Drinking Closer to Home Read online

  “Portia, Anna,” Louise said, and she began searching through the little piles of papers, mail, phone books, and pencils that covered from end to end the white tile counter that separated the kitchen from the family room.

  “Yeah?” Portia asked. Anna looked at her freckle-faced sister, her white, hairless flesh, her wispy brown hair that shone like corn silk. As much as she often hated her, she could understand why her parents were always pawing at her with hugs and kisses: the girl was like a pastry or a sweet. She looked edible.

  Anna was as small as Portia. But she was all muscle and sinew, as if she were made of telephone cables. No one ever wanted to pinch telephone cables. She rolled the dice and ignored her mother.

  “Come here,” Louise said. She continued to shift things around. Portia pushed her doughy rump up and went to the counter. She moved aside an empty box that had held ten Hot Wheels racing cars and handed her mother the pack of unfiltered Camel cigarettes she was most likely looking for.

  “I quit.” Louise tapped out a cigarette, then lit it from the pack of matches she kept tucked in the cellophane wrapper. She had grown her hair long at a time when mothers didn’t have long hair. And she didn’t wear makeup—a habit that made her look fresher and more alive than the other mothers. Anna hated it when Portia said that their mother looked like a movie star—she hated that her sister couldn’t see the drop-out anarchist mentality their mother conveyed through her hippie clothes. And it really drove Anna crazy when she witnessed Louise opening the front door to the Fuller Brush Man or the Avon Lady and they asked Louise, “Is your mother home?” What kind of a mother didn’t look like a mother?! One like Louise, Anna supposed, who only wore wide, drapey bell-bottoms, cork platform shoes, and flowing silk shirts with no bra. In her ears were always two gold hoops that hung almost to her shoulders. Anna knew that people in other parts of town dressed like Louise. But no one in their neighborhood did. They lived in a place of pantsuits, helmets of hair, waxy lipstick, sensible sneakers. Anna didn’t know any mother who worked, or did art. At least her parents weren’t divorced, Anna thought. The only person she knew who had divorced parents was Molly Linkle, a girl who was so fat she wore bras that made her breasts look like cones and shopped in the Ladies’ Department at Robinson’s.

  “What do you mean you quit?” Portia climbed onto the orange stool. Anna wondered when her sister would stop asking questions.

  “Your turn,” Anna said. She looked toward her sister’s back and watched as her mother pursed her lips and let out a slow stream of smoke.

  “I quit being a housewife.” Louise shook her hair and smiled.

  “Can you do that?” Portia asked.

  Anna was going to pretend she wasn’t listening. There was something inside her that often led her to believe that if she ignored certain things they would cease to exist. She turned the Parcheesi board over and dumped the pieces on the rug.

  “Of course I can. I just did. I quit!” Louise took another drag off her cigarette.

  “Anna!”

  Anna knew Portia was staring at her but she refused to look up.

  “Mom quit!”

  “I heard,” Anna said. She could feel her face darkening, like a mercury thermometer.

  “Does Dad know?” Anna asked. She crossed her legs and glared at her mother.

  “I told him last night.”

  “What about Emery?” The idea that her mother wouldn’t have the same occupation as her friends’ mothers enraged Anna. Who would have the nerve to give birth to children, move them into a house, and then declare that she wasn’t going to take care of them? A drug-addicted hippie, Anna decided, that’s who.

  “You girls are in charge of Emery now.”

  “Really?!” Portia’s cheerful voice made Anna want to knock her off the stool. Portia was such a wannabe mother, she coddled Emery as if she owned him. In fact the only thing Portia had ever claimed she wanted to be when she grew up was a mother. She had a doll, Peaches, with whom she slept every night. When the family traveled, Portia always packed Peaches first in the bottom of her white, satin-lined suitcase. The current Peaches was actually the second Peaches, as the first Peaches had devolved into a repellent, floppy, dirty thing with a body like a lumpy mattress and arms and legs that were four different colors from dirt and stains. She’d gone bald from Portia’s carrying her by her hair, and she smelled like spit. Anna didn’t even like being in the same room with old Peaches. When Portia was seven, Louise had sewn Peaches a pink satin retirement gown with a matching satin-and-lace cap, and gave Portia a new, fresh Peaches who smelled like plastic and who, Anna thought, wasn’t the embarrassing rag that was old Peaches.

  “Yeah, Emery’s yours,” Louise said.

  “Can he be mine alone?” Portia asked Anna.

  Anna couldn’t believe that her sister felt compelled to ask this question. It was like asking if Anna wanted to share old Peaches.

  “What do you say, Anna?” Louise asked.

  “I don’t want him,” Anna said. “He’s dirty and he smells.”

  “He’s adorable!” Portia said.

  “Are we getting a maid?” Anna asked. Her friends’ mothers cleaned their houses, but people on TV, characters with apartments and homes that seemed much smaller than theirs, had maids.

  “No!” Louise snorted. “There are enough people hanging around here between your and your sister’s friends. Besides. We don’t have that kind of money.”

  “So who’s going to cook dinner?” Portia asked.

  “Anna will cook.”

  “Fine.” Anna stood up and joined her sister at the counter. She could feel rage inside her like a team of insects crawling through her veins.

  “And what about everything else?” Portia asked, although to Anna she didn’t seem particularly concerned. And why should she be concerned? Other than giving Emery an occasional bath, Anna couldn’t really name the things Louise did as a housewife. By all appearances, their mother did little other than swim naked in the pool and write poems or paint in her studio. On the rare day when Anna’s friends came over (despite Louise’s claims of frequency, Anna always tried to steer them to someone else’s house), she had them wait on the porch on the pretense of having to ask her mother if it was okay if they came in when, really, she was checking to see that Louise was dressed. Anna preferred to hang out at her friends’ houses, as even when Louise was dressed, she was an embarrassment.

  Louise gave the girls a housewife’s tour that started with the washer and dryer in the garage.

  “This is where you put the dirty clothes. You open this up, put your clothes in, then pour in a bunch of this detergent.” Louise picked up a green cardboard box and shook it.

  “How much detergent do I put in?” Portia asked.

  “A bunch,” Louise said. “You know, a bunch! Shake some out, it doesn’t really matter.”

  Anna rolled her eyes. There was a plastic scoop sitting on the shelf where the detergent was. Why didn’t her mother measure it out like a normal person? Like the people who did laundry in the detergent commercials! Like all the other mothers in California!

  “Then what?” Portia asked. Anna saw that Portia was getting nervous—more than one step in any set of directions was too many for her simpleton sister.

  “Then shut the door and turn this dial to three o’clock.”

  “Three o’clock,” Portia repeated, and when she rolled her eyes up toward her forehead, Anna knew she was envisioning a clock in her head.

  “Yeah. Three o’clock,” Louise said.

  “Just turn it to the right, dingbat!” Anna said.

  They took one step over and Louise opened the dryer. “Put the wet clothes in here and then turn the dial to nine o’clock.”

  “Nine o’clock.” Portia looked back and forth between the washer and the dryer. Anna almost felt sorry for her; she knew Portia was trying to imprint in her mind which one would be on her left and which on her right. Portia had a horrible sense of direction and often
she would state the landmarks they passed when she and Anna rode their bikes to the store or the beach. “Big white car with Arizona license plate,” Portia once said, and Anna had hoped that the car would soon leave the driveway where it had been parked, only so she could see if Portia would then get lost on the way home.

  “The washer is closer to the door,” Portia said. “And the dryer is near the workbench.”

  “Yeah,” Louise said.

  “Duh,” Anna said.

  Upstairs, Louise showed the girls how to set the alarm clocks she had put in each of their rooms.

  “Is this the only color they had?!” Anna held up the black clock and shook it. She didn’t know anyone who had a black anything in her room. Everyone had pink or blue or yellow, or even green. But black? Black was a color for drug addicts and psychotics.

  “You’re going to have to get yourself up a little earlier than I’ve been getting you up,” Louise said, “so you have time to feed Emery and get him dressed before you go to school.”

  “Okay.” Portia stared at the back of her boxy alarm clock. Anna knew she’d already forgotten how to set it—there were too many knobs for her sister to keep track!

  In the downstairs broom closet Louise showed her daughters the vacuum, the dust mop, the Lemon Pledge, and the dust rags. She also pulled out a bucket and sponge mop that the girls had never seen used in the house before.

  “Do you do that?” Portia asked.

  “Of course,” Louise said.

  “Really?” Portia said. “You do that with that thing?”

  “MOP!” Anna said. “Don’t you know what a mop is?! Are you a retard or something? And no, she never mops, because I didn’t even know we owned a mop!”

  Portia and Louise both looked at Anna without responding. They were used to her outbursts in the same way that they were used to Louise’s cigarette smoke.

  “When do you do it?” Portia asked.

  “When you’re at school,” Louise laughed. “It’s a lot of work being a housewife! That’s why I quit.” Anna rolled her eyes and slumped against the wall.

  Anna was certain that the kitchen would be impossible for Portia. She was afraid of the gas stove, of flames that would burst out and lick at her thin, sun-frayed hair. And there were too many dials on the wall oven with nothing that differentiated the broiler dial from the bake one.

  “Just stay out of here,” Anna said to Portia. She already had full control of the kitchen. Anna liked to bake when she got home from school, using recipes from the back of Sunset magazine.

  The yard and gardens, Louise said, were Buzzy’s concern, a concern the kids had heard them fighting about in recent days. Buzzy wanted to hire a gardener. Everyone on Abelia Way had a gardener—illegal Mexicans who always smiled and often liked to whistle while they did the quieter jobs like planting and weeding. Louise didn’t want any strangers in the yard. She claimed it wasn’t safe to have anyone, even an illegal alien, know about the marijuana orchard in the backyard.

  “We’ll get Esteban who does the Dixons’ yard!” Buzzy had argued. “He takes care of their marijuana plants as if they were his goddamned children!”

  “Well, what about swimming!” Louise had said. “How am I going to swim in my own pool with strange men lurking nearby?!”

  “You think Esteban hasn’t seen tits before!” Buzzy had frantically begun to pace the family room, waving his hands in the air. The black curls on his head bounced as he walked. “He’s from Mexico, for God sakes, they nurse their babies till they can talk, there are tits everywhere—”

  “They’re Catholics!” Louise had shouted back. “The only tits they know are covered with a drape and the head of baby Jesus!”

  Esteban was never hired.

  There was no system to oversee the care the girls took of the house and Emery. So by the time Anna was thirteen and Portia was ten, the house had grown so dirty the once-white kitchen floor was the color and texture of sidewalk gum. Emery’s cockatiel, Ace, had permanently fled his cage and taken refuge on the wrought iron curtain rod that hung above the couch, and so the back of the orange family room couch was encrusted with gray and white bird droppings. Anna was not surprised that no one minded the usually hardened, stiff splatter of shit behind their head. Portia was a slob whose hair was often so tangled that a little pod of snarls the size of a robin’s egg sat at the nape of her neck. And she wore the same clothes every day—brown cords that were rubbed smooth at the knees and were shredded like lace at the hems that dragged on the ground. Emery’s brain seemed to have not developed any ability to discern between filth and nonfilth: a Life Saver candy plucked from the gutter was every bit as good as one taken from the roll.

  As far as she knew, Anna was the only person in the household who bathed daily, ironed her clothes, and kept her room neat. She was the single child with linens on her bed, as she dutifully pulled off her sheets each week, washed them, and returned them to the bed. Portia’s sheets were kicked down into a greasy bundle at the bottom of her bed. Her mattress was slick and shiny-gray from body oil and dirt. Sometimes Anna went in Portia’s room just to make sure it really was in the decrepit state she imagined. Emery’s sheets were tangled up in the eucalyptus tree where he had tried to make a canopy in case it ever rained (which it rarely did; California was in the midst of a years-long drought). His mattress was almost black because he was as dirty as a feral guinea pig—and he smelled like a guinea pig, too: earthy, pissy, with an astringent echo of eucalyptus.

  Anna didn’t like touching Emery because of his filth. But Portia didn’t mind. Sometimes Anna would sit on the closed toilet seat and watch as Portia gave Emery his Sunday bath in the bathwater that she, Portia, had just used. Next to the tub were kept two dented aluminum pots and two thick gas station glasses that Buzzy or Louise got for free when they filled the car at the Esso station. The glasses had Daffy Duck and Goofy on them; Emery often spoke to them as he filled the glasses up and poured them out while Portia scrubbed him with a washcloth. There was always a black crescent moon of dirt behind each of his ears, and a necklace of dirt around his neck, swooping down to his clavicle. Often Anna would jump off the toilet and rush to Emery to examine his neck before Portia started scrubbing. There was something about the before and after images that thrilled her. As long as he had pots to fill, pour, and refill, Emery would sit relatively still while Portia scoured him clean until he shined as pink as a tongue. Later, when Anna saw the movie Silkwood in which Karen Silkwood is abraded with wire brushes to remove the radioactive material on her skin, she thought of her sister giving Emery his vigorous Sunday scrubbings.

  When Emery was out of the tub, Anna would watch her sister bundle him in the same black towel Portia had used, which was never washed and simply dried between uses. Anna hid her towel in her bedroom. She washed it almost daily and never left it in the bathroom where her brother and sister could wipe their sticky paws on it. Anna washed Emery’s clothes every now and then, so after his bath he was often dressed in pajamas that had holes in the knees and at the neckline but were clean nonetheless. In fact, with the exception of Sunday, the pajamas were usually cleaner than her brother.

  Buzzy and Louise seemed to neither notice nor care about the derelict state of the house. When an earthquake cracked the pool foundation, Buzzy bought a sump pump, connected it to a long garden hose, and drained the pool down the hill into the orchard. Louise did her sunbathing at the nude beach while weeds began to grow out of the crack in the pool. Emery liked to play in the empty cement basin—he rode his big wheel around the oval like he was on a racetrack and when he got his first skateboard he ran straight to the backyard, dropped it into the shallow end, and took off. Even Anna and Portia liked to roller-skate in the pool from time to time, sliding down the slope toward the deep end where the drain had a leafy branch darting up through its slats like a bony arm through a prison grate.

  Buzzy and Louise’s bedroom was as forbidden to the children as Louise’s art studio off the garage but
, unlike the studio, there was no padlock on the door to keep them out. Anna and Portia liked to dig through the room—excavate it as if it would answer the questions they had about their parents. Portia always went into the jewelry boxes that were stacked on top of Louise’s dresser. She would stand on the small padded stool that sat at the vanity and bring them down one by one, while Anna spread the bedspread over their parents’ unmade bed. One day, when Portia questioned Anna’s reasons for always making the bed, Anna explained to her sister that if she didn’t cover up the sheets, Buzzy’s loose sperm would crawl up their legs and impregnate them.

  “Why is his loose sperm on the bed?” Portia asked.

  “It slips out of his penis,” Anna said.

  Portia stood back and watched as Anna pulled up the comforter and tucked it under the pillows. When Portia didn’t get on the bed, Anna grabbed her arm and pulled her toward it. There was no way she was going to sit there if Portia wouldn’t. “It’s safe now!” she said, yanking Portia into place.

  Anna assumed it was Portia’s low intelligence that led her to only the jewelry boxes. Portia seemed content trying on rings with giant glittering stones in them, or bracelets that jingled when stacked on her arm. Louise never wore any of this jewelry and the girls couldn’t understand why. She didn’t even wear a wedding ring, although she seemed to have several—some with diamonds, some with lace-like patterned gold, and one with a simple, round rock sitting like an offering.

  Anna preferred to go through her parents’ drawers, particularly the drawers in each of the black nightstands that stood on either side of the bed. She’d flip through the notes, receipts, and stacks of loose papers in Buzzy’s drawers. At Louise’s side of the bed, Anna would look through her mother’s silky underpants and nightgowns and examine the beige, ridged vibrator that had an on/off button on the bottom. Anna often turned it on, held it up in her hand, and watched it buzz.

  “Gross,” Anna said, every time, as she rotated the vibrator in her hand. At thirteen she had a fairly clear picture of how it could be used and imagined that if hadn’t belonged to her nudist mother who always smelled like armpits, she might want to try it out.