I talked to my sister about it, because sometimes she was wise, even if she was annoyingly optimistic. “Do you think we’re living a lucky life?” I asked. She bopped me on the head with her support monkey. “We’re not living the exact same life, so how would I know, genius?” she said.
The dog was scratching again although Mom had flea-bombed the fleas. Our living room was covered in shoeboxes and there was nowhere to hang out. And our goldfish, Marilyn Monroe, like the two Marilyn Monroes before her, went belly-up.
Our mother wearing a turquoise sundress, strappy sandals and zebra-framed sunglasses was showing houses to young married clients from LA who could never make up their minds and who would inevitably buy from somebody else. Oversized hoop earrings rattled against her sunglasses and every night for dinner she defrosted soup.
Nothing was being said about the flea infestation or the mountain of shoeboxes all over the living room filled with ancient family photos. There was only one tiny cracker box with photos of our father, and we couldn’t find it anymore, but Mom promised us it was somewhere beneath the other boxes. “If you girls want to remember him, why don’t you sketch him?”
It was clear to us that Mom’s luck was running out, or maybe she never had any to begin with. “My picker is seriously broken, girls,” she liked to say, which seemed true, although middle-aged men’s ardor was easily aroused by our mother’s beauty.
Just six months after Dad disappeared, Mom met “Bob from Berkeley” in the canned fruit aisle at Trader Joe’s. That fizzled out in a few months. Three months later she met “Perfecto from Pittsburgh” who was handing out Chinese restaurant fliers in the parking lot of the Dollar Store. Finally, there was “Sometimes Stan”, a pest control guy from the Central Valley with a giant plastic spider on top of his van. He was the one who told us girls that being born with good luck matters far more than developing wisdom.
“A person born with luck will have a good life and I guess I’m living proof,” Stan said combing his scanty black hair in the hallway mirror. “That’s complete bullshit,” my sister whispered. It was hard to know what to believe. Days, weeks, hours flew by and our luck seemed to be, if anything, worsening.
And then, on the first day of summer, I ran outside to ride my bike and found a dead squirrel next to the dog’s water bowl. I screamed. It was skinned and decapitated. Mom rushed outside. “What kind of animal could have done such a ghastly thing?” she said, her eyelids baggy. A bad omen if ever there was one, I said, but my sister disagreed. “Bad for the squirrel you mean,” she winked.
But I was adding up the evidence:
1. The dog was scratching even though we flea-bombed the house.
2. There were new shoe boxes piled on top of the old shoeboxes and the towers were beginning to lean on each other.
3. The fourth Marilyn Monroe was beginning to look pale and depressed.
And then, to top it off, a bulbous Midwestern businessman with tuna breath, Bill from Biloxi, decided not to buy the house Mom’d been showing him for months, and instead, asked her to marry him. Mom said yes. “Talk about a surprise!” she squealed when she broke the news.
I was planning to run away.
“If this isn’t proof of bad luck I don’t know what is,” I whispered to my sister. But my sister pointed out that our new goldfish, Dolly Parton, was doing just fine.
