add that to the list of places we can’t eat anymore.”

Elise got in the car and asked where Dad was.

“The bathroom,” my mother said, checking her watch even though there was a clock in the middle of the dash.

“You’re running a minute behind on every conversation,” I said. “It’s super annoying.”

She leaned over and opened her hand: a pink lighter with the words “True Love” in red rhinestones. “Texans love to bedazzle some shit,” she said. “I couldn’t decide between this and one with Elvis’s head on it—young Elvis. Have you ever seen pictures of young Elvis?”

“Of course.”

“He was amazing,” she said. “I see we’re picking up Joyce Meyer. How wonderful.”

“Joyce is preaching on obeying God and being blessed,” I said.

“Isn’t she always?”

“Unless she’s trying to explain why bad things happen to good people.”

“That’s a tougher sell. What town are we in?”

“Beaumont,” our mother said.

“Beaumont! I think that’s where
Footloose
was set,” Elise said. We loved Kevin Bacon, too. Kevin Bacon was his most beautiful in
Footloose
, primarily for the angry dance scene in the abandoned warehouse, even though you could tell it wasn’t always actually Kevin Bacon. When the camera panned out, something was off—the torso too wide or the legs too long, something hard to put your finger on.