little by little, day after day. They loved each other like the sunlight that makes the plants grow, then scorches the leaves and bakes the moisture from the earth. They loved each other like the seagulls love the bronze statue they’re always shitting all over.
My dad moved to the States from Colombia back in the early nineties. He’d gotten this prestigious scholarship to study medicine at UC San Francisco, but he never finished his degree. Unbeknownst to his family back home, he’d started taking creative writing classes at California College of the Arts, and he eventually dropped out of medical school to pursue writing full-time. He spent three years on his first novel, a pulpy science-fiction adventure that sold enough copies to cover the cost of a used Toyota Tercel and get him a teaching gig at CCA. My mom was studying poetry and Spanish there. They met at a bar in the Mission. Two years later they were married, with a porky little newborn baby named Parker. All I can remember about them as a married couple is a perpetual hum of anxiety, the same kind you feel when the heroine of a horror movie is hanging around the haunted mansion for the first time, and you know some seriously bad shit is gonna go down before too long.
So I guess what I’m trying to say is that I basically learned fuck all about love from my parents.
I’ve learned even less from direct experience, for obvious reasons. It’s tough to romance a girl when you can’t speak. My dad won my mom over with Neruda. (I’ve got his copy of the love poems now, in both languages: “Para que tú me oigas/mis palabras/se adelgazan a veces/como las huellas de las gaviotas en las playas.” So that you will hear me, my words sometimes grow thin as the tracks of the gulls on the beaches.) But reciting love poems is to writing them down as a box of chocolates is to a box of croutons; there’s just no comparison.
So what could I possibly know about love? I definitely didn’t think I was “in” it or anything; I’d only met this girl a few minutes ago. All I knew was that I’d told way bigger lies than the one I was about to tell for way less important reasons, and if the alternative to lying was never seeing her again, I would’ve promised to go to a hundred colleges.
I reached across the table and shook her hand.
“Good,” she said. “That’s settled. I’m Zelda, by the way.” She put the wad of bills back in her purse and stood up. “Now shut that silly notebook, Parker. We’re going to the mall.”
FOREVER 21
LIKE MOST PEOPLE WITH A brain, I’ve always hated malls. And it’s not just the insane specificity of a shop called the Art of Shaving, or the inexplicable cost of the ass-ugly plaids for sale at Burberry (what kind of raving serial killer psychotic would drop nine hundred dollars on a scarf?), or the fact that the whole building stinks of whatever toxic waste goes into Cinnabons and Wetzel’s Pretzels, or the soul-crushing volume of the music that gushes out of Abercrombie & Fitch like so much sonic sewage. No, it’s the people that really get to me. It’s the minimum-wage-powered sales staff, made up half of hormonal, sulky teenagers (like me) and half of embittered adults railroaded back into the workforce by the recession (like my mom). It’s the crush of foul-smelling skater punks, bleached-blond cheerleaders, testosterone-addled jocks, happy couples (rarer than sushi), unhappy couples (common as a cold), bawling babies, and the shitty parents who never bother to pick them up out of their strollers.
Also, it’s pretty much impossible to steal from people in a mall, because of all the cameras.
Zelda seemed to share my general contempt for mall culture, but instead of being depressed by the crass consumerism and mindless conformity, she found the whole thing hilarious.
“Look at that one!” she said, pointing out a Lids store and laughing a condescending little twinkle of a laugh. “Is there nothing in there but baseball caps? My God, your generation really will buy anything with a logo on it.” She turned around and found a group of punkers chomping down on McDonald’s burgers. “And what about these kids here? All dolled up like rebels, but spending their money at the biggest multinational corporation in the world.” She grabbed hold of my hand with a little-kid-at-Disneyland sort of excitement. “You have