Oola. Brittany Newell

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      “Do you think there are ghosts out here?” she asked one evening, cheek pressed to the sliding glass, a glass of wine on the floor beside her.

      “No,” I said calmly, though I thought otherwise. “Do you?”

      “Oh yeah. How could I not?” She smiled with excruciating slowness, the corners of her mouth pushing the planets out of line. “I’m a sucker for that sort of thing.”

      “Have you seen any?” I played with the fringe of a pillow. My weak heart had begun to thud, as loudly as when she undressed; perhaps this was the source of the bumps in the night.

      She shook her head. “No. But I feel them.” Her expression was deadpan.

      “And what do they feel like?”

      “That game, Telephone. Or …” She mused. “A tongue in the belly button.”

      I insisted she demonstrate, the marble-blue moon illuminating the back of her neck while the rest of her body went grainy. “Heebie jeebies,” I screamed when her tongue hit its mark.

      “There have been mornings,” she said, “when, I swear to God, I wake up with my hair braided.”

      We moved on to the topic of moths in the cupboard; they’d made a home in our unsealed cereal boxes. They died soundlessly, added crunch to our breakfast. As we spoke, they cluttered the lamps in the garden, polluting the light. How we hated those fay motherfuckers. We gazed outside at the lamps grossly strobing and plotted how best to annihilate them.

      Everything we did in the desert felt subversive to me, a classic New England romantic. Instead of romancing, we tried not to be interested in each other. Instead, we stuffed our shoes with newspaper in fear of scorpions and felt aroused by the sky (so big, so blue). Instead, I bit her nipples until they bled and came on her chest and we both mixed our hands in the fluids, half-smiling. In this landscape that felt limitless, we were equally curious to see how far we could go, who would be the first to cry uncle, to get hurt and not find it sexy. A moment when I felt myself tipping was when I asked, somewhat reflexively, mouth full of her, “What feels good?” and she tilted her head back and said happily, “Everything!” and I was struck with so much tenderness that I couldn’t make a joke, couldn’t speak, all I wanted to do was embrace her, say thank you. But before I could, she put my whole fist in her mouth and garbled, “Chubby bunny.”

      We lived like this for twenty-one magic days, until the night she rolled over and said, “My mom would think that I’m a prostitute.” She chuckled from deep within. “Like, literally, a prostitute.”

      It was a full moon, and the desert throbbed with little lives, innumerable transactions taking place just outside the sliding doors, ajar.

      “I haven’t given you money,” I said, too stupid to realize how stupid I sounded.

      She smiled and traced a spiral on her thigh. “Not explicitly, no.”

      I sat up, confused. “That’s not fair.”

      She traced her nails over my nipples. “Life’s not fair,” she murmured, completely unfazed. “Yabba dabba doo.” There it hung, our first cliché as real lovers. I could picture them accumulating, like glass balls on a Christmas tree.

      I leaned forward, wiping my mouth. “What do your parents do?”

      Here was the crux. She paused, and I could see that she was weighing her options. Something outside screamed, just once. To answer would be to tear down the partition we’d carefully built, to let me in deep without a clear exit.

      She switched on the bedside lamp and sat up. There were bruises forming on her breasts, yellow blobs, our poor rendering of the California poppies that dotted the highways. “My dad was a roadie for metal bands. Now he sells jewelry and rocks. My mom is a hostess at the Gold Rush casino.” She laughed. “Have you heard of it?”

      “No.”

      “Didn’t think so.”

      Then, without bothering to put on clothes or wash her mouth out, hands folded patiently over her lightly creased stomach, she proceeded to give me the Story of Her Life, something she’d clearly recited many times and tweaked into a monologue she could rattle off with eyes half-closed. As she spoke, I felt funny; I nodded along, though my pulse was racing. Up until that point, I’d assumed she came from money. Something about her quietness, her way of leaning back, her queenly limbs, bespoke privilege, or perhaps I’d been dense enough to associate her long blond beauty, the sort that I fell for, with good breeding, good luck. I found myself scanning her body for remnants of hardship, for giveaways (her quietness evoking resilience? Her thin arms the result of PB&J for three meals? Her masochism really a familial relation to pain?) that I’d previously been too besotted to notice. The white lines of scar tissue on her thigh caught the light. Where before she’d been a twist, a bit of newness in my life, I was watching her rapidly become something more—a destination, perhaps. A landscape. I blinked and tried to listen. The cunt I thought I’d come to know was suddenly a tunnel; I was standing at the mouth. The desert clatter fell away. I didn’t hear the coyotes that night.

      “Papa was a rolling stone,” she said, then cracked up. I smiled weakly. She wiped her eyes. “I always used to say that. It’s kinda true: He was on the road a lot of the time, and he’s always been obsessed with rocks. Hence the jewelry business. He makes them into necklaces. Now he drives up and down the coast, selling his rocks at flea markets. He’s happy, I think. He was happy then too. He’s a pretty carefree dude, my dad. If you saw him in a bar, you might think he’s a Hells Angel or something, but once you get him talking, he’s totally harmless. He remembers everyone’s name, their birthstone too. He and my mom were drifters—you know, a bit harder than hippies; they met at a forty-eight-hour Beltane party, both tripping. According to Dad, he was starstruck. Mom was wearing rubber pants so tight she couldn’t sit down; he says that’s why they danced all night. I saw him probably three times a month, and those were always good times. It’s not like he was trying to get away from my mom and me; it was just part of his job. We had Marilyn Manson over for dinner a few times. He told my parents I was the most self-possessed ten-year-old he’d ever encountered. I always remembered that.

      “I grew up in a dinky town north of L.A., just around the corner from Neverland Ranch. You know, Michael Jackson’s place. That was our town’s one and only claim to fame; everyone’s parents either didn’t work or worked far away. My mom drove across the border into Nevada every single day for work. Sometimes she slept over at the casino, which was also a hotel. She would come home smelling like a totally different person: twenty different types of perfume. I think she and I would have been close, if she’d had the time. Sometimes we hung out on weekends, and we’d fill out our birth charts; most of the time, though, if she was home, she made a beeline for the shower, asked me how school was, asked Grandma how I was, didn’t listen to her answer, and then went to bed. She slept all day Sunday, her one day off. At a certain point I think we both realized we had nothing to talk about, so she clung to the idea of me as a good student. You should be a lawyer, O, she always told me; I don’t know why. Go to college. Don’t stay here. As if I could anyway. But so long as I kept my grades up, I could get away with murder.

      “When I was nine, my grandma moved in with us, allegedly to keep an eye on me when Mom and Dad were working. But all she ever did was watch TV and yell at me. She’s the only person I’ve ever hated. She told my mom I was bad news, mostly because I stole her cigarettes. She was too senile to prove it was me. I always thought grandparents were supposed to know how to cook, but the only thing СКАЧАТЬ