Whackadoodle Times Galore

ONE I know exactly when things changed. Most people can’t point to the time and place when life went whackadoodle. I can. I suppose if I were introspective I might be able to look back in time and say that life as we knew it started to dissolve when Henry Ford made the car. Or when God made man. Or Goddess made woman. Or when the first two haploid gametes fused to become a zygote. Or when I got married. Had children. Became filled with ennui. Lived the dissipated life. Only I wasn’t filled with ennui—grief, maybe, but not ennui—and my life wasn’t any more or less dissipated than anyone else’s. At least anyone else on my block. Which could have been part of the problem. I didn’t exactly live on a block. More like an enclave. Or a bunch of big houses in an area that could be called a canyon, mountain, or hill. All of it slip-sliding into the ocean that was getting closer every day. But I digress. I babble. Thus my father’s nickname for me: Brook. I added the “e” for fun when I was in college. I thought that would stop my classmates from asking me if my brother’s name was “Up a Creek” or “Down the River.” It wasn’t a very good college. Anyway, it began once upon a time, I suppose, the day Hayword and I were sitting out by the pool. It was a beautiful bluish kind of day. (We were close to la-la land at the time, so how blue could it be? It’s what the locals call fog and the scientists call the Earth going to Hell in a hand basket—or in a designer handbag, given we were in Californ-eye-eh.) Hayword was working on a script. Yes, I was married to a Hollywood writer—had been one myself for a while. And he was such a cliché, really. One day he was in great demand; the next day no one would return his calls. This made him slightly neurotic and a bit moody. Some might say he was manic-depressive, but he was not. (Can’t a person drink to blackout some days and cry uncontrollably other days without being labeled?) Not that Hayword ever drank to a blackout or cried uncontrollably. Someone in our house did that, but I don’t think it was Hayword. On this particular day, Hayword was working on the rewrite of Powerbreakers, a script that had already sold. He had gotten the money, so he was on his way to the stage when he started to feel guilty over the massive amount of filthy lucre he received for writing down lies. That was how he characterized it. When he was talking to a stud head, he waxed on about story and drama and point of view. When he groused to me, Hayword said he was merely taking out a book from his library of lies—i.e., his brain—and transcribing it. Hayword had more guilt about the good life than anyone I had ever met. He was like that when we were kids, too. I’d known him since we were in elementary school. He was a little kid—until he hit about thirteen. Then he sprouted up like a big old sunflower. (I’m spinning some corn now because I did grow up in the Midwest.) Even when he was little he was always standing up for some cause or some kid, going toe to toe with the bullies that were twice his size. And then there was me, his best friend, motioning the head bully over to me to convince him it would be much more lucrative to let Hayword go. In return, I gave them the answers to some test or paid them a couple of bucks for a week. I’d try to convince Hayword to shut up, but he never would. At least back then. Felt it was his obligation. Meanwhile, I was paying off his debts. I was glad when he got tall. We were sitting by the pool together and the doorbell rang. We both got up to answer it. Hayword may have wanted a break from the manuscript—or maybe he was trying to get away from me. I had been talking about our daughter Fern who was working on her master’s degree in psychology up in Santa Barbara. (I named her Fern because I wanted to carry on the woodland fiction that began with my name. Was Fern grounded, rooted or feathery and wild like her name? No. She was mean. Hadn’t liked me since I birthed her, as far as I could tell.) Hayword and I, along with our twelve-year-old son David, lived in an exclusive neighborhood where we knew all our neighbors, and unfortunately, they knew us. We attended each other’s birthday parties, our children’s weddings, and any backyard barbecues, and we occasionally slept with each other’s spouses. And by “we,” I mean “they.” Personally, I’d seen too many of them naked and heard their views on too many subjects to be interested in having s*x with any of them. What I’m saying is that we knew the people in our ’hood. Still, Hayword should not have opened our front door without even looking through the peephole. We did have a gate; Hayword must have left it open. He wanted to pretend he was still that boy from the Midwest who knew and liked everyone. A boy from the Midwest who believed in the goodness of everyone. Every time he started dancing down this particular nostalgic yellow-brick road, I reminded him that he grew up fifty miles from Detroit, which was the murder capital of the world when we were kids. “Not murder capital of the world,” he’d say. “Just murder capital of the United States.” Hayword opened the front door. A startling-looking woman stood on our threshold. She wasn’t dressed like a bag lady, but she was not dressed like anyone I had ever seen in la-la land or environs. She was Caucasian. (I hate that word. Sounds like something out of a police bulletin. That was how I looked at her just then. I wanted to memorize her features in case I had to describe her to a police sketch artist.) So she was white. Probably Irish. English. One of those pale tribes. Yet her skin was slightly brown, as though she’d been climbing a mountain or windsurfing. You know what I mean. She had that burnished look of someone who was outdoors a great deal. Her brown hair was pulled away from her head into those nasty Rasta braids. And she wore some kind of dress—truly nondescript—with pants on beneath it. She had a huge bag slung over her shoulder. She did look like a bag lady. Or what I imagined a bag lady looked like. It had been a long while since I had been anywhere bag ladies roamed. This woman looked at us with clear blue eyes and said, “You got a pool house?” Conventional wisdom holds that women are sentimental suckers. Let me tell ya: It ain’t so. It’s men. They are such soft touches. Especially when it comes to women. Hayword was no exception. I don’t mean he was leering at this woman. She was probably only a few years younger than I was. Men don’t lust after women my age much, at least not in this town. She looked smart, like she had all her marbles. Hayword probably assumed she was down on her luck. I figured she was selling something. Whatever it was, I wasn’t buying. Hayword was. “Sure, we got a pool house,” he said. “Why?” I groaned. Whenever he was fully onto the path of the guilty rich guy, he wanted to do good deeds to assuage his conscience. “It’s not a pool house,” I said. Hayword looked at me. “It’s more of a garden house.” “Garden?” Hayword asked. “I’m going to put in a garden,” I said. Some freaking day I was going to put in a freaking garden. “So you have a garden house?” the woman asked. The wind shifted then, and let’s just say that this woman standing on our threshold was a little earthy-smelling. Musky. Sweaty. Not sweat that has turned. But that rich sweaty smell you like on your lover but not on a stranger. “Look, Eartha,” I said, “whatever you’re selling—” “I’m not selling,” she said. “And how did you know my name? My father nicknamed me Earth because I smelled like dirt. I added the ‘a’ so it wouldn’t be so strange. But then people nicknamed me Eartha Kitten. I didn’t really like that. Eartha Cat I can dig. Eartha Jaguar. Eartha Cougar.” She was looking at me, but I could tell she was paying attention to my husband, too. “I would like to stay in your garden house for a while,” she said. “I’m a traveller, and I need a rest.” “Just like that?” I asked. “In exchange,” she said, “I will do one great thing a day for you.” I looked at my husband. He was smiling. A sly smile. He loved these kinds of distractions. “Oh yeah?” he said. “What one great thing would you do today?” “Let me see the garden house, and then I’ll decide.” “Okay,” Hayword said. “Hayword,” I said. “Are you crazy?” “Excuse us,” he said. “My wife and I need to discuss this.” He shut the door gently, with Eartha on one side and us on the other. I stood looking at him with my hands on my hips, like some stereotypical woman in some bad movie who was always ruining the fun of her infantile husband. “Brooke,” he said. “This is gold, gold! We’re locked up in this huge house where we never experience real life. Here’s someone offering to do one great thing for us. Even if it’s only for today, don’t you want to see what it is? Just for fun?” He grinned. “Come on. In the old days, you’d walk a mile for a good time.” “And I’d walk ten miles away from a bad one,” I said. “Let’s see where it goes,” he said. “Might make a good movie.” “She could be a psychopath,” I said. “A serial killer.” “I’ll make sure she’s not,” he said. He opened the door again. Eartha Kitten was still standing there. “We’ll let you do one great thing,” he said, “and then we’ll see. First, though, we need to know that you’re not a psychopath, a serial killer, or on the FBI’s most wanted list.” “Oh, good lord,” I said. “Just stamp sucker on our foreheads.” Eartha held her bag out to Hayword. “You can check for weapons,” she said. Hayword didn’t take the bag. Neither did I. If this were a movie, millions of people in the audience would be screaming, “Don’t, don’t, don’t let her in, you i***t!” Well, maybe not millions of people. She slung the bag over her shoulder again. “My name is Eartha Jefferson.” I squinted. Her real name could not be Eartha. She was playing me. She seemed to be waiting to hear who we were. I didn’t say a word. Hayword moved out of the way so she could come inside. “First, the one great thing,” he said. Eartha stepped into our house. I shook my head. Hayword was going to learn to lock that goddamn gate if I had to shoot him to get him to remember. My daft husband led the way through the house and out the back to the pool. Eartha didn’t look to her left or to her right. She wasn’t obviously casing the joint. We walked along the pool and a bit away from the house to the garden house. Hayword opened the door and let Eartha go in first. I stayed outside. “Go sit by the pool,” this strange woman said. “I’ll be right out with the one great thing.” She handed Hayword her bag. He took it this time. He looked at me and grinned. If I hadn’t been so annoyed with him, I would have laughed. We went back to the pool and sat in the lounge chairs. Hayword started looking at manuscript pages again. I lay back and wondered if I could really put a garden somewhere back near the pool house. I kept looking over my shoulder to see what Eartha was doing. Probably sticking our valuables under her baggy dress. And then she came out of the pool house—garden house—carrying two filled martini glasses. She handed one to me and the other to Hayword. I looked at the drink. It was slightly darker than any martini I had ever had. And the glass was warm. Room-temperature. “This is your one great thing?” I asked. “How do you know we’re not both recovering alcoholics?” Hayword asked, “and if I drank this it would end a decade-long dry spell?” “If that’s the case,” she said, “you might want to do something about that garden house. If you named a place by what was inside it, you’d have to call it the liquor cabinet, not a garden house.” Hayword laughed. “There is one caveat,“ Eartha said. “You have a choice. This will be the one great thing for the day. And there are only two glasses of this drink. One each. Once you drink it, it’s done. It’s over. I cannot make another. This one great thing will be gone forever. Do you understand?” I frowned. I wasn’t sure I understood. Hayword said, “Sure.” He downed his martini. Just like that. I yelled his name to stop him, but it was too late. She could have poisoned it. She could have put drugs in it. She could have done anything to it. We had no idea. “Oh, man,” Hayword said. “What did you do, Eartha? Brooke, you’ve got to taste this.” I sighed. “She’s waiting to see if you’ll go down,” Eartha said. “What?” Hayword asked. “Oh.” He laughed and looked at me. “I don’t think she poisoned it.” I smelled my drink. The scent of juniper went up my nostrils and seemed to tickle my brain a bit. I closed my eyes, carefully brought the glass up to my lips, and took a sip. For a moment, I thought I was in a forest. I could smell the pine trees. I could feel the slight chill of the snow on the floor of the forest. And somewhere, someone was brewing hot chocolate. The martini had a slight sweet taste of chocolate. “Just the right amount of gin and vermouth,” Hayword said. “And maybe lemon? I love lemon. Or orange. I wish I had savored it. That is a continual lesson for me to learn. Savor, savor, savor.” I took another sip. It was the best drink I had ever tasted. I held my glass out to Hayword. “No,” Eartha said. “One each. That’s yours.” “Do you want the rest of it?” I asked. “I don’t drink,” she said. “So do we have a deal?” Hayword looked at me. I looked back at him. “I want to see some ID,” he said to Eartha. “And then we’ll take it one day at a time. One great thing at a time.” “Good,” she said. Hayword stood and reached out his hand to her. “I’m Hayword,” he said, “and this is Brooke.” “Nice to meet you,” she said. “And now, I’ve been walking for a long while. I’d like to rest.” “I’ll show you where everything is,” Hayword said. He picked up her bag, and together they went into the garden house. I sat in my lounge chair looking at the martini. It was absolutely the best thing I had ever drank. I suddenly felt like that little boy in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe who wants more of the magical Turkish delight the White Witch feeds him. I wanted to keep drinking this liquid forever. I felt so relaxed after two sips. Happy. Contented. I wanted more. And more. I stared at the gulp of drink left in the bottom of the glass. Who did she think she was creating something like this and only making enough for two drinks? I was no Edmund Peevish in Narnia. Or whatever his name was. And she wasn’t the White Witch. I tossed the rest of the drink in the straggly bush next to me. I gasped. What had I done? And then I licked my lips.