here.”
“Yeah,” she says, as she closes the front door behind her. “Too bad.”
That evening, with Maya at the bar and Perfect Brad working late, I decide to clean their apartment. Because I’m a good houseguest. Plus, if I clean I can snoop in their drawers.
I do the kitchen before the bedroom, to establish my noble intentions. But washing dishes by hand always makes me think. If my world had flashback wiggles like in old movies, they’d pop up every time I did dishes by hand.
I wasn’t flashing back to falling in love with Louis: walking hand-in-hand on a cherry-blossomed path at the Jefferson Memorial, going on our first real date to Emily’s, greeting him in an apron and stilettos after he took the Bar (See? I used to be a Cosmo girl!). No, I was thinking of that shack-landlady, her hollow voice reverberating in my memory, “first, last and security…first, last and security.” And she wasn’t the only one, it seems everyone requires obscene amounts of money before they let you move in. I’m not sure my monster stack is going to cover first and last…and security? I wish.
I dry my hands and call my mother.
“Hi, it’s me,” I say, when she picks up.
“Me who?”
“Me, your daughter, Mom.” She never recognizes my voice. Sometimes I make her guess who it is. She got it right on the first try, once.
“Elle, thank God. I was worried. I got your message. I don’t understand. I called yesterday and Louis told me you’d already left. Santa Barbara? You’ll be back before the wedding, won’t you? I’ve already made my plane reservations. I still don’t—”
“Mom.”
“—know what I’m going to do about the hotel. The cheapest one you suggested charges one-fifty a night! That’s too expensive. Why can’t I stay with—”
“Mom—”
“—you and Louis. I won’t be in the way. You know the store takes every spare penny, and I—”
“Mom! Listen to me.”
“I am listening, darling. What do you think I’m doing?”
“Louis and I broke up.”
“Yes, that’s what he said. But I already made my plane reservations. The tickets, darling—they’re nonrefundable. I told the girl—”
“Mom—focus, please!”
“Well, you and Louis have broken up before.” Which is utterly untrue. She thinks that because we weren’t speaking after the Mizrahi couture incident, we were broken up. “It’s only pre-wedding jitters. You’ll just have to go back and make up.”
“It’s a little late for that. He married someone else.”
“He did what?”
“An Iowan.”
“He married an Iowan? When did he—how did he?” She pauses for a fraction of a second, which means she is truly shocked. “Well, are you gonna kick her ass back to the corn fields?”
Mom watches a lot of daytime TV. I often wonder what her New Age customers would think if they knew. She owns a crystal and herb shop in Sedona—she moved there when I went to college. She gives off an Earth Mama vibe, and a lot of her customers come in to ask for advice. Little do they know that the wise and evolved spirits she’s channeling are Montel Williams and Jerry Springer.
“Mom, I haven’t even met her.”
“Well, maybe you should. I was watching Ricki Lake this morning—you know she’s lost weight again—and there was a woman on who’d never confronted her mother when she stole her brother’s girlfriend…”
And she’s off. Why do I bother? She always makes me feel like this. Like the people on Judge Judy are more important than me. I don’t know why I called, why I—oh, right. Security. As in deposit. She marks up those crystals four hundred percent.
“Mom! Louis dumped me, and I’m living on Maya’s couch, and I don’t have an apartment or a job or a car or anything. I don’t care about intergenerational love triangles.”
I must sound desperate, because she actually responds. “Oh, Elle, honey. You should have come here, where I could take care of you.”
I feel my eyes water. “Yeah, I sh-should have…”
“I would’ve made you scalloped potatoes and Boston cream pie.”
I wipe my nose with the wet dishcloth. “B-better than chicken soup.”
“Hop on the next plane, darling. The red rocks here cure everything. Broken hearts included.”
She sounds so sympathetic, I’m almost tempted. Cake and sympathy and reversion to childhood. But it wouldn’t be like that. Ten minutes after I got there, everyone would know it was my fault that Louis married someone else. Which it wasn’t. And she’d rope me into her shop for horoscopes and palm reading; she decided when I was eleven that I had the Gift, even though I always thought Capricorn was the bull.
“In fact, I wrote a letter about that to Oprah,” she says. “She should do her show from here. In Sedona. For the healing energy. It’s a nexus, Elle—and Oprah’s a wise woman, like the wise women of old, imagine if she tapped into the—”
“Mom!” I cut in. “I need to borrow some money.”
Silence.
“I didn’t realize how expensive things are, when you don’t have any money. And my credit cards…well, Louis was going to pay them off after the wedding. But now…”
“Are you in trouble with credit again?”
“I am not in trouble!” And I’m not. Because I’ve moved. How are they gonna find me in Santa Barbara? “I just need a little cash.”
“You’re welcome to stay with me,” she says. “The café next door is looking for a busboy.”
“Thanks, Mom. But couldn’t you at least…”
“Why don’t you try your father?”
Bad sign. She never mentions him. Her friends in Arizona think I was an immaculate conception.
“You know how Dad is…”
“I do know. I saw a segment on Jerry Springer about deadbeat dads, and just because your father never missed a payment doesn’t mean he’s not a deadbeat. There was this man, a yacht repairman, something with yachts, maybe a designer, I don’t know, and he had seven kids—well his wife did, but he said only one of them was his—but she said at least four of them—”
I hang up, mid-story. That’s just ducky.
Chapter 6
So crossing off “apartment” on
