Household Gods

Now that Frank didn’t live there anymore, Nicole had to drive twenty minutes in the direction opposite the one that would have taken her to work, then hustle back across the Valley to the Woodland Hills office. After she got off, she made the same trip in reverse. No wonder the Honda needed a tuneup. Nicole kept wanting to try to find someone closer, preferably on the way to work, but the kids screamed every time she suggested it, and there never seemed to be time. So she kept taking them to Josefina’s, and the Honda kept complaining, and she kept scrambling, morning after morning and evening after evening. Someday the Honda would break down and she’d scream loud enough to drown out the kids, and then she’d get around to finding someone else to take care of them while she went about earning a living.

She turned left onto Victory and headed east. Sometimes you could make really good time on Victory, almost as good as on the freeway – the freeway when it wasn’t jammed, of course; the eastbound 101 during morning rush hour didn’t bear thinking about. She hoped this would be one of those times; she was still running late.

She sailed past the parking lots of the Fallbrook Mall and the more upscale Topanga Plaza. Both were acres of empty asphalt now. They wouldn’t slow her down till she came home tonight. Her hands tightened on the wheel as she came up to Pierce College. Things often jammed there in the morning, with people heading for early classes. Some of the kids drove like maniacs, too, and got into wrecks that snarled traffic for a mile in either direction.

Not today, though. “Victory,” Nicole breathed: half street name, half triumph. Victory wasn’t like Sherman Way, with a traffic light every short block. Clear sailing till just before the freeway, she thought. She rolled by one gas station, apartment house, condo block, and strip mall with video store or copy place or small-time accountant’s office or baseball-card shop or Mexican or Thai or Chinese or Korean or Indian or Armenian restaurant after another, in continual and polyglot confusion. They had a flat and faintly unreal look in the trafficless morning, under the blue California sky.

Six years and she could still marvel at the way the light came down straight and white and hard, with an edge to it that she could taste in the back of her throat. Good solid Los Angeles smog, pressed down hard by the sun: air you could cut pieces off and eat. She’d thought she’d never be able to breathe it, gone around with a stitch in her side and a catch in her lungs, till one day she woke up and realized she hadn’t felt like that in weeks. She’d whooped, which woke up Frank; then she’d had to explain: “I’m an Angeleno now! I can breathe the smog.”

Frank hadn’t understood. He’d just eyed her warily and grunted and gone to take over the bathroom the way he did every morning.

She should have seen the end then, but it had taken another couple of years and numerous further signs – then he was gone and she was a statistic. Divorced wife, mother of two.

She came back to the here-and-now just past White Oak, just as everything on the south side of the street turned green. The long rolling stretch of parkland took her back all over again to the Midwest – to the place she’d taught herself to stop calling home. There, she’d taken green for granted. Here, in Southern California, green was a miracle and a gift. Eight months a year, any landscape that wasn’t irrigated stretched bare and bleak and brown. Rain seldom fell. Rivers were few and far between. This was desert – rather to the astonishment of most transplants, who’d expected sun and surf and palm trees, but never realized how dry the land was beyond the beaches.

There was actually a river here, the Los Angeles River, running through the park. But the L.A. River, even the brief stretch of it not encased in concrete, would hardly have passed for a creek in Indiana. She shut down a surge of homesickness so strong it caught her by surprise. “Damn,” she said softly – too soft, apparently, for the kids to hear: no voice piped up from the back, no “Damn what, Mommy?” from Justin and no prim “We don’t use bad words, Mommy,” from Kimberley. She’d thought she was long past yearning for Indiana. What was there to yearn for? Narrow minds and narrower mindsets, freezing cold in the winter and choking humidity in the summer, and thousands of miles to the nearest ocean.

And green. Green grass and bare naked water, and air that didn’t rake the lungs raw.

Just past Hayvenhurst, everything stopped. A red sea of brake lights lay ahead, and she had no way to part it. She glared at the car radio, which hadn’t said a word about any accidents. But the traffic reports seldom bothered with surface-street crashes; they had enough trouble keeping up with bad news on the freeways.

“Why aren’t we going, Mommy?” Kimberley asked from the backseat, as inevitable as the traffic jam.