Day 33 #2
Lally did wait before checking once more, but the lights remained.
She was then distracted by 12B, who was awake again; he didn’t like his wine and wanted a beer.
He gave her the little wine bottle back; since it was only half empty, she decided it was fine to serve him the beer, but her card reader was acting up (first the lights, now this), so she gave him his drink on the house in a rush to get back to her perch in the window; now they seemed farther away.
Moments like these always made her take stock of her life.
Well, there were very few moments like these.
But plenty lately when she felt anxious.
Alone. It wasn’t how she thought her life would go.
Her brother Norman met someone with relative ease decades ago; they had quite literally bumped into each other.
That was the way things were supposed to go.
You go to school, get a job, meet someone, have kids.
Her parents had done it that way, they met in school.
Norman and Jesse followed that path more or less, and they were two men!
But life hadn’t worked quite that way for Lally; things had always been harder for her.
It started, she supposed, when her brother Robbie died.
And then later when she got braces and headgear; unlike her grief, which she became adept at making invisible, braces were an exterior physical awkwardness to match her inner emotional one.
Everyone told her how lucky she was, as she was the first in her family to get them, when everyone else had to accept whatever grew out of their head.
As soon as they came off she realized how grateful she’d been to have them, but for two years, her life was hell.
It wasn’t just braces, but this entire headgear contraption.
Boys wouldn’t look at her, girls wouldn’t talk to her.
Not to her face, anyway. Plenty was said behind her back.
Kids were cruel, and she absorbed every word of it until she was cruel to herself, too.
She was lost without Robbie, who had been her defender.
It got better for a time in college, but by then she was spending evenings and weekends with her brother and his new boyfriend, preferring their grown-up friends to her own.
She was everyone’s little sister, and the crowd that Norman and Jesse cultivated had a hard time looking at her as anything but.
Even when she thought she might be open to having a lesbian affair (in college, such a cliché), the women she met never considered her a sexual being.
The few straight men they encountered, waiters and bartenders and barbacks who flooded the Venice Beach scene, didn’t seem to see her that way, either, and Norman, in an effort to comfort her, told her she was someone likely to blossom later.
And now it was later, too late even, if you asked most men, who always had their eye on someone younger, someone dumber, someone who giggled easily and would go along with the status quo.
Lally’s one serious relationship had been with a gourd farmer, of all things.
“A what now?” Norman and Jesse had teased.
She had to tell them they heard her right.
“You can’t grow gourds in California,” they protested.
It seemed like such an East Coast thing.
How did the Pilgrims have the first Thanksgiving if gourds were grown outside of L.A. ?
“That’s simply not true,” Lally told them. She’d learned a lot about gourds. They preferred warm weather and ample sun and at least six hours of direct sunlight a day.
“Maybe we’re gourds,” Jesse had mused.
“Maybe,” Lally retorted. “You’re bumpy and unevenly shaped.”
When the relationship ended, Norman and Jesse had gotten her drunk at a local bar. They sang karaoke to her, Elton John and Kiki Dee. Don’t gourd breaking my heart. She hadn’t dated much since.
Lally had little need for a man now, but she wanted a baby.
That sometimes required a man, but she already had two: Norman and Jesse.
Between them they had created nine viable embryos, three boys and six girls, currently taking up space in a freezer in the Mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles.
Not only did she deserve to become a mother, they deserved to become children, some of them at least. If Norman and Jesse had changed their mind about fatherhood (why, she didn’t know), there was no reason for them not to agree to let her take custody—biologically, they were half hers, even if not legally.
And, hey, if they later relented and did want to bring children into the world, their kids would be both cousins and siblings.
How great! Hopefully they would grow up as connected as she felt to Robbie and Norman.
But where was Norman? Since she’d paid her visit to Jesse, her brother had not been answering his phone.
At first she thought it was unusual perhaps, but not unheard of; he had a way of getting lost in a build.
But it had been over a week and still no call back, despite repeated messages and texts. Something was not right.
So she wished upon the UAPs like stars. She wished to be a mother.
She wished to find her brother to make that happen.
She wished for more out of life. She wished for one bad crop of gourds, not enough to ruin a man, but enough to punish him just a bit.
Then she unwished that wish, because there was enough negativity in the world.
She wished for kindness and forgiveness.
She wished for everything to be different.
Outside the window, the lights switched positions one last time and when Lally blinked they disappeared. She kept one eye open for them until the sunrise cracked the horizon and the day’s first light appeared. Once they were gone, she actually missed them.