Oranges; Charcoal

Michele Kilmer

We lost the house in May 1982. I hate that term; lost the house. I knew right where it was. Still do. It was the day after my sixth-grade graduation. We packed up with nowhere to go. We spent some nights among orange groves in an undeveloped part of Redlands, California. Nobody would spot us there. There were nights spent in our faux-wood-paneled station wagon with a rear-facing seat. I was the oldest. I called the way-back first.

We spent a few weeks in a mansion owned by a doctor friend of my dad’s, they were on a European vacation. The house was four floors and big as a hotel. They were Mormon, part of my dad’s interfaith prayer circle, and a real source of fascination for us as fundamentalist evangelicals. They had a drink in their kitchen called Postum, which they drank instead of coffee. We wondered what the thing was about coffee.

My parents threw me an unwanted slumber party and invited every girl from my sixth-grade class. I remember my mom dressed up like it was a Sunday and standing at the top of the stairway to the front porch. She waved glamorously, like she was leaving on the Love Boat. The other moms waved back jealously as they dropped off their daughters. Everyone brought presents even though it was July, and my birthday was in December.

After that, we spent time in a trailer, in a different orange grove. I don’t remember my parents being at the trailer. Our “we” went from five to three. We ate saltines with mustard. We tried to open a can of tuna without a can opener. I cut my finger badly, jamming a rusty steak knife into the can.

We avoided standing for too long on the nasty red shag carpeting—I worried it had never ever been vacuumed. The wood panels were tacky, dusty, and the trailer had the nauseating shake of a single-wide not built on a solid foundation.

There was a dry riverbed nearby. We spent most of our days testing how far down the river we could get, and we ate a ton of oranges. We never found a drop of water in that dry riverbed. We saw maggots for the first time, though. I broke my ankle jumping off a low bridge, showing off. I hobbled back to the trailer, using my brother and sister for crutches. Our parents didn’t show up for three days; they were on a church-sponsored marriage retreat.

We got farmed out after that. Our three “we” turned into three “I’s.” I don’t know where my brother and sister were sent, but I ended up with a wealthy family, the Kittersons. When my dad dropped me off, he told me that I should use this time to work on being grateful—he said I was an ingrate, and it was something I needed to get right with God. It’s hard to be thankful for things you don’t want, like losing your house or living with people you don’t know, but I kept trying.

I arrived late on a Friday night. The family was already in bed. The gardener, Manny, grabbed my bag and handed it to Maria, the housekeeper, who led me to a room with a king-sized bed that had fancy lamps on the side tables that turned on and off with the touch of a finger.

The K-house was quiet on Saturdays; each family member was involved with this or that interest. They let me sleep. When I woke, I begged God to make me more grateful. I wondered if an “outgrate” was a thing I could be. With a gleaming silver pen engraved with a swirling K, I wrote the word outgrate on a small white pad imprinted with “Kitterson’s” in raised silver letters.

I slipped out of bed and made my best effort to make it look untouched. Leave it better than you found it. I put back the decorative pillows and smoothed the comforter. I re-wrapped the ace bandage that was over the dressing on my ankle. Not too tight. I’d had to have surgery as my ankle had set badly by the time my parents came home. The doctor made a joke about being accident-prone; I’d broken twenty-seven bones at that point.

I snuck across the hallway to the bathroom using only one crutch. The bathroom faucet was gold, and there was a massive bouquet of freshly arranged flowers that were all in different shades of cream and peach with fat brown cattails that poked out of the top. My favorite was the white ranunculus, but a close second were the peach roses that filled the bathroom with their soft musky scent. The bathmat, even the toilet paper, was colored peach. There was a large seashell on the counter filled with small white towels rolled up and stacked in a pyramid. You were supposed to use them to dry your hands and then put the used towel in a hole in the counter, where a hamper was hidden underneath. I liked using a dry, untouched towel.

I never saw a speck of dust in that house. I wanted a house just like that. Big and clean and beautiful, with flowers in the bathroom and things that matched, and a driveway you couldn’t see the top of from the bottom. Want, want, want.

I can still hear my mom’s voice in my head saying my “want-er” was getting out of whack. I wanted more than I deserved—she never missed an opportunity to remind me.

The walls and curtains of the guest room were draped spring-green silk with hand-painted, stark-white cranes that waded in swirls of paint-implied water. There was a large painted crane over the headboard, its wings outstretched, that looked as if it was forever coming in for a landing. A painted magnolia tree in the corner went up into the ceiling. Gray mountains whispered in the background, surrounded by swirls of clouds. I felt like I was living in a painting and wanted to lay on the bed and imagine being a crane with wide-open wings and watery landings, but I was afraid to dawdle—dawdling was not outgrate behavior.

I hobbled around the house and over the smooth marble-floored ballroom; I pretended I was a dancer. Down, up, up, down, up, up, I twirled on one crutch and then the other. I poked around the house, tested door handles—I didn’t open any of them but made note of which ones weren’t locked.

There was a card with my name spelled with an extra “L” on a tray and my breakfast under a silver dome in the kitchen. A glass of orange juice in a heavy crystal glass smelled divine, and the frothy pulp on top was delicious. I ate every crumb. I suctioned a tiny single-use jam jar emptied of boysenberry jam to the end of my tongue like I did with communion glasses, which my mom said was blasphemous. I washed and dried my dishes, but I left them on the counter, too short to reach the cabinets. My doctor said I would have a growth spurt when I turned thirteen, but that was six months away.

Outside, it was 105 degrees and an ugly smog hung in the ether. I threw my crutches into the backseat of the golf cart and hopped into the driver’s seat. I turned the cart slowly down the winding driveway, just like Mr. K had showed me, my left foot lightly on the brake. Best chore I’d ever had.

“It’ll be easier once your right foot is healed up.”

“Will it?”

“Look,” he’d said.

We paused at the very top of the hill.

“You can see the whole city from up here,” I said. It would look more beautiful without the smog.

“You can almost see the ocean from up here.” He said it with a tinge of sadness in his voice, like everything would be perfect if only the view ended in blue.

“It’s like being on top of the world,” I said.

When I got down to the gate, I punched in the code. The gate’s creaking made it seem like it had stiffened after a workout. The golf cart shot out of the drive, and I rounded it up to the mailbox. The mail was packed with catalogs and magazines; everything looked important to my thirteen-year-old self. I felt cool. Free.

Rotting oranges cluttered the gated entrance. Using a crutch like a golf club, I knocked them into a pile for Manny. “Not a bad shot,” I said to myself. I picked a few good oranges and plopped them on top of the mail. I didn’t know if horses liked oranges, but I was gonna find out.

I headed back past the gate, closed it, and hit the steepest part of the drive, “pedal to the metal” like Mr. K taught me, but the golf cart came to a slow plop of a stop. I put both feet on the brake, but the golf cart slid backward, skidding slowly at first. A sharp pain shot through my ankle, and I eased my right foot from the brake to relieve it. The cart spun around fast and met hard with the wall the gate was attached to; a fat chunk of chalky stucco fell onto the clean blacktop of the drive. The cart whipped around again, spilling me out, crashing into the gate, and running over my unbraced ankle. Mail scattered everywhere as my face found the heat of the driveway. I watched as the oranges I’d gathered rolled under the gate and into the middle of the street.

There was a big dent smashed into the rear driver’s-side fender. The cart was out of power, and its front grate was tangled in the front gate, a crutch caught under a wheel. My cheek burned with the heat of the blacktop, my ankle had split open, the pain was breathtaking. Both heels of my hands were scraped with bits of gravel embedded under the skin. Tears rolled down my face without permission; I gasped for breath. This was not better than I found it.

I gathered the dirty mail, envelopes torn and pages of catalogs ripped. Everything was orange-sticky. I hobbled back to the house, skinned knee dripping blood, hands throbbing, one very bent crutch. My elbow was scraped with sharp white stucco and blacktop streaked my skin, making it look burnt. I tried to hold my breath, but it escaped in little squeaks that made me sound like a baby, the wind knocked out of me. I shivered with a cold sweat and threw up in a potted plant; the sight of frothy orange vomit made me disappointed in myself; I didn’t know how to fix any of this. Outgrate, outgrate, outgrate.

I used the hose to clean up and entered the side door to a screened-in patio they call a lanai. My skirt was now a blood-covered towel. I made it across the lanai floors, the hallway’s white carpet, and into the bathroom with no trace—relieved. I wrapped my palms, knee, and elbow in the thick peach-colored toilet paper, after which there were tiny specks of peach trapped among the hair on my arms and legs. I blew on them and watched them scatter into nothingness. I used the whole roll of toilet paper. I was afraid they would notice. I didn’t know where fancy toilet paper came from. Blood had soaked through the ace bandage, and I wondered how to feel grateful. Ingrate.

Back in the bedroom that was not mine, I reached into my bag. At the bottom were the fluorescent orange pain pills I got after surgery. I’d never taken one. I didn’t want to end up like my mom. I’d rather be in pain. But then, without deciding, I took one, then another, and then I downed them all. I finally stopped shivering and lay on a towel in the corner of the room under the painted tree; curled up like a cat, ensuring my body was inside its rectangular borders. I was asleep by the time everyone got back.

“I shivered with a cold sweat and threw up in a potted plant; the sight of frothy orange vomit made me disappointed in myself; I didn’t know how to fix any of this.”

I woke up in the hospital, while a tube was slipped out of my throat.

“Don’t try to talk,” a nurse said. “Just relax.”

She squeezed my shoulder like a coach.

“You’re going to be alright.” She smiled and winked.

She smoothed my hair and put a piece of it behind my ear, then cupped my face with her hands. Her eyes were full of sadness when she looked at me. She handed me a bottle of liquid charcoal to take home.

“Make sure you drink every drop. It’ll clean you out.” She winked at me with a sly smile.

My dad drove all the way from Marina Del Rey to Saint Bernadine’s Hospital. Three-plus hours in traffic. He didn’t say a word to me until we hit the ambulance bay outside.

“Do you know how much this is going to cost!” He put up his finger to silence me. Hundreds of dollars, maybe thousands, I thought. I knew crutches weren’t cheap.

“Do not humiliate me like this again!” he said.

The blue velour V-neck he had on made his eyes look beautiful, like Paul Newman’s. I could see why all the ladies at church gathered around him whenever my mom was in choir practice.

“You’re damn lucky you don’t need another surgery.” Another finger in the air, no response necessary. He looked at his watch and, without another word, he jogged to his car, slammed the door, and tore out of the parking lot like he was late for something important.

A candy striper in the lobby let me use the hospital phone to call my grandma, but she wasn’t home. So, I took my new crutches and sat in the grassy area next to the parking lot. It had just been mowed, and the clean cut-grass smell made me feel good. I lay down just as the sun’s heat broke, and a slight breeze tickled some relief.

The doctor who’d pumped my stomach spotted me on the grass as he was leaving.

“Need a lift?” he asked as he did that hair-flip thing that boys do.

I felt my face flush red.

He got out of his car and helped load me up, as if I had said, “yes, please.”

The top was down on his convertible, and I was glad the wind made it too loud to talk.

“Nice neighborhood,” he said, when I told him the address.

“I don’t really live there,” I said.

The doc stopped at the gate. I could see the missing chunk of wall was already patched with wet gray cement. The blacktop showed no trace of the chalky white stain of stucco. I pushed the open code into the gate.

“Be right down,” Mr. K’s voice scratched out of the speaker.

The doctor waited in his car. Mr. K came down in the golf cart; it worked just fine, even with dents and a missing grate. He waved at the doctor.

“Nice Targa,” he said. “Got a T-top myself. Love how it corners.”

The doctor and Mr. K shook hands and exchanged business cards while I hobbled to the passenger’s seat of the golf cart, a sticky slick of orange on the floor. Tears rolled down my cheeks, again. I shivered, again.

“Accidents happen,” Mr. K said. “No big deal.”

He patted me on the back, and I wasn’t sure what to do.

“Looks like we are going to have to sign that new cast.”

I looked down at the cast, its ugly white calling for attention. The nurse had rolled a gray hospital sock over my toes; I tried to wiggle them, but it hurt too much.

The family was being served dinner, a place set for me. Too nauseated with pain, I didn’t eat. They talked about their days, shopping, horse-riding lessons, tennis. Mr. K had bought a new boat. Next weekend we were going water skiing in Havasu.

“We’ve got to find a floaty for that ankle,” Mr. K said with a laugh.

After dinner, the family went into the den to watch TV, hands full with root beer floats and popcorn. I stayed back to help with the dishes.

“Maria will do that,” I was told.

I stayed anyway but was embarrassed when I saw that my help was more work for her. Maria set me up on a chair to help put things in the dishwasher. She rinsed; I placed dishes in the rack. Tears with no sounds poured down my face. I held my breath, determined not to be a whiner.

Maria stopped cleaning and hugged me. She rocked me back and forth as she hummed sweetly. She gave little kisses to the top of my head, and I snot-cried big time. She took the palm of her hand and wiped my cheeks, then hugged me tightly. She smelled like bleach and lemons and onions and lard. She gave me one last kiss on my forehead, put the liquid charcoal into my pocket, and sent me into the den with a pat.

I avoided the den, went back to the bedroom that wasn’t mine, and sipped the charcoal in quick gritty gulps. I spent the rest of the night in the bathroom, pooping black bricks of charcoal and calculating how long it would take to pay back the Kittersons and my dad. I didn’t know how I could ever earn fixing-a-golf-cart kind of money, let alone ER visit money. I slipped into bed as the sun started to rise and dreamt of cranes and charcoal and oranges and little wisps of water and clouds. Still do.