The Elizas: A Novel(37)
But then, two days later, while Dot was in an American literature lecture, a grad student called for her in the doorway. “There’s someone here for you downstairs, and they say it’s urgent,” he said in a stoned voice. Dot walked out of the school slowly, afraid it would be her stepfather. Maybe her mother was sick, or even had died. But when her vision adjusted, she gasped.
It was Dorothy. Really her. She was home.
ELIZA
WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, I get a text from Bill that says, simply, We need to see you. Can you come for dinner? Hours ago, I would have blown it off. They’re just going to shove the Oaks Wellness Center idea down my throat some more. But after what happened just outside the Cat Show, maybe I need to go to the Oaks. I certainly need something.
Because I am too shaky to drive, a Hyundai with an Uber sticker in the window drops me off at my mother’s place. The house is on North Beachwood Drive, a snake of a street in the Hollywood Hills. It’s a circular, shell-pink bungalow that, when we moved in, reminded me of a cupcake; apparently, in the 1930s, it belonged to a magician who’d died attempting an underwater lock-breaking stunt. I’d heard that the magician had installed a secret door that led to a private lair, but though I’d spent days knocking on the walls, looking for openings, I never found it.
I loved the place when I first moved in with my mother—we’d bought it for a steal at a sheriff’s sale; it was haunted, apparently, which is why no one else wanted it. The building was carved up into lots of small, stucco-walled, womb-like rooms, each crisscrossed with cobwebs and stinking of mold. Dusty, ghost-shaped slipcovers were draped over the sofas, which apparently came with the place, though they were so filthy we immediately put them on the curb for the garbageman. A giant brass candelabrum stood in the middle of the dining room table, each red candle melted into pools of bloody wax. There were gory, dark-red stains on the upstairs Oriental rug that I prayed were blood. A pergola in the backyard looked like it had been chopped up with a dull axe. There was a little cemetery out back filled with little stones marked secrets; I dug them up and found no graves. Shaky script was on the inside of the closet walls in the bedroom that became mine. All of the handwritten messages were facts about death: within three days of dying, the enzymes that digested your dinner begin to eat you. What a remarkable person who lived here before us, I’d thought with glee. We could have been best friends.
A friend I would have remembered. Because you remember friends, don’t you, even ones from long ago? And you remember boyfriends, no matter how inconsequential? How could I have forgotten an entire boyfriend? I remembered random boys I pulled into the dissection room to make out with in high school. I remembered a sickly boy named Darius who felt me up on a school bus trip to the La Brea Tar Pits. And yet a whole boyfriend has been wiped from my hard drive. Was this possible?
“Oh, him,” I’d said to Kiki at the Cat Show, quickly, urgently, to cover up my distress. “Sorry, he just looks so different these days.” I’d dramatically slapped the side of my head. “Brain fart!”
Inside, though, I was panicking. I’d already forgotten the name Kiki had told me. All I remembered was that it was long, complicated, and pretentious. My tumor was definitely back. That had to be it. The doctors hadn’t dug the whole thing out. After the procedure, I was told I might forget moments, names, faces, details . . . but this seemed bigger than anything like that. This was an entire person.
Kiki had looked at me with concern. “I actually never met him, you know. I only recognized him from your Facebook page.”
I frowned. “I don’t have a Facebook page.”
“Sure you do. I looked at it after we went to the bar that first time after workshop. There were pictures of you and Leonidas on it. You were both wearing UCLA sweatshirts. You looked really happy.”
I didn’t know whether to continue to rebuke this claim or go along with what she was saying in an attempt to appear in control of my reality. I decided on the latter. “Oh. Uh, yeah. Well, I’ve been trying to put him out of my mind.”
She cleared her throat. “He wasn’t . . . abusive, was he?”
Her guess was as good as mine, but because I didn’t want her to worry, I smiled confidently. “No, no, nothing like that. It’s just alarming when you hear someone talking about you across a room.”
She frowned. “What was he saying?”
“Forget it,” I said. There was no way I could mention that stuff about Palm Springs and the cops. Then I touched the hem of her sweatshirt. “That’s quite a fashion statement.”
Kiki stroked the cat’s puffy face. “Yeah. I ran into this breeder my parents used to be friends with, and we got to talking. She sells these on Etsy for eighty dollars. I couldn’t say no.”
And then she’d blathered on about the MacDonalds’ latest Abyssinian and how the winning Maine Coon looked like an asshole and had let out some putrid gas. I thought the Leonidas thing had blown over, but she gave me nervous glances when we got in the car and headed for home. When I went to my bedroom, I heard her whispering downstairs to Steadman. I can only imagine what she said. Eliza forgot her ex! Is that normal?
As soon as I bolted the door to my bedroom, I pulled up Facebook and typed in my name. I have a fan page for The Dots; it has 834 likes. There are no pictures on the page besides the cover art and my headshot—certainly none of this Leonidas person and me in UCLA sweatshirts. But if Kiki really did look me up on Facebook shortly after we met, I wouldn’t have had the Dots page yet—I hadn’t even finished the novel.