By JoAnna Novak

Originally published in West Coast Review #1

Before dinner they sit on the patio, under the fichus tree and the fig tree and the anomalous birch. The dogs pace like thoughts in the dusk: Lady, an addled golden, and Maddie, a shaggy lab, the house pets; Lucy, a libidinous King Charles. The furniture is upholstered in green twill stained from the fichus berries the dogs would be eating if the fruit had not been swept up for the season. 

It is becoming a beautiful September night. California fall, cool air outlining their bodies: Lucy’s people on separate chairs, Sasha and Michael, married junior faculty in the English department. Together on the matching couch, Jim with his emeritus position and his daughter, Zoe, who, just last spring, completed her degree. Jim’s wife and Zoe’s mother Anna finishes in the kitchen—she has an appointment in English as well. That morning at two to eight, using a semicolon to separate items in a list, she texted Sasha and Michael an invitation and a menu. When they arrived, she handed Michael a cold bottle of champagne, told him to pour, then shooed everyone outside to finish the guacamole. 

The men talk about ethics. They lean back, soles on the sandstone: Michael in his year-round boots, cuffed jeans, spirit-flushed cheeks, heavy-framed glasses; Jim in sweatpants spored with bleach, his gut hiding the elastic waist. 

Sasha is not listening. She is already lightheaded. There is a round, pillow-topped table between the couch and her chair. She leans over this table, champagne tilted toward Zoe. She likes Zoe, even if Zoe is the age of Sasha’s youngest students. It is not clear to Sasha if she herself possessed such self-awareness at twenty-three. She was in the hospital then, and the stay still shadows her memory.

A helicopter chugs above, swiveling a strobe. Zoe speaks up.

“My struggle has always been those people who want to be all elitist about art,” she says to Sasha, staring at the stem of her flute. Her fine-framed glasses narrow the wide gap between her eyes. “They look at like, I don’t know … some poetry, or genre stuff like it’s a big shameful secret. Why can’t someone just—”

“Enjoy what they want,” Sasha says. 

“Exactly.” 

“I had a professor. I said I liked David Sedaris and she said, ‘He’s fine, if—’” 

“Why you gotta hate?” Zoe says. “Let people like what they like, c’mon.” 

“I’m not hating,” Sasha says. She recrosses her legs and her fingers find the side of her thigh, the quadricep’s ledge. She wears jean shorts she might be too old for. 

“I’m just looking for a story that’s not going to have too much sex,” Zoe says, “at least not, awkward-for-me-and-Dad-driving-across-every-inch-of-Texas sex.” 

Sasha re-recommends David Sedaris. The audio books are good: he reads his essays himself. You’ll be in tears of laughter one minute, wrecked the next, Sasha says, remembering how she and Michael played the CD on a road trip and pulled over in hysterics when Sedaris cast himself as a petit aesthete who paints his walls scarlet. 

“Holidays on Ice?” Michael says. 

Sasha glances at his glass. The days get darker earlier: she can no longer see the champagne’s pink.

“I’m taking audiobook recommendations,” Zoe says. A metallic purple vape pen glints in her lap. She blows a luxurious cloud of strawberry smoke. “Any suggestions?” 

Michael talks about a novel. Sasha tunes out. It’s a book she gave him for his birthday a year ago, and he just last week read it, only after she said (immediately regretted saying) that he only read novels by men. Not so, he seemed to be saying as she watched him read all over their small apartment, on the couch, in the chair, on the bed, sitting on the front steps with coffee, at the kitchen table while he ate crackers and cheese. He hasn’t stopped talking about the book, it’s as though its his ships, his family secrets, his wars and eggs poached in incredible depths of water, its young female protagonist, who achieves spectacular, frontier-blazing feats while overcoming personal demons.  

A pouncing rattles the birch. The three dogs sound, Maddy thundering, Lady’s choppy barking, Lucy’s woo-woo-woos. Everyone pauses. A squirrel, a raccoon, a stray cat—.

“LADY!” Zoe calls. “GET over here.”  

Zoe makes a series of fists and Lady collapses by her feet. The dog is mouthy, bobbing her snout at a knee, an elbow, into a crotch. She rolls over, waggling her legs as she writhes. 

“Did you teach her?” Sasha says. 

Zoe nods, scratches the dog’s head with a bare foot. 

“You know what I used to do,” Sasha says. “Read nutrition labels like poetry.”

“I used to get night terrors,” Zoe says. “I miss those.” 

In the pause, Sasha hears Jim describing the sport of shooting doves. 

Zoe peers down her nose. “I’m going to see if Mom needs help.”

The Moreton Bay fig is in Sasha’s line of vision. Its Jurassic root system roils like a whip throughout the patio. A movie prop clock with big, serifed numerals is nailed to the trunk. It’s perennially midsummer back here, especially since the clock doesn’t work. 

“I was never very good at it,” Jim says in his molasses voice. “The doves on the farm have a tendency to swerve. That’s the challenge. They translate wild parabolas in the sky, up, down, up, down. That’s what attracts a true sportsman to this target: the part I had no aptitude for.” 

“What kind of doves?” Michael asks.

Jim stares into his thoughts. “I believe gray doves.” 

The three creep toward drunk, picturing smoke-colored birds. 

After a minute, Zoe thuds down the deck steps. “What do you people want to drink with dinner?”  

“What’s your mother having?” Sasha asks. 

“Wine, wine … ” Zoe says. She taps her fingers on her cheek. “Red or white?”

“We are having shrimp,” Jim says. 

“Anything.”

Zoe surveys them, pityingly. “So, wine and—wine. Real decisive.” 

She comes back with Anna, carrying a tray: a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, a basket of tortilla chips, a lava stone bowl of guacamole with a pig’s head mounted on the outside. Anna sets the tray on the table. 

“It’s a chunky guacamole,” she says, wielding a spoon. “I think this will be the best way.”

“You’re saying we shouldn’t dip?” Jim says.

“At your own risk,” Anna says.

Zoe stares off, looking at the shed, no walls, just a roof, where she tried all summer to keep sculpting the way she did when she was in her studio in the art building on campus half a country away. High, like she is now, she smells her oils, turpentine, spray paint, gray gum erasers, Modge Podge. The lights are switched on, dragonfruit-sized globes. 

“Well I thought we were going inside to eat,” Zoe says. “I haven’t eaten.”

“I’d like to have a glass of wine before dinner,” says Anna. “I’d like to relax.” 

She lowers herself into the chair, holding her wine glass out in front of her like a barre. A woman who dignifies Birkenstocks! She arranges her long lavender skirt, so the lace inlay shows her smooth calves. She crosses her legs. Her blouse reminds Sasha of the chemises Marie Antoinette wore for visiting her Hameau at Versailles. 

An owl hoots, a passing vehicle radios the rondo of “Notorious Thugs.” Anna tells Sasha about a paper she’s had accepted about diaspora and migration in two Toni Morrison novels; Michael and Jim talk film. Sasha catches the name of a best actress nominee from the year prior; she hears herself reference high school, this time at the mention of Beloved, which Anna believes young women find difficult to read when their own maternal relationships are so fraught.

“That’s the thing!” Anna says. “Martin Luther King’s ‘inescapable network of mutuality’ says an individual’s suffering can only be valued as part of a collective—” 

“What’s always been my struggle is that I understand what people are feeling,” Zoe says loudly. 

Maddie pads about, a mangy black wolf. Lucy paws Jim’s leg. 

Zoe sips her drink. “I can sense when a person is uncomfortable or not relaxed.” 

Sasha adjusts her black cardigan. It’s cheap cashmere with flat-faced mother-of-pearl buttons that, in most lights, look like tarnished silver.

“Which is actually intense,” Zoe says. “Being aware all the time.” 

“It’s your superpower,” Sasha says.

“The depressed person’s superpower. Too much empathy.”

“This is why you’ll be an asset at CPS,” Anna says. 

Her first semester at the University, Sasha observed one of Anna’s classes and watched her rectify the argument of Susan Sontag from the hack job of grad students. She is still not sure she knows anything well enough to salvage.

“What would you be doing exactly?” Michael says. He spins a pinky in his drink. “With … CPS?” 

“When Child Protective Services comes in, there are three stages,” Zoe says. “The first happens when there’s been reported neglect or abuse. A case worker like me goes to the family and tries to get them to shape up. That’s what I’d be doing. Very limited involvement with the family, which I like because—it’s already going to be hard not to get totally invested. After sixty days, I check back, but then I pass it off. If things aren’t any better, it goes to the next tier, a level-two person. In which case, the family still has a chance to change. And even a third time, there’s STILL a chance, but then the whole foster thing comes up.” 

“I always hear about people being seized,” Sasha says. “This seems much more prolonged.” 

“People get a lot of time to get it together. Or keep messing up.”  

“I value what Einstein wrote about optical delusions,” Jim says. He rattles the ice cubes in his drink. “We’re imprisoned in our own subjectivity, the only thing we truly have ‘access’ to. But if we ‘widen our circles of compassion,’ then we find beauty that’s even greater than anything we’d encounter on our own.”
“Wow,” Michael says. “That’s spectacular.” 

“If you have the privilege of knowing you’re in a prison, good for you,” Zoe says. “But last fall, when I wasn’t doing well, I knew I was hurting. I knew I couldn’t leave my apartment. I knew I wasn’t sleeping. It wasn’t like I had any energy to think about … self-compassion. Or if I was in a prison.” 

Anna sets down her wine. She slaps her palms on her thighs and smiles toward the house. “Shall we have dinner?” 

*

They eat on bone china. There’s garlic shrimp and sun-dried tomato aioli, green salad and a cruet of vinaigrette, Sasha and Michael’s empanadas. Cilantro, scallions, and jalapenos blitzed into a green sauce called aji. The red wine travels from one end of the table to the other. Sasha eyes its label: Nero. 

Near, noir, black, death, the reign of a Roman emperor.

Maddie and Lady stay outside. Lucy paces under the table, such a pretty dog, you can’t help feed her. Her plume tail bats Zoe’s ankles. Zoe, who sits next to Sasha. Across from them, Anna picks up an empanada. Michael saws his. At the head of the table, Jim works through a heap of shrimp, which he takes by the tail and jabs in aioli. He sips between a tumbler of whiskey and a glass of red.

The empanadas are dry; no one remembers if empanadas ever aren’t dry. The shrimp is delicious, despite a grayish pall. Every bite Sasha takes, she chases with wine and a silent imploring to not get sick. 

When they finish, the table seems to sigh. It’s obvious that everyone is drunk, that the food was needed as much as enjoyed.

“And now, chocolate hazelnut cake,” Anna says.

Zoe scurries into the adjacent living room and flings herself down on the couch. “Too full,” she cries, muffled.

“All right,” Jim says. He fishes his napkin from his lap and empties his Scotch.

Michael and Sasha help Anna clear the table. They collect plates and silverware and bring them into the kitchen. Michael scrapes tails into the disposal. He runs the water, searching the wall for a switch; a cloudy, putrid soup collects. Sasha brings in the wide clay bowl with the remaining shrimp and turns off the tap. Michael scowls. He’s redder now. Flushed. At a point, his eyes go from round to beady. Easier, Sasha thinks, pretending she doesn’t notice.

“You two are wonderful,” Anna says. “Thank you for your help.” 

“Anna.” Michael takes a long time to find his words. “Where is the switch?”

“The switch …”

Sasha lids the shrimp. “For the garbage disposal.” 

“Ohhhh.”

It purrs more than rumbles.

Anna takes a moment to admire the cake. A year ago, she made this cake for Sasha and Michael, inverting the proportions and winding up with a leaden hunk of fudge. This time, she has followed The Silver Palate to a T. 

She brings it to the counter. With a fat-bladed chef’s knife, she slices. Whole filberts decorate the top, at the intervals of numbers on a clock. Everyone gets more than one nut on the big wedges she places on the pink dessert china. Sasha watches. It’s a ritual, ogling the pink. 

“Isn’t it fun?” Anna says. “I thought to myself, ‘If I invite Sasha over, I can make chocolate cake.’”

Its cross-section pleases them: the cake’s chalk brown, the cream’s pale tan, the deep gloss of bitter chocolate. 

“Cake is … ” Sasha says. There is a word for missing words: Lethologica.

“I have high hopes,” Anna says, handing her two plates. 

They bring the slices to the table, where thumb glasses wait for after-dinner drinks. If Michael is red, Jim is scarlet, scarlet and wet, sweat-coated. He doesn’t look good, a man on the verge of collapse. Anna must worry about him dying when she sees him this way—Sasha would. She does with Michael; she has, though she is running out of the energy to care. Also, what right does she have to protest? She’s been a problem herself. Has, was. Not now. Now she sees her emotions like the cake’s layers. The taller the cake, the more important each layer has integrity.

Zoe grabs Jim’s shoulders and shakes him. Lucy hops up and fits herself between the small of his back and the spine of the chair, and he laughs, so probably he isn’t dying.

“Hey Lucy,” Michael says from the doorway. He has a bottle of tequila and a bottle of brandy, and from Jim the bottle of single-malt, from Islay. “That’s a no.”

“She’s fine,” Anna says. “Aren’t you, Lucy-Loo?” 

The night is repeating itself, wearied of its guests, but there is liquor in glasses and cake on plates and the five couldn’t rush dessert if they tried. 

The talk turns to travel. Anna invites Sasha and Michael to join her on a nine-day trip to Paris, where she’ll teach a course on expat artists in the twentieth century. The itinerary is usual: Eiffel Tour, Notre Dome, Les Deux Magots. Sasha and Michael went on their honeymoon, but they’d been wandering and subsisting on water until dinner and it was the last time she’d felt—not young exactly, not not sad, what? 

“I’d love to go.” Sasha forks a piece of cake, mashes it in a mound of salt on her plate. “I just renewed my passport. Finally. I haven’t used it since our honeymoon.”

“Did I tell you what happened when I tried to get my passport?” Michael says. He drains his thumb glass. 

The pause has been so long it seems he might, at any second, continue. The others think so, too. That is a comfort, the company: Sasha can’t count the number of times she’s been sitting like a fool, alone in the thrall of his incoherence, waiting.

Anna turns to him. “What happened, Michael?” 

“I went to the post office, on Vermont. I got there and said, I’d like to make an appointment to renew my passport. ‘Sir, we don’t take appointments and that window doesn’t open until 10 a.m. You can come back or have a seat.’ I said, your website says passports. ‘I know, sir, but you have to come within the operating hours.’ I had to teach. That was the first time. The second time, I brought photos. I had my glasses on in them—because I wear my glasses—and … NO. You can’t wear glasses in your photo? I said, I can’t operate a motorized vehicle without glasses. I—”

He shows the table the thickness of his lenses.

“Honestly, the post office needs a hard time,” Zoe says. 

“Zoe!” Anna says.

“But you got your passport,” Sasha says. “You—”

“I did get my passport,” Michael says. “But I had to get all new photos. And then go back to the post office—AGAIN.” 

Zoe squints. Anna bites her lip. Michael pushes his untouched cake to the center of the table.

Jim chuckles. “The border of what is permissible and unacceptable: constantly changing, constantly alienating the individual. First, it is the window of operation. Then, the acceptable identification. But who determines what is acceptable? And where are those rules posted?”

“Probably the website,” Zoe says, and far, far too loudly, Sasha laughs. 

At a certain point in life, one is either flummoxed by family or continuing in spite of them, Jim thinks. “And then the final trip,” he says, leaning toward Michael’s seat. “Now that you’ve met our conditions and satisfied our rules, you may apply—because you still apply—you may apply to receive a booklet that will let you cross our borders and identify yourself as ‘one of us.’”

Michael nods. Zoe presses her finger to her plate, collecting crumbs. Sasha blinks. Then she sees it. Three times, Anna mouths, eyes bright.

“Michael, have you used this new passport since spring?” Anna says, “You’ve told me this story three times now. It must’ve made an impact on you.”

“It did,” Michael says slowly. 

“He hasn’t,” Sasha says quickly.

“When Mom and I went to France, they didn’t even look at my passport,” Zoe says. 

Michael swallows a brandy. He lifts the fork from his cake, examines the ganache on the tines, and then flings it at Sasha. 

He slurs, angry. “It’s not right.”

“Jesus!” she shrieks.

Are they too drunk to notice? Everyone considers their glasses face versus their no-glasses face. Anna removes hers, slender-armed and wire-framed. Jim removes his, as well. The wrinkles that set off his eyes negate the change. Zoe takes hers off, and her mother marvels at the wideness of her eyes.

“You look like an okapi.”

Michael shakes his head. “I just take them off to shower.”

Sasha is the only one without glasses. Her face stays the same.

*

They stagger home, down Estrella, onto 23rd. The moon is a toothpick. Michael carries the dish in which they’d brought the empanadas. Now it has a slice of cake. Lucy’s leash is wrapped and wrapped around Sasha’s wrist. The dog helps her balance. 

Even at night, the white jasmine blossoms bloom sweetness. There are stomped bags of Cheetos on the street. Gnawed ears of corn in flower boxes, cacti, hard dirt. 

“I can’t believe we haven’t seen them since May,” Sasha says. “Convocation. I mean, Commencement.”

“We talk about the same thing. Without fail. Would you not let her go in there?” Michael says. “That’s human shit.”

Sasha looks in the grass. Lucy is sniffing and circling. 

“Do other dogs look so pretty when they pee?”

“Seriously, she’s eating shit,” Michael says.  

“No, she’s not.” She looks again. “No.”

“Do you want our dog to get typhus?”

They approach the elementary school. In the floods, Sasha sees a skateboarder on the low roof, showing off for two other boys on the ground, pointing their phones. 

“I thought we got into new territory, talking about food,” she says. “It’s not always the same. We were talking about food, right? Food, the memories it—” 

Michael pets Lucy. “They just like to hear themselves speak French.”

The metal rattles as the skater coasts down the roof. Then at the edge, he abandons his board. It clatters off, racketing the ground. His friends call and laugh.  

“It’s amazing,” Sasha says. “I mean, look, he’s just going to fling himself off.” 

“C’mon,” Michael says, walking. “It’s time for bed.” 

*

Her stomach wakes her. The dark is thick. Michael takes up most of the bed. What they swore they wouldn’t let happen has happened: Lucy is wedged into the pillows, between them. 

Sasha puts on a nightshirt, hugging her abdomen. The bedroom spins, paper-shaded night lamp, Michael’s enormous dictionary, open to the headword fulguration. She grips the windowsill and counts streetlights. 

She has been inching her way through a book on depression, opening it every night once Michael is out. She fears she is disserving the book, coming to it sleepily. 

Is it good for you to be reading that anyway? Michael keeps asking. So soon? 

Now she turns on the bedside lamp. The words swim. “The most basic human response is sensation,” she reads. “If hunger were not a disagreeable sensation, we would starve.”

Lucy burrows under the pillow. Michael finds Sasha’s thigh.

“Are you getting up?” he murmurs.

“I can’t sleep,” she says. 

“You’re fine,” he says. Then he is back asleep.

She turns off the light.

In the office, they keep manuscripts in the bottom desk drawer. They keep taxes prepared by a CPA who’s also a volunteer clown. They keep a checkbook for writing rent checks. Boxes of two-dollar bills. Stamps with corsages. Packing tape. Dead credit cards bound in purple asparagus bands. 

Her private things are up top. A cut from the osier at the arboretum. Journals, notebooks, evidence from a handful of good days, traffic tickets, discharge papers, blood work results, ID bracelets, insurance statements, real ones and the ones that tease: THIS IS NOT A BILL. 

She has never suspected Michael of searching her papers. Snooping, in the old-fashioned way. Still, she is ginger opening his cupboard. (Though, he does not wake up for anything. When he was a baby, he used to tell her, he’d sleep through monster truck rallies in a car seat.)

She crouches to open his cupboard. The middle one. It creaks. The same queasiness stirs inside her. It’s the alcohol, she tells herself. Or the shrimp, or the mayonnaise. Rage is not a productive feeling, her therapist says. Rage is anger with claws and teeth.

Michael keeps his things in long boxes. She opens the top one and moves aside wallet-sized pictures of their mean, blond nephews in frog suits. She finds, right away, his passport. She takes it to the armchair. 

There is her husband, the skin below his eyes pale, indented. Sasha reviews the three stamps. Brazil, France, Cuba. Places she’s never been, dates she spent in the hospital, June, July, August. Health, that mere trinket, locketed, gorgeous, stupid. It’d been a very hard summer, yet she never resorted to talking to herself or blaming herself or asking too much, like, “where does he hide the aspirin?” or “who have I become?”