Saturday, Los Angeles
I used to live in Los Angeles, right now, I am just visiting. I moved up to Northern California when I was 39 or so, now I’m 51. Los Angeles is the last place I was young. It’s comforting walking around this place now as a middle aged woman, in a blue caftan, soothingly invisible.
I was hoping for a day of pleasant emptiness, I just wanted to enjoy blue skies. I tried as hard as possible to not do any thinking. We went to the farmer’s market, getting coffee first, like we did when we were young. These routines hurt a little now. They are embarrassing somehow.
At the farmer’s market, my friend was on a mission. She bought so many vegetables. She/we will eat them all in three days.
We walked home with all the vegetables. Waiting to cross Sunset I watched a couple make out. They had clearly recently met. The man was clutching the tiniest parcel of coffee I have ever seen. I saw the amount of coffee as somehow indicative of how long they were planning to stay together: We will finish this amount of coffee and then we will see if we are interested in getting more coffee as a unit or if we want to move on.
My friend went back to the house to write an article about rape. I got a manicure and a pedicure. I picked gold to go with the Cartier gold watch I am unable to return. My right hand looks fine, the left hand got messed up right away. I think the top coat went on too soon. Is that a thing? I want to go back and get it fixed but I am afraid to explain, afraid they will think I am mad. This is silly, because if I don’t act mad, they probably won’t think this. Am I mad? No. But I do think that somehow my left hand just never dried, and I had no control over that. It’s not my fault!
I went to lunch with my friend David. He told me he wrote a play. I’m not a huge theater fan, to be honest, but he said writing it kept him sane during the pandemic, so that’s good. He has to move out of his apartment which means he might just have to leave Los Angeles. It will be impossible to find another place to live that he can afford. Our lunch order got messed up. They brought me chicken instead of tofu. They brought him rice instead of cole slaw. I wanted a glass of orange wine but I didn’t get one and boy am I glad I didn’t now that it is 3:30 and I’m sitting here writing this without a mini day drinking hangover. They were apologetic about our food. We said we didn’t care. David asked me if I thought I was funny anymore. “Sometimes,” I said. “Once in a while.”
My car, an old but still sprightly Toyota, was in the shop. They texted me that it was ready. We drove to Hollywood with the windows down, because of COVID. It was hot. We talked about climate change, which David is less immediately worried about than I am. I told him if he had been living where I live he might feel differently but I didn’t mean to be a know-it-all, I was just saying. This was more thinking that I had wanted to do. He dropped me off. My car repairs cost a lot but I paid without dwelling on it. What did it matter?
I drove east on Hollywood, back towards my friend’s apartment. She wrote me that she could not in fact go to dinner as we had planned because she forgot she had a previous engagement with someone else. I said I couldn’t remember if that person liked me or not, she said they said they’d love to see me. I didn’t know if I believed this. I asked my friend if she still needed to get fake tears from the drug store she’d forgotten to get last night. She did.
“Fake tears? I don’t think we have those,” said the young woman working at Von’s.
“I’m pretty sure you do,” I said.
“The eye stuff is over here,” she said, leading me to the shelf where it was locked up. Everything in this Von’s was locked up, not just cold medicine. Shampoo, makeup, lotion, eye drops. Everything. “I’ve never heard of fake tears,” said the young woman confidently.
“That’s because you’re not old,” I said. I spotted them. “There we are! Fake tears!”
My friend’s doctor wanted her to get one of three brands, and each brand had several iterations of itself. “This is tiring,” I said, to the young woman. “This shopping for fake tears business.” She smiled patiently.
At Crossroads across the street I bought a loose white shirtdress, so I wouldn’t have to do any laundry, and a pair of long gold earrings, interlinking ovals.
Parking back at my friend’s apartment was easy. She was still writing the essay about rape, which was also about soccer. “Writing makes me so hungry,” she said. “I want to eat a lasagna.”
Sarah Miller is a writer.