How to Get Into the Twin Palms (18 page)

“I’m not bringing it to New York City.”

They smiled at me and waited for me to thank them and bring it inside.

I nodded my head, turned the key to my door and said good luck. And thank you.

The apartment was dark.

I put the painting up against the wall and walked into the kitchen. I found what I was looking for and went and nailed the painting to the wall. Or, I nailed a screw into the wall and hung the rusting wire of the frame on it, hoping it would hold. I hung it so you could see it through the sliding glass door, so they could see it. My immigrant velvet painting. I stood back and stared at it. It was the best thing I owned.

My mother would hate it. It was cheap and dated, mid-seventies kitsch. Probably the Ural Mountains.
Uralskie gory.
Or maybe the Tatras.
Tatry Zachodnie
. Why would Russians have a velvet painting of Polish mountains? It didn’t make sense. They were the Urals for sure. Lev would like it, I think. I imagined him standing back and laughing, telling me all about the Urals. And then, I realized that would happen so I opened the curtains so the whole street could see my new painting, my gift. I had to share it with someone.

THE CHECKS HAD STOPPED COMING A FEW
weeks before and I knew I would be in trouble. When I walked outside and saw my car was gone, I panicked at first, had the police taken it, did they know? But I was still here, they hadn’t come after me, so I knew it wasn’t that. Boris from upstairs called down to me. “They took it.”

His shirt was stained and had holes in it, and he stuck his plastic shoe through the metal bars of his balcony.

“Who took it?” I asked.

“The truck came and – ” He threw his hands up, motioned the rest.

When I exhaled he leaned down further, almost falling over the ledge. “What you going to do?”

“I don’t know, Boris.” I went back inside and closed the door behind me.

Repossessed, I thought. There was no leaving here now. Just sit and wait for them to come to me, if they were ever going to. I turned on the television. The helicopters on television were echoed by the ones in real life around me. The newscasters were using words like
deliberate
.

I stared at the Urals on my wall and wanted to be there, instead of here. I tried to think cool thoughts. Snow and such. Anything to get away from the oppressive heat surrounding me.

I TURNED OFF MY PHONE, I TURNED OFF THE
lights, and I didn’t leave the house for a few days. I ate beans and rice, chicken broth with frozen mixed vegetables and broken pieces of spaghetti, frozen burritos with freezer burn through the plastic, which I found toward the back of the freezer where I never looked.

I found more of Lev’s hair. At the bottom of the bathtub, in my sheets. I tried to get rid of it all. I scrubbed the bathtub and the toilet with bleach until my hands burned and my nostrils burned. Until I couldn’t smell anymore. I had fine cuts on my fingers and palms from scrubbing with the scouring pad, from rubbing at the bleach. I took my sheets and put them in the washer, in the laundry room with the rubber tube that let the water flow out of the washing machine, into the big molding basin, a rim of hair around the base, and I knew Lev would stay there. His hair mixed in with the others.

I could hear Boris coming down the stairs and I didn’t want to talk to him, have him ask me about my car again. Talk about the fires anymore. I turned off the light and crouched next to the bleating machine. It sounded like it was dying and it drowned out my breathing. I could see Boris’s head bobbing as he carried his trash to the alleyway. Singing something from Ukrainian television.

And then I could see Lev. He pressed the buzzer several times,
then knocked against the metal grate of my door. I guessed he had come back for his things. But I had left them in the park, burning.

I saw Boris coming back around from the alley and Lev spotted him too.

“Where is she?” he asked Boris.

“How should I know?” He continued up the stairs, unafraid of Lev.

He banged on my door a few more times, peered into the laundry room at the shaking machine and tried the door. It was locked and he couldn’t see me crouching under the basin, under the dripping water pooling in the sink.

I waited for him to leave and got up when I heard him turn on his car and drive away. He was going back to his wife or to someone else. I didn’t care anymore. He wasn’t mine. Never was.

I THOUGHT ABOUT WHAT PEOPLE WOULD FIND
in my apartment after I left. What remnants of me would tell them who I was? The television said they were closer to figuring things out. Possible witnesses. I went about searching for things in the apartment.

I found:

I HAD FIFTEEN MISSED CALLS AND SEVEN MESSAGES.
I didn’t think anyone would call and I was keeping a low profile as people like to say. When I checked the messages I confirmed that no one good had called.

My mother left all the messages on Sunday. I knew what it was about. Lent. What was I going to give up? Had I gotten ashes crossed on my forehead. Had I gone to confession? I had done both.

 

I turned the television on for the first time in several days. The newscasters were on site, ash in their hair. The fire someone had set near the Hollywood sign was spreading and the observatory was already damaged. They were spraying the surrounding homes with water, keeping everything wet, the ground saturated. There were evacuations, but some people didn’t want to leave. They were showing a man next to a pool with a surgical mask on. He was pumping pool water in a hose to the sloping hillside. He said, “I’ve been through fires before and beat them every time.” The newscaster had an urgency in her voice, like he was being foolish, like he might not make it if he didn’t leave.

I opened the windows to let the air in and the smoke came in huffs. The newscasters played out the scenarios. How to save each letter. How firefighters were stationed around the sign, wetting it cold and damp. Trying to keep it safe. It was going to
be a story of saviors, that’s how it was playing out now. Heroes were being made right on the television.

There was a knock on my door and I was afraid to open it. I hid back in the shadows of the apartment but could see my neighbor leaning over and trying to peer in through the glass doors. I worried about him jumping the lip of my balcony, seeing if they were open. Why hadn’t I closed the blinds? He moved away from the glass and went back to knocking on the front door.

I came and opened the door a little, eyeing him.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Fine. Sick.”

“My mother made you soup.”

I looked at his empty hands.

“She has it on the stove,” he continued.

I was wearing clothes that I had not changed for days. I had not showered and I had tufts of hair growing in my armpits. He smiled at me and nodded his head. Saying yes for me.

I kept the door open as I went to look for my shoes. When I came back he motioned to the mountains and said, “It is nice.”

 

Their apartment was built much like mine. Wall to wall oatmeal-colored carpeting, a living room, their sliding glass door, a dark hallway leading to bedrooms and a slim alcove of kitchen to the left, instead of the right, like mine. The blown up photographs of family lineage I had seen through the window were right in front of me now, lining the tops of the wood and glass cases, tacked to the walls in a line all around the tight room. Close up they were fuzzy with dust and yellowing.

They had fit a dining table, sofa, Persian rug, six curved and wooden dining chairs and dozens of black-and-white photos in cheap plastic frames into the front room. I was in a mausoleum smelling of chicken fat and boiling root vegetables. The old woman in the
chustka
came out of the kitchen smiling, holding
boiled chicken pieces, tawny skin fat still puckered and goose-pimpled, and thick-sliced pieces of gray boiled beef sitting in a thin sleeve of oily chicken stock. She set it down on the white embroidered tablecloth and dribbled oil on the cloth and went back into the kitchen, ladling soup over thin egg noodles and passing the bowls to her husband, the small hunched man I had seen walking back and forth in front of our apartment building, hands behind his back held together by the thumbs and loose-fitting gray slacks bunched at the waist with a belt. He wore the same square-sided hat atop his head, beaded and sparkled. I wondered if he was wearing it for religion, for some Russian Orthodox reason. I didn’t want to ask. The television was blaring guttural fast-talking. When he put the bowls on the table he put himself back in the worn leather chair and his wife set the soup in front of him. He turned the TV louder and I noticed the glazed gaze I often saw when passing by the window. He didn’t say a word to anyone and my neighbor and his mother sat at the table, smiling their toothy and toothless grins at me. Waiting for me to slurp the soup and break apart the loose-skinned chicken sitting in front of me. I looked down at my soup, the parsley cut coarsely, floating atop a film of oil and gristle. It smelled delicious. It smelled like the old country. I ate it up quickly and was given seconds. Not even working around the brown and gray bits floating in the broth, I ate those too. They smiled and the mother nodded.

She said, “Good.”

I nodded and said, “Very.”

Her son smiled at me and said something to her in Russian. They both smiled at each other and then smiled at me. He didn’t translate what he said. I kept my head down. Smelling the
rosół
and my own body odor. I would shower when I got home, I decided. I would start fresh. The soup warmed me and made me feel taken care of. They spoke in another tongue, ignored me, and it felt fine.

IN THE SHOWER I SHAVED MY LEGS AND ARMPITS
, looked at the fine hairs on my arms collecting water drops from steam. I foamed my legs and pulled the razor up carefully, cutting through the cream, shaved my pubic hairs, all of them. I cut the lip down there and let out a whimper. It bled into the water, pouring down my legs, and I bit down hard. I had done it before and knew it would take a long time to heal. My hair was washed thoroughly, shampooed twice until my fingers felt no slickness from grease and squeaked clean against the hairs. Next, the conditioning treatment for shine. I left it on for 10 minutes. Longer than necessary. So I shampooed again and hoped the shine would stay. I rubbed soap on and finally turned off the shower, pulled Epsom salts from next to the tub and poured some in my hand, careful not to drop any in the tub, lose any. I scoured my skin, taking off layer after layer. Checking for softness, spending extra time on my kneecaps, elbows, the skin next to my anklebone. I rubbed my toes and my heels and rubbed at my heels until they felt raw, then my fingers and wrists, the part above my wrist bone, pulled salt around the thin blond hairs of my arms and tried to scour the hair away. I rubbed salt on my shoulders, tried to reach my back, rubbed my butt raw, trying to rub the stretch marks away, the same with my thighs, my inner thighs, careful not to get salt into the cut I had given myself while shaving. I had felt the sting before and had not liked it.
My face was last, lightly on the cheeks, forehead, chin. I knew I would be red-faced but I needed to get it all off – smells of him, ash flecks, smells of smoke both from Los Angeles and my cigarettes. I turned the water back on and the spray from the shower pooled all the salt at the bottom of the tub and I watched it go down, turned it hotter, almost scalding, and watched my skin turn red.

Next, I slathered on layers of cream on my freshly raw skin. It felt smooth and new. The roughness washed away with the salt. When I emerged from the bathroom the steam folded off of me and I smelled the burnt smell again. In the bathroom it was gone, just the smell of water and bath products and thick creams and my grime washing away. Now the smell of the fires pulled into the house from the open sliding glass door and I ran to close it.

WITH NO CAR, I HAD TO RELY ON BUSES.
There were no maps at the bus stops. No indication of where to go. I figured each bus went down each avenue, each boulevard toward downtown or off toward the beach. I pointed myself east and rode buses in a maze toward Little Armenia, toward the Church of the Holy Virgin. Toward the fires on the hill in Griffith Park, toward the firefighters coming down in stretches trying to save the white letters stabbed into the hill.

I walked three blocks past the bus stop to get to the Holy Virgin. Mary was standing in front of the church, looking perturbed. “Where you been?”

“I was away,” I said.

“You didn’t tell anyone.” She looked at me annoyed. Started walking away.

“Why aren’t you going inside?”

“Canceled. The fires,” Mary said.

She stared up at the black cloud of smoke hanging low in the distance and scowled, flicked ash from her hair, nearly pulling out her red rhinestone barrette.

“What’s your name again, honey?” she asked. I was hurt for a moment and then I remembered she was old.

“Where’s your car?” she asked me. I could only tell her the truth.

She shook her head at me.