M.E. Breen

Fridge options dire: a slab of something called Sprout!Tofu, parsley, a bagel of ancient type. I mash these together, plus mustard, plus mustard on my sweatshirt = lunch.

I eat on the back steps where the dog is having her sunbath. She’ll come over to investigate if I’m eating a saltine, cantaloupe, muesli, spicy cashews, but no interest at all in the tofuwich. Next comes dessert, a plum, which I eat pretty fast because after fake dessert is real dessert. Chocolate! But that is kind of sad, too, because it’s only plain chocolate, not the dark chocolate full of almonds and sea salt and persimmon chips or whatever that I think of as fancy Snickers, or, really, an overblown version of Cadbury Fruit&Nut, which I discovered in 1984, the year we lived in England, and have not tasted since. I think you can buy it here, but what if I try some and it turns out that whole year wasn’t as great as I remember? What if Daniel, small as a jockey, smallest as a jockey, I should say, since after all this was fifth grade, beloved by all the girls at Park House Elementary for his white blond hair and shy smile –what if angelic Daniel didn’t really like me best?

He did, though.

There are only so many times in life you get to hear that, and of those an even smaller number when you get to believe it. Of all of us, he liked me best. There was Elaine, who had the most beautiful name, and Frances, sandy with freckles, and Uns, who looked like Natalie Wood if only I’d known to make the comparison, and Nusrat, who held things in reserve. I galloped through that scene like a horse. If you had Uns ride piggy-back on Frances and put all the girls together under a blanket and made them run around the school yard, then basically that was how big and wild and horsey and American I was. Oh, Daniel! You had a pure heart.

There was no relationship that I can recall. There was nothing to screw up the declaration or its acknowledgment, breathed into the mustard-colored phone from the floor at the foot of my mom’s bed. I don’t know why the Sprout!Tofu has sent me down memory lane. Or wait, I do. There’s something about my life now that feels at once shrunk and expanded, as though the only people in the world are the people I know, the only rooms the rooms I occupy. When I leave the house I feel like an explorer.

J and I were talking about vacations we took with our families to resorts or family camps, where the kids form a pack and the parents go off and swim laps or play cards, trusting to the security of the setting and the safety of numbers. There was that queasy, giddy feeling of running with kids a few years older than you, kids who might be liking each other, kids who used slang you didn’t know, and then at the end of a long day of running you would return to the family cabin after dark, and as soon as you ducked through that flap of canvas you would just be your old self again, sleeping in the usual bunk, your sister her old self as well, your mom in the same t-shirt she had on that morning, a million years ago.

Some wild stuff has happened to us in the last month, but I don’t think this sense of the world’s newness, its threat and possibility, has to do with that. I think it has to do with the safety of home. J calls our apartment the Minnow. She’s snug, her walls are brown wood, she even has hatches and a sun-drunk, hairy, inarticulate crew. Our bikes, our skiffs, are on deck, ready to drop over the side when we need them. Provisions of food and comics get low and we restock. It’s the best.

I wanted to use a futbol metaphor to tell this story but it felt like trying to tell a joke in another language. My enthusiasm for the game way outstrips my understanding. Never mind. I’ll just tell it like it is: I’m back at the beach! I never left. I thought I was writing the story of this move. Correction: I thought I was co-authoring the story, but one of the minor characters came along and hijacked the whole plot. Oh, hey, I’m using a writing metaphor instead.

Anyway, point is, we thought we were moving into a new apartment, and due to a shocking, then worrying, then baffling, then dismaying, and ultimately tedious turn of events, we are staying here.

A few nights after all this went down, when we were still baffled but edging toward dismay, we took the dog for a walk. Here’s how it works at Ocean Beach: first you cross the Old Great Highway, which has houses and last-chance motels and coffee shops on its east side and what I suspect is a man-made hill on its west side. The hill runs almost two miles north-south and is covered in ice-plants and tea trees and twisty native pines that look like Brobdingnagian bonsai, all crammed together into a wad of vegetation that does a marvelous job blocking the wind and sand that blow off the beach. A path runs along the top of the hill. About a zillion joggers, cyclists, roller-bladers (stalwart few!), stroller-pushers, dog-walkers, and dogs-in-strollers-pushers use the path every day. West of the hill is the New Great Highway, a big lumpy road of four lanes and traffic lights. On the other side of that road is another path, and then the dunes, and then the beach, and then the water.

We were preparing to cross the New Great Highway when we saw a fox. It was across the road on the path by the dunes. Truckstop is not enfolded by this “we,” by the way. Truckstop was too busy investigating someone’s old hot-dog-2-go box from the 7-11 to notice the fox. But the fox noticed us, and as we started to cross it crossed in the opposite direction, back to the bike path and the twisty pines.

Now, I have seen a fox at a distance, and I have seen a fox that has been killed by a car, and I have seen plenty of photographs of foxes and even a few animated foxes, but somehow this fox looked nothing like any of those. It was big, and had a long body and long legs and absolutely giant ears, and it was sort of yellowish grayish. It looked like a member of a hyper-intelligent and bloodthirsty alien race that lulls heroes into passivity with its furry cuteness. It looked like my dog and cat fell asleep in the sun and melted and pooled together and woke up as a single animal. It looked like it knew more than we did, about everything.

Once it had crossed to the opposite side from us, it watched us. It would be safe to say it saw us off. We walked a few yards. It walked a few yards. We walked a few yards more. It trotted along, stopped, watched. The poor co-evolved dog never spotted the fox at all, though she did nearly give herself a strain trying to follow its scent. And even though the fox was an alien of impossible genius, I couldn’t help wringing my hands whenever a wave of traffic went by. What if its babies are on this side? What if our presence here drives it to some desperate act! We are the interlopers! This is not our galaxy to invade!

When we’d gotten far enough along down the path, the fox crossed back over to the dune side and continued to stare after us until the dark swallowed its shape. Then I imagine it went back to its regularly scheduled nightly activities: assembly of the Nova Corps via the Worldmind,* plus gopher hunting.

Of course we Googled “California fox” when we got home. Gray foxes do almost as well around people as rats and pigeons. They nest in trees near human habitation. They eat just about anything. They are wily canids. Still, the picture on the site didn’t look like the animal we saw. And so of course, here it is, my metaphor: the most ordinary things assume the strangest shapes. Things that happen between people every day, ordinary human failures and deceptions, become so improbable, so hard to grasp, when they happen to you. The world seems knowable, mappable, and then all of a sudden it seems like outer space. There are no laws, not even the law of gravity.

So we are back where we started, in the summer fog, the weird soft air, that one corner that always stinks, the shoes dangling from the telephone wire at the end of the block, the cactus on our steps that never stops blooming. The fox set the whole thing in motion from the start. The great mind grew bored in its nest in the trees. It sent us out and it brought us home.

*Marvel’s Annihilation: Book One. Fun!