Four Hundred Years Plus

Judith found it last week. She found a lump on the side of her right breast; it was larger than she thought it would be. When she was younger, she imagined that it would ache, that it would be noticeable and raised. But in the shower, it was a simple, solid presence right below the surface of her skin. But, even with all those years of preparation and visualization, Judith cried.

She cried in the shower for an hour and when she finally dried off, she dressed herself. Judith wanted to pretend it had never happened.

Judith had been feeling it grow; massaging the lump for the week since she had found it. On the seventh day, she had made a decision. She only cried for a moment after measuring the lump and then woke up Adam. Her eyes were only slightly red.

We cried out to Adonai,the God of our ancestors; and Adonai heard our plea and saw our affliction, our misery and our oppression, -Deuteronomy 26

Judith’s eyes were typically the color of pennies. Her hair reflected the same copper highlights against a background of mahogany strands. Adam loved playing with Judith’s hair. When they made love, he’d run his hands through it. He was crazy about how soft she kept it. Judith remembered her father saying similar things about her mother.

She guessed it was genetic.

Although Judith woke up two hours prior, Adam was still lying in bed. They had met each other at the beginning of Fall Semester. It was now May and she still hadn’t told him. But now Adam was beginning the conversion process. He had transcribed the first thirty mitzvot of the Torah onto index cards. Things had moved quicker than she had expected and the time had never been right.

He worked at the coffee stand near the building that most of her classes were held in. She was a Jewish History Major at Columbia and had a dependency on soy lattes. Especially soy lattes served by six foot tall, blonde men with broad shoulders and large, white, teeth.

Early on, the two of them started traditions. Tuesday became movie night. On Sunday afternoons, they jogged around the campus together. Two weeks after their initial date, Judith invited Adam up to her apartment. He was only her second lover.

It was now May. She had to tell him. With damp hair, Judith walked down the hall of her apartment towards the bedroom. It was morning; Adam was folded into her honey colored sheets. The white comforter had been kicked off onto the typically immaculate floor during the night. They were both poor sleepers. He had one sock on and his already unruly, blonde curls seemed alive with its bold twisting and mixed direction.

With his pale hair draping over his blue eyes, Adam’s features screamed gentile.

He didn’t know anything in particular about Ashkenazi Jews before meeting Judith. He wasn’t raised religious; his family didn’t have time for things like that. That’s why it was easy for Adam to adopt a new culture and new traditions. He was looking for a new family anyway.

Both of them had lost mothers. Maybe that’s why it had worked so well; maybe that’s why they fell so quickly. He decided to convert immediately after saying ‘I love you.’ A few internet searches and visits to the synagogue later and Adam felt ready. After his first meeting with her Rabbi, he bought both ‘The Ten Commandments’ and ‘Ben Hur.’ He had called her from the DVD store to brag.

After all, he figured he’d marry her. She was beautiful—they would have beautiful children. She was going to graduate soon with her PhD. She would teach ‘Messianic Studies’ or something of the sort and he would finally have time to return to school. He liked the idea of having a religious family. He wanted to learn Yiddish. The entire package deal appealed to Adam.

“Adam? Hey, Adam, are you awake?”

He clearly was not awake, but when Judith had made her mind up, there was seldom anything that could disrupt her. Adam tried to ignore the prodding. It was nine in the morning. It was Sunday.

She always made a large pot of coffee on mornings when Adam slept over. Their mornings were growing into a tradition as well. Coffee was the only extravagance she allowed herself. As she walked away from the bedroom and back into the kitchen, she awkwardly stared at the coffee cup that sat on the bar. Judith filled the cup and waited for him to wake up. The lavender mug was only one of the many items in the apartment that was coordinated with feminine flair. While Judith prepared his coffee, she was reminded of the many lifestyle changes that Adam had undertaken recently.

She was uncomfortable about asking him to make yet another adjustment.

In a way, Adam was constantly assimilating to Judith. There were slight changes he made as well as grandiose ones. Adam’s learned appreciation of flavored coffee out of pastel mugs was one of the trivial ones. On a daily basis, Adam washed his hair with her scented shampoo and proudly donned her pink bath towels. Judith knew that there were many men who would have complained about their circumstances. Only a matter of weeks into the relationship, Adam gave up smoking cigarettes. Judith was terrified of smoke. Judith also ate a religiously low cholesterol diet. She made him breakfasts with egg beaters and turkey bacon. He grew accustomed to the taste. He always said he loved how healthy she was. He called her a good influence—he now jogged. She found her habits annoying. Judith thought of the ten pound weights lying beside the couch as handcuffs; but that was Judith’s life. Apparently, it was also Adam’s now.

He walked into the kitchen towards Judith’s bar stool in the kitchen. Adam’s one socked foot caught her attention. He was wearing a pair of grey briefs. There was a hole in them. She thought about how comfortable they had become. It was odd how comfortable he had made himself in her life. He made her life their life.

“Hey. Do you know anything about DNA?”

“Yeah. I took a couple biology classes in my day. Why?”

In Judith’s family history, in the Abram’s family history, genetics was a popular term.

In Jewish history, there is a catalogue of guest star adversaries. But for the Abrams, their adversaries were not the Greeks. They were not the Persians, Egyptians or Syrians. Judith fought a microscopic enemy; she had inherited it. It was an enemy that traveled alone- traveled at night. It left their households barren, and it murdered their first children. A molecular antagonist that was harder to identify than an Anti-Semitic and too tenacious of a Goliath to be beaten by David’s sling shot.

The wars the Abrams fought happened on the front lines. On the lines etched into the corners of their worrisome eyes. Their eyes all shared the same brazen polish and the same worrisome creases.

Judith had trouble remembering a time when she wasn’t fighting.

The BRCA1 mutation, primarily found among Ashkenazi Jews, raises the risk of ovarian cancer as high as 54% and breast cancer up to 81%. – The Los Angeles Times; Anna Gorman; April 13, 2007

“Okay. Well, DNA, right--it has to do with genomes. I don’t know why I’m summarizing this for you, you’re a smart guy… “

She trailed off. Judith didn’t know where that introduction was going to lead her. But she needed to say it. He deserved to know. Everyone else already knew. They had all read the last page and it was wrong to leave Adam on the prologue.

Judith thought that if she waited any longer, it wouldn’t be fair to Adam. It wasn’t just her, when it happened; it would happen to both of them. Adam always spoke of them as a team—he wanted her to see them as a pair. And Judith thought that if they were a team, then he needed to know.

All the kingdoms of the Earth of his dominion, and all the peoples, fought against Jerusalem,

- Jeremiah 34:1

She laughed. It was her fake laugh. She didn’t want to explain the situation scientifically. That didn’t seem like the appropriate way to explain it to Adam. But that was the only way she knew how.

He could tell she was upset. Adam put down the mug. His right hand reached out for the hipbones that peeped out of her black sweatpants. He wanted to pull her close to him. When his two fingers grazed against her lower stomach, searching for invisible guide lines, he meant to calm her.

She stepped away from him and pulled her tank top lower.

When she was a child, it had been explained to her in very simple terms. Judith needed to find those words now. If only she had inherited articulation.

“Everyone gets cancer,” Judith had whispered to her grandmother.

Even at six years old, it had become obvious to her. Judith understood the fate that waited for her. And she understood that this birthright didn’t solely concern the end of her, it involved every day in between. It involved not dating very often. It involved avoiding smokers. It involved constant exercise routines and obsessive scanning. It was a chore and a responsibility. A legacy.

Cancer was the blanket wrapped around her in the maternity ward. One day, if she were lucky enough, it would be hidden in the hem of a wedding gown. And she most certainly knew that cancer would one day be the dark shroud she was laid to rest in. For Judith, cancer was a lifestyle.

Judith wore a black, cotton, jumper to her mother’s funeral. She kissed her mother goodbye, and then sunk her hands into the large pockets at the front of her dress. She was six years old. Her thirty four year old mother had eyes that even when closed were framed by thick, black, lashes. They curled with an unintentional art. Judith never had a chance to realize how beautiful her mother had been.

“But does everyone die of cancer. I don’t get it.”

As her grandmother recalled, Judith remained confused for a number of years. The weight of it took far too long to sink in. It was still resonating. The mixed emotions of fear, anxiety and anger now mingled together with new shed tears. It echoed in the walls of her apartment. Standing there at an awkward distance from Adam, unable to find the words she needed to say, she felt its familiar twinge. She recognized the way it tasted, two decades later. And the original wrenches of pain that she had felt had only strengthened with time.

That was the problem with dead mothers, Judith thought. It was a problem that concerned dead mothers, dead aunts, and dead cousins. Judith realized that contrary to popular belief, those losses never got better with time. As the years rolled by and the pages of calendars were pinned back, it never began to hurt less. If anything, the passage of time only solidified the painful absence. The minutes paraded in front of Judith all the memories that had never taken place. And it made her sick.

“This does happen a lot; you’re right. And, we’re going to have to get used to it. But if you’re a good girl, then it’ll all work out, baby. It’ll all work out. God takes care of us.”

Remember Moses, the servant of the Lord, that trusted in his own strength, and in his power, and in his army, and in his shields, and in his chariots, and in his horsemen, not by fighting with the sword, but by holy prayers, -Judith 4:13

That was all she needed to know at that age. She was young. That’s what everyone said. That’s what everyone murmured as they walked down the aisle past her. While she set there miserably accepting apologies and condolences, she only needed their monosyllabic comfort.

“Just so young—it’s a shame. It’s a damn shame.”

“They all get it. Have you noticed?”

She was young. At that time, Judith needed baked apples, warm blankets and monosyllabic comforting. At twelve, with a climbing number of causalities, she needed more. Adam would need to know more. There were entire manila folders of information she could give him.

Her grandmother had had her ovaries removed after the birth of her second child, Judith’s mother, Hannah. Her Great-Uncle Benjamin was the first to leave the family. He died of pancreatic cancer at the age of fifty-one. Uncle Gabe died on Gramdma Ruth’s birthday. For him, it was colon cancer. He was forty-eight. Her uncle David died of pancreatic cancer at age forty-two. Then her cousin, Sara, was the most recent. She had breast cancer, died at thirty, leaving a son. And of course, there had been her mother: ovarian cancer, thirty four.

“Cancer runs in my family, Adam.”

“Is this about your mom?”

“And what I mean is that cancer more or less runs my family.”

He was lost. His eyes were squinted; Adam looked the way he did while Judith and him watched foreign films. He was never able to read the subtitles quickly enough.

She cleared her throat and spoke again. Standing so far away from him, it almost felt like she was lecturing him. It was uncomfortable and rather painful. It was difficult to stand alone.

“Certain disorders tend to be more common among Ashkenazi Jews.”

“Ash-what?”

“Jews from central and eastern Europe, Adam. Like myself.”

She sounded practiced. She sounded as if she was reading from a pamphlet or speaking to a man she didn’t know. Judith entertained the thought of just leaving.

She wanted to leave before he had the chance to. She would never have to tell him about the lump. And then he wouldn’t have the privilege of making her even more similar to her mother. Both left by men unable to play the role. She needed a man who would appreciate the job, the job as the patient, loving, praying husband.

“Adam, I can’t do this.”

She brushed her hair up in to a messy ponytail at the top of her head, pushed away from the bar she had been leaning on and walked toward the bathroom. She closed the door and splashed water on her face. It didn’t work. She didn’t know what to say and didn’t remember why she had to say it.

She drew back the clear shower curtain and sat herself inside the bathtub. This was where she had found the growth. Her only enemy crawled into the fat cells of her breasts. She lay in the bathtub and appreciated how the tile cooled her reddened skin.

Judith lied, undisturbed in the bathtub for eight minutes. Eight minutes, exactly.

Adam counted the elapsed time on his cell phone. He sat there on his designated bar stool, next to her empty one and anxiously shook his foot on the lowest rung of wooden slats. He chewed at his fingernails. Adam wondered if she was sick. This seemed like one of those conversations. He thought that she must be sick. Then he wondered what kind of sick. He remembered having a similar conversation when it had been his mother.

He had just entered high school when it happened. Unfortunately, the memory was rather vivid. Adam had been too old. After reaching a certain age, people lose the ability to forget. He would have considered himself lucky if the memory would just fade a little. His cub-scout leader mother, his science teacher mother, was diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease a week before his first formal. Only one per cent of the American population contracts the dementia creating, hallucinating, seizure causing Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, but there was Adam’s mother lisping at forty six year s old. She didn’t recognize him or his brothers. She made horrible noises and seldom showered. Her movements were jerky and her beautiful face was bastardized by her new inability to control the spasmodic movement of her facial muscles. She had had one of those broad, bright smiles.

Adam didn’t know if he could deal with that again.

Hospice.

The terrifying seizures.

Watching the vomiting; watching the crying; smelling that smell and living that life. He had already spent five years doing that. Adam wasn’t sure he would be able to do it again.

Before he answered the question, he rushed into the bathroom without knocking. He couldn’t be answering questions that hadn’t been asked yet. She needed to finish what she had started. He was surprised when he found her in the bathtub, fully clothed.

“You need to say whatever it is that you need to say.”

“There aren’t words. I don’t know how.”

“Do I look like your fucking prom date, Judith? Don’t tease me. Don’t jerk me around. Tell me what’s going on. You’re not protecting me from anything, if that’s what you think. If you have something to say, say it. Say it, straight up. This just stopped being an option.”

By the time his speech ended, he was yelling. It was the first time he had ever yelled at her and it was only accentuated by the fact that they were in such a small room with the door closed.

She started sobbing. Her chin was bent against her chest and the dark brown hair that framed her face was quickly wet with her tears. Between deep gasps, she addressed him.

“Are we seriously fighting? I could be dying right now and you have the nerve to yell at me in my own bathroom? Seriously, Adam?”

Judith felt that all the information she had originally planned on sharing was worthless. None of it would help them. Because it isn’t helpful to know why Jews from Russia, Poland, or Germany are different from those from Israel, it is not helpful to know how rare the condition is or how low her chances are of escaping cancer. None of that had made her life easier and she didn’t expect it would satisfy Adam either. She knew it hadn’t helped with either of their mothers and the last thing Judith had wanted was to be another dark era of Adam’s life. That’s not what they had been about. From the start, they were about beginnings. Judith liked who she was able to be with Adam when Adam didn’t know.

Adam and Judith were about being young. Judith thought that perhaps that’s where she should leave them-- leave them in the glory of what they had started. After all, she had seen what a long life was like. Grandma Ruth had had a hysterectomy, years of hormone replacement therapy, multiple sessions of chemotherapy, about one hundred miracles, a mastectomy and oophorectomy. That was her only chance; that was the bright future Judith needed sunglasses for. And statistics, and history lessons, and biological charts don’t make that easier.

Adam was right. He needed to know. But, the consolation he would need afterward, she was unable to provide. All the things a man needs to hear and feel after his girlfriend confesses about a lump, about a genetic disorder, about something she’s known since they first slept together, months prior, were not things Judith possessed. She only knew the things no one cares to know.

It all made sense after the Punnett squares had been drawn, after the studies, after Darwin. Isolated populations, either due to political or religious reasons, narrow their genetic diversity. This tends to cause problems in many cultures. Most Jews tend to marry within their faith and community, the same way her mother had, the same way she wanted to. It was ideal to marry inside the Jewish community, she thought.

These genetic components can lead to Bloom Syndrome, Canavan disease, Crohn’s disease, Cystic Fibrosis, Hemophilia C, Tay-Sachs, and Gaucher’s disease, among many others. -by Will Dunham in

The Scientific American, April 15^th, 2007

Judith had asked too many professionals. Too many scientists, doctors and specialists; too many she knew so well. She knew all of their technical answers. But when it came to sharing it with Adam, Judith felt that there was too much to clarify. But according to the way Adam was staring back at her empty face, she for once, didn’t have enough to say.

He looked worried. He also looked angry. She used cancer as a tool to win an argument and they both knew it was poor sportsmanship. Adam looked exhausted and Judith regretted waking him up on his only day off. She got out of the bathtub and walked over to him.

Judith tried to hug him and he walked into the kitchen instead. He saddled the original barstool. She cleared her throat. She needed to speak; she was angry; and she was scare. Judith’s cheeks were still occupied with tears when she opened her mouth. She didn’t want to be the first one to speak.

“This is not how I wanted this to go. You’re acting ridiculous.”

“No. I am not. Let’s just try this thing again.”

His gray eyes stared at her, wishing they didn’t recognize her. At least that’s how Judith interpreted his awkward stare.

“Okay. Fine. I’ll start. Are you telling me you have cancer?”

“I don’t know how to answer that question.”

“I think you already actually answered it. I’d just like to hear it again.”

“Well, I have a lump.”

Know for certain that your offspring shall be strangers in a strange land, and shall be enslaved and afflicted for four hundred years. But know with equal certainty that I will judge the nation that enslaved them, and that afterwards they will leave with great substance, - Genesis 15: 13-14

His eyes were focused on the kitchen floor. Adam was uneasy sitting there, wearing his underwear. She was attempting to gesture with her hands how long it had become. Judith tried to imitate how she had found it. She was mimicking how long the growth was. He looked uninterested.

Adam wanted to ignore it. He wanted to pretend that if he didn’t watch her represent its length, which was apparently analogous to fingers, that maybe it wasn’t there. He wanted to have sex with her. He wanted for her to stop talking; he wanted to forget that any of this had happened. Adam wanted to crawl back into bed and wake up beside a girlfriend who had normal breasts. He wanted a girlfriend he could marry instead of eulogize.

Judith read it all. It was written in the vertical lines formed between his guilty eyebrows.

And that’s when she broke. Judith broke down. She sat down on the hardwood floors that faced the island they usually ate breakfast at. She crossed her legs underneath her like a child and wept audibly. Her face was wet and red and she didn’t care. Judith was shaking.

Her closed, crying eyes were asking him if he still wanted her. She didn’t know if he would still want to make such an investment and he certainly didn’t look like it. He was sitting stupidly silent on a barstool above her. Adam watched her rupture, watched her composure melt away and her tear ducts explode and he watched her from a distance that was growing by the minute.

She was now a woman undressed by truth. Only weeks away from her twenty-sixth birthday, she only had a couple more years, at the most, until they would want to remove her ovaries.

And with a trail of tears being forged across her face, she mentioned that she had visited the doctor the day prior. She answered the question before he had asked; she was playing both parts now.

Judith’s practitioner ordered an immediate mammogram. Who then, after discovering the
alarming size of the growth, ordered a blood test and an MRI. The results had not been disclosed to Judith. They would need to be analyzed, and then Judith’s oncologist, a family friend by this point, would be immediately alerted. Judith was expecting a call.

She disclosed that part of the story after lifting herself from the ground. She didn’t bother washing her face and she wiped her nose on the sleeves of her shirt. Judith carried herself to the couch and waited for him to join. She sat there holding her swollen breast and spoke without interruption.

She was mumbling the transpired events.

That was when Judith listed all of the medical history, the many scares from the past. She mentioned how cold the office had been; how uncomfortable ultrasounds were because the jelly they use has such an awkward consistency. The process always left her skin irritated.

He sat there with an empty stare. He tried his coffee again and it was definitely cold. He spit it back into the cup and felt embarrassed.

She was stuttering, shifting her eyes quickly, and uncomfortably moving her feet.

Judith was wondering if this had been how her mother felt while sharing her medical results. She wondered if her mother had felt this dryness near the opening of her throat.

She tried to picture what it would have been like if she hadn’t said anything. She tried to imagine who she was before she had become obsessed with the lump. It was the weekend which meant that she would have been sitting next to Adam on the other barstool. This was their day off together and it was nearing noon. She would have made them lunch. He liked grilled cheese sandwiches. They would have made love afterward and then Adam would have held her. He would’ve felt her breasts. She would’ve liked it. But that was all before this morning. Before she was obsessed with it, obsessed with the feeling, with the conviction, with the theory that cancer had been chasing her these many years and had finally caught up with her. And that although she had been convinced that those twenty six years had been a long enough time to understand cancer, she hadn’t realized how quickly it spread.

Judith now held her worst enemy close to her chest, holding her adversary the way she wished she was holding Adam.

He broke her chain of thought. He dragged her averted glance back to himself.

“So, you already went to the doctors.”

Adam finally stood up. He wasn’t looking at her when he asked the question; he rinsed out his coffee cup in the sink and then walked over to the couch. It was a two person couch and Adam sat on the part she had left for him. He pulled Judith close to him. She left her feet in their place, but Adam placed her head up against his bare chest. He held her so she couldn’t move. Once there, once housed in that intimate position, she buried her face and cried. She muffled her open mouth and showering eyes. With hysterical eruptions, she dampened his skin.

We cried out to Adonai, the God of our ancestors; and Adonai heard our plea and saw our affliction, our misery and our oppression, -Deuteronomy 26

“I mean, you went without me? What the hell?”
He was trying to laugh and she appreciated it. He was pretending that it was going to be alright and they both knew it wasn’t. She appreciated it.

“I would’ve wanted to go. Judith, we’re a team. You know that, right?”

His voice cracked.

Judith nodded. She wanted to believe him but more than that, she wanted to stop talking. She wanted to stop waiting for an answer. She wanted to know what was in her breast. She wanted to see it written on paper and she wanted a boyfriend who could simulate conviction and optimism more effectively than Adam.

At that point, she was exhausted, so she silently accepted his romantic gesture.

They stayed like that, with their legs awkwardly and uncomfortably placed in their original positions for over an hour. They were both hungry, but they didn’t move. The crying exhausted her. Adam was far too awake and after he knew she was surely asleep, he slid out from under her.

Judith was still waiting for a phone call. Waiting for a phone call that even if it were successful, its ringing, its message, its existence alone, still indicated a lifetime of worry and fear.

Adam showered alone. He wanted to go for a run, but felt paralyzed waiting for the phone call. He still hadn’t made his mind up and although running would probably provide an answer, he was well aware that even without words, she needed him to be around. He knew that if the phone call confirmed her suspicions, they would both stop running. She would need him to be around even more than he already was. The thought depressed him and he felt guilty when he wondered if they would have sex while she fought cancer. He figured they wouldn’t.

If they could make it through this first time, he thought, that it would be okay. That it would give him time to decide. Perhaps, he could stall on finishing the conversion process. He just needed a few more months with her outside this cloud of confusion. It had only been a matter of hours but he needed to be reminded about how good it was. He felt that after being good, after being the kind of boyfriend who would give up Christmas, he deserved this one break.

After pointlessly bothering themselves for hours, they called it an early night. Adam pretended not to hear Judith praying under her breath. They fell asleep shortly afterward on their corresponding, separate sides of the bed. Adam found it difficult to not hold her, but he could imagine that it would be far worse if he actually did. He was worried he’d accidentally hurt her.

They woke up the next morning to her phone ringing. It was five after nine. Judith’s naked torso rolled over Adam so that she could reach the bed side table. The loud vibration had only slightly woken him but the presence of her warm body up against his stomach reminded him of the day prior. Reminded him that no matter how badly he wanted to pretend that nothing had happened, doctors were calling with results. Judith sat straight up in bed, holding the sheets up against her chest and the phone tightly against her left cheek.

“Is it a condition or a disease?”

He had no idea what was being said on the other end of the line, but this particular statement which was said at a ridiculously fast pace seemed to not be addressing cancer. Anything other than cancer at that point was reason for celebration. It was what he had wished for. He just needed time to decide. He knew he loved her. No one would be this nervous if they didn’t love her, but he needed time to know if he could stay. Adam was hoping it was a condition. “Conditions” sound more managable.

She hung up the phone after arranging an appointment for the week following. That was a good sign, Adam thought to himself. He knew from past experience that anything urgent was worth worrying about. Adam thought about how he’d buy her flowers before picking her up and driving her to the office. He thought that maybe he could be good at this whole thing.

“It’s a condition called fibro-cystic breast tissue. Apparently, I’ll be fine. “

Adam luckily didn’t voice what he was thinking. You’ll be fine, this time, he thought to himself. She seemed so happy and he wanted to experience that same relief, that same gratitude. He wanted to see how this was a blessing. He wanted to feel the resolution he had been expecting. He was supposed to have made a decision.

Downshifting

During the last few months, he had stopped using nicknames.
“Cassandra-- people die on Sunset Boulevard all the time, okay?”
Alan said it sternly, with an unnecessary emphasis placed on her name, while the question mark was swallowed and only remembered through habit. It bothered her. It bothered her greatly.
Cassi’s stomach knotted as she uncomfortably listened to her name’s many syllables leak out of the disinterested corners of her boyfriend’s mouth. It was a burgeoning problem. He had now adapted to using her full name while in the bedroom as well. It made sex awkward. An intimate transaction trapped within a painfully formal shell, sealed with empty diction. She drew similarities between those twenty minutes to her weekly deposits at the bank.
Alan broke her concentration as he dropped the car keys into her asking hand. Cassi was holding the door open; she was sitting in the driver’s seat. The door sat between them, idle in the stale Los Angeles summer. Her mid-length, strawberry hair had been meticulously pulled into a neat ponytail at the nape of her neck. She had to ride the bus to three different grocery stores to find the light colored bobby pins, the type that blended in well with her hair. Their matte, creamy finish matched her khakis.
Cassi was staring at the uneven cement.
Since graduation, she had been working as a mortgage loan consultant at a small business in Pacific Palisades. She was still nervous about what to wear in the office. Cassi was by far the youngest employee. That day, she chose a pastel colored dress shirt.
It was ten in the morning and he wasn’t wearing shoes yet. She was embarrassed by the fact that he wasn’t wearing pants either. Alan needed to shave. His facial hair never grew in fully on the left. Although he held grand ambitions for goatees, side burns and the like, they knew it would never work out.
She brushed the bangs out of her eyes and wondered about leaving. She thought that if she suddenly left, if she, more appropriately, finally left, she would have no way to get to work. Cassi briefly entertained the idea of not returning that evening. The difficult part wouldn’t necessarily be the beginning, but the aftermath. The hangover would include sharing the ‘Cass and Al’ obituary with her parents.
“We broke up.”
“What?” They would say it exasperated; her mother was a fan of histrionics.
“Yeah, I left… and I still have his car.”
It wouldn’t go over well-- needless to say.
She didn’t know how she would spend the upcoming holidays without him. With five shared Christmases already filed away in scrapbooks, Alan had become a staple. He was the cranberry sauce.
They were in the driveway facing Alan’s apartment building. He had been living there for four years and the building was beginning to appear dilapidated. In fact, Cassi found the conditions so heinous; she had stopped sleeping there altogether. It must have been at least two weeks since they had had sex.
Sitting in the car with one eye squinted, due to the sun, she contemplated the peeling paint. There was a boarded up window that faced the street. During college, it had never appeared so worse for the wear. When she would walk the two blocks over from her organized, ordered from catalog, single bedroom, it hadn’t been that way. When they would spend hours tangling themselves within sheets of tequila and lustful declarations of young love, she found the home charming.
They had only graduated two years prior. It drove Cassandra crazy when Alan decided to stay in the area. She didn’t understand why a man would want to live two blocks away from the college campus he already graduated from. When he spoke to her about needing to stay near his friends, she stared at him with eyes that searched for subtitles. Regardless of their language barrier, Cass had decided to stay in LA rather than take the job opportunity it Sacramento. She was betting on Alan.
Their conversation ended with the Sunset Boulevard remark. As the comment staggered in the stale air between them, Cass thought how absurd the remark had been. Obviously people die on Sunset Boulevard, she thought to herself. People die on streets every day across the nation; nothing made her street or her life or his ramshackle car exceptional. She was upset—sometimes she was convinced that Alan said things like that, with a dry tone like his, with her elongated name, just to frustrate her. They sat there looking at each other for a minute before she turned to the radio and raised the volume. He always set the radio to classic rock.

Just a small town girl
Living in a lonely world
She took the midnight train going anywhere--

With an intentional frown, she closed the door and began to inch out of the driveway. Alan half gestured a make-shift goodbye with two of his fingers raised in the air and returned to bed. It took twenty minutes to get to work, and because she was new at driving a manual, she had allotted an extra thirty minutes. It was her first time driving stick alone. Alan taught her when she first she had gotten the job. He had been sweet while teaching her; but that was two months past. Since that first day on the road, the bank had run a background check, and organized multiple training sessions. During those months, she had been busy acquiring an adult-like wardrobe, reviewing corporate policies, and spending less time with Alan. Unfortunately, the distance from her apartment to the bank couldn’t be traveled on bus.
Living in Los Angeles for six years she had nearly given up on driving altogether. And although the thought of his car was certainly unappealing, there didn’t seem to be a better option.
She could easily remember learning how to drive. At sixteen, her father taught her the workings of an automatic transmission. Cass’ father had chosen a small, affordable sedan for her when she was younger. She had wanted something more exciting, but he wanted to teach her about being sensible. He took her out driving every evening for half an hour before she tested for her license. He was that kind of father. The “particularly protective and worrisome type.”
He had wanted it to be easy for her.
“Cassi, be a defensive driver… always better to be driving slower rather than faster. You’re never going to get pulled over for going too slowly.”
He taught her to coast as often as possible. Her father had taught her mother how to drive as well and they both always remained under the speed limit. They had just celebrated their twenty five year anniversary.
Alan was the first boyfriend Cassandra’s family actually liked. Her highschool boyfriend always drove too fast. If they were driving separate cars somewhere, he always opted to race. Driving above sixty five miles per hour made her queasy. She found the sound of wind shaking her windows frightening. That relationship hadn’t lasted long, but long enough to make him a rather significant name on a list of insignificant ones. At the very least, he had taught her how to parallel park.
The traffic on Sunset was ridiculous. It was stop and go.
“Stop and Go.”
Cass said it out loud although no one could hear her. She thought about how she had never understood the full weight of the term before driving stick. The constant pushing in of the clutch exasperated her. She wondered if it was Alan’s car in particular that was difficult. It seemed like the pedal pushed against her with an uncanny amount of force; it was defiant; it refused to behave and move forward. That’s what she hated about driving manual, the car needed constant attention. Anytime she wasn’t working, it was breaking. She deemed the entire concept poorly designed.
It wasn’t just the clutch. She hated the waiting and the wishing. She was constantly wishing for things to change and to become simpler. She was constantly waiting to up shift and downshift, wondering when it was time to alter her speed. But regardless, the traffic never dissipated and the entire process made her short of breath. She felt hot. She was already exhausted as she rolled down the window.
That was of course also manual.
When Alan had taken her on a practice run, it hadn’t seemed this difficult. As long as
he was there to participate alongside her, to hold the e-break as she rested at the top of hills, it was okay. But, now it was just Cassandra struggling to stay in place. She felt a new migraine burrow into the side of her temple as she imagined Alan sleeping on his undeserved futon of wellbeing. She hated that futon.
Cassandra wondered if he even knew how miserable they had become. She thought that there was no way he could fathom the depth of their shared discontentment. Otherwise, he would
have at least half the trouble she had sleeping. Her fingers crept around the steering wheel harder and she silently prayed with words lodged in the back of her throat. Things like this made her religious. For Cassandra, stalling was a relentless threat looming in the corner of her vision. It was this dreadful horror lurking in rear view mirrors that waited for red lights at the tops of hills. She just wanted to be able to live somewhere between second and third gear; she wanted to be safe. She just wanted to coast.

Earthquake Girl

Claire’s mother always said that summer weather made hair grow faster. And now, years later, Claire began to believe her. With bangs slightly stuck to her forehead, she tied away the rest of her hair into a messy ponytail. Claire had decided it was too warm; it was only June, and it was far too warm. It was one of those nights where even the sheets seem too heavy; one of those nights where a mattress doesn’t seem big enough for two people.

"Why do you love me?

Wyatt's fingers were intertwined behind the back of his head; he was, like most men, unprepared for romantic questioning at two a.m.

"Because you're beautiful."

As per usual, Wyatt was not on the same page, let alone reading the same novel as Claire. She was considering breaking up with him and it further frustrated her that regardless of how many times she tried to trigger this conversation, he was always the last to realize what they were talking about. She was talking about leaving him.

"I'm beautiful? That's what you want to go down in history saying? I'm in your bed, asking for a reason why the fuck I should stay and that's the first thing that comes to your mind? Jesus, Wyatt!"

"Well, excuse me, but I didn't know we were having this conversation again. Excuse me, Claire, but I thought that we could at least have one night without you threatening to leave me."

Only three years ago, they had started dating. And even now, Wyatt still loved telling people about how he had met Claire, how he had some ridiculous crush on her that he had carried around the office for weeks before finally blurting out, "like an idiot," he always said, about how much he loved her green eyes. At parties, or any type of event that Wyatt chose appropriate to showcase their relationship, people would then look at Claire for her version of the romantic episode. Claire would smile and say that it was because of his height, but by this point, two years afterward, she could not remember what it was that she had liked so much about that awkward boy from the office. And now he was Wyatt, her boyfriend--a boyfriend who apparently thought she was beautiful. Years before the Wyatt saga had begun, years before her parents' divorce, back to the years when she was too young to laugh at her father's punch lines; Claire's father used to tease her about her good looks.

"Claire, Baby, you've got one of those faces that makes nice boys write bad checks. You're as pretty as a pair of red shoes, just like your momma."

It was odd how often Claire’s father compared her to her mother; everyone else chose to focus on the similarities between her and her father. The list of commonalities included identical smiles; they both had those teeth that were slightly too big for their mouths. But what stood out more than all of their other similarities combined were their eyes. A bright green was painted across both their wide open eyes; each freckled with unsuspected brown splashes. Claire had inherited Robert's exact eyes- the kind of eyes that saw Robert Little in such a complementary light, eyes that loved to forgive him for his faults, eyes that never saw him for the kind of man he was.

A big dreamer from Nebraska, Robert Little had moved his young, pregnant wife away from Tornado Alley and toward the ocean. Of course, all he found in California was that it was hard to buy a house, harder to find a job, and that the earth wouldn't stay still. But with an ego that refused to be bruised by moving back eastward, they stayed on the coast. Claire was born in the San Fernando Valley, on a small street called Rocking Horse Lane, in an even smaller house, exactly fourteen years, to the day, before the Valley met an earthquake that produced the strongest ground motion ever recorded in America.

The 1994 Northridge Earthquake was the first to strike directly beneath an urban area. On the morning of January 14^th, the day planned for Claire's fourteenth birthday party, the earth shook for fifteen seconds. And all the while, Claire's father sat in the bathroom doorway, alone and in his underwear with a fist tightly wrapped around a flashlight.

For weeks afterward, the Valley walked around in a stupor. It reminded Claire of one of those migraines that just couldn't be shaken; like a hangover that lasted for days. And during those pale green, nauseous days that followed, all Claire could remember was how her father had just sat there watching books fall from their cases, plates from their cupboards and daughters from their beds.

During that earthquake, Rocking Horse Lane ruptured open. The asphalt cracked and the separation stretched like a small river across the entire length of Claire's house. A few months afterward, while the city was still recovering, he moved back to Nebraska. He returned eastward on a pilgrimage, searching for a land of stable tectonics- and Claire and her mother hadn't been invited to join. So, the fissure stayed and no one ever bothered to fix it.

And every time that Claire's mother drove over the crack in front of their house and the carriage of the sedan shook, they were both reminded of that man they barely knew anymore. They were both reminded of how ridiculous he had looked, a man just beginning to lose his hair, clutching on to a flashlight. They were reminded of what kind of man he had been and both secretly wondered what kind of man he had tried to become back in Nebraska.

Claire had now, at the age of twenty six, known all types of men. She had gone to school with rich men's sons, poor men's sons, dumb sons, and then in college met even more men, fraternity men, bookish men, and even the occasional foreign man. She had met men that had the power of tornadoes. Claire was always able to find a category to place men in. Over the years, she had dated fiery men, older men, and she had gone through a phase where she was especially fond of Jewish men. Yes, she had known many men. But her father- her father was her first earthquake man.

He was an earthquake man she hadn't seen in twelve years.

But now, lying in bed, only an hour after making love, Claire thought of what kind of man Wyatt was. She tried to dig past the last nine months of slamming doors, ignoring phone calls, and tear dampened pillows, to the first two years. She could no longer remember how he had made her happy. She was almost positive that those things only annoyed her now. Like his constant positive attitude, his lack of coordination, (a result of an overly hasty growth spurt) or even his eagerness to be involved in a serious relationship, a quality she had originally searched for in him.

"I guess I shouldn't blame you, Wyatt. After all, we don't have anything in common, so what could you love about me besides the way I look?"

She covered her bare legs with the comforter on his bed, suddenly feeling embarrassed about being naked in front of a man she now deemed a stranger.

"Baby, look at me, baby? I think you're just trying to find a reason to leave, like you just want to pick a fight because you're scared. Claire, hear me out. I think you need to just settle down a little. I'd be happy to take a few weeks off from apartment hunting if that would make you happy."

Wyatt rubbed at the corners of his blue eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose, as if he had written some type of solution on the inside of his eyelids. He reached over to Claire, reached over to the foot of the bed, where she sat coiled up in a mess of sheets, and tried to kiss her.

"You just don't fucking get it, Wyatt. Do you?"

Claire was now a firm believer in what she called disasterology. Wyatt had recently cemented the entire theory; three years ago she had singled him out as a tsunami man, before barely knowing anything about him, and now, it was coming true. She had first started believing in the theory when she had met Aaron, her first boyfriend, her freshman year in college boyfriend. The infamous man of 1998.

1998 was a horrible year. It was the year Titanic won eleven Oscars; it was the year Claire dropped out of junior college; it was the year she fell in love for the first time, and besides that, it was also the year that thirty eight thousand acres of Los Angeles burned. While everyone in California was focused on a fire that consumed an acre every three seconds, Claire fell in love.

It was on their first date that Aaron had brought up the idea of disasterology. It started as simple small talk; they were just grasping for things to say on a first date. Claire was convinced that all first dates were awkward, but this one had been especially awkward. She had told him how uncomfortable it was for her to start something when everything around them was ending. But, Aaron had insisted and Claire couldn't deter him, nor had she really wanted to. So they met for lunch and chose to sit on the outdoor patio. Claire remembered the Santa Ana winds being flavored with the taste of pot luck barbeques and the false smell of summer.

"It's like our own little version of a fire side chat, just less political."

After speaking, Aaron inhaled deeply from his cigarette and smiled at Claire. He smiled like he already knew what it was like to have sex with her. As if somehow, within the first twenty minutes of knowing one another, he knew that he would end up being the only ex that mattered, that he would be inside her within a few hours time and remain coiled within her most intimate memories for the rest of their lives.

Claire thought he was perfect. His blonde shaggy hair and single wrist tattoo were perfect, so much so that it carried over and compensated for his less than normal interest in fires. He was overly fascinated, not in a pyromaniac sense, but in an aspiring philosopher sense. Before Aaron, she found both fires and philosophy uninteresting, but she soon learned to adopt most of his tastes. That date was a day of many firsts. It was the first time she drank a vodka tonic, which, since that day, had become her 'go-to' drink. It was also the first time she smoked a cigarette. It was also the first time she heard about disasterology.

He leaned across the table toward her and when he spoke, she recognized the scent of tobacco lingering with his saliva. His hair hung in his eyes and when he swept the fringe off of his forehead, he began one of his tangents. Like her father, Aaron was a man who loved to speak.

"Okay. So I know this is atypical first date talk; but there's at least one good thing about a nasty, fucking, fire -- "

While he spoke, he kept his cigarette lit between his pointer and middle finger. His hands moved rhythmically while he spoke; he used them to emphasize points.

"-- look at the sun. Seriously, look at it. It's all covered in smoke, but it's the only time you can really see it. It's too much, you know?"

On a normal day, on a day with less vodka and more tonic, Claire may have reacted differently. On a day that she would have typically spent with a regular man, a man who would never order vodka before five pm, she would have been taken back, stalled at least momentarily by this kind of talk, but with Aaron, she was fascinated.

"So, Claire. I got a theory."

"Really now? Wanna tell me about it?"

Claire was aiming for sexy and she was young enough to not know if she was failing, but it didn't seem to matter. It seemed that whatever she was doing was exactly what Aaron had wanted. He was older than her by only a few years, but she could tell by the way he looked at her, that he was hungry for her bare shoulders, and her accented collar bone; in those years she had been very thin, she had been the kind of thin that leads to the allusion that skin is more like draped silk over the body.

"Absolutely- I wouldn't have brought it up otherwise; I call it…

He was searching for a name to call it and Claire loved the idea that they were about to start a conversation that Aaron had never had before with anyone else.

"I call it disasterology."

"I don't know if I follow."

But she would have followed him anywhere.

"Everyone has their disaster of choice; Myself, I'm into fires."

That lunch date, a date that included too much vodka with too little tonic was the first time Claire started to believe in disasterology. Before Aaron, Claire believed in the rather popular pseudoscience of drinkology, a theory cooked up in cramped bars in which she and her girlfriends would try to read a man's drink order like Chinese tea leaves.

"Anything out of a blender means that all he wants is to be some lucky man's cabana boy."

"Well at least he isn't drinking White Zinfandel."

Disasterology was just a more effective and unique version of the same pseudo science, after the same objective. And even after they broke up and her belongings were no longer coated with the scent of his stale smoke, Claire thought of Aaron. Especially whenever every an earthquake, a mudslide, or a flash flood appeared on the television set.

She liked to think of Aaron as her favorite disaster.

"What don't I get, Claire? Do I not get your daddy issues? Do I not get that fucking, stupid crack in the asphalt in front of your house; God knows what you wanted me to say in response to that field trip, or let me guess, do I just not get it the way Aaron had got it?"

Wyatt seldom yelled, and even now he would argue that he wasn't actually yelling. He was just simply raising his voice, letting her know that he was passionate. He took a deep breath, he was trying to appear more collected, trying to relax her, not further anger her; he ran an open hand through his hair and tried to start over.

"Look- Claire. I may not get some things; okay? I never claimed to be a psychic. But I do know something. I know that if you want to break up, then you're going to have to do it yourself, because I'm not going to do it for you. If you want to ruin this and make yourself miserable, go ahead Claire, I dare you. But, just so you know-- I won't do it for you."

And that's why Wyatt was a tsunami.

Wyatt was not only a tsunami; he was also a 'red ale kind of man;' which, as she had once told her girlfriends, is the sign of a good man. The pint of red ale type of man is a laid back man, he's the kind of man who wants to coach little league one day; Wyatt was that kind of man. He was a hand holding man. But even more than that, Wyatt was a tsunami man.

The one commonality between all disasters, and in a lot of ways, all relationships, is the aspect of surprise. Claire learned that painful lesson the day her father left. She remembered seeing her father in the open doorway, no longer only dressed in underwear, but in his best suit. Claire learned the morning her father left that the worst part of a disaster is being shocked. Claire spent years wondering how she hadn't expected the divorce. She spent years wishing she had known before hand, rather than coming home from school, exactly a month after her birthday had passed, a month after her tree house had crashed open in the backyard, a month after their street had busted open, to discover that her father wanted to leave her. Claire felt that she deserved a fair amount of time before she had to face a packed suitcase stand beside the front door; she had hated seeing that suitcase, a suitcase meant for vacations, packed full of his white dress shirts, his cologne and his toothbrush.

She was sorry that she hadn't figured it out sooner, the same way her mother was sorry that she hadn't put the wedding china into the lower kitchen cabinets. But, that was the thing about a disaster. Disasters are unsuspected. And that was definitely how it had been with Aaron.

She hadn't suspected that while buying books, books she would never read, that she would find someone who would ignite a passion inside of her that made her hungry for sex, thirsty for vodka in the middle of the day and addicted to the smell of tobacco in bed. And while in complete adoration, fallen literally in a way that placed her head over her heels, Claire had neither expected the beginning or the ending of their relationship.

"This is over."

"What? Aaron, What? Why? Why does this have to be over?"

"Claire, I should be the one to ask that question. I wanted this to work and it’s not my fault that it didn’t. I tried my damn hardest.”

Once their cars were no longer coated in ash, they decided to see other people. It came abruptly; one day they had announced on the radio that the fires were raging with zero percent containment and within twenty four hours, people were praising the Los Angeles Fire Department for their rapid response.

Claire argued endlessly with Aaron; then she pleaded, then she cried alone and then she silently watched him stuff his backpack full of his belongings. He left with pajama pants, text books, and CDs; she watched him with the kind of eyes children wear in magic shows, eyes that don't understand what they may have missed. Claire promised that she hadn't been doing anything; she had no intention of making him leave. She had wanted for him to stay, she had wanted to love him forever, and she wanted to love him in that eighteen year old sense of the word for many years after she was eighteen. And when he left, Claire knew that he blamed her. But at nineteen, she considered herself blameless for everything besides being too in love with a boy who was too pretty for his own good, a boy who was able to consume her with uncanny speed.

"Oh, you want to dare me? You want to dare me to leave you? I don't need a dare. This isn't like the other times, Wyatt. I'm serious. I'm done, just like that. I'm done."

"Then I deserve a reason, Claire. At least one. And go ahead, try to find one, I don't beat you, I don't sleep with other women, I don't ignore you, I don't boss you around and before tonight, I've never once yelled at you. Not once, Claire. So please; tell me what excuse you've concocted in that crazy head of yours. Because after three years of absolutely loving you, loving everything about you, I think you owe me one goddamned reason for you leaving."

Claire was now out of bed searching for her jeans. She had decided she would drive back to her mother's. Even after three years, she had never officially moved in with Wyatt. Claire was committed to not having to relive another horrible suitcase toting walk-out, so she kept the things that mattered at her mother's house on her cracked asphalt street.

While pulling a sweatshirt over her head, she started to search for a way to tell Wyatt he was a tsunami. That was, after all, the reason she was leaving, and he deserved to know what he had done wrong. But just as she was about to begin, he added:

"And don't make it one of your metaphors either."

So she began to think. She sat down on the hardwood floor beside his bed, without her lost jeans and questioned why she was leaving. Sitting up against the wall in her underwear and a sweatshirt, she searched for an answer while Wyatt silently waited for one.

Searching for an answer, she felt sick, she felt weak. There had been nothing to say besides 'tsunami.' If she had been with her friends, the conversation would have ended with the ominous title. They would have understood, she thought. They never asked for more details concerning her personal disasters; but then again, that may have been because they already knew she would be unable to produce deeper reasons. She tried to remember how many men she had excused on the basis of their disaster warning label, character judgments Claire gave away like candy on Halloween. She tried to remember how many relationships she had ended, perhaps ended wrongfully, ended too early, or perhaps never even started.

And she finally remembered how it had been with Wyatt during their first two years. They had been good years, simple years, years of sitting in bed and reading, years of eating meals together and taking long drives at night.

"I think, at one point, I had really wanted to be happy with you, Wyatt."

Her voice cracked slightly and although Wyatt had gotten out of bed to comfort her, she moved away and struggled to continue.

She had wanted to be happy. At one point, Claire had liked the idea of a little league team, but then abruptly, she hadn't wanted any part of it. When Wyatt had asked her to move in, she had been overwhelmed. Confused, she agreed, but wanted to retract the statement almost immediately. She instinctively wanted to run for shelter. But he had been so happy. When she said yes, Wyatt had erupted from his chair and covered her in kisses of excitement; he had wanted to move forward. He wanted to move forward with her, move her towards embroidered his and her towels, toward mini vans that had automatic closing doors and she had felt threatened.

It seemed to all make sense now. Claire realized as she stood up and walked herself toward the open doorway that this entire time, that for the last twenty six years, she had been an earthquake girl.