Read Online The End of Eve by Ariel Gore - Free Book Online Page B

early retirement. I had to plead with them. These men need this project. I may be dying, but I can give these men their lives back. Just try to think about somebody other than yourself, Ariel.”
    I felt like throwing up, but I just closed my eyes. “All right,” I said. “I’ll do that.”
    Maybe it wasn’t Nevada’s fault, but right then I hated Nevada. I stared at it for a long time, Nevada. A few tears fell, but the hot desert air just baked them into my cheeks. There’s a color called blue and that’s what the sky was. Maxito came bounding out of the water, at first a silhouette against that blue, then into full color with his red swim trunks and green bug-eye goggles. “It’s cold water, Mama.”
    Sol stepped up behind him, took one look at me. “What’s wrong?”
    I shook my head. “Nothing.”
    THAT NIGHT AT a dark campground picnic table after Maxito had gone to sleep in the trailer, I spelled it out for Sol.
    She quietly filled her glass pipe with weed, lit the bowl and breathed it all in. “So the contractor knows a lot about erotica?”
    I sipped my whiskey. “Anaïs Nin just wrote erotica to make money. Her major works are – you know – modernistsurrealist – like – Cities of the Interior. About architectural spaces that don’t actually exist.”
    â€œOh.” Sol took another hit of weed and nodded. “That don’t exist.”
    JUST A FEW miles in the morning to the Hoover dam and across the Arizona border where they asked Sol for proof of her naturalized citizenship and searched our trailer for human cargo as if Arizona was an independent country and this was an international border.
    At a café in Kingman, I put in a few hours teaching my online writing class while Sol and Maxito killed time at a park. I checked Santa Fe Craigslist for housing, found a listing for a quaint little adobe on Canyon Road and called the landlord.
    He said, “Sure, come and look.”
    A couple hundred miles then and a night in a rented teepee. I watched the quarter moon through the smoke hole and I prayed for nothing in particular, prayed that I wasn’t right here and now irrevocably ruining Maxito’s life, that I wasn’t ruining my own.
    Just a few months earlier, in Portland, I’d had what I always imagined I wanted: A partner and a home of my own, work in my chosen field, Maia making her way to an undergraduate degree. Some kind of an all in the list of checkmarked boxes I called life. I thought of my Gammie, and the way she’d pour herself a nice, tall vodka tonic whenever she saw my mother enter a room and sip her drink and whisper under her breath, “If there isn’t chaos, there soon will be.”
    Weak morning coffee and a couple hundred miles and the highway sign read Welcome to the Land of Enchantment. Casinos, desert, heat. A mid-spring dust storm held the highway in a terracotta haze.
    Do not come to Santa Fe. When we got there, I didn’t want to stop at the gutted house, didn’t want to tell Maia or my mother we’d arrived. So we just sped past the duplex that maybewasn’t a duplex anymore. It didn’t look any different than it had back in November when I flew down and made the offer on it. Flat roof, faux-adobe stucco walls. A long rectangle of a place set on the property at an odd angle, as if it had landed there accidentally. A few dented pickup trucks were parked in the driveway, but no other evidence hinted at demolition or construction.
    We drove down Old Santa Fe Trail and up the hill to Canyon Road to look at that quaint adobe. The landlord had said “sure, come and look,” but when we pulled up with that turquoise trailer, two road-tired and tattooed queers and their sugar-faced kid, well, that landlord came running out and yelling into the street. “Do you know where you are?”
    I didn’t know.
    â€œIt’s Canyon