Last Days in the Desert

Heat waves rose in ripples of watery deception. Smart animals burrowed far under rocks or rested under shade trees.

  Was the hellish asphalt really liquefying under the girls’ sandals, fusing the leather soles to the tar with every step? They carried boxes, bags and luggage to Tiffany’s car in an endless train of drugged and drunken coeds.

  Up the sidewalk toward her porch, Yadira noticed that even the concrete had that searing feeling after basking in the sun all day. The stored heat made walking a slightly painful proposition with thin leather sandals. Even in the shade of the porch, the soles of Yadira’s feet continued to burn.

  When she walked through the front door, a gaggle of stoned girls sloshed paint brushes carelessly over the two newly filled holes in the living room wall. Itzel had set up small speakers from a phone to play music as she examined the last, biggest hole. Several of the painters stopped to dance.

  Yadira walked through the house. In the kitchen the tiny fake sun of the oven light streamed out (someone had cleaned the oven and was airing out the fumes) and it warmed a gigantic volcano of cold auburn coffee grounds piled in the trash. Jutting out at a hundred crazy angles, every kitchen cabinet door stood open; the kitchen was empty and two blackened basketry items, which were once Hohokam-styled hot plates, now hung high on the yellow enameled wall, reminded absolutely no one of the ancient, inefficient housewife who’d lived in the house for seventy years.

  Yadira had finished packing her own car and so she continued wandering slowly through the house and finally out the back door into the dirt yard. She still felt hung over. Her head was throbbing above her left temple and she was having a hard time focusing enough to walk. She kept trying to clear her head by shaking it and eating food. Nothing made a bit of difference.

  A spray of water from a garden hose slung itself in a heavenly arc over the sky. Stacie was using the hose to make a wet patch at the back of the old shed in the yard of the rental house. They were going to leave the toads there. They had talked it out and that seemed the best solution.

  Yadira leaned on the old tin shed and watched the water flying through the air. In the main, Yadira’s desperate longing for the hottie T.J. had increased exponentially as the date for her departure from the desert neared. Depressed as she was to have slept with him and to have discovered that he was unable to recognize her, she now realized that his presence in her Home Sweet Home (soon not to be) had thrilled her because she had been waiting three years for him to show up at one of her parties. How ironic it was that he’d fulfilled her wish and thought someone named Jaydee (or was it Kaydee? Yadira could no longer remember what name he had said) had invited him. It was over, her crush on T.J. was kaput.

  And what of her love, her crush, at that moment? What if she would have looked him up at that very instant? She would have found T.J. still at home and very much willing to hook up with anyone who was available for the upcoming night. He could not remember the night before, could not recall hooking up with Yadira, though he vaguely knew he had fallen into cactus somewhere in an unknown backyard in the city, and he was still trying to get the smaller, irritating thorns out of his fingers and legs. He planned to go out at about eleven that night to the bar with the giant Easter Island head and see if some of his friends could explain what had happened to him the prior evening, though he was bound to be disappointed because they would remember even less than he did. Everything he learned in communication classes he was quickly forgetting, but that wasn't tragic. His father had announced after the graduation ceremony on the day of Yadira’s party that he had bought his son a condo in Happy Valley, north of Phoenix. He could live there and do fuck-all.

  And what of the girl with the garden hose, what of Stacie’s love life? Who did she think about as she sprayed water on the ground?

  It was strange, but she also loved in vain. Her love was a man named Walter Culpepper Boone.

  Walt Boone, newly appointed Columbia Professor of Anthropology, had already emptied the tiny room he rented near the university, the one that Stacie had visited (for a hook-up) several times in her last months at school. He had hurriedly packed his bags. Joking with the colleague who was driving him to the airport about the desperately ridiculous undergraduate with lovely thighs who was in love with him, he was not leaving any forwarding address, and he was shutting off his cell phone.

  While a post-doc in the desert, Walt had chomped peyote buds with the best of them, frequent strip joints, and gotten drunk in cowboy clubs. He had slept with undergraduates, including Stacie, and used drugs at wild parties. In a large, lonely rock mansion in the desert, he especially enjoyed a sport called coliseums, which involved battles in great glass jars between vinegaroons and tarantulas, palo verde beetles and scorpions. He was one of a group of wild intellectuals, many of whom returned to mundane unspoken existences on the East Coast. While in Arizona, Walt never vaguely hinted of, never even referred to, the really extraordinarily ordinary life he was going back to. He would reenter this boring life the moment he flew out of the desert. His fiancée, planning their wedding on Cape Cod, was having difficulty choosing the wine charms for her goblets without Walter. She was oblivious to the fact that her husband-to-be had recently cheered at the spectacle of insects battling in glass jars.

  Stacie had lied to her friends and told them she was going to New York to live with her aunt and uncle. Actually, she was going to New York to throw herself at Walter Culpepper Boone. Tracking him down through mutual friends, she would arrive outside his brownstone exactly a week from the day of the graduation. She would crouch behind a stubby rhododendron at the corner of a nearby wall only to see him walking away in his stupid suit from the home which she quickly discovered he shared with his beautiful and well pulled together wife-to-be. Thus Stacie's fling with Walter was destined to be a colossal flop, bigger than Yadira’s crush on T.J, which at least was over. Stacie would stay on in New York with her aunt and uncle until she got her own place. It would take her three years to get over the loss of Mr. Boone.

  Yadira left Stacie spraying the ground and walked in the blinding light of the setting sun to Tiffany’s bedroom window. On the other side of the open window, Tiffany was staring wistfully at the neglected bed of irises outside her room.

  “Hey, girl, what you so deep in thought about?” Yadira asked Tiffany.

  “This and that,” said Tiffany, but that mild statement of hers was a lie, because one thing and one thing only was on her mind. Her terrible love life.

  Tiffany had agreed to leave town early the next morning with Robert, her boyfriend, the one she had decided to keep—God only knew why. By the summer’s end, Robert would be enrolled in grad school at UC Santa Rosita and she would be enrolled too. And she didn’t actually know how that had happened. Somehow she’d agreed to study the Economics of Tide Pool Environments. And all this was so Robert could go to law school and still surf.

  She’d flippantly filled out the application to the Tide Pool Program one bright fall morning, six months earlier. Nothing she was doing then seemed real or important and the only thing she could think of was the next night of drinking and getting through the courses she had and graduating with grades that weren’t Fs at Christmas and going on to do the same thing in the spring. Really her thinking about the future, her projections into her future, were rudimentary. Why she was agreeing to live with Robert in Santa Rosita was beyond her. Robert was so excited to be able to surf while in graduate school. It seemed that was all he was thinking about, him being in graduate school and being able to surf. It was something he was obsessed with, but which he had only just discovered in the last year at school. Frankly, though she made fun of Robert’s interest in surfing, she wished she had found out something real about her life goals in her last year in college. Instead she was letting herself be succumbed by someone else’s goals, letting herself sink into the inevitability of everything. She ought to snap out of it and yet that seemed fundamentally impossible for her no matter how hard she thought about waking up a
nd doing what she really wanted to do. It was simply too hard and took too much planning. Also, the uncertainty of what she was doing intrigued her. The lack of logical planning excited her. She was lulled into a sense of being controlled by forces outside herself, and she wasn’t certain why that was happening. Somehow she had lost the assertive edge she used to have. Tiffany had the feeling that once Robert got her to Santa Rosita he would find someone else, or she would find someone else, and she would move out. She and Robert didn’t have any kind of future together. He’d never introduced her to his family. He was barely letting her into his life. And yet she was agreeing to help him go to Law School and surf. She wondered if at the last minute she should go back to Corpus Cristi to live with her parents the way Yadira was returning to Chicago and Stacie was going to New York to live with her aunt and uncle. She would have changed her plans for anyone or anything that came along and asked her to. She realized this fact, and it made what she doing all the more stupid. However she was continuing on with The Plans.

  When she wrote this essay about Tide Pool Economics she sat there at her desk in the room that looked out on the eastern side yard of the old bungalow and the old bed of irises (probably important plants for the old lady who had once lived there), and she quickly zipped out an utterly bizarre essay on the computer, without a single revision, without thinking. Unconsciously, her stupid grad school application essay, crammed as it was with strange unsubstantiated claims and jumbled ideas about tide pools, had been designed to sabotage her future.

  What a shock it was to get the crisp ivory letter of acceptance from the UC Santa Rosita. Even more shocking was the fact that she found herself accepting the offer and monies, rather brightly and cheerfully on the phone while she was talking to some strange man with a creepy deep voice who was named Professor Clive Redtooth and who seemed awfully interested in her welfare, and asked if she was coming to Santa Rosita on her own, and why had she lied and said yes, all the while knowing perfectly well that the Economics of Tide Pool Environments sucked, but she was going on with that and moving to Santa Rosita with Robert, somehow expecting something good to coming out of a relationship with a person whose main interest was his surfboard.

  So, now she was destined to study with the world famous madman Clive Montgomery Redtooth who had established quite a reputation as a specialist in tide pool environments. Everyone who was anyone in the new field of biological economics thought (erroneously, in fact) that Professor Redtooth was destined to win a Nobel Prize. Only Professor Redtooth could gaze intently into the pristine world of a tide pool and ignore its beautiful waving dark green weeds and voluptuous shells, its sweet tiny crabs and golden sands, and see instead the savage encroachment and competition of violent biological interests. The incessant struggle, the games of strategy, the convergence of the strategies to a stable point in a game thrilled his mad brain. He loved imposing the rigidity of graphs of encroaching seaweed and their overlapping zones of survival on the sweet, gem-like pools.

  In fact, it was Tiffany’s bizarre essay that impressed Professor Redtooth with the idea that she was an utterly brainless lunatic, and therefore she might be great in the sack. Also, a close look at her picture, which was part of her application, showed her to be achingly young and full-breasted, and he so hoped she wouldn’t have a boyfriend in tow when she arrived in Santa Rosita. He stole her photo out of the applicant pool in violation of all principals and kept it in his desk drawer, staring at it and sighing in long intervals.

  Chapter Eight