Moonrovia
This isn’t the valley that inspired the term, “valley girl.” That valley is known for its upper-middle-class suburbs built around malls and proximity to Los Angeles. The valley where this story takes place was further east than either of them had been before the day they first visited the apartment.
“There’s no fucking way I’m letting him near you again,” he’d teeth-gnashingly said to her one oppressively hot night outside her favorite bar (they were both only 20, but nobody asked for ID’s at this place). When she was a little girl she'd once surreptitiously seen an R-rated movie with a scene like this, of sexually charged, drunken, public jealousy between young punk-rockers – it had been thrilling to imagine herself the female character – but here she was in the middle of it, and she wondered if she should be calling 911.
The instance Cole was so upset about was a quick glimpse he’d caught of the handsome bartender, Grayson, squeezing her arm affectionately for a moment. Now she could never go back there.
At some point that night, they’d at last stopped arguing, and he begged her forgiveness for having pushed her. They made love, then he opened the two mini-bottles of champagne kept cold by the small refrigerator in his bedroom at his family’s house. There was nobody home besides them, but they kept the door closed and spoke quietly.
“Oh man! We’ve been arguing for ages,” she stage-whispered, “it’s just after three a.m. already.”
“The witching hour,” he said. “Didn’t you tell me that?”
“You remember that?”
“Of course, sweetie,” he said, hugging her, “come here.”
They made love again, more quickly this time.
Then he said, “Actually, the reason I brought out the champagne tonight is because I realized I want to spend my life with you and wanted to ask you – let’s move in together.”
***
Most people have not heard of Monrovia, but many people have heard of its next door neighbor to the west, Arcadia, home to the Santa Anita racetrack. Arcadia’s history includes a Denny’s with its own windmill, and a founder nicknamed “Lucky,” who had peacocks brought over from India in the 1870’s, because they were so flashy and pretty. They’d since proliferated to the point where there were at least two hundred in the town at any given time, and they were allowed to walk around wherever they wanted.
The first time that Nicole and Cole met Dahlia, their future apartment manager, she seemed fixated on the fact that Arcadia was richer than the majority of Monrovia (there were three anomalous blocks of old mansions along the northernmost edge of Monrovia, before the land sloped up towards the richly quiet, rather tame, arid wilderness of the San Gabriel Mountains). The young woman imbued the peacocks with haughty personalities during their first conversation, talking mostly to Cole as Nikki sat lightly on the low, soothingly cool, jade-colored Formica bathroom sink counter top.
“They are allowed to crap and have babies on the residents’ front lawns and the rich people have to just put up with it because the birds are completely protected under the law, but I saw a news story about it the other day where they interviewed some of the rich people in Arcadia, and it was like, they wouldn’t admit how much they hate the birds! They were all, ‘Well, we have to shovel their droppings five times a day, but they’re majestic birds.’ Stupid. But anyway, one of the people they interviewed made a joke about how the birds never seem to cross city limits into Monrovia. That was a really mean thing to say, but I noticed that about them too, like they’re snobs and will only stay in Arcadia.”
“Yeah, I did notice that big town sign that town has, how it’s all built up with those big river rocks. My dad used to do that kind of work – those rocks are hard as fuck to haul, and they’re not cheap.”
“Exactly, exactly,” flirted the apartment manager.
Nicole could tell early on that this was going to be one of the people she would actively try to avoid, probably looking through the peephole before leaving the apartment. Like Cole, Dahlia’s assessment of others seemed unfair. The two young people both looked and sounded well-matched. Cole liked to dress more normal than Nicole did and on the day they got the apartment in Monrovia, he was wearing a pair of tight black knee-length shorts and a tight black button-up short sleeve shirt. Dahlia wore a tight, knee-length jean skirt and a black spandex shirt with big pink flowers on it. She had a long shiny ponytail that smelled like strawberries, a necklace of several long, delicate strands of gold, and a French Manicure. They were both physically fit, and Armenian, a culture that Nicole had long secretly romanticized, only once admitting that to Cole, not sure whether he would think it were racist or sweet, realizing he was asleep in bed next to her already as she made her confession.
She didn’t mind observing the two from a distance. Her therapist in middle school had called it using dissociation as a coping mechanism, but her old best friend, Lulu, had just called it being an old soul.
The apartment cost only half as much to rent as the one they had just come from viewing in North Hollywood. Cole found out about that place from a tenant he’d recently visited with a friend who was there to buy pills. Nicole and Cole had to drive around the area for fifteen minutes before finding parking to view that apartment. Then she had cried in the bathroom there, not only because everything looked broken and smelled bad, and that it was practically out of their price range, but because he was interested in paying the application fee and trying to move in there.
“It just seems like if you want to keep staying so close to Hollywood and all those places you used to kick it with Lulu and your high school friends, it’s going to cost a lot of money and look kind of like this, babe. But it’s okay. I’ll make it look nice for you, Mama. Let’s just try to get this place and get it over with though, it costs the same as the others.”
There were two much cheaper apartments he’d agreed to look at, in neighborhoods they’d never heard of, thinking that they must have made a mistake when they wrote the Monrovia address down because of how long the drive was there from North Hollywood, over twenty miles away. She would be able to afford the rent for the Monrovia apartment even without Cole, or at least for a couple months, if something happened. She had money in savings and worked full-time.
“Let’s rent a hotel room here for the night, huh? Fuck a couple times –” they were in the car, having just finished the paperwork and given Dahlia the security deposit.
“We can go exploring. I think there’s some kind of street fair tonight; I know you love that shit.”
Five major franchises were headquartered in Monrovia, all lined up along the freeway and interspersed with corporate motels intended mainly for guests of national business conferences held at these various headquarters. They found a room immediately at the first one they came to when they turned right at the T-intersection of their soon-to-be new home. The air conditioning as they first entered the room was so cold it made her laugh.
“Nicole baby, come look out this window for a minute. Come here.”
He looked so handsome with his shirt off, beckoning her over to the large window on the second floor that overlooked the old and new suburb.
She joined him.
He laughed playfully at her, “Why’d you tense up like that? I’m not going to bring up getting married anymore. I promised you already. I just want you to stand here with me and look around. We’re going to live here together.”
“Oh babe, I was only thinking good things. I love it here. Let’s go to the street fair.”
***
Drawing only from her extensive knowledge of movies both old and new, as the weekly Friday Night Street Fair and Market came into view, she thought how much it reminded her of a summer fair in a Tennessee Williams movie or a musical from the forties. Maybe the mayor was going to make a speech from the front step of the white Christmas light-framed gazebo. That would be in the movie. In real life, there were two tables set up there, one for homemade beaded jewelry and the other for handmade organic baked dog treats.
In the black and white movie she was imagining, the people attending the beautiful event might contain several obnoxious tertiary characters, despite the fair-like beauty of the electric light-sprouting trees spreading their limbs moonward, as large groups of people usually contain a racist, a classist, a mean dad yanking some kid’s arm too hard like a show-off, someone laughing at a fat person walking by or a person with unique fashion – there were definitely those people there, but she somewhat fed on a current of light disapproval from normal people anyway, and was not unhappy with this.
Many of the businesses on the few-block stretch of the night market extended their usual business hours to nine or ten pm those nights. Her favorite business that kept its doors open late was the homiest of the town’s three real estate agencies. They decorated their impressively detailed scale model of the town a little differently each market Friday. This night, the miniature town was already decorated for Halloween, while the actual town was still holding its breath until October first. There were five or six plastic figurines from the film Nightmare Before Christmas, none more than four inches tall, posed to enjoy the celebration’s offerings. The little skeleton man in a suit and his pretty, sewn-together girlfriend stood frozen, admiring the scale model petting zoo that in real life Cole and Nicole visited next. The man that owned the petting zoo let Nicole stay with his two friendly gray sheep, brushing them, for as long as she wanted, while he and Cole talked about playing guitar.
She’d decided that morning to put on three candy necklaces and a candy bracelet, solely as a fashion statement, but Cole assumed and insisted she’d be interested in going to the Olde Fashioned Candy Shoppe because of this jewelry choice, and that’s where he kept wanting to go next. It was the type of candy store where you filled a cellophane bag with the candy you wanted, and paid at the register according to how much the bag weighed. She would have to pretend to be interested; most of the candies there were just different colors and shapes of the same gelatinous sugar that she would throw away when she got the chance. He let her stay with the sheep far longer than she’d thought he would before getting frustrated though and then, miraculously, let her give the bag of candy to a teenage boy wearing black lipstick and black clothes, who’d asked them for a cigarette.
***
The first time she met Cole was in the Special Education classroom at Melrose High School, in Hollywood, when she was in 10th grade. However, they hardly spoke to each other until a few years later, when, by some fate clumsy and mean as a family friend, they ended up working at the same location, a well-known cemetery in the Hollywood Hills. Classic old film stars like Lillith Mandalay and Richard Marin were buried there, and that was one of the facts she used to repeat when friends had originally asked her why she’d want to work somewhere so adamantly Christian.
As for Cole, the franchise was the de facto resting place for the majority of L.A.’s Armenians; this was because the original location was in Glendale, a city with a larger Armenian population than Armenia itself. There was a rumor that if you had a relative buried in either of the two locations, you were guaranteed to get hired if you applied for a job, and his aunt Lilit’s husband was interred at one of the locations, in a section whimsically named Cherubim. A few of his friends also heard that and also had family members who had been interred there; they all worked at one of the two locations now.
Nicole and Cole moved all their things into the new place on a Sunday and he had the following Monday off. When she anxiously showed up to work that morning, the few employees they were both social with already knew about the move, which she’d assumed, as Cole was on a text chain with them, so that now, her favorite one – Anne-Marie – waved wildly and mouthed “Oh my god!” the moment their eyes met, right as Nicole opened the heavy door to the basement-level office.
Nicole could only smile and walk right by to her own desk, as the boss was watching, but they managed to take their first smoke break at the same time. Now she could show her thankfulness for Anne-Marie’s unquestioning enthusiasm.
“It’s so sudden! You guys are so crazy. Do you love your new apartment?”
“I really do,” and she tried to describe to her friend exactly how much and why her new home was her dream apartment, but it seemed so hard, because Nicole was used to describing objects and amorphous feelings to her old best friend Lulu by referencing movies they’d seen. The brown pebbly translucent plastic that covered the lights in the bedroom and bathroom, and dark orange laminate countertops in the kitchen reminded her of 1970’s movies, like one by the director John Cassavetes, and the green bathroom countertop under the large mirror with pink glass-hooded mirror lights reminded her of the pastel candy look of Wizard of Oz and other Technicolor films. So she didn’t know how to answer questions about how she felt about the move without some sort of faltering one-sided conversation about movies, or beating around the bush about being slightly afraid of Cole. Finally, she burst out with forced happiness that she loved how easy it was to park in Monrovia, compared to all other places she’d lived, where the difficulty of parking was a recurring subject of her anxiety dreams.
“You guys are so cute. Cole mentioned parking, too. He said you guys have key cards now that open a gate to the parking lot where you have two spaces reserved just for you. You guys both have parking trauma!”
“Ha ha, well, we both grew up around a lot of chaos, so maybe the easy parking is, like, a sign of our lives getting chiller. Maybe. I don’t know! I don’t have the key card yet though, so I have been parking down the street. It actually looks like a real Fall season there, like the leaves on the trees are orange and red and they’re crunchy on the ground when you walk to the apartment. It’s really, really pretty. You should come over sometime.”
“So funny! Cole was actually texting Joseph we could come over tonight for like a little housewarming,” which sounded cozy and fun to Nicole, despite her deep dislike of Joseph – she felt that, whereas Cole was around seventy-five percent caring, twenty-five percent scary, Joseph’s percentages were the other way around.
She’d always remember this as a charmed night, the most tangible evidence being that Joseph showed up wearing a t-shirt of their mutual favorite classic rock band, The Doors. He carried the temporary truce further when he brought out a bottle of Southern Comfort, thought to be lead singer Jim Morrison’s favorite alcohol, at least until he moved to Paris and was often photographed drinking from bottles of wine.
Once they’d all had a few rounds of whiskey and Coke, Nicole became brave enough to suggest an activity, trying to contact the spirits of the dead with the ouija board she’d used as a bedroom wall decoration in her teens. There were no items of furniture yet, but Cole’s aunt Lilit had given him several oversized decorative pillows, and they sat on the brown carpeted living room floor, each on a pillow, with the ouija board between them on a pillow of its own. They tried to reach the spirit of Jim Morrison, but the plastic piece they had their fingertips on and that was supposed to move if there were any spirits in the room did not move at all. However, as they waited silently for a sign from the deceased musician, who’d called himself the lizard king, Anne-Marie excitedly mouthed, “Oh my god,” and pointed to a lizard crawling across the living room wall.
Everyone was in the tingly first blush of drunkenness, and had implicitly agreed to believe in the possibility of a life after death at least for the duration of the game, so the coincidence of a lizard appearing as they’d summoned the lizard king caused a current of amazed laughter. Then Nicole put her hand out, palm up, next to the lizard, and it crawled into it and up her arm, resting on her upper arm for a moment before skittering away. This caused a burst of riotous laughter that left her feeling warm and momentarily like the star. Later, she’d read that lizards dislike scents, and since she never wore any perfume, maybe that’s why the skittish little creature with the unfairly bland species name of “Western Fence Lizard'' (it moved so mechanically and had such an intricate pattern on its skin, she felt she was in the presence of something both prehistoric and synthetic, like a dinosaur with hand-beaded skin) had decided to crawl into her open hand that night.
Suffering from a health condition that most of her doctors attributed to her having been born several weeks premature, Nicole was frail, and often wore herself out, leaving the fun early without anyone having to think that her feelings had been hurt or that she was being rude, because people expected it of her. Now she went to lie down on the blanket-covered mattress on the floor in the bedroom, content to listen. She fell asleep open-handed with a lizard asleep in her palm. She wondered if it was a new lizard or the same one from earlier, Jim Morrison. But in fact, the sleeping lizard was part of her dream. In her dream she decided it was the earlier lizard’s child.
***
There were also the wild dogs. They looked like no other dog she had ever seen. They were uniformly mangy, with roughly the same color of fur.
“Those are coyotes!” an old-timer would later, laughingly insist.
“No…I don’t think so,” she would respond, respectfully, incorrectly, “I don’t think these were coyotes I used to see, and it was only for a little while anyway – I never see them anymore. But I did a report on coyotes in middle school, and that’s not what these were.
“My old boyfriend Cole used to come home later than me on Thursdays. I would take my time driving home from work. I liked to park on one of the rich streets on the foothills, where it suddenly changes from apartments to old mansions with tall hedges, so I felt like nobody could see me when I smoked weed in my car. I’d watch for the dogs.”
She watched them walk slowly together up and down the very middle of the streets, scattering then reclaiming the space; she’d assumed they were a pack of dangerous hunters, but they appeared to be slowly starving.
***
She was on four different medications, and needed them refilled soon after they moved there, necessitating a familiarity with the nearest pharmacy that took her insurance; it was within walking distance, the convenience of which she was grateful for. They walked there together the following Friday afternoon, past the high school with its lush green track and a shopping complex with a Spaghetti Factory.
Rex Drugs contained a permanent half-aisle of Christian merchandise, including knick-knacks, home decorations and bed sheets with crosses on them that made her feel unwelcome, because when she was younger, she tried to become invisible by wearing all black, but instead it made her a target for the group of Christian bullies who used to call her a devil worshiper, sometimes sneaking up and pouring an entire small carton of milk on her, to purify her, they’d joked. It was October, however, and the shelves of a whole aisle were overburdened with heaps of merchandise emblazoned with devils and witches. They decided to buy some decorations for the apartment, Cole eager to decorate the apartment for her while she rested once they got back home from the walk. There was a bed frame and a small table with a TV on it in the bedroom by this time. After the length of a show, he told her everything was ready, and she opened the door to find their living room decorated in black streamers, with two dozen orange and black inflated balloons on the floor, gently undulating as one surreal, squeaking ephemeral body in response to even the slightest movement. He had hung large paper decorations of a witch on a broom with the moon in the background, a ghost, a black cat and a Jack-o-lantern. She thought it looked great and was already planning to write about it in her diary, when he made her feel even more excited by suggesting they have Anne-Marie and Joe over again, so they could see the place with furniture and the decorations.
“Oh my gosh, yes!” she responded.
However, her moments of happiness were usually followed by a recoil, as in this instance, when Cole turned angrily to her and asked, “Do you think that you can flirt a little less this time?”
“What do you mean? Me, flirting with Joseph? He’s not even my type. I don’t think he can even read.”
“So let me get this straight – you think you’re better than him?”
***
In November she was fired. There had been something disarming about her boss the first time she met her, in the way she reminded her of her mom, causing her to fear and try unsuccessfully to impress her. Both of the older women wore rings on every finger – this was a detail Nicole thought must signal some whimsy of the soul. One morning in the parking lot the supervisor remarked, “Are you okay, Nicole? You don’t really seem like yourself lately. I’ve been noticing it for a few days now.”
She’d felt cornered and the urge to overshare rose up in her; either this woman was inappropriately nosy or genuinely oversolicitous, and this sacrifice of Nicole’s cherished privacy might be a gift that would afford her some job security or even kindness.
So Nicole responded, “Well, I don’t really believe in psychology, but supposedly I am bipolar, which basically means I have, like, these intense ups and downs. So maybe you are just picking up on that? Though honestly, I’ve been feeling, like, great lately.”
The boss, whose gossamer white perm and pastel skirt suits gave her the look of a “church lady” Halloween costume had slight palsy, and the slight shaking of her head in unison with the horrified look on her face made it look like, “Oh no, oh no.”
From then on, she honed in on Nicole as the untrustworthy employee to be monitored, whose work she routinely went over in a way she didn’t the other employees.
Another diagnosis she’d been given, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, meant that she felt compelled to fight whatever instruction she was given by an authority figure. She felt this to be absurdly unfair. Instead, she was eager to wholly trust whomever's care she was placed in, and when the master was unjust, she loathed them with a passion that no other student in the classroom could ever feel to their own teacher and no other employee to their boss. Nicole behaved furtively, mutinously, feeling both painfully guilty and betrayed for having been forced into the role of an untrustworthy subordinate, and it was a blessing to be released from the woman’s presence, especially as she would be receiving unemployment benefits.
It was a time of nurturing from Cole that she could always look back on as an example of why she’d stayed. Having money of her own and living with a young man who had enough money for himself and for her as well was the second most novel thing about being on her own, after the newfound semi privacy. She’d made money for years, since her first job as a grocery store bagger at fourteen, but had always had to share it. Now, Cole enjoyed buying dinner for them every night. They often had Armenian take-out from a place that had appeared in one of her many favorite movies; it had been on her commute home from work and she would miss seeing it with her own two eyes, but was glad to still be able to taste the deeply fatty tasting garlic sauce they slathered on steaming chicken and shawarma meat that they piled onto full moons of pita bread and ate on bar stools on the little patio area many nights in the concentrated time span between first getting fired and the holidays.
The bar stools were from the nearby Target, and had cost only $17 each, but were sturdy and looked the same as two bar stools that Nicole had seen Lulu buy at an antique furniture swap meet for $40 each (that’s why she asked Cole to get those ones). They didn’t have a table set up, so they passed the Styrofoam take-out boxes between the two of them. On a recent whim, she’d decided it would be cool if they drank bottles of sake with dinner, and sometimes he indulged her; there were cup-holders on the chairs.
The patio itself was just a small area of cement boxed in by a bleached brown paint-peeling wooden gate. They lived a block away from a freeway overpass (on which the cars whooshed a white noise lullaby for her at bed-time), close enough to spy on the drivers as they stopped at the ramp signal on red lights during rush hour when she brought the binoculars out. That was fun. The backdrop to this was the San Gabriel Mountains, looking purple against pink at sunset. She had long felt self-critical about her reliance on having the television on all the time, whether it was to entertain her or keep her company. It was a lifelong habit, but now that she was starting her own life, she wanted to break bad old habits, and when her unemployment started, he helped her watch less TV by making sure they either had dinner out on the patio, with music from his phone playing, or at a restaurant.
They went to the Friday Fair and Farmer’s Market two more times. She had to play-act through the farce of enjoying the Candy Shoppe again, but those times, she enjoyed the quaintness of the misunderstanding, and being the misunderstood woman in a couple who accepts the misguided gesture gracefully, like adult couples in movies sometimes. There was a rockabilly band playing music in the gazebo once. The other time, the library had its doors wide open and its lights on, which was unusual. It was the Friday before Thanksgiving, and the library was open for a special reason, to display the dioramas that elementary school children had made of the first Thanksgiving. It would be the first time she came to the library where she would spend so much time later on. That Friday night they were there looking at the Monrovia school kids’ dioramas, she felt thankful to have the bench at the library; there was a sharp pain in her chest that made her dizzy.
The other dinner routine they usually had during this interlude was at a sushi place across the street from them, in an outdoors shopping center. Though situated right along the edge of the parking lot with just a narrow walkway between a whitewashed bumper block and the restaurant’s front door, inside, the restaurant felt fortified not only against the exhaust and ugly sight of other people’s cars, but against reality in general, by the screen depicting cherry blossom trees that covered the windows, mostly, though the ambient light was also enchanting; the room was dimly lit by chandeliers dangling complex loops of red plastic beads, casting shadow partners. She thought that the servers and chefs there seemed to like Cole and her well enough even though Cole sometimes rubbed servers the wrong way by, in this case, asking skeptical questions about the freshness of the fish the first time they went there to eat. However, he always tipped generously and they dined there at least ten times.
One time, the waitress bringing their food quipped, “And here are some salmon rolls for the love birds,” as she placed their dish in front of them. The special attention was flattering. Another time, however, Nicole watched that waitress bring out a bowl heaped with two large scoops of green tea ice cream to a couple who’d already paid their bill.
“Excuse me,” she heard the woman say, "we didn't pay for this.”
“Free ice cream for the lovebirds,” the waitress replied.
Hurt, Nicole flagged the waitress down to ask why they’d never gotten any free ice cream.
“It’s no big deal,” the waitress irritably replied, “I guess I’ll go back to the kitchen and get some for you too.”
***
Nicole held two contradictory superstitions about what preceded, or possibly caused, cataclysmically bad events. The first was that they were caused by God or fate as an over-correction of an event that’d been too happy, as when Cole’s gift of decorating the house for Halloween led to him starting one of his unwinnable arguments.
Other times, she noticed that a significantly bad event was portended by something more minor, like the waitress who didn’t want to give ice cream to her; the day after that happened, she felt a horrendous pain in both her back and chest. As she tried to stand up from the chair at her little desk that was placed rather awkwardly facing the rear wall of the kitchenette’s small dining area, she passed out, and woke up in bed, in a dim room at Monrovia General Hospital, with a tube down her throat so she couldn’t say anything when she opened her eyes and saw Cole standing at the foot of the bed; he looked terrified.
She was moved from the small curtained area that had been hers in the ICU to a spacious private room the third day after the aneurysm repair surgery she’d undergone. She’d had her chest opened, her heart exposed, her blood run through a machine, she was pretty sure, that made it cold and then put it back inside her body. She’d read some of the details they’d printed out about it.
The last time she had surgery, it was at the Los Angeles General Hospital, in the most dangerous part of downtown. The hospital bed she stayed in for over a week (actually begging them to let her leave) was one of five in a row, in a column of four, in a big room with no televisions. Despite the security guards posted at the entrances and the sparse medical staff who attended to the patients overnight, she felt afraid not to be on-guard herself from around eleven pm until it got light, even foregoing pain medication one night in an effort to stay alert. As soon as she’d stepped outside that hospital, where the front entranceway pavement was marked with polka dots of the flattened, chewed up, spit out gum of decades of strangers, she saw two older men engaged in a fist fight.
She doesn’t clearly remember anything from her stay in the hospital in Monrovia until her second night in the private room, when she awoke abruptly, feeling more cognizant than she had been since she got there. She was nonetheless disoriented enough to wonder if it was snowing outside, even though she’d been sweating in a cotton skirt and t-shirt just a few days ago. She thought of snow as she woke because of the cold, bright light that came into the room through the small opening in the curtains. It was such bright moonlight that she had at first imagined it must have been reflecting off the snow, as in scenes from the cartoon version of A Christmas Carol that she’d seen playing on television earlier that day. She quickly realized, however, that the light was probably from the parking lot. Still, she wanted to make sure, so she painstakingly pushed herself into a sitting position, not yet considering how to unhook herself from the wires connecting her to a machine next to the bed, instead transfixed by the sight of her own legs dangling off the side of the bed.
“Sorta looks like you’re glowing, doesn’t it?” asked the nurse who’d appeared in the room, reading Nicole’s mind. “Tonight’s the supermoon,” she continued, whispering. “It’s when the moon's orbit is closest to Earth at the same time that it’s full. That’s why you look so bright.”
“Oh. It’s beautiful.”
They exchanged these words as the nurse guided Nicole to the bathroom, because she assumed that’s why Nicole was trying to get up on her own. The kind, burgundy-haired woman stood outside the small private bathroom, babysitting both Nicole and the IV pole she was connected to like a sister for a couple days, so Nicole made herself pee and then crawl back in bed, never looking out the window at the special moon. That was good. She could always use her imagination when picturing what the small hospital grounds and surrounding residential area must have looked like bathed in the supermoon’s luminescent glow.
When Cole picked her up after six days to take her home, he appeared with an aura of equanimity about him that she was grateful for as he pretended to be a responsible adult to the nurse that wheeled her to the car. He had volunteered eagerly to stay home with her for the first two weeks when the doctor told them she should be accompanied day and night. Additionally, a nurse would come by for a half hour each day for a month.
The first few days, he patiently helped her get out of bed, walk, stand and eat, reverting to the way he used to treat her during their courtship, jokingly, without requiring anything in return.
“Hey funny face, no cocaine for a week,” he quipped in passing the second day, tousling her hair like a big brother when he saw that she’d spilled sugar for her tea on the table. That night when she was getting ready for bed, he said he was going to sing her a lullaby, and instead he started to sing the first few lines of a song by Britney Spears that he remembered her and some friends of hers singing mockingly in class back in high school. For some reason, though, he lied when she mentioned having seen him at the hospital.
He was unused to tending to even his own body, so instructions such as “Wash and dry the wound” didn’t carry the intended connotation of gentleness to him – he used the rose-perfumed soap they had in the bathroom, which stung the open parts of the wound. He did wash the area gently, but then dried it vigorously, getting blood on her favorite hand-towel, which was made of stiff, thin fabric.
There was a spiral bound informational booklet about postoperative experiences and care that a hospital employee had handed directly to Cole the day they’d left the hospital. She’d read the booklet first herself, and felt comforted by the information, apart from being deeply troubled by one of the prohibitions for the fragile first month – anal sex. Anal sex, it said, could upset the incisions, or put too much pressure on the surgery site; though Cole felt an aversion to it, she worried nonetheless that this instruction would stir a sense of incredulity within him.
During her recovery, she got to sleep under a pile of quilts on the living room’s comfortable sectional four-piece sofa, rearranged into a big, cushiony square mattress. She felt like a character in a children’s story about maybe a slumber party or a kid with chicken pox. That was the room the lizards favored. It seemed like a new one showed up each night; their sparse black bodies occasionally flitting across the walls that glowed with flashing television colors from the near-silent, universally accepting universe of the kid’s movies she had on DVD. Very occasionally, a lizard would see her see it and then freeze, staring at her staring at it – the lizards seemed to be magical thinkers, as she was, hoping that if they waited it out, they’d just disappear, out of sight of what might be a predator.
It was not long before he wanted things back to the way they were before she went into the hospital. Usually, when they were aroused at the same time, any old resentments or barriers fell away, and they snuggled and spoke easily, suggestively, at the best of times of course. She was not entirely sure whether she was in limbo or reality the night Cole helped her out of the bathroom and said, “Here, come lie in bed with me a little bit, babe.” She tentatively slipped under the covers. He hugged her from behind, pet her hair softly the way she liked, and started to have sex with her.
“Wait, wait,” she shuddered. “I’m not supposed to.”
“Just relax,” he commanded, “I’ll make it quick.”
“Please not yet. We’re not supposed to.”
“Fuck, just relax. That book only said no anal. You’ll be fine. I’ll be quick.”
***
After that, her body language in his presence naturally reformed. When she was still accepting his help, his touch caused a sudden tensity in her muscles so strong it hurt her wound; she pretended it was pridefulness that made her want to take care of her hygiene and opening or closing doors and drawers independent of him, letting herself slouch, shuffle, grunt gutteraly, imagining herself a sick animal, though not self-pityingly, more with a sense of relief that she’d transitioned into a more visceral understanding of her own mortality. She could not spend any more time with him.
He usually stayed out past nine pm on the nights leading up to Christmas. She slept in one of three mutely colored oversized flannel pajama sets from his aunt Lilit. She made sure to have the lights off already. There would only be the colorful light of the TV, which he had always hated about her. She made sure to leave the screen door open for the lizards and pile the quilts over her warm, bony body so might not see her.
“I don’t want you to be alone for Christmas,” he told her, “and my family is going to be so fucking pissed at me if I move out while you are still so weak.”
“Tell them I begged you to. Tell them I was crazy as always, or that in the end, it turned out I was gay, after all. Please Cole, if you ever loved me, just leave me alone.”
Christmas morning, she heard him outside, talking and laughing with Dahlia. He opened the door to the apartment looking refreshed and happy, carrying hot chocolate from Starbucks for her with the air of it being a tradition, though she’d never had it before. That was in one hand, and the handles of three overflowing gift bags from Lilit and Anne-Marie were in his other. The liquid was so hot, it hurt her chest to swallow. She managed to smile but asked, “Thanks for bringing the gifts. This doesn’t mean you’re not moving out at the end of the month, does it?”
“No. Shit. I was just trying to do something nice.”
“I know. Thanks. Are you going to stay over?”
“No, there’s a party at Anne-marie and Joseph’s place. Hey? Don’t worry. I’ll be out on the thirty-first. Here’s a hundred dollars, and I brought you some weed.”
It was immaterial. That was practically the last conversation they ever had.
***
There were twenty-two units in the apartment building and only three sets of washers and dryers in the little laundry room; Nicole assumed that’s why a photocopied sign on the bulletin board instructed residents to take up only one washer and dryer at a time. When she saw Dahlia taking wet clothing out of both washing machines the next day, the injustice of the apartment manager breaking her own rules inordinately upset her, and she said, “So, are you doing someone else’s laundry, too?”
She was being combative with her now because she once saw Dahlia speak sharply with someone else about the laundry room rules, but she was also on steroids.
“Oh, yeah,” Dahlia replied, “The office put those signs up. It makes sense on the weekends when everyone’s home and trying to do their laundry before the school and work week start back up, but it’s not usually a problem on weekdays.”
“What about stay-at-home Moms?”
Dahlia appeared not to take her seriously enough to engage in the argument Nicole realized she was trying to start, the exertion of which was so dizzying she had to lean for a moment on the extended handle of the rolling suitcase she transported her dirty laundry in. She actually looked concerned for Nicole.
“You know there’s the other laundry room, right? I mean it’s only one washing machine in there and a big utility sink – maybe I never showed you? It’s that building that looks like a little shack, but with windchimes in the window.”
Nicole was completely unfamiliar with the little building Dahlia mentioned, though one had only to look up as they walked to the back of the building to see it, so she must have been looking for lizards or down at her feet when she walked to her car, or past it at the mountains. It was indeed a small structure, and more glass than wall; the one solid wall blocked the only ugly part of their view, the backside of a huge gas station with a drive-through car wash and a beige Staples superstore. The north-facing window faced the mountains, the glass panes of the eastern window sidled up against the leaves of a large old tree with dark green heart-shaped leaves. The other window let her watch the buildings’ tenants come and go from their parked cars to their homes.
From the last days of December through the first few of January, the weather in Monrovia ranged between seventy five and seventy eight degrees. If you looked outside, you’d see the blue skies and palm trees that, in her own words a few months later, she’d always sort of thought of as property of Hollywood that’d followed her there. These were the days she was too physically weak to take care of herself, but she felt genuinely relieved to have her own apartment. Her old best friend did not respond to any of her emails. Her dad was the reason she didn’t have a cellphone. She did feel lonely, and hungry, and fragile, and scared of the wild arrhythmia of her heart, but she was free. During those days, she followed the daily nurse’s instructions to sit in sunlight for a half hour a day, up in the treehouse-like laundry room, intently watching and listening to the neighbors come and go from their parked cars to their apartments. She regarded this pastime as a similar, yet healthier version of watching a movie or show alone indoors, because these were real people. She tried with all her might to drum up some interest in them, and hoped for a future.
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