We Run the Tides(48)

“Maybe I should take you back to your house,” he says.

“You drive?” I say.

“Yeah,” he says, hesitantly.

“You have a car?” I say.

“My friend does,” he says, and then looks around. The man whose hand he was holding has vanished. “Joel?” Lazlo calls out.

“Where’d he go?” I ask.

“Probably back to his wife and kids,” Lazlo says. He tries to disguise the anger in his voice but that only makes him sound angrier.

“Stay here a second,” he says.

“Okay,” I say reluctantly, as though waiting is an inconvenience. I like pretending I have someplace to be. I watch Lazlo run down the block and come back, and then run in the other direction. His torso seems unusually long, his legs small and rubbery like a centipede’s. “Joel!” he calls out. “Joel?” His dark blue Members Only jacket inflates as it gathers wind.

When he returns he looks distracted and defeated.

“Should I walk you home?” he says.

“I can’t go home,” I say.

“I’ve been in that situation,” he says.

But have you led a boy to his death? I want to ask.

Instead I say: “I’ve missed you.”

We end up taking two buses to his house, which used to be my grandma’s house before she died. Now a small herd of my Hungarian relatives live there—Lazlo, his mother, ágota (my aunt), his sister Jazmin, and another cousin, Zsolt, and his family. I’m not sure how cousin Zsolt is related to me, and there’s some ques tion in my family about whether or not he is in fact related to us. But he’s a contractor or carpenter, and helps keep the house intact.

“Will everyone be there?” I say. We’re sitting side by side on the slippery orange seats of the bus.

“I don’t know,” Lazlo says. “Some people are working. Jazmin’s knocked up,” he says.

My cousin Jazmin is twenty.

“Who was the old man outside the theater?”

“He’s not that old.”

“He was at least forty.”

“He’s thirty-four.” Lazlo grows somber. “I know him from this restaurant where I work. He’s confused.”

“You kiss him?” I ask.

“I’m not answering that,” he says.

“Does your mom know you’re gay?”

“I haven’t told her anything but I think she knows,” he says, and rests his head on the seat in front of us. “She’s always making comments about Harvey Milk,” he says to the floor of the bus.

“My dad met Mayor Feinstein once,” I say. “He said she had nice calves.”

Lazlo sits up straight and looks at me like I’m an idiot.

Lazlo’s mom, ágota, and my dad had a falling out over the kinds of things siblings usually have falling outs over: money and love. My father made money and Aunt ágota lost money. Then there was some disagreement about how their mother, my grandmother, should live. My father thought a retirement home. ágota wanted to be paid to take care of her. The argument didn’t help anyone. In the end my grandmother died anyway.

Then all my relatives who couldn’t afford their own places moved into my grandma’s house, which wasn’t big to begin with. I’ve just heard this from Lazlo. I haven’t been to the house since my grandmother passed.

We get off the bus in West Portal, and walk a few blocks through the sleepy residential neighborhood and into her small, gray house. It’s strange how many things are still the same from when my grandma was alive and living there—the clock radio by the yellow refrigerator, all the miniature ceramic dogs she collected.

From the kitchen I can look down into the rectangular garden and see that Jazmin is asleep by the apple tree. From this angle she looks so natural, like an earth mother relaxing in the garden on a sunny but crisp winter day. But Jazmin is no earth mother. Her nails have always been long and fake, her clothes black.

“You want to go say hi?” Lazlo asks.

“Nah,” I say. “I think she should sleep. I mean, she’s pregnant.”

“Yeah,” he says.

We both watch Jazmin for a moment, and I’m surprised she doesn’t wake from our collective stares.

“I’m not really sure what I’m doing here,” I say.

We play Centipede and Pac-Man. Eventually Jazmin comes inside.

“What the . . . ?” she says when she sees me but doesn’t give me a hug. I congratulate her on her pregnancy. She shrugs. Her small green eyes look even smaller now that she’s gained weight, and maybe it’s the pregnancy but her dark-blond bob looks much thicker than it used to be. The phone rings and she goes to answer it in the other room. Her gait is colt-like even though her stomach is huge. After a few minutes she comes back and looks at me strangely and for a second too long. “Let’s get that head of yours cleaned up, Eulabee,” she says.

I follow her into the bathroom. When she opens the medicine cabinet above the sink, I feel a sinking sadness in my chest. My grandma’s pink Oil of Olay moisturizer and her Pond’s cold cream are still sitting on the bottom shelf. I know the way these creams smell, and how they made my grandma’s face shiny and cool when I kissed her goodnight on the evenings I stayed over at her house.