Form.a.tion

     When I wake, I want to sleep again. A name ticks across the front of my mind. Jenny Agutter. Jenny Agutter. Agutter. Agutter. My hip starts to ache so I turn over. I fight to keep my eyes shut. When I finally open them, I stretch like a cat, back bent, arms outstretched. Coffee. Waffle. Couch. There’s a flimsy blanket that I drape over my legs. Again, I close my eyes. 

     “How is your morning so far,” asks the driver when I am on my way to work. I notice his skin. It is dark against the zip-up soccer sweatshirt he is wearing. Bright green with gold letters sewn down the arm. Brasil. His voice, his accent is beautiful. I tell him I do nothing with my mornings. I mention the Chinese and their calisthenics, the Japanese and their natural inclination for good habit formation. 

     “I just don’t have any discipline,” I say. He smiles, laughs.

     “I tell you a story,” he says. “My wife, well, she passed three years ago...she get up every day and four kids...,” he turns his head slightly, “No stomach,” and, with a flat hand, he makes a motion over his body. 

     “Four kids and she stretching and doing her exercising...every day. And I ask, ‘why do you do this?’ She say, I grow up in the projects. I look across the street and I see those Chinese women getting up eeev-ery morning and they stretching and doing their exercises. I guessed they were doing something right’.” He laughed. 

     “She did it every day.” He laughed again. I wanted to ask how his wife died. He mentioned what he’d read that day. How the Mars rover has a 22 minute delay in communication, that it had to land, sight unseen. I relayed the announcement of the detection of gravitational waves thanks to the merging of two black holes.

     When I get to the store, I grab a cup of coffee, unlock the door, place the vintage Brown Jordan chairs out front. It takes twelve trips. I settle into one of the Wegner wishbone chairs at the Eames table. By the time Nam arrives, my heart feels like it’s struggling to beat. She walks in like she owns the place, dropping her small, black purse on the walnut rocking chair, walking towards the bouquet of flowers at the front.

     “It was my birthday,” I tell her. 

     “Ooohh. These are beautiful. Very beautiful. Very special.”

     “I know,” I say. I got lost in them when they arrived. I’d never seen flowers like that. I loved the green, bulbous things that looked like hairy balls. 

     “I don’t do anything with my morning. I have no discipline,” I tell her.

     “Oh. No good.” She shakes her head. Her hair looks freshly cut and curled. “You must get up, greet the day.” She turns her head back, raises her arms. 

     “You go for walk, greet the sun. Come home. Make one egg and avocado. Coffee home. Not out. This too expensive,” she says as she points to my cup of coffee. “Your eyes sparkle. You make yourself beautiful. You make good energy and then you follow it.” She looks up, raises her arms above her head, making a fluttering motion with her hands. She continues. “I walk in the mountains. You know this? I live on Tica. I walk. It is a good walk.”

She picks up a pen and turns the yellow pad towards her. 

     “It is like this.” She draws one arc, then another and another so it forms an S. “You get sun, shadow, sun,” she says. “It is good.”

     “You walk? You walk with me?” she asks. When she smiles, she looks so Chinese, I think. 

     “You must form good habits,” she says.

    Later, when I am talking to my mother on the phone, I ask her why the Japanese have such a natural discipline.

     “Oh...it’s inculcated since they are babies...” She pauses. “Sorry, hon.”

city bright, city light, city dark, city night

      

     Sitting on the curb on Main St. in my hometown, a boy looked up, stared off into the night and said, because our bodies contained similar elements as those found in stardust, our awareness of ourselves meant the universe was contemplating itself. 

“Isn’t that neat?” he asked. 

“I guess,” I said.

      City scene: On the 110, I spot a large structure, all i-beams, shrouded in black scrim. A large section flutters open to reveal a massive Catterpillar anchored at a treacherous angle atop a pile of waste fifty feet high. The arm of the machine rises up and sweeps down, violently scooping material from one area to another. Bits of trash waft slowly through the air. The scene is gone. But it stays with me. I will revisit this scene, I think, take a closer look. Watch the horror. 

     City scene: I am lost and I give up. At a stoplight, I look to the right and scan the facade of an autobody shop. Nothing interesting here. I see the gaping holes of the open garages, grime and dirt everywhere. But no people. It’s hot. The sign is wood and faded with blue lettering. And then they appear, like shapes in those 3D images. You crossed your eyes a little and looked at the picture as you would something at a great distance. If you were lucky, you were rewarded with some dumb scene, a couple of giraffes or some palm trees. There, peppering the facade, were cages upon cages of small, bright birds, fluttering, chirping. Affixed to the side of the building at different heights, I hadn’t noticed them at first. There were at least fifteen of them, filled with birds. Yellows, blues, greens, flitting about.

     City scene: Crime scene tape stretches across the boulevard, across six lanes. It’s the longest running length of tape I’ve ever seen. Crime Scene. Crime Scene. Crime Scene, it says over and over again and over again. Three male cops are eating, wrappers littering the hood of their vehicle. The female cop walks towards us and says we cannot get into our apartment. I am annoyed with S. for trying to follow the rules. “C’mon,” I say and start off towards a driveway, not our own. Under cover of darkness, save for the far-reaching radius of a motion-sensor light, we scamper across a few low-slung roofs, and jump down into the back of our building. We are home. We do not leave for the rest of the night. For once, it is quiet and still, the din of traffic having died down to nothing. In the morning, the tape and the cops are gone. In their place are wandering investigators in search of details and witnesses. Good-looking, local news anchors show up. There is a march. The story goes like this. A man was waving down police. His hand was wrapped in a towel. Police thought it was a gun. They shot him. In the back. In the head. During the march, people had gray towels in their hands. They were swirling them in the air. 

     City scene: the corner of Sunset and Hollywood. I see two cops standing near their car. They are looking at a man who is packing up his belongings. He thought he could spend the night at the side of an electrical box. He was wrong. He swiftly folds up his clothes, patting them a few times when he’s done. And then, quite suddenly, he’s on the balls of his feet, hands raised in the air, pelvis thrust forward, hips moving in a controlled, precise motion from side-to-side. His moves are illuminated by the cold white, light of a street lamp. And just as suddenly, the outburst is over. He leans over his belongings and continues packing. The cops get in their car and drive away. I laugh out loud.

The Price of Things

      “How much do you think I paid for these bananas?” She asks, holding them up.

“A dollar,” I say, definitively.
She loses her breath for a moment, surprised at my lowball guess.
“A dollar fifty,” she nods. “How much do you pay for your trash bags?” 
“I have no idea.”
We hate her trash bags. They are clear and flimsy. She knots the bag at the top of the bin, a knot that, when I try to replicate, is impossible because there isn’t enough material. I leave it loose.
When she moves in, I count twelve cans of Comet, six large jugs of Arm and Hammer detergent, six bottles of Woolite, roll upon roll of paper towels. She drove up every weekend for awhile, filling her car with junk, saying it was saving her thousands in moving costs. We helped her unload once. Umbrellas, party trays, large serving bowls, weights, glass shelves, chunks of extruded foam. She places something of hers in every part of the house, marking her territory, even though there are two of us and one of her. She is one woman with fifteen mugs, two sets of silverware, thirty-seven glasses. She fills the back room with the kind of furniture you buy for a dollhouse, tiny and Victorian. Two large rugs cover the marble floor.
“You want to know how much these rugs are?” she asks me. "Fifteen thousand each.”
“I tried to sell it,” she says, nodding her head towards the furniture. Her hair is short and dyed black. It is straight during the day, curly when she wakes up. “But you know how much I could get for it?” 
“Half what you paid for?” 
“Not even.”
“Why do you have this stuff?”
“For my guests,” she says. “I need them for my guests. They require these things...a certain...formality.” 
It starts with the water filtration system and suddenly there is a barrage of service calls. The magnets on the shower door need to be replaced. The ceiling light in the dining area too. It crackles and smokes when left on for more than a minute. The electrician is coming. There is a smell in the den. She thinks the culprit is our light. She holds her hand up to the bulb, feeling for heat. 
“There’s no smell,” says S. And when she insists that there is, he starts yelling very loudly at her in his native tongue. 
The latch on the sliding glass door is not popping out. And the doors are too heavy to top it off. The bathtub is not draining. The toilet in the bathroom is running. The shower drips. Each closet has a lightbulb with a chain dangling from it and a bauble at the end. In one of the closets, it’s just a shoelace. In the others, the chains are different. So are the baubles at the end. One is a round, white plastic ball. Another is a wooden piece. When I notice this, I can’t stand the discrepancy. Just like I can’t stand the 27 different finishes in the house, the green marble in the foyer, the linoleum in the closet with a marble pattern, the buttery marble in the large room, the Pergo in the den, the ceramic tile in the bathrooms, the old, scratched and stained linoleum in the kitchen. She calls someone about the screens. I see nothing wrong with the screens. 
All of a sudden the heat is running at 72. There is a dish rack where there was none. And large, absorbent pads taking up all the counter space. She puts some succulents in giant, crystal vases and fills up the alcove behind the sink, pushing my small, modern vases out of the way. A toaster oven appears on one side. An off-white microwave on the the other. An automatic can opener. A ceramic jar with fruit on it, full of tea bags. A container holding two wooden utensils. She came from San Diego. San Diego is the place for me, she said. But it’s too expensive. 
We divide up the kitchen. You take those drawers. We take these drawers. We leave. We come back. She has taken three of our five drawers. I fight back, reclaiming two.
“I have to ask, whose idea was it to dismantle my fort?” She asks me when I am doing dishes one night.
“It got hot,” I say calmly. You were gone for weeks, I thought. The dogs would have been uncomfortable in that fort. It’s true, though. We woke up one morning to gusts of wind, hot air pushing its way through the canyon. 
“It’s El Nino,” said S.
“What’s El Nino?” 
“I don’t know. Something to do with the ocean.”
“What’s La Nina?”
“I have no idea.”
“How does the internet work?” I asked, starting to smile.
“I have no fucking idea,” he said, “How things work.”
“Jesus, we don’t know anything.”
“Was it your intention to leave the door open?” she asks one morning, as I am on my way to the kitchen. “I woke up this morning and the window was wide open.”
“Noooo,” I say, shaking my head, stopping in my tracks. “There’s no way.”
“I swear to God. I swear on my mother’s grave.”
“I’ll try to be more aware.”
A few days later, she stands squarely beside me as I am washing dishes again. 
“You left the gate open,” she said.
“I was going to close it. I just took out the trash.” I don’t bother looking up this time. There’s no point.
One day, she calls S. when he is far away on business. 
“Something is stressing me out. A. keeps leaving all the windows and doors open. I came home yesterday and the side door was wide open.”
“You know what?” said S. “We’re just gonna move out.”
I can’t remember if I left it wide open or not. I let her dogs out to pee. A friend was with me. I was sure I closed it. Maybe I didn’t. Maybe I closed it but didn’t lock it. Who knows. The next morning I stay in my bedroom and make phone calls. When she is in her room, I go outside to check the weather, unlocking the front door, first the deadbolt, then the knob. I could use a sweatshirt. I go back to my room and shut the door to change. I hear her emerge from her room. I stand very still and listen. I hear the clink of the lock. And I wonder what she is afraid of.
She tells me the price of everything.
“You know how much this house is?” I shake my head. “$5,000. I am negative every month.” 
When I come home one evening, I find her sitting cross-legged on the couch, our couch, watching TV, the gas fire flickering quietly in the corner. Before I know it we have both decided that the best way to die is liquid morphine. She says she wants to do it in Holland. Or Oregon, because it is legal there, because you can die with dignity. She is adamant. 
“Do you plan on getting sick?” I ask. She shakes her head but says,”You never know.” 
She is suddenly talking about where she is from. “They used to go around to the villages. Kohmeini would wear a white robe. That’s what people wear when they die. They wrap them in a white robe and put them in the ground. He would come with a large key and say this is the key to heaven. If you fight for Islam, you will go to heaven. Only thirty percent of the country was literate. So seventy percent of the people were illiterate. It worked. They fought.” 
“I would live and die in this house,” she says. “If it weren’t for the neighbors on either side.” She gestures sharply to the left and then the right. “I would live in Armenia but they do not have a well-established medical system.”
She talks about her brother and says she hates him, he’s an asshole. She talks about her father and says she hates him, he’s an idiot. She talks about S., and says he is not a nice person. When I tell her he is nice to me she says, “Well, good for you.” She talks about the neighbors, she curses them every day. Time passes. Her guests never arrive.

Paradise Cove

         
         
Imagine this: a trip down a winding road into Topanga canyon. I am listing right, then left as the road turns. A touch of vertigo as the ground falls away from the road. The bottom of the gully looks far away. I smell wood smoke. I see ramshackle structures here and there, a quaint fish market, a little restaurant. Campers parked everywhere. Signs for firewood. A minimalist bridge, a large, simple arc spans a dead stream. Another market, little signs affixed to the facade. I look up into the hillside and see a white house. It looks like a modern castle. 
“That was a beautiful house. I would live there.” 
“If I won the lottery, I would buy it,” he said.
“What if it’s not for sale? What if has sentimental value?”
“Everyone has a price. If it was worth 1.2 million, you think they wouldn’t leave for 8?
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Of course they would. You can buy and sell people if you have enough money.”
I drift off again. We pass a cluster of shops with names like OM and Hippy Dippy Market. 
“I love this place,” I say. “This is where all the artists are.”
We’ve already passed two large, wooden signs for singing lessons. 
“What the fuck,” he says, “Is this where singers retire?”
I’m getting hungry. We finally arrive at our destination, the Paradise Cove Cafe. We already know what we’re getting; clam chowder, cole slaw. I’ve had it before, I know it’s good. 
“Inside or outside?” he asks.
“Outside.”
We get a prime spot facing the ocean. The tables are in sand. Strips of cloth are suspended above, flapping gently in the breeze. We walk, swiveling our feet to gain traction. We order the chilled seafood platter for two. It’s only $26.95 and HUGE, as advertised in bold caps. When it comes, the food looks naked and I regret not getting the fried and battered version. The chill, white color of the scallop ceviche and the flat loops of calamari with their rubbery texture suddenly grosses me out. What look like tiny octopuses lie splayed out on the ice, their legs limp and curled with a purplish tint. Tuna tartare and the tail of a lobster are two things I don’t touch. I am reserved and quiet, pensive and withdrawn. I am reeling from three lines of coke and good, cold vodka from the day before. The bottle came with a little hammer and brush to break the seal and sweep it up. My organs feel swollen. I snorted myself into some kind of quiet oblivion. 
When we are finished with our meal, we walk towards the beach.
“Look,” he says, “It’s your favorite bird, the one that runs!”
I spot it. I think it’s called a sandpiper. At least in the east it is. This is the west, so I’m not sure. I chase it so I can watch it’s legs become a blur. I take a video and follow it as it runs along the moving edge of the water. A fat seagull enters the frame and I follow it too. I want to lie down and bask in the sun. 
“How about there?”
“Beware of falling rocks. Stay away,” he says, reading a sign. 
“It looks safe enough.”
“You don’t want to get hit on the head.”
“There.” I point to a patch of sand and plop down. I close my eyes. He sits. He stands up. He sits again.
“Can’t you relax?”
“No. It’s uncomfortable.”
“I’m comfortable.”
“You don’t look comfortable.” Admittedly, I don’t.
“How long do you think you could lay here?”
“I don’t know...twenty minutes maybe.”
“I could lay here for hours.”
“I know.”
He stands up and looks out across the sea.
“That’s Catalina island,” he points. “I went there for a school trip once.”
“Do people live out there? Is it like Nantucket?”
“Good question. Not sure.”
I don’t care if people live out there. I want him to be quiet. The island is just a gray blur in the distance. I learn that it’s a two hour ferry ride. 
“Alright. Time to go,” he says.
“Back to Glendale.”
We return to the restaurant. I walk away to use the bathroom while he retrieves the card he forgot. He tells me to wait but I can’t. It’s an emergency. When I finally emerge, I can’t find him. I step outside, sit on a bench and am about to text him my location.
“Where were you?”
“In the bathroom.”
“I told you to wait.”
“I couldn’t.”
There is a short fight in the car and stony silence for twenty minutes. 
“You know, my friends and their wives live separate lives,” he says. 
He thinks I want him to be someone else. Someone who doesn’t smoke, someone who lies in the sun, someone who doesn’t talk as much. 
“I’m going to be a healthy, happy woman one day,” I whispered in a man’s ear once. 
“I like you the way you are,” he said. I was drinking too much, fucking too much, dancing with the dark. 
“You cut a tragic figure,” someone told me around that time. I was pleased because that’s what I was going for. 
This man now, this is the man who brings out the good in me. I have a star chart from when I was born that says I should be with someone who is highly verbal. I offer him something to eat. He needs some time alone. He spends the night at the casino. When he comes home in the morning, he has won.

Permafrost

       

       When I was very young, I lived in a place called Pufton Village. It was ugly and gray, full of grad students and poor people. Roaches roamed freely on the kitchen floor. My mother did what she could with the place. She built a loft for my brother that could be reached by a chunky ladder made of two by fours. There was a small nook underneath where I played with a set of wooden blocks. My brother would construct elaborate mazes and thoroughfares and then put a marble in my hand and tell me to drop it in a certain location. I was little so when it disappeared and then reappeared, I was delighted. My brother surrounded himself with bright colors. He had a bureau that he painted grass green on the outside and electric blue on the inside. He filled an entire drawer with hard candies with colorful plastic wrappers, the kind that made crunching noises when you balled it up to throw it away. I remember sinking my hand down to the bottom and rifling through them. The apartment was small enough that one time, my brother constructed a giant web of masking tape, sticky lines running back and forth across the space. There were other boys there, my brother’s friends, scampering around, gleefully unrolling rolls and rolls of tape, shrieking when it made that thwap sound as it unpeeled from itself. I was small and clumsy and I ran into a piece of tape in the corner, bringing an entire section down with me. “Crawl. Just crawl! Damn it!” yelled my brother. 

In photographs of that time, I am wide eyed and smiling. I am adorable. In one picture, my face is scrunched up with joy. In another, I am sitting in my mother’s studio amidst her calligraphy pens and various nibs, a row of ink bottles close by, playing with a pair of orange-handled scissors that look massive in my hands. In another, I am sitting like the Buddha, a book splayed out on my lap, just awoken from a nap, a blanket draped over me like a monk’s robe. I am utterly at peace. That photo has circulated amongst my mother’s friends because of the look of serenity on my face.

There was a store called Watroba’s that we went to for things like milk and bread. The owner always gave me an Andes chocolate for free when we went to pay for our items. I liked the mint green strip sandwiched between the milk chocolate. I liked the dark green foil wrapper with the mountain peak on it. I liked how stiff it was as you unwrapped it, how it kept it’s shape.

When we went one November, I wandered around the store until I came across a pile of frozen turkeys behind a glass door. I stood there quietly until my mother found me.

“Are those turkeys?” I asked. 

“Yes,” my mother said. 

“Can we save them?” 

“Well...”

“Can we bring them back to the woods?” I said, without taking my eyes off of the pile. I thought their feathers and heads would grow back, that all we had to do was return them to the woods and they would start hopping about. I didn’t understand that frozen meant dead. I grew very upset. So my mother told me that she and my father would come back to the store and bring them to the woods and they would be alive again, free. I retrieved my Andes chocolate and left, convinced my mother would follow through with her plan.

“You were always compassionate,” my mother said when I told her I thought I’d sewn a set of armor so tight around me that I couldn’t get out. I was thirty-three. 

“Sometimes, I’ll break free, when I’m with S.,” I said. “We were at a gas station and I turned the corner and did a flying kick. Out of nowhere. My foot got really high, too.”

It happened with M. sometimes. We were talking about farts. I got the giggles, my cheeks pushing up into my eyes. With others, when they were in front of me, they shimmered like mirages. But I couldn’t feel them. I thought maybe it was because I couldn’t gain a foothold where they had vaulted. I saw couples form. They started with a large dog and then added a small pug. Or it was a cat and then a Great Dane. I knew what came next. A child. Always a child. And I also knew, I would never have one. Children shouldn’t beget children. That’s what I say if people asked, “But I’m still I child.”

He was in the elevator when he told me. My boyfriend had sent a text that read: Disaster. I lost a shit ton. I’m an idiot. He left $300 in his account for food. I was the only thing standing between him and zero. I was a mouth to feed. And Thanksgiving was just around the corner.

“Hold on...hold on,” he said. “I might lose you.”

No, I thought to myself, you won’t. I heard an ad playing on the radio. 

“It’s not just time to talk turkey. It’s time to buy turkey.”

The World At Large

In Erfurt, Germany, while doing an internship at a state parliament in Thuringia, I started asking, “Was braucht die Welt?” - What does the world need? My desire to study political science had been fueled by a youthful idealism and a naive exuberance. But it left me feeling empty...spent. The internship was a farce. I wandered in and out of the parliament building and into various ministries where I interviewed the men and women who made up the government. I didn’t know what I was doing there. I didn’t know where I was going. So I asked, “Was braucht die Welt?” over and over again in an effort to lay claim to a direction. I was determined not to make a frivolous choice. I thought by asking those around me, the adults, the grown-ups, I was being efficient. I was considering law school. But did the world need more lawyers?

After pondering my query for a minute, one man responded, “Captain of container ships?” 

“Really?” I said, slightly incredulous. Sitting there, in my long black pants and spiffy corduroy jacket, did I look like a future captain? 

“Well, there’s a shortage.”

“Oh. Huh.”

It didn’t seem like a viable career choice for me. Not then. Not now. I chose architecture school. I emerged an artist, ill-equipped to deal with the rigors of a traditional architecture career. Digital space was deadening. I floundered. Others, looking in, saw my stagnation and made suggestions. They keep coming. It started with a letter from my uncle, whose low opinion of me led him to believe I should consider the sanitation industry and shovel shit out of port-o-potties. I was pretty sure that wasn’t how it worked anymore. I was pretty sure the process involved a large pipe or hose that sucked the contents out rather than a shovel. A friend of my mother’s said I should work for the telephone company. He had made a career out of it. He had a pension. It had been a good gig. I suspected, however, that the ‘telephone’ company was only a fraction of its former self, that it was now a patchwork of cellular networks vying for market share. Did he think I would be laying down wires in the ground, as he had done? Or would I be repairing fiber-optic cable networks? Or hocking cell phones at a Verizon store in a strip mall? People tend to suggest their own line of work, which strikes me as small-minded and unimaginative, indicative of a lack of empathy and supremely narcissistic. 

My brother told me I should go into security. He is in security. The monotony, I thought. What qualified me for this line of work? I’ve broken the law and gotten caught. He said they don’t check those things if you go into management. “What a mismanaged industry,” I thought to myself. What made him think I would enjoy monitoring people’s movements? Or patrolling the inner sanctums of some building in the off hours? Would I carry a gun? Or a large flash light? Would I shine it down the hallway when I heard a strange noise? Would I have to hit someone over the head with it? 

      “Where the fuck does this guy get off telling you to go into security,” said a friend, when I told him of my brother’s suggestion. He followed up with a number, the number he thought might be my IQ. “What the fuck.” My father did not suggest I go into nursing, but he is a nurse. He stops life from leaving the body. I could never do it. I don’t have enough respect for life. I don’t have enough respect for myself. 

When I made a move to the West Coast, I started looking for jobs. At first, I cast a wide net. If people asked what I was looking for, I told them something adjacent to the creative world at the intersection of art and culture. 

“Are you interested in accounting?” 

“So...marketing?” 

Why did they keep missing the mark? I thought. How daft were these people? When I got an offer for a job at Pottery Barn Kids, I declined. The title of the position was Designer, but it really meant sales, with an impossible metric of $600 an hour. I wasn’t interested in schilling shit for a multi-million dollar business, or recommending the latest shade of beige as a wall color for some young mother’s nursery, or suggesting they spell out their child’s name with giant, ornamental letters, baby blue for a boy, pink for a girl. When I described the position to someone they said, “So, it’s a little bit like you’re a whore.”

“Exactly,” I responded. 

“You have the wrong attitude,” said a friend of a friend when I told them I’d rather do nothing than do that, I’d be doing more harm than good, populating the world with bad taste. It turned out I had the same attitude as a cousin of theirs, a perpetually unemployed, possibly schizophrenic, sometime meth addict. And, sitting there in the hot tub, the water swirling around me, I remembered something I will never forget. “Some people,” said a professor once, during a seminar, “Go up,” and his fingers flitted toward the ceiling. “And some...” his fingers made a downward, trickling motion, like he was stroking the air, “Don’t.” It turns out, the world doesn’t need me at all.

These Bandits Are No Outlaws

In Los Angeles, in a quiet suburban hell, there is a house on Larco Way, nestled into the horseshoe of a canyon. A steep wall of hard dirt rises from the ground in the back where there’s a cement patio, smooth as skin. The front door opens to a set of brick terraces spilling out to the edge of the street. When I arrive, the flora is alien. A grove of giant stalks with oversized leaves borders the lawn along with a set of massive succulents sporting thick, spiked leaves. A bush with yellow flowers conceals the bedroom window, hummingbirds needling their way into the blossoms every morning. A curtain of magenta flowers on the other side doesn’t attract them. Here and there, groups of thick branches grow in odd curves along the ground. A front section of the yard has five rose bushes sitting in round hollows. Every time the roses bloom in full, a bold, enterprising deer comes by and eats them. In the morning, it looks like a massacre, the red petals spread out like blood over the ground. When the roses bloom again, one bush is yellow, another pink, another red and two seem dormant, battered. I smell them all but only the yellow one has a scent and even on the single bush, only certain flowers. 

I am living with a man I am trying to love. When his sister comes by to drop off her dogs, a hyper teacup Yorkshire and a King Charles Cavalier with cataracts and a dumb look on his face, she maintains an intense, dour look. She wears black when she drops them off and she is wearing black again when she picks them up. She motions for me to follow her outside where she tells me, “That tree is out of control. This bush...they need to cut it.” She selects a few stalks from the grove. “And here, they need to take these out, they do not look good.” She walks to other side of the yard. “And here, these leaves, they need to be pulled out.” I can tell that some of them are dying, browning along the edges. She draws me around the corner and points to another plant. “Here...these leaves should not be touching the ground. They don’t want to do it because it’s more work. I pay them extra. But they don’t want to do it. More work for them. I will call them and tell them. But you see them, you can tell them too.” She is talking about the gardeners who come twice a month. 

“What about this bush?” I ask, pointing to the one with the yellow flowers.

“Yes. It is out of control.”

Two Thursdays go by and they don’t come. Grass starts growing in uneven patches. Weeds sprout up around the roses. Dead leaves populate the terrace along with flyers for expensive houses and shitty pizza. A book of yellow pages gets dropped off. More flyers get stuffed into the wrought iron railing that runs up the length of the steps. When the gardeners finally do come, I go out to meet them. One of them is standing near the fence with a weed whacker thrumming in his hands. He turns it off when I approach him. I ask if someone called about the yard. The man nods. All I can see are his eyes. They are blue. He wears a bandana across his face, with the corner pointing down in a triangle. I point to the bush and say it needs to be cut. He nods. I motion to the tree in the very front and make a sweeping curve with my hand. He nods. I go to the bush with too many leaves. I grab at the air and pull. He nods. I forget to mention the giant stalks or the plant whose leaves are touching the ground. I am nervous. I am suddenly aware of being white. Of being American. Of being educated. Of being unemployed. When he pulls down his bandana, I am shocked to see how good-looking he is. I go back inside and notice that my shirt is see-through. I try on another shirt, one that is also transparent. I put the first one back on. When I look outside again, there are four or five men in the yard, dressed in pants and long-sleeved shirts despite the heat. They don’t look like the other Mexican gardeners. These men don’t have short legs and short torsos. These men don’t have dark skin and dark hair. They are light with blue eyes and good bodies. One is clipping the front bush with abandon when I suddenly remember the hummingbirds. Another is hacking brush with a hatchet. And another has a machete, poised to take stalks out. It is a violent scene, full of sharp edges and swift movements. With their red bandanas covering their faces, their baseball caps pulled down to shield their eyes, they look like bandits. It’s not that I don’t feel safe. But I choose to leave, telling myself it’s the noise. I imagine where they’re from, a dry village in the middle of nowhere, chickens kicking up dust as they pick their way through town. I imagine them making their way across the border in the dead of night, crawling along the ground like lizards. I go to Baskin-Robbins for a strawberry milkshake and, blasting the AC, start driving down a tree-lined street that seems to go on forever, winding its way through the hills. When I turn on the radio, a black man is talking. He is struggling to describe what it feels like to have a terminal degree and be pulled over for no reason, to be questioned. He starts to cry.

“Take your time,” says the DJ.

I turn it off. Driving around in a borrowed BMW, it is so easy to feel you are above and not below.