Lightning Field: A Novel by Spiotta Dana

Author:Spiotta, Dana [Spiotta, Dana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2002-01-29T21:00:00+00:00

Second Road Stop:

Between Arizona and New Mexico

“Why do I hate the ocean? Well, I don’t, I just don’t have the sentimental fetish for it that all these people do. As if the oceanon the one side and the desert on the other sort of justifies whatever lies between.” Lorene smokes her long cigarette and will not take off her sunglasses. We sit in a bar in a town halfway between Flagstaff and Santa Fe. We sit in the afternoon light and she will not take off her sunglasses.“The sun is our enemy, don’t you know, Mina, beware always of the sun. Relentless, inexhaustible summer is no way to live your life.” I eat a hamburger. She watches. I can feel her hunger like a wave behind her glasses. I eat with gusto, but not too fast. I sense her watching my every move. She keeps speaking as if we were having a conversation.

“It’s important to live in a place that is affected by seasons. Where time is measured in weather. Where there are constant reminders that your approaching death is inescapable. You know, leaves falling, that sort of thing.” I slurp on my Coke. She lights another cigarette.

“Mud slides don’t count. Disasters, fires, unusual weather systems don’t count. Earthquakes don’t count. They are just random, a kind of meaningless natural hysteria. Earthquakes, when you grow up in California, they are like an E-ticket ride at Disneyland, a joke, a way to make the nonnatives come forth and identify themselves.” The afternoon light on her white face makes her look celluloid, as if she could shift the whole world to black-and-white. Michael said there is nothing more beautiful than white, white skin because it is so unforgiving, so bruisable, and the person inside seems only barely covered. To me her cheek looks cool and poreless, not at all trembly and translucent. But she may have been different then. Or maybe he could see through skin.

“Oh, honey, you’re upset.” Lorene leans toward me as if she could see me only now, as if she had just walked into the room.I feel nothing, but there must have been a sort of look on my face. I stare out the window. A large woman is trying to get her stuff into her tote bag. Kids’ clothes and hairbrush and cigarettes all spilling out. She has blond hair cut close on the sides and left long in back. Her toes press over the edges of her sandals and the nails are not deep red but lollipop red. Her son is tiny beside her, pulling at her. I keep staring at the fat part of the backs of her legs, the part where the skin puckers whitely and it looks as if no nerves are there, that if you touched her flesh she wouldn’t know.

“Lorene,” I say.

“Yes?”

“I think I made a huge mistake.”

“Oh, dear. Do you want to go back, doll?”

“No, no, no. I don’t mean leaving L.A.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, Lorene. Oh, God. I’ve made an awful mistake.

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