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.