The Elizas: A Novel(62)
Dorothy set down her wineglass. “Do my stories bore you?”
Dot swallowed hard.
“Am I just some windbag?”
Dot touched the tines of the fork, wobbled the spoon.
“Because I thought I was important to you. You’re awfully important to me. I thought you’d want to hear this stuff. But if you don’t, we can end this evening right now.”
Dot hated Marlon, suddenly. He’d shoved a spike between her and Dorothy. Who cared if she twisted some details of her time overseas? Who cared if she told a pack of lies? It didn’t mean she was evil. It didn’t mean she was hurting anyone. She gave so much love; she was the most selfless person Dot had ever met. Marlon was being narrow-minded, perhaps as ageist as those grungy kids in the bar.
“I came back just for you,” her aunt said. “But if it’s not worth it for you, I had a good thing going in Italy. I can go right back.”
Dot’s throat was suddenly dry, and she reached for her glass and took a drink. “Please don’t.”
Dorothy nodded slowly. “Okay, then. Good.” She pointed to her water glass. “Drink. You sound hoarse.”
After that, the lights brightened, and Dot felt herself unknot. Dorothy told stories, some of her best ever, and Dot began to laugh. Her limbs turned loose, and she enjoyed the dinner. Until the nausea hit her. One minute she was at the table, then in a blink she was on the bathroom floor, half in a stall, half by the sink. “Oh, dear,” Dorothy said above her. Dot lay in the back of her aunt’s car. Dorothy’s voice floated from the driver’s seat. The lights of St. Mother Maria’s receded in the distance. “Just tell me if I’m driving too fast,” her aunt said.
Next thing she knew, it was morning again, and she was waking up in the Magnolia. Panic clutched Dot’s chest. This didn’t make sense. Here was the same headache. Here was the same nonplussing blankness.
“Just rest,” Dorothy was telling her, the old refrain.
Dot bolted up. “But I only had water last night. Nothing else.”
“It must have been food poisoning. Or maybe you’ve got the flu. I wouldn’t be surprised, living in that dirty dormitory.”
Dot didn’t feel like she had the flu. She felt hungover. She was about to say this, but then there was a knock at the door. “I bet that’s our room service!” Dorothy trilled, the ends of her poppy-printed silk kimono trailing behind her. “You’ll feel better once you’ve had some eggs.”
She whipped the door open and made a strange choking sound. Dot sat up fast, head throbbing, and watched as her aunt tried to push the door shut again. Whoever stood on the other side outmuscled her, and the door flew open, banging hard against the stopper on the wall.
Dot’s mother was backlit against the bright California sunshine. When she stood on tiptoes and saw Dot, her expression darkened and twisted.
“I am going to kill you,” she whispered, and headed straight for Dot in the bed.
ELIZA
THE DRIVE HOME is a repeat of my flight from the Palm Springs hospital except I’m in better clothes and in my messy Toyota Rav4 instead of Bill’s Porsche. I can still smell Desmond’s body spray on me as though we’ve rolled together wildly, our skin touching in all kinds of places. I peel off one of his long, silky black hairs from my pants and whip it out the open window.
After a while, the scenery along I-10 becomes familiar. To avoid post-work traffic, I get off the freeway and turn onto a busy thoroughfare in Alhambra, passing by derelict strip malls and little shacks that sell porn on VHS. After a while, the neighborhood improves, and a hospital looms ahead. I see a familiar sight and lose my breath. Stunned, I cut across four lanes of traffic into a driveway. A neon sign looms above me.
M&F Chop House.
I park in a space, suddenly shaking. The steak house rises above me, brick and stucco and concrete and real. My vision starts to swirl. When I turn clockwise, there’s St. Mother Maria’s Hospital across the street. I must have seen this out the window or in an ad and used it for the book. It looks just as I described it in The Dots.
I push the door open and look around cautiously, as if I’m expecting sirens to go off at my presence. A chunky man with red blotches on his cheeks smiles at me vacantly, then ushers me through the dining room. “This table all right?” he asks. It’s in the middle of the space. A menu sits jauntily next to an unlit candle and a small potted succulent.
I nod and collapse into the chair. It seems like a normal steak house: wood-paneled bar, framed photographs of old newspaper articles, brass plaques bearing regulars’ names on the walls. The only problem is that I know every inch of the room astonishingly well. The place even smells like how I imagined it in The Dots: meaty, saucy, like red wine and money and sex. Perhaps because all steak houses are alike?
Sizzling plates swirl by. A baseball player cracks a hit on television, and the yuppie twenty-something bankers with their whiskeys cheer. I wrack my memory: perhaps I was here with Leonidas? Perhaps with Bill and my mother? And I must have driven out this way while researching the book. How else would I know there was a hospital named St. Mother Maria’s across the street? How would I know how many floors it had, or that there was a big parking structure right next to it that was taller than the hospital itself? This isn’t a neighborhood one takes pictures of or sees on the news. This isn’t a neighborhood featured in movies, iconic and quintessential. It’s a nothing sort of neighborhood, and yet I seem to know it by heart.