Panic was the worst thing. When you panicked, you couldn’t see possibilities. Then came despair. A man from Japan was adrift four days in a boat when he panicked and hung himself. He was found twenty minutes later. A sailor from Soochow floated 116 days on a life raft before he was found. You never knew when rescue might come.
And if my life had come to this—shame and long bus rides and the stink of diesel-soaked air, trying not to get beat up at Madison Junior High, Justin’s sweater and Caitlin’s red rash—people had gone through far worse and survived. Despair was the killer. I had to prepare, hold hope between my palms like the flame of the last match in a long Arctic night.
When I couldn’t sleep, I’d sit on the picnic table in the backyard, listening to the music from our next-door neighbor’s house and imagine my mother, awake in her cell just like me. Would I want her around if I’d crashed my plane in Papua New Guinea or Para, Brazil? We’d slog through a hundred-mile labyrinth of mangrove forest, covered with leeches like in The African Queen, maybe even pierced with a long native spear. My mother wouldn’t panic, rip out the spear, and die of blood loss. I knew she could do the right thing, let the maggots feed in the wound, clearing out the hole, and then in five days or a week, pull out the spear. She would even write a poem about it.
But I could also see her making a terrible mistake, a failure in judgment. I imagined us adrift in a life raft ten days outside shipping lanes, pressing fish juice, sponging each drop of water from the clean morning deck, when suddenly she determined seawater wasn’t undrinkable after all. I saw her going swimming among sharks.
“ASTRID, come help me,” Marvel called. She came out from the kitchen to where I sat on the back steps watching the kids, and twisted her neck around to see the picture, five blackened Frenchmen who tried to cross the Qaza basin in Egypt by day. “Still reading that book? You ought to think about the army, you like that kind of stuff. They take care of their people fine. Now they let women in, you’d probably get along. You work hard, you keep your mouth shut. Come on, help me with the groceries.”
I went with her to unload the cans of soup and bottles of soda, cheese slices and family-pack pork chops, more food than I’d ever seen in my life. The army, I thought. How little she knew me. I appreciated her interest, I’d come to believe she really did want me somewhere comfortable, with a decent pay-check. But I would rather live out on the desert alone, like an old prospector. All I needed was a small water source. What was the point in such loneliness among people. At least if you were by yourself, you had a good reason to be lonely.
Or even better, I thought, stashing packaged cocoa mix and Tang in the cupboards, a cabin in the woods, snow in the winter, jagged mountains all around, you’d have to hike in. I’d cut my own wood, have a few dogs, maybe a horse, put in bushels of food and stay there for years. I’d have a cow, plant a garden, it was a short growing season, but I’d raise enough to get by.
My mother hated the country, couldn’t wait to get out. When I had her, the city was fine, it was free Thursday afternoons at the museum downtown, concerts on Sundays, poetry readings, her friends acting or painting or casting their private parts in plaster of paris. But now, what was the point. I hadn’t been to a museum since her arrest. Just that morning I saw a piece in the paper about a Georgia O’Keeffe show at the L.A. County Art Museum, asked Marvel if she’d take me.
“Well, pardon me, Princess Grace,” Marvel said. “What’s next, the opera? Change Caitlin’s diaper, will you, I got to take a leak.”
I called the bus company, they said it would take me three hours there, three hours back. It dawned on me how far I was from where I’d begun.
When you broke down in the desert, you had to work fast. In the Mojave, it could be 140 degrees in the shade. In an hour, you might sweat two and a half pints. People went crazy from thirst. You danced and sang and finally embraced a saguaro, thinking it was quite something else. A lover, a mother, a Christ. Then you ran away bleeding to die. To survive in the desert, you had to drink a quart of water a day. There was no sense in rationing—all those movies were lies. To drink less was just to commit slow suicide.
I thought about that, what it meant, as I took the giant box of disposable diapers and toilet paper back to the bathroom. It was one thing to hope, but you had to take care of yourself in the present, or you wouldn’t survive. You put out your hubcaps to catch morning dew, drank radiator water, and buried yourself to the neck in the sand. Then you set off at nightfall, retracing your steps. Overhead, the sky would be full of stars. You needed a flashlight, a compass, you had to have watched how you came.
Davey had known all of these things. I suddenly knew he would also survive.
In the prolonged twilight of the lengthening day, I started dinner, thinking about the desert, imagining myself buried to the neck, when I heard the mechanical purr of the neighbor’s Corvette turning into her driveway. I looked up in time to see her, a striking black woman in a white linen suit. I’d only seen her a couple of times, picking up her magazines, leaving her house in the evening in silk and pearls. She never spoke to us or anyone in the neighborhood.
Marvel heard the car too, and stopped making a bottle for Caitlin to stare out over my shoulder and glare. “That damn whore. Thinks she’s the Duchess of Windsor. Makes me want to puke.” We watched the neighbor pull her two small bags of groceries from Whole Foods out of the champagne-colored sports car.
“Mommy, juice,” the baby whined, tugging on Marvel’s T-shirt.
Marvel yanked her shirt from the baby’s hands. “Don’t you ever let me catch you talking to her,” she said to me. “Christ, I remember when this was a good neighborhood. Now it’s the blacks and the whores, chinks and beaners with chickens in the yard. I mean, what next?”
It bothered me that Marvel told me all this stuff, like I sympathized with her, like we were some Aryan secret society out here in the Valley. “I’ll make up some juice,” I said. I didn’t even want to stand next to her.
While I mixed the juice, I watched the neighbor, stopping to pick up the magazines from her porch, slip them inside her grocery bag. She wore white slingbacks with black tips, like deer’s hooves.
Then she disappeared inside the shuttered house. I was sad to see her go but glad she was out of sight of Marvel’s talk like hot tar, that fumed and stank as it left her lips. I wondered if the woman in the linen suit thought we were all like Marvel, that I was like that too. It made me cringe to think that probably she did.
Marvel grabbed the juice and filled the bottle, handed it to Caitlin, who toddled off, clutching her special velvet pillow that said Guam. “Traipsing around in that car,” Marvel grumbled. “Flaunting it in decent people’s faces. Like we didn’t know how she got it. Flat on her back is how.”
The car gleamed like the flanks of a man, soft and muscular, supple. I wanted to lie down on the hood, I thought I could probably come just lying on it. I gazed past the carport to the door where she went in, wished I didn’t have anything to do and could just stand there all evening to see if she’d come out again.