The End of Eve (15 page)
Authors: Ariel Gore
Yes. This was the place for us.
THE SINGLE MOTHER
who lived around the corner took a few more days to appear, skittish, on my porch. She wore an Adidas running suit, said she'd noticed Sol building a chicken coop in the backyard and did we have chickens?
“Not yet,” I told her, “but we have chicken dreams.”
She squinted at me. “Are you Ariel Gore?”
I felt a sudden panic at being found. “Yes?”
But she wasn't a process server. “Oh my God-Ariel Gore. I've read all your books. You look just like your author photos. I thought you lived in Los Angeles.”
“No,” I confessed. “I live here right now. But, you know, I'm trying to lay low.”
She nodded, held my gaze. “Me, too,” she whispered. “An ex-husband situation.”
“I understand,” I promised. “Say no more.”
INSIDE, I TOOK
a random book from the shelf. I needed a new oracle.
All Things Are Labor
by Katherine Arnoldi. I fingered the gray cover and asked, “What am I doing here?” I opened to a random page, pointed to the middle and read, “What we are looking for is something small that we can use. This is all we need, a little bit, something that happened by chance, something common like a broken piece of glass, some string, a book of matches: just a small thing where there is nothing but what is here to find.”
My oracle. I didn't know what it meant, exactly. Except that I should pay attention.
THE LOCAL NEWSPAPERS
called that winter mild even though it was the coldest of my life. Cold and easy. The snow glittered, dusting our little adobe as we settled in.
The first dawn of spring came and Sol bought baby chicks from San Marcos Feed Store out on Highway 14.
Maxito squealed as he fed them under their heat lamp. “My chickies getting so big.”
Sol drove me to the train station every morning and Maxito to preschool.
The girl I'd let blindfold me in Albuquerque winked at me from her seat across the aisle.
I winked back. But I never missed the 5:34 train again.
In my advanced fiction workshop at the university, we discussed the elements of story. Alexandre Dumas said that to make a novel, you need a passion and four walls. To make a passion, Wallace Stegner added, “you need people in a bind, a situation full of love, hate, ambition, longing, some tension that cries out to be resolved.”
What cried out to be resolved here?
This was supposed to be a book about a typical caregiver â a daughter with children of her own trying to help her terminal if eccentric widow-mother through a final year. But now here we were mid-narrative, more than a year gone by, and no one had died and I didn't have a mother anymore and the semester was wrapping up.
Soon I wouldn't have a job.
SOL BROUGHT MY
coffee out onto the front porch at sunrise, set it on the low table. “Do you think you'll ever see your mother again?”
I leaned back into the big equipale chair and it creaked the way it did. It seemed like a crass question, but maybe a reasonable one. “I guess not,” I said.
Sol sipped her coffee. “How do you think we'll find out when she's dead?”
I didn't know how we'd find out. “We'll find out,” I said. “Everyone loves to spread news of death.”
My cellphone buzzed just then and I cringed the way I always cringed then, but it was just Abra, a 20-something acquaintance from Portland, texting to say
I'm moving to Santa Fe to go to the Native Arts College, If you still have that trailer, can I rent it?
I texted Abra back:
Sure.
SO ABRA MOVED
into the six-by-ten turquoise trailer. She was just a few days out of the hospital with a new type 1 diabetes diagnosis, but she smiled bright like any kid getting ready to start college. Over coffee on the dusty porch, she pushed her hair out of her face, looked at us and around, out across the high-desert street and beyond to the naked hills and she said, “Aren't we the Californian, Dominican, Native Alaskan diabetic, gay-straight alliance? I hope there aren't any neo-Nazis out here.”
So many people to hide from.
THE WILDFIRES CAME MEAN THAT YEAR. THEY STARTED
in May and burned into summer. We watched the mountains and the hills around us catch and blaze. The smoke billowed, held heavy in the air. We coughed and bled. More than a hundred thousand acres burned, were still burning. I dreamed of lungs without bodies that glowed red like the fire-season moon and I woke to mornings covered in layers of white ash.
Brown bears and bobcats from the burned out wilderness wandered the streets near our little adobe and we had to keep our chickens inside the house.
The fires tore through pueblos and towns and national monuments. We listened to the radio and TV news reports online. The fires were within ten miles of Los Alamos National Labs.
Within five miles.
Within a mile.
Within yards.
How many yards?
The laboratory
PR
guy wore a yellow tie and promised, “No threat to public safety,” but the professors on
NPR
warned of nuclear disaster and 30,000 above-ground barrels of plutonium-contaminated waste that would soon catch fire and burst, sending plumes of radioactive smoke into the winds.
As the birds flew, we lived twelve miles from Los Alamos National Labs.
I wanted to evacuate. I packed the car with enough water
and canned food and tortillas for a week; packed all our passports and birth certificates. But which way would we drive? The horizon burned in every direction.
THAT NIGHT, SOL
and I invited all the lesbians and trans guys we knew in Santa Fe to come out to our place in the country for vegan tacos. We wanted to pretend we were building community here instead of waiting for all that smoke to bleed radioactivity. And they came â the brave ones came â miles closer to the fires and miles closer to the labs. We fed them tacos and fennel salad and we made small talk and Sol put on a Dolly Parton
CD
and without announcement all the lesbians whipped off their shirts and they ran outside and the trans guys ran after them and Sol looked surprised, but she whipped off her shirt too and she ran after them all and they chanted for rain.
I watched from my kitchen window and rolled my eyes. It was just so California circa 1970 to 1999. I mean, I didn't know any trans guys back then â but the rest of it.
Abra watched, too, bewildered from her trailer.
They ran unembarrassed, ran the circumference of our property, all those lesbians in their bouncing red bras and the trans guys in their white muscle T-shirts, and they chanted “Rain goddesses! Rain goddesses!” until Maxito couldn't contain himself and despite my obvious disdain, ran with them chanting, “Rain goddesses! Rain goddesses!” and they ran and chanted and ran and chanted until of course the desert winds shifted and the smoky sky crowded itself with monsoon clouds and “Rain goddesses! Rain goddesses!” those clouds opened and the lesbians and the trans guys and Maxito cheered, “Rain goddesses!” and they laughed as the downpour drenched their hair and there would be no nuclear disaster in New Mexico that summer.
No.
There would be rain.
“
CAN I ASK YOU SOMETHING?
”
Sol looked up from the Walter Mosley mystery she was reading in bed. “What?”
“When we moved to New Mexico, did you know that Bipa lived here?”
Sol blinked, looked down at her book. “Sure. I knew she'd moved back.”
I fiddled with my Gammie's ruby engagement ring I wore on my right hand. “Are you pursuing her? Bipa?”
Sol closed her book “What kind of question is that? That's completely irrational.”
I climbed into bed next to her. “Sorry.”
She rolled over, curled her back to me. “I've been completely honest with you about Bipa,” she said to the wall. “Bipa broke my heart a long time ago. I'm over her.”
I SPENT THE
balance of the summer and the tip of autumn baking pies in my adobe kitchen, building Lego sets with Maxito and catching flights between Albuquerque and Los Angeles. I'd found work as a ghostwriter. I slept on the leopard-print couch in Maia's studio apartment in Pasadena. I'd bought that couch when I was her age, a single mom with a toddler. Now the two of us stayed up nights eating ramen and drinking strong tea, Maia doing her graphic design homework and me writing in voices
not my own. It reminded me of being in my 20s, when we were an easy family of two.
At home with Sol in New Mexico, things teetered between silent irritation and resigned tolerance. This was my life. A little adobe. It wasn't so bad.
Make the best of it, Ariel.
I was rushing to a departure gate at
LAX
on my way back to that life when my phone buzzed with a text message from Vivian in Portland:
Just broke up with my girlfriend.
I texted her right back:
Jealous.
But then I felt like a cad. Maybe I could fix this thing with Sol after all. I was good at fixing things. We'd been together for ten years. Ten years wasn't nothing. We got along all right when she wasn't mad at me for being three minutes late or for not properly pre-sorting the recycling. She'd never waved a knife at me in the middle of the night or kicked me as I slept. I'd buy her a cake at the Chocolate Maven when I got home. I'd pick a bouquet of wildflowers. I'd find cheap tickets online for a wintertime week in New Orleans. Right before Mardi Gras â when all the bands are practicing in the streets, but before the drunk boys arrive for the party.
She texted to say she had to make a few house calls that night. She'd be home late. Would I pick up Maxito?
Of course.
The Chocolate Maven and Maxito and wildflowers and New Orleans.
I stopped at home to feed the chickens and grab everyone's dirty clothes to take to the laundromat. Picking up jeans and T-shirts and sweat pants and Spider-Man underwear, I screamed like a child when I saw the snake coiled on the tile floor at the foot of my bed. Beige and black, fat and archaic, I jumped back as the thing slithered away.
What was it?
“Did it have a pattern?” the guy who answered the phone at animal control wanted to know.
“Yes?”
“More like diamonds, or stripes?”
I didn't know. “It was fat and archaic,” I whispered.
“It just darted away?”
“Yes.” It had. Where was it now? Under the refrigerator?
“I wouldn't worry, ma'am,” he said. “A rattler would've held its ground. Probably just a garter. It'll slither out the same way it came in.”
I texted Abra:
Snake in the house. What does it mean?
Surely a snake in the house was an omen.
She texted right back:
I guess it means we live in rural New Mexico?
Yes. Maybe that's all it meant. We lived in rural New Mexico. Snakes needed a place to hide, too.
Abra texted again:
Probably because no one's been home for a few days.
I texted right back:
Why hasn't anyone been home?
But she didn't answer me.
Relax, Ariel. It'll slither out the same way it came in.
I had errands to run. Laundry and the Chocolate Maven and Maxito and wildflowers and New Orleans.
I drove the 20 minutes into Santa Fe, read Dashiell Hammett at the laundromat.
When I pulled into the parking lot of the Chocolate Maven, I was thinking
Belgian chocolate torte or coconut cream cake?
I scored a parking place right in front of the place, turned off the ignition.
The Chocolate Maven and Maxito and wildflowers and New Orleans. Yes. I could fix this. Café Du Monde in the French Quarter. All those Mardi Gras bands. It would be so romantic.
But when I pushed open the glass door to the café, I froze at the sight of them: Sitting across from each other at a little rectangular bistro table, Sol and Bipa, faces painted in full mime white and black, gloved hands open and moving together in synchronized pantomime.
Bipa moved one hand in a clockwise circular motion and
Sol followed. Bipa moved her other hand counterclockwise and Sol followed.
My body felt like it was shrinking in on itself. I stepped back. They hadn't seen me yet. I could still just recede into my humiliation.
But just then the hostess chirped, “Joining us for dinner?” and Sol and Bipa looked up, two startled mimes in their grease-white make-up and their black berets.
Bipa held up her gloved hands theatrically, like maybe this was a stick up.