No. But she can sure find rubble. Thirteen apartment impossibilities later, and I’m back where I started.
“You wouldn’t believe these places,” I tell Maya one evening before she heads to work. We’re in the bathroom. I’m sitting on the toilet, downing a beer. She’s applying makeup.
“Like what?” she asks.
“Like a shack, with a toaster oven for a kitchen, mildew in the bath and heinous red carpet. Guess what they’re asking.”
She shrugs. I tell her she needs more eyeliner.
“I don’t know,” she says. “$700?”
“No, they want…well yeah—$700. It’s insane. Remember that set we built for the school play?”
“We didn’t build a set. We built one doorway.”
“That doorway was architecturally sounder than this place. I’d pay $700 a month for that doorway and be getting a better deal.”
“It was a nice doorway.”
“Then I saw a fantastic place in Hope Ranch.”
“Oh?” She lifts a brow. Hope Ranch is home to Santa Barbara’s nouveau riche—the old riche live with Oprah, in Montecito.
“A guest house. Beautiful white couches. Landlady wearing JP Tods. The ad was a misprint—they want $2,600 a month. Then there’s the place that smelled like cat pee, and the one where I’d have bathroom privileges. Since when is sharing a bathroom with two teenage boys a privilege? And all the places that won’t rent to you if you’re unemployed—which I’m not, I just don’t happen to have a job. And the places that won’t accept dogs and the—”
“You don’t have a dog.”
“Not yet.”
“Ellie…” she says, washing her hands and leaving the bathroom.
“Well, how can they hold my future dog against me, but not give me credit for my future job?” I follow her to the front door. “Seriously, I don’t think I can find a place.” I point to the mess I’ve made of her living room. “I may be permanently ensconced.”
She looks slightly alarmed. Possibly at my vocabulary. “Maybe you need a roommate. Then you could afford something better.”
“I don’t know, living with a stranger. It’s too bad you don’t have an extra bedroom here.”
“Yeah,” she says, as she closes the front door behind her. “Too bad.”
That evening, with Maya at the bar and Perfect Brad working late, I decide to clean their apartment. Because I’m a good houseguest. Plus, if I clean I can snoop in their drawers.
I do the kitchen before the bedroom, to establish my noble intentions. But washing dishes by hand always makes me think. If my world had flashback wiggles like in old movies, they’d pop up every time I did dishes by hand.
I wasn’t flashing back to falling in love with Louis: walking hand-in-hand on a cherry-blossomed path at the Jefferson Memorial, going on our first real date to Emily’s, greeting him in an apron and stilettos after he took the Bar (See? I used to be a Cosmo girl!). No, I was thinking of that shack-landlady, her hollow voice reverberating in my memory, “first, last and security…first, last and security.” And she wasn’t the only one, it seems everyone requires obscene amounts of money before they let you move in. I’m not sure my monster stack is going to cover first and last…and security? I wish.
I dry my hands and call my mother.
“Hi, it’s me,” I say, when she picks up.
“Me who?”
“Me, your daughter, Mom.” She never recognizes my voice. Sometimes I make her guess who it is. She got it right on the first try, once.
“Elle, thank God. I was worried. I got your message. I don’t understand. I called yesterday and Louis told me you’d already left. Santa Barbara? You’ll be back before the wedding, won’t you? I’ve already made my plane reservations. I still don’t—”
“Mom.”
“—know what I’m going to do about the hotel. The cheapest one you suggested charges one-fifty a night! That’s too expensive. Why can’t I stay with—”
“Mom—”
“—you and Louis. I won’t be in the way. You know the store takes every spare penny, and I—”
“Mom! Listen to me.”
“I am listening, darling. What do you think I’m doing?”
“Louis and I broke up.”
“Yes, that’s what he said. But I already made my plane reservations. The tickets, darling—they’re nonrefundable. I told the girl—”
“Mom—focus, please!”
“Well, you and Louis have broken up before.” Which is utterly untrue. She thinks that because we weren’t speaking after the Mizrahi couture incident, we were broken up. “It’s only pre-wedding jitters. You’ll just have to go back and make up.”
“It’s a little late for that. He married someone else.”
“He did what?”
“An Iowan.”
“He married an Iowan? When did he—how did he?” She pauses for a fraction of a second, which means she is truly shocked. “Well, are you gonna kick her ass back to the corn fields?”
Mom watches a lot of daytime TV. I often wonder what her New Age customers would think if they knew. She owns a crystal and herb shop in Sedona—she moved there when I went to college. She gives off an Earth Mama vibe, and a lot of her customers come in to ask for advice. Little do they know that the wise and evolved spirits she’s channeling are Montel Williams and Jerry Springer.
“Mom, I haven’t even met her.”
“Well, maybe you should. I was watching Ricki Lake this morning—you know she’s lost weight again—and there was a woman on who’d never confronted her mother when she stole her brother’s girlfriend…”
And she’s off. Why do I bother? She always makes me feel like this. Like the people on Judge Judy are more important than me. I don’t know why I called, why I—oh, right. Security. As in deposit. She marks up those crystals four hundred percent.
“Mom! Louis dumped me, and I’m living on Maya’s couch, and I don’t have an apartment or a job or a car or anything. I don’t care about intergenerational love triangles.”
I must sound desperate, because she actually responds. “Oh, Elle, honey. You should have come here, where I could take care of you.”
I feel my eyes water. “Yeah, I sh-should have…”
“I would’ve made you scalloped potatoes and Boston cream pie.”
I wipe my nose with the wet dishcloth. “B-better than chicken soup.”
“Hop on the next plane, darling. The red rocks here cure everything. Broken hearts included.”
She sounds so sympathetic, I’m almost tempted. Cake and sympathy and reversion to childhood. But it wouldn’t be like that. Ten minutes after I got there, everyone would know it was my fault that Louis married someone else. Which it wasn’t. And she’d rope me into her shop for horoscopes and palm reading; she decided when I was eleven that I had the Gift, even though I always thought Capricorn was the bull.
“In fact, I wrote a letter