Free Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins

is?” asked Ig.
    “Holes,” said Luz.
    “Oles,” said Ig.
    At the center of the courtyard was the dry swimming pool, its lip glistening black with grind wax. Ray paused over the enviable glob. Chalky sky blue, a color named such before the sky went bloodred with ash, and that before blood went xanthic for want of iron. Luz waited, squeezed Ig to feel the baby resist. Beneath their shoes were the spots where Lonnie’s grandfather, the Persian Jew slumlord of Koreatown, had scattered huge hunks of rock salt along the wet concrete, wanting to mimic the popular pocking of American midcentury driveways. But the salt took forever to dissolve—no moisture—and instead of the subtle stippling of Pasadena, it left behind craters the size of unshelled peanuts. Among those craters, heartening and forgotten imprints where Lonnie’s oma had laid leaves from neighborhood trees atop the wet pour: melaleuca and magnolia and camphor and jacaranda and sweet gum, all the citizens of the so-called urban forest long since charred to carbon.
    Luz would have liked to leave Ray beside the dry pool and show Ig the spot Ray had shown her, near the laundry room that had been their room, where the fossil of a spruce sprig was flanked by two gentle divots: Oma’s fingerprints, from where she’d laid the spruce. But to go to the sprig would be to go to the laundry room, would be to go to the chemical and supposedly orchid smell of an ancient half-gone box of dryer sheets, would be to slide down the greased wormhole that scent can be, to their first time, to go to Ray’s bedroll, his canvas duffel, his nine Red Cross candles lined up on a shelf beside his can opener, which she could not stop counting the night—their last inthis complex—when she woke Ray and told him, I kissed Lonnie. I let him kiss me. And touch me. We—
    —I know.
    —I’m sorry.
    —Did you want to?
    —No. It just happened.
    —Why?
    —I don’t know. I was fucked up and flattered. I liked that he wanted me.
    —Everyone wants you. It’s your job.
    —Not anymore. Not like that.
    —I want you.
    —I know you do.
    —Do you want me?
    —Yes, Ray. Of course I do. It wasn’t about that. I liked that he liked me.
    —Did you like it?
    —No. I don’t know. Liking didn’t really come into it.
    —Jesus.
    And later, because she could not resist:
    —How did you know?
    —What?
    —You said, “I know.”
    Ray, disgusted: You came to bed smelling like him.
    Luz had to pull it together now. They were here for a reason. Ig squirmed to be put down but Luz told her to shh.
    Rita retrieved a wreath of gold keys from the folds of her skirt and unlocked the red door to the apartment she shared with Lonnie, back in the far corner of the complex.
    Ray said, “You’re locking doors now?”
    Before, all five doors opening onto the courtyard were always wide open or taken off the hinges completely—all except for the storage room, unit B. No locks at the compound, no structure, only frolicsome joy and jam sessions, pranks and all-night debates, raids of merry looting and after these a Christmas-morning vibe. Anyone and everyone was free to come and go, so long as they were committed to the cause and traveled light. No rules was a rule, no labels, and no hierarchy, stressed Lonnie, who owned the place.
    Now, all five doors were re-hinged, shut and outfitted with shiny new deadbolts. Rita jangled her keys. “Ch-ch-ch-changes.”
    But Lonnie’s apartment was as it had always been, owing to Lonnie’s pathetic Oedipal preservation of the décor meticulously assembled by his mother, the shikse feng shui guru. Here were her star charts, her compasses, her astrolabes of brass and some of lacquered wood. Here were her gnomon, her trigrams, her incense coils gone scentless. There, her dragon head medallions, her color wheels, her innumerable bouquets of plastic bamboo, jabbed into vases half-filled with iridescent glass droplets. Here was her coffee table Zen fountain, now merely a