Box Girl (24 page)

The Firecracker Concierge falls into the glass again. What is the deal? Is this guy drunk? Now the deejay is leaning against the glass. These people obviously don't know how alarming this is. I eye the pane of glass above me, wondering how, exactly, it would shatter.

Tsunami

I recently got a notice in the mail, outlining the tsunami
danger zones for coastal Los Angeles. I looked for my street. It was highlighted in purple. Purple seemed good. Purple was not red. Purple was not orange. Purple was not even yellow. What could purple possibly mean? I read the legend. Next to purple it said: “Tsunami Inundation Zone.” As if my garage apartment was not scary enough.
Maybe I should start sleeping on a raft
, I thought. With a helmet, and rain boots, and a life jacket, and a paddle.

According to the pamphlet, because I am in the “Inundation Zone,” I am encouraged to get the hell out of there as soon as an earthquake stops quaking. It suggests I head for higher ground on foot, because there will probably be all sorts of crap in the streets. (I'm paraphrasing.) My most recent tsunami escape plan is to wait out the shaking in my bathroom doorway, because it's the only interior doorway, and I think my twee Parisian café table, however darling and shabby chic, won't suffice as a barrier between my head and
falling objects. After the trembling subsides, I'll put on a pair of running shoes, then grab a jacket, my purse, my laptop, and a box of cereal. Armed with my Multi Grain Cheerios, I will make my escape.

I almost executed this plan one night when I was awakened by a friend who told me to turn on the news. A magnitude 8.9 earthquake had just hit the coast of Japan, and a tsunami was headed our way. I don't know if it was my friend's panicked voice jolting me awake, or the doomsday music on CNN, but I was positive we were done for. I called Peter (we didn't yet live together) and told him, in my most authoritative voice, that we needed to head for higher ground.

“Huh?” he said, his voice thick with sleep.

“There's been an 8.9 earthquake in Japan, and there's a tsunami warning for the coast of California,” I said.

“Huh?” he repeated.

I repeated myself, more urgently this time.

“Is Wolf Blitzer awake?” he said.

“Huh?” I said.

“Is Wolf Blitzer awake?” he repeated.

“No. It's some guy I don't know,” I said.

“Call me if Wolf Blitzer wakes up,” he said, then let out a loud yawn.

“But who cares if it's Wolf Blitzer or not? They are playing the doomsday music!”

“Has it hit Hawaii?”

“Has what hit Hawaii?”

“The tsunami. Has it hit Hawaii?”

“No,” I said.

“Call me when it hits Hawaii,” he said, “That should give us at least six hours.”

A friend of mine was staying in Hawaii that night at a fancy hotel. She said they moved everyone onto the golf course—the highest point on the hotel's property. They pitched tents and set out silver buffet trays of food. A string quartet played, she said, to calm everyone's nerves, “Like in the final moments of the Titanic.”

The tsunami never hit Hawaii. Or at least, not very hard. It never hit the continental United States, either. Actually, that's not true. I think a boat was overturned in Oregon.

Scotch Please, Splash Soda

My parents are now “snowbirds,” meaning they fly south in
the winter for a warmer climate. They spend six months on the coast of southern Georgia and six months in the hills of southern Connecticut, which allows my dad to play golf in near-perfect conditions all year long.

My parents' Georgia home is a picture of Southern hospitality. Most every surface is monogrammed—the bath towels, the coasters, the seashell-shaped soaps. Give a WASPy Southern woman a millimeter of material, and she'll figure out a way to put someone's initials on it. During the holidays, the monogrammed cocktail napkins are replaced by a stack of green ones that say, “Holidays with the family are always a trip. A trip to the liquor store.” I think these napkins were created with my family in mind. As my grandmother once said, elbow-deep in a Scotch and soda, “Jews don't recognize Jesus as the Messiah. Protestants don't recognize the Pope as the head of the church. Baptists don't recognize each other at the liquor store.” We're not Baptists, but based on my family's idolatrous worship of alcohol, we might as well be.

While most children spend the week before Christmas shopping and wrapping, I prepare by resting, hydrating, and stretching. You have to understand, these people are animals. And by animals, I mean my grandfather, my grandmothers, and my great-aunt, all in their late eighties or early nineties. If these folks don't have a drink in hand by four o'clock, they rattle their canes in protest. And they only drink the hard stuff, or “meaningful drinks,” as my dad calls them: bourbon and water, Scotch and soda, gin and tonic, vodka on the rocks, the occasional Bloody Mary (but only if it's before noon), and wine (but only if it's with dinner). If there's one thing upstanding Southern WASPs like to do to celebrate the birth of Christ, it's get drunk.

The location for this bourbon-soaked soiree is Sea Island, Georgia, an emerald enclave of the rich and retired, covered in golf courses, spas, and Spanish moss, where money hangs from the Magnolia trees. While waiting tables one night, a customer said, “Wait, your parents live in
Sea Island?
Why the hell are you working as a
waitress
?” It's that sort of place.

At the helm of this holiday operation is my mom, a perky perfectionist who was once crowned The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi at The University of Georgia, and the Miss Augusta
runner-up
(but we wont talk about that). Christmas gives her an excuse to be in a great mood at 7:00 am, shower people with presents, decorate and re-decorate, and drink in the afternoon. So hopped up on the holidays, she didn't even notice one year when I wrapped a cashmere sweater I had borrowed from her two years prior. “Oh I just
love
this,” she said, swirling a celery stalk into her Bloody Mary. “And it's
just
my color.”

My mom desperately wants us to share her zeal for the holidays. One Easter, she wanted her children—ages twenty-nine and twenty-six at the time—to participate in an egg hunt, so she stuffed the plastic pastel eggs full of money. Sitting on the patio, hungover, sweating, hands shaking, her “children” were
barely breathing, let alone showing any interest in skipping around the yard for eggs. Finally, she yelled, “Damn it, y'all, there's money in them!” Some eggs had singles, some fives, others tens and twenties. My brother and I tore toward the lawn. After several slide tackles and a yellow-card's worth of elbowing each other in the ribs, our knees skinned and covered in grass stains, my mom got just what she wanted: joyful holiday togetherness.

My mom never turns down an invitation, certainly not at Christmas. Every year on Christmas Eve, she insists we go to this god-awful caroling and Yule-log-lighting party, and she drags the entire geriatric wing of the family along. But they don't seem to mind. After all, these bloodhounds can smell eggnog from a mile away.

My least favorite of our holiday traditions is the dreaded staging of The Christmas Card Picture. While this was a perfectly acceptable tradition when my brother and I were kids, now that we're adults, it's just plain embarrassing. At least for me. My brother now has a wife and two children, so in our Christmas Card Picture it's very obvious that there's: 1) an older couple in their sixties, 2) a cute young married couple in their thirties with two darling little boys, and 3) shoved somewhere in the periphery, me.

I am sure the four-hundred-plus recipients of the annual card must wonder:

“Is she still single?”

“She must be a lesbian.”

“Betty with a lesbian daughter, no.”

“But she does live in California.”

“And I think she worked for the Obama campaign.”

One year, after the cards were delivered, my mom got an email from a friend in Texas: “Just wanted to say I'm so happy to see that Lilibet is expecting!” My mom called me immediately, horrified. I ripped the thing off my fridge.

“Oh my god,” I said, “I
do
look pregnant.” Something had gone horribly wrong with the lighting, the angle, something. We discussed, in disbelief, for the next hour.

“See, she was the only one to
say
something,” my mom said. “I wonder how many people thought it but didn't say anything? I mean, my Lord, do these people actually think I'd put you in the picture pregnant
with no husband
?”