Drinking Closer to Home Read online

  The Saturday morning of Bubbe and Zeyde’s arrival, the family was quietly occupied with the final acts of preparing the house. Buzzy was sitting on the stuffed green chair in the TV room, leaning into the white kitchen trash can he had dragged in there as he rummaged through the latest stuff Anna had thrown away. Portia was cleaning the sliding glass door in the family room with Windex and newspaper and Anna was dusting the newly empty surface of the black driftwood coffee table with Lemon Pledge. The room smelled fabulously, chemically sterile. Emery was organizing the board games in the family room and Louise was sorting sheets she had purchased for the beds (the old sheets hadn’t been laundered in a year and were almost waxy with dirt and oil). As in other years, Emery would sleep with Portia, or on a nest of blankets on her floor. Bubbe and Zeyde would sleep in Emery’s first-floor room on his bed and a foldout cot, which was kept in the garage between their visits.

  Louise gathered up the sheets, a burning cigarette dangling from her mouth. She stared down at Buzzy, who was reading a crumpled piece of paper. Louise shifted the sheets to one arm, pulled her cigarette out, and pointed it at Buzzy as she spoke.

  “Buzzy, fuck the trash, get the plants.”

  “She may have thrown out the receipt from when I had the oil changed on the car last week, I can’t find—” Buzzy dropped his head back into the trash can.

  “GET THE FUCKING PLANTS!” Louise lifted her cigarette hand and pushed a sweaty strand of brown hair out of her eyes. Portia was stilled by the suddenness of her mother’s anger.

  “Dad,” Anna said, “you have to chop down the marijuana plants.” She was the only one bold enough to insert herself into their parents’ arguments.

  Gardeners had been called in to bring the front yard under control, but the backyard, with the bursting fruit trees and chipped tile deck, had been ignored. The empty pool had been transformed into a giant junk container that reminded Portia of the drawer most people have in their kitchen that holds all the odds and ends that have no other place. Only larger. There were bikes in the pool, unused lawn tools, skateboards, old terra-cotta planters, even shoes, towels, and a few bathing suits.

  “They never go in the backyard,” Buzzy said, “and chances are they won’t even recognize that they’re marijuana plants.”

  Emery looked up from the Masterpiece Game; he was separating the painting cards from the value cards.

  “We have marijuana plants?” he asked. His eyes were oversized brown grommets; his hair was a blond rag mop.

  Portia, Anna, and their parents looked down at him, squatting like a monkey in front of the game.

  “No,” Louise said, calmly, “we don’t have marijuana plants.”

  “Marijuana’s against the law,” Emery said. “It’s illegal.”

  There was a certain oddness to any moment when Emery spoke while the entire family was present. What Portia thought of as the original family—Buzzy, Louise, Anna, and herself—was such a noisy, bickering group that there never seemed to be room for Emery’s tiny voice. He was like Ace, his bird, a vision of constant movement, chaos, and mess, but not a vocal part of the family.

  “How do you know it’s illegal?” Buzzy asked.

  “We talked about it in school.”

  “You talked about marijuana in school? What the hell kind of a school are you in that you talk about marijuana in third grade?” Outrage at his children’s schooling was a common theme for Buzzy.

  “We talked about drugs. Marijuana is a drug.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Louise moaned and shifted the weight of the sheets in her arms. “Marijuana is harmless! And yes, we have marijuana plants because I smoke marijuana!”

  Portia turned from the sliding glass door and leaned toward her brother. “Don’t tell your teacher or your friends, okay? Or Mom will go to jail.”

  “For chrissakes, Portia!” Louise snapped. “Nobody’s going to fucking jail— why put that thought in his head?! Now come help me put sheets on the beds, and Buzzy, cut down the fucking plants!”

  Buzzy stood from the trash can. “But the buds are only a few days from being fully ripe—”

  “You don’t even smoke them!” Louise said. “Portia! Take these!”

  Louise dumped the sheets in Portia’s arms, then circled the room with her cigarette butt, searching for the abalone shell ashtray that usually sat on the coffee table. There was a perfect cylindrical ash sitting atop the clean white sheets. Portia walked to the trash can, tilted the sheets toward it, and blew the ash off. It left a streak of gray, like a cartoon drawing of movement beside running legs.

  “Where are the marijuana plants?” Emery’s mouth was pulled into a worried little scowl. Portia imagined the picture in his brain of a drawing by his favorite illustrator, Richard Scarry, whose dog-police would pull up in a black-and-white paddy wagon and haul off their parents.

  “They’re surrounded by lemon trees,” Buzzy said. “No one can see them.”

  “Dad,” Anna said, “I know you like to grow the best plants you can, but you have to admit that if it doesn’t matter to Mom, it’s much safer to chop them down than risk that Bubbe and Zeyde see them and—”

  Emery stood and slid open the glass door. He ran out into the backyard toward the lemon trees.

  “You think he’s going to pull off the buds and sell them at school?” Anna asked. Portia laughed, although she didn’t quite know what the buds were.

  “Poor little guy,” Louise said, and she walked out after him. Buzzy got up and followed, so the girls went, too, the pile of sheets still in Portia’s arms.

  Emery was in the middle of the stand of six-foot-high marijuana plants, pulling one down to the ground and trying to break it at the base of the stem. The plant bent and bounced as he pushed on it with his dirty brown bare foot.

  “Okay, okay,” Buzzy said, and he took Emery by the arm and directed him away from the plant he was attacking. “Don’t worry, I’ll pull them out. Okay?” He tugged on Emery so that he faced him. “We’re going to lock them in your mother’s studio where Bubbe and Zeyde will never see them.”

  “IT’S AGAINST THE LAW!” Emery wailed, and fat tears began to fall down his face. He broke free of Buzzy’s grip, ran to the eucalyptus tree, and scaled it to the platform perch before anyone could even reach the base.

  “Hey,” Anna called up the tree, “Noble Citizen, come on down! Dad’s taking care of it!” Louise and Portia laughed. Buzzy sighed and went to the marijuana plants, where he dug each one out at the roots.

  They all piled into the long, blue station wagon to pick up Bubbe and Zeyde from the airport. Even the car was clean—Anna and Portia had picked up all the old, nearly petrified McDonald’s French fries, the mysterious hairballs fuzzed with dust, the gum wrappers, and other detritus off the floor of the car before Buzzy took it to a car wash, where the workers vacuumed and wiped down the inside as well as scrubbing the outside. The car smelled like pink bubblegum—a change from the usual cigarette and gasoline smell that, strangely, in Portia’s mind, equated with the smell of vomit.

  At the airport, they stood at the low stucco wall that separated the grassy courtyard from the runway. Emery scaled the wall and walked along the top of it, his arms extended like the wings of an airplane.

  “Hey, Noble Citizen, get down from there,” Louise said. The name Noble Citizen had stuck since Anna first used it; Louise, Anna, and Portia had since completely abandoned Emery’s proper name. Buzzy took Emery’s hand and held it while Emery leapt from the top of the wall to the grass.

  Bubbe and Zeyde’s plane came roaring in. Portia put her hands over her ears; Anna squinted toward the plane, her eyes crinkled up like black raisins. Buzzy picked up Emery and held him near his shoulder so he could better see the plane touch down, then roll along the runway until it stopped not far from where the family stood.

  They gathered near the wall, their bodies still in anticipation as the moveable stairs were pushed by a small tractor-like vehicle to the white, looming airplane
. Movie star–looking people—men in sports jackets, women in owl-eyed sunglasses—effortlessly glided down the stairs and onto the runway. And then came Bubbe and Zeyde.

  Bubbe was the size of kids a grade lower than Portia. She wore a pink skirt-suit with shiny square-heeled pink shoes. Her curled white hair had a glossy sheen that could be seen from the distance. She stopped on the stairs, smiled, and waved. Emery jumped up and down, waving his arms. Buzzy groaned and waved.

  “There she is,” he said. The only person who dreaded Bubbe and Zeyde’s visits more than Louise was Buzzy. He claimed his parents were loony: his mother a meddler, his father a braggart.

  With one hand on the handrail and her face directed down at her feet, Bubbe slowly stepped down the stairs one foot at a time, as if she were doing the wedding march. Zeyde was right behind her. He was the shape of a penguin and wearing his usual bow tie. (After retiring as an accountant for the post office, Zeyde had taken up sewing and painting. The only thing he sewed was bow ties. He claimed that his attention to detail was greater than anything one might find in a bow tie from Boscov’s department store.) Zeyde’s hair was black, slick. His nose looked like a crow’s beak. His skin was darker than Buzzy’s, as dark as Anna’s.

  “Cookalah!” Bubbe shouted as they crossed through the open arch into the courtyard. Bubbe grabbed Portia and gave her hollow smacking kisses on the cheeks and the forehead. Then she pulled her granddaughter’s head down to her sloping bosom and rocked her back and forth. Zeyde was kissing Anna all over her head. He was taller than Anna, but not as tall as Buzzy and not much taller than Louise. When that was done, Portia was passed to Zeyde and Anna was passed to Bubbe, where the process started all over again. Buzzy, Louise, and Emery stood by waiting. Emery was open-mouthed smiling and bouncing on his toes—Portia knew he thought just as much love and affection was about to come his way.

  “Look how these girls have grown!” Zeyde said, and he laughed in a sharp, whining rhythm that sounded like a boat engine working to turn over: AH heh heh heh heh, AH heh heh heh heh. It was a sound that belonged to Zeyde in the same way that the bubbly rumble belongs to a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

  At last Emery was kissed, with far less enthusiasm and barely a grasping hug. Portia hoped he’d think that Bubbe and Zeyde had run out of kissing energy because they were so old. She didn’t want her brother to know that Bubbe and Zeyde had never taken to him. It was as if having Anna and Portia were enough and Emery was one child too many for their tastes.

  On the drive home, Bubbe and Zeyde sat in the backseat with Anna between them and Portia on Zeyde’s lap. Emery asked if he could sit on Bubbe’s lap, but she said no, he’d wrinkle her skirt, and so Emery was tossed into the way-back, where he stuck his head over the edge of the seat and watched his sisters, like a dog.

  Portia stood in Emery’s room as Bubbe unpacked the two hard blue suitcases. She moved quickly, humming and smiling, like a little windup toy. Propped against the mirror on Emery’s dresser were two paintings, done by Zeyde, that he had given Buzzy and Louise for Hanukah a few years earlier. One was a bald baby in a bath. When they had unveiled the painting, Zeyde put a fat brown finger on the canvas and said, “Can you believe I got the water to look exactly like water?!” When he opened the next painting, Louise gasped.

  “Oh, I like that pirate!” Portia said, and her parents and grandparents laughed.

  “That,” Zeyde said, his finger pointing to the ceiling in a gesture of erudition, “is Moshe Dayan.”

  “Is he a pirate?” Portia asked, and her grandfather chugged with laughter.

  “HE”—Zeyde paused to give weight to his words—“was a great leader of the Jewish people.”

  “A great leader of the Jewish people!” Bubbe had repeated.

  They kept Baby in the Bath and Moshe Dayan behind Emery’s dresser between Bubbe and Zeyde’s visits. Anna was the one who always remembered to pull them out. She remembered things in general: where the tape measure was, how much gas cost, what day Bubbe and Zeyde were arriving. Portia, on the other hand, remembered details: what Bubbe and Zeyde were wearing when they stepped off the plane last year (she was in a peach dress with a matching cardigan, he wore a satin peach bow tie), what Louise said to the dinner guest she thought was an obnoxious flirt who was trying to seduce Buzzy (“You know, why don’t you just leave? Why don’t you just get the fuck out of my house?”), who Emery’s favorite characters were on Sesame Street (Ernie and Bert).

  “Cookalah, Cookalah,” Bubbe said, and she grasped Portia’s hand with her pointed, bony fingers and slipped a twenty-dollar bill in her palm.

  “Thanks, Bubbe!” Portia shoved the bill down into her shorts pocket.

  “Use it in good health,” Bubbe said, and she smacked some kisses on Portia again. “Now, where’s your sister?”

  “I’ll get her. Do you want Emery, too?”

  “No, no, shhhhh . . .” Bubbe raised a crooked finger to her lips and looked around as if she were a spy on a mission. Knobby gold rings tilted on her hand, as if the rocks were too heavy to sit upright.

  Portia brought her sister back to Bubbe the moment her grandmother was about to change into her housecoat. She had removed her bra and stood in the middle of the room with her giant, plummeting breasts sitting below her waist.

  “Cookalah, Cookalah, shut the door!”

  Anna and Portia stepped in and closed the door behind themselves. Portia thought Bubbe wanted it shut for reasons of modesty, when, in fact, she later realized, her grandmother was no more modest than their mother, who never wore underwear (even when she was in a skirt) and didn’t even own a swimsuit. Portia thought about her own breasts, which had just started to grow and had no fold; her mother’s breasts, which had a fold but faced forward, staring the viewer in the eye; and then her grandmother’s breasts, each like an orange sitting at the bottom of a net bag. She decided then that she would never go braless: she would bind her growths so tightly against her chest they would never stray, bounce, accordion-fold, or release.

  Bubbe tucked a twenty into Anna’s palm, then went to her suitcase for more goods.

  “Do you want your housecoat?” Portia held out the pink shapeless shift that was hanging on a wire hanger on the closet doorknob.

  “Yes, yes, but first I have presents for you girls!” Bubbe clapped her hands together and flashed her gold teeth at her granddaughters. Portia stared at her teeth as a way not to stare at her grandmother’s hipline breasts. Her sister had completely turned her head and was facing the door as if waiting for someone to enter.

  Bubbe lifted some shirts from Zeyde’s suitcase then pulled out two white plastic grocery bags.

  “One for you,” Bubbe said, and she handed Anna a bag, forcing her to turn to accept a kiss on the cheek. “And one for you!” She handed Portia the other bag, kissed Portia on the cheek, and, at last, reached for the pink housecoat.

  The two girls moved to the bed. They sat side by side, opened their bags, and peered in.

  “Use them in good health! God bless!” Bubbe said, as she buttoned her housecoat. “And share!”

  In Portia’s bag were white pens, perhaps a hundred, with Bank of Trenton printed on the side. In Anna’s bag were about fifty plastic rain caps that appeared to be little more than Saran Wrap with a string. They also had Bank of Trenton printed on them. Anna unfurled a rain cap and put it on. Portia thought she looked like she was wrapping her head for refrigerator storage.

  “They fit in your purse, see?” Bubbe said. “I never walk out the door without one.”

  “That’s cool,” Anna said.

  “Yeah, really cool,” Portia said.

  “Use them in good health!” Bubbe said, just as Emery burst into the room.

  “Your grandmother’s getting dressed!” Bubbe turned to Emery and, with a hand on each shoulder, pushed him out the door and shut it tightly behind him before reaching up and pushing in the last button on her housecoat.

  “I don’t have anything for him,” she
whispered. “He’s a little boy! What can he do with a pen or a rain cap?!”

  “Yeah, he likes getting wet in all our rain,” Portia said. Anna nudged her fiercely with her knee. California had been in a drought for so long, rain was an event—like the Santa Ana winds or a big earthquake. The last time it had rained, all the neighborhood kids ran out into the street, heads tilted toward the sky, tongues out, screaming and jumping around. Everywhere Portia looked, people were adjusting their lives for the drought. The Fletchers, at the end of the cul-de-sac, dug up their grass and replaced it with gravel and fire hydrant–sized cacti. At Portia’s friend Denise’s house, she had to turn on the water in the shower, get wet, turn off the water, soap up and shampoo, and then turn the water back on and rinse. And Anna told her about a girl at school whose entire family showered together in order to save water. They also had a saying written in brown ink and taped to the inside of the downstairs toilet lid: If it’s brown, flush it down; if it’s yellow, let it mellow. In Portia’s home, the marijuana plants were watered regularly, Anna took daily forty-minute showers, and there were no demands for when one could and could not flush the toilet. It was as if Buzzy and Louise were too preoccupied to notice the drought. In fact, the one time Portia heard her parents mention the drought was when she and Denise performed a rain dance they had choreographed one Saturday afternoon—leaping and clapping in synchronized fashion over a tin bucket they had decorated with grimy little feathers they had found in their yards and in Portia’s family room (the latter thanks to Ace).

  “Wait,” Buzzy had said, after he and Louise gave slow, weak applause. “So is the rain dance to stop rain in flooding areas or to bring rain?”

  “It’s to end the drought, asshole,” Louise had said, and she got up and walked into the house.

  When they had shown Denise’s family the dance, her parents and little sister stood from their lawn chairs and gave the girls a standing ovation. Then Denise’s dad fetched his home movie camera, which was the size of a saxophone case, and asked Portia and Denise to perform the whole thing over again so he could get it on film.