Chapter 5 #4
He turns off from the reservoir and drives up a steep hill. It seems too narrow for a two-way street, and he has to pull over several times to let other cars go by before finally slowing to a stop.
Eliza’s house is surrounded by thriving vegetation: green bushes with pink flowers and the largest succulents Susan has ever seen.
The garden is so dense that you can barely see the house, just the front door and some windows.
The driver helps her with her bag and then takes off, his tires squeaking on the sharp turns back down the hill.
Eliza’s garden is alive with jewel-toned hummingbirds and monarch butterflies and thick squirrels that look buffer than the ones in Brooklyn, as though they all belong to a little squirrel gym together, where they do pull-ups on bird feeders and deadlift acorns.
The front door opens.
“Susan,” Eliza says.
Hearing Eliza say her name makes every cell in Susan’s body sing.
Eliza’s hair is the color of a sugar cookie and she’s wearing an oversize white cotton button-down and brown linen pants. She looks like a cult leader, or a wellness guru, or some combination of the two. Like she might be running a pyramid scheme involving handmade candles out of her garage.
Time expands and contracts. It’s been five minutes since they last saw each other and also a million years.
Susan feels strongly that she needs to put her hands on Eliza to confirm it’s really her.
Eliza is standing too far away for Susan to even smell her.
Instead, she’s getting hit with strong whiffs of jasmine, which is pleasant but distracting.
“It me,” Susan says.
“What’s that?” Eliza asks, as though she’s never been online.
“Do you hug these days?” Susan asks back, instead of explaining herself.
“Thank you for asking. Do you mind just taking a rapid test first?”
“Of course,” Susan says, even though she knows this is stupid; if she got COVID on the plane, it won’t show up for days. But she knows it’s important for people to feel like they have something resembling control. “That will give me time to shower, too. I’m disgusting.”
“Great,” Eliza says, still in the doorway. “I’ll give you a big hug after.”
Susan gets settled into the guesthouse in Eliza’s backyard, which has a bedroom, a bathroom, and a tiny kitchen with a café table and two chairs.
It’s bigger than her last apartment in Brooklyn had been, decorated in that minimal California style she’s seen on Instagram, complete with rattan furniture and potted cacti on the bookshelf.
It’s throwing her off, how casual Eliza was, but she’s not sure what she expected. To fall into each other’s arms? She tells herself not to be ridiculous.
She shoves a nasal swab into her nose and mixes it with the tiny vial of test solution.
She leaves the test on the kitchen table to process while she showers the airplane stink off and tries to make herself look presentable, but she’s feeling overly self-conscious about how tight her clothes fit and how blotchy her skin is.
She wonders how Eliza always manages to look so good.
Now in their mid-thirties, they should be too old for the kind of effortless, unintentional beauty that radiates off Eliza.
Susan has the quiet beginnings of crow’s-feet and a single white hair near her left ear.
It’s not that she’s unhappy with how she looks; if anything, she’s glad that people no longer tell her she looks twelve.
But it’s hard not to compare herself to Eliza.
She checks the test on the table. It’s negative. Part of her is disappointed. If she was positive, she could avoid whatever is going to happen next.
Susan lets herself in through French doors at the back of the main house.
Inside, it’s decorated minimally; the mid-century modern furniture is simple and low to the ground, and all the walls are white.
She wanders through an arched doorway into the living room—feeling like she’s about to get arrested for breaking and entering—and then into the kitchen, where Graham, whom she immediately recognizes from the photos online, is sitting at a white marble island reading a book.
He’s dressed like a hipster from another era: black jeans, a tight black T-shirt, flannel button-down, work boots.
Only his tortoiseshell reading glasses and the lines in his face anchor him to the middle-aged present.
He stands up, greeting her with a warm smile. Just like Eliza, he is too casual.
“Great to meet you, Susan,” he says, and shakes her hand. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
He’s even more handsome up close.
From another room, Susan hears Eliza call, “Only good things!”
“I wish I could say the same about you,” Susan says. She only knows what she’s googled. “You’ll just have to tell me yourself.”
Eliza emerges into the kitchen, looking a little bit out of breath, as though she’s frazzled to see Susan and Graham interacting without her.
A loose strand of blond hair sticks to her forehead.
She immediately busies herself assembling a tray of cheese, olives, and crackers, which prevents them from the promised hug.
Susan wonders if Eliza doesn’t want to touch her, or if she just doesn’t want to touch her in front of her husband, or if—most likely—Susan is just overthinking it.
Eliza says, “Let’s go outside.”
Susan follows her out onto a terrace in the front of the house, where there’s a view of hills and palm trees.
The sun is starting to set, turning everything a shade of electric pink that Susan didn’t realize could exist in nature.
The palm fronds look like tinsel as they shimmer in the fading light.
Three Adirondack chairs are arranged in a half-moon facing outward.
Eliza places the tray of food on a small wicker table between them.
A railing that doesn’t look up to code is the only thing preventing them from a tumble down into the street.
“You look like someone from a TV show,” Graham says, lowering himself into the chair in the middle. Susan and Eliza sit on either side of him.
“Oh, god,” Susan says. “Which one?”
“The L Word?” he says. “Sorry if that’s a truly uncool comment.”
Susan groans. “Who? Don’t say Shane.” She looks at Eliza for affirmation that this is cringey, but Eliza’s face gives nothing away.
“Shane!” He slaps his knee. “That’s the one.”
“Because of my hair, right?” Susan has had this conversation with straight men before. They only have so many pop culture references for girls with alternative haircuts.
“Susan is so not a Shane,” Eliza finally pipes up, though it sounds less like she’s correcting Graham and more like she’s piling on Susan.
She’s not wrong, though. Susan says, “Yeah, I never really saw myself in any of those women.”
“You’re kind of a mix of Alice and Dana, may she rest in peace,” Eliza says.
“May her memory be a blessing.” Susan nods solemnly. “Eliza is a total Jenny,” she says to Graham.
“How could you?” Eliza says, but she’s laughing in a way that tells Susan she agrees.
A motorcycle roars down the street, loud and out of place in this quiet, peaceful neighborhood. Eliza covers her ears as it passes.
“So you guys met in high school,” Graham says, changing the subject as he pops an olive in his mouth, the first among them to touch the snacks.
“Technically,” says Susan. “We met while we were in high school. Different schools. Not that we would have been friends.”
“That’s right,” he says. “Liz was popular.” He grins as though it’s the silliest thing he’s ever heard, while Susan feels herself tensing—the implication being he can tell Susan was not popular.
Based on what? Her hair? Her queerness? Maybe she hadn’t been popular, but she’d always been cool—just not cool in a way that was visible to her peers.
She wonders if she should bother getting into it with Graham on this and decides against it.
“Let’s just say we wouldn’t have sat at the same table at lunch,” Susan concedes.
“And what table were you at?” he asks.
“Next to the emos and adjacent to the metalheads, I guess. There was a very specific niche within early 2000s indie rock that I based my whole life around.”
“So you were a music snob,” he says, smiling. He puts another olive in his mouth, spitting the pit out into his hand and placing it on the table, where a small tower of his olive pits is growing.
“Oh, yes.” Eliza leans forward, cutting in. “Imagine the most pretentious teenage girl you’ve ever met in your life explaining how to pronounce the name of some obscure band. That’s one of my fondest Susan memories.”
“I honestly don’t think I’m that person anymore,” Susan says while wondering what other snapshots of the past Eliza might be holding on to. “I can’t keep up with new stuff. I like what I like.”
“Welcome to getting old,” Graham says.
Susan narrows her eyes at Graham, trying to determine his age. He is, she thinks, maybe seven years older than her, unless he’s just been prematurely weathered by that powerful golden California sunlight.
“I think I actually have a few good years left,” she says.
“You know what he meant,” Eliza says. She looks at Susan with imploring eyes that say Please be kinder.
“I guess it is kind of a relief, not being young anymore,” Susan says, trying to appease Eliza. “Keeping up with what was new and cool was taking up a huge amount of space in my brain.”
“I feel you,” Graham says.
“Graham sat with the nerds,” Eliza offers up, and Susan can’t be totally positive, but she’s pretty sure she sees Graham wince.
“I was a late bloomer,” he says.
Eliza smiles at him, full of fondness, like she can’t tell how annoyed she’s made him.
“Anyway,” Susan says, eager to talk about something—anything—else, “I’m really excited to be working with you.”
“We’re excited to have you,” Eliza says. “And I’m so glad you decided to come now. There’s so much to see and you won’t have time to be a tourist once production starts.”