Page 19

Palm Springs

November 29, 2022

Le Desert seemed quieter with Hobie gone. The power structure had shifted, like when your boss goes on vacation.

With Hobie on fire duty, Grant went by himself to Painted Canyon in Mecca. He said you can only get to the parking area if you can off-road. “See,” he said, “I told you we’d need the Jeep.”

It seemed unfair that Grant was having big athletic adventures when I was the one who loved and embraced the outdoors. I swam in the lake into October most years. I was always trying to rally Grant and the girls to go to state parks or on canoe trips where we’d sleep on sandbanks in the Wisconsin River.

I suppose I could have ventured into and around Palm Springs, too. I kept telling Grant we should check out Joshua Tree, about forty-five minutes away, but he suggested we wait until I could get around more comfortably.

It’s hard to tell the difference between inertia or contentment. To be at Le Desert, for me, was to feel that I was already where the action was. The communal, almost dorm-like experience reminded me of my childhood. I saw Coco, braless under her pajamas, as she fixed Jeanie’s silver hair next to the pool. I could hear what Gene was watching on television—then again, the television was so loud it could probably be heard all the way in Los Angeles. Cassie was chanting, and I could smell Thomas grilling chicken next door.

There was no room for washers and dryers in the smaller units, so everyone shared a communal laundry room. Basil could have found a way to add machines in his place, but he never did because he used a service and suggested we do the same, but I’d never pay for someone else to do my laundry, not ever, so I headed to the laundry room with a basket filled with Grant’s workout gear. Sharing washing facilities was one of the bigger psychological adjustments to group living. I hated doing laundry at home, but here I didn’t mind because it wasn’t a solitary activity.

Gene and Jeanie hogged the machines; they were always seemingly midcycle. They’d run a whole load just to wash a pair of giant briefs. If I was even a minute late to get my stuff out of the dryer, someone would leave my clothes neatly folded on the table, which was the California version of a neighbor shoveling your walk for you back home.

That morning, I saw that someone had hung cheesy paint-by-number cat paintings across one wall—cats chasing balls of yarn, cats sleeping, cats looking out the window. On the other wall was the famous print of dogs playing poker.

“Looks like someone decorated,” I said to Cassie, who was the only other person in the room, which exploded with the scent of her jasmine body oil.

“Oh, Coco bought those at Revivals. She’s trying to piss off Hobie.”

At that very moment, as though she’d heard Cassie’s voice, Coco walked in with her laundry in a rolling basket.

“Hi, Queen,” Cassie said.

Coco’s voice was gruff. “Hobie’s damn dog kept me up all night.”

“She’s just a puppy,” Cassie said.

I could tell that even when Coco was talking about something that bothered her at Le Desert she lit up. The complex was home. It was her family. She loved it, and I had a feeling she still loved Hobie.

She pushed her laundry in the machine I was about to use, slammed the door shut, and said, “That yappy little shit won’t stop barking, so you know what I just did? I walked over there and fed her an entire can of baked beans. She’s going to fart her way to the moon.”

And then Coco was gone, her clothes and her anger still swirling in circles.

I’d heard from Thomas that, during COVID, Coco’s business at the salon dried up. She barely got by hustling the residents at Le Desert for services. Thomas and Raul had come to her rescue, loaning her money for the RV. Now she drove it all over town and parked outside the resorts. She’d long since paid them back. “That good deed paid off in unexpected ways,” Raul said. “Free back waxes for life.”

Cassie said, “There’s a lot of love but also a lot of bad energy between Coco and Hobie. I offered to do some candle work to remove their blockages. They’re twin flames, but they have entities between them. And bad energy. Like you and Grant.”

“We don’t have bad energy,” I said, feeling defensive. “But I think we do have entities.”

She nodded. “Like I said, bad energy.” She was folding some shirts on a piece of cut cardboard with flaps. She could work for the Gap. It was hard to believe someone so flighty could also be so precise, and it seemed wrong for a woman as gorgeous as she was to have to engage in such a menial chore.

“You know,” she said, “Grant’s a good guy, but he’s an energy vampire.”

“A what?” I wished Cassie came with a translation guide.

“That’s his mode, to feed off the energy of other people. I could see it the minute you guys got here. Energy vampires and energy mirrors aren’t always a great combination.”

“I’m an ‘energy mirror’?”

“Well, yeah.” She said it as if I were stupid.

“What does that even mean?”

“It means he looks into you, and you only let him see himself reflected back.”

I was shocked. She’d basically summed up a relationship dynamic that would be hard for me to describe to a therapist. “What do I do about that?”

“There’s a way to fix it.” She brightened. “I’ll show you how. But, Kim, you need to be one hundred percent congruent with your yes, that’s all.”

“Cassie, I’m sorry, but what does that even mean?”

“Anyone can see you’re really blocked in your relationship. A wall rises up around you whenever you’re with Grant. It’s a force field so powerful it’s like he gets electrocuted every time he comes near. If you want to let him in, you need to start saying yes. He told me the same thing.”

She folded another shirt in a few deft movements. I’d been folding shirts all my life and they never looked like hers; this gave me some confidence in her therapeutic abilities.

“Cassie, when did you talk to Grant about us?”

“On our hike.”

“You went hiking with Grant?”

“We went to South Lykken last week. Yesterday I took him to the Bump and Grind.”

“The what?”

“In Palm Desert. That’s my favorite trail, but he hated it. He said there were way too many people. But we had some really great, soulful conversations. It sounds like you guys are stuck in the abyss.”

“What did he say, exactly, about our ‘abyss’?” How could Grant get upset that I talked to Basil about us when he’d been blabbing to Cassie about our problems?

“You each have individual healing work to do before you can come together. He needs to look into his shadow spaces from his past, and you need to awaken to an embodied existence with him.” She lifted her pile of clothes and set them in her basket. We were like old-fashioned wash maids in a weird, new world. She smiled, and it felt as if the light in the room grew brighter.

“‘My embodied existence’ with him?”

“Just like it sounds.” I watched as some of the goddess veneer stripped away and we were back to being two women in reality. “And be careful of Hobie.”

Had she overheard our conversation the other night? Sound traveled across the pool, and the desert.

“Why?” I asked, pretending to be clueless.

“Because if it has wheels or a dick, it’ll give you trouble eventually.”