Les Enfants Horrible

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

It started not just innocently, but nobly: my sister Sarah and I, having driven to Pavilions and bought the sandwiches and pickles and chips and fruit and juice and coffee, and then plated the above, and then eaten the above, were washing the dishes. She had paid the lion’s share, and laughed delightedly at me as I bitched, about everything and everything, about the man who would not drive to the middle of the intersection when turning left—even though I was not behind him and so should have merely noted it and driven on rather than shaking my fist at him and the heavens—about the fact that our father had not provided his own damn food for his own damn barbecue, about the Pavilions workers who spent several tense minutes together mulling whether we could replace the missing Pete’s Wicked Ale from our sixpack with a Pete’s Wicked Ale Strawberry Blonde—they feared reprisal, or just loved Rules and hated Chaos, and could not bear the thought that a Strawberry Blonde sixpack would be only five strong, as our original sixpack had been before we noticed and rectified the situation, and two were aghast that we simply, carelessly as Daisy Buchanan, had gone off and gotten a bottle ourselves while a third tried not to roll her eyes at her dithering coworkers and said of course we could, what did it matter, whom would it harm? And we lorded it over them, that we were the customers, and were taking the damn beer, which cost the same amount and was the same brand, and what were they going to do, arrest us?

So anyway, having bought the food and plated the food and done the dishes while everyone else sat on their asses, we were putting the dishes away, because we are good girls and good daughters. Dear Old Dad had decided that the manager of the sober living where he’d been successfully and inexpensively residing was out of line, a control freak even, for telling him he needed to wipe up the grease that frothed over when he cooked the ground turkey for his dog, and they both—or all three, if you count the dog, and Dad most certainly does—decided it would be best if Dad moved on, and he was minutes away from his bad old digs at the Malibu Riviera motel when a longtime client asked him if he wouldn’t housesit for him at his lovely place in Sherman Oaks instead, and so Dad did, and so there we were, going through the cabinets. The luck of the Devil, old Dad has, and really always will.

It’s a lovely house, and now we all want to live in Sherman Oaks. A really gorgeous garden, a calle full of jacarandas, a place full of things to the point that it would be cluttered if the things weren’t all really interesting and well-made and artistic. And cabinets. That we were going through. Not the medicine cabinet. Since Sarah and I are not drug addicts, it didn’t even occur to us. Just the food cabinets—full of salts from Portugal and other far-away places. And bars of chocolate, nice ones, for when you might have a yen. And more than 20 kinds of barbecue sauce, but no mayo or mustard. And teas! Many teas! Neatly enclosed in gallon Zip-Locs! For when you would like to own tea, but not necessarily drink it!

The cabinets were bountiful and well-organized and almost anally neat and full of interesting and high-end products, and Sarah and I just naturally started looking through all the rooms to see what else there might be. We were just sort of getting to know the homeowner from his lovely things, including the coolest little herb-chopping basin-and-knife that we did not steal, and making bets on what we might find in each of the scattered chests filling what otherwise would have been empty corners (the chests were all filled with nothing but air), when our Dad caught us, and was horrified, and yelled at us to stop. What the fuck? What are we doing? Why are we snooping? Nothing! we lied, incredibly unconvincingly. We’re not! We’re not doing anything! We totally swear.

I’m pretty sure we actually put our hands behind our backs in the manner of any child caught in some terrible act, as if we were seven and had been busted making toilet soup out of mom’s perfume. I am 37. My sister is 42.

And then my sister, who was trying to open a wicker basket in the guy’s lovely bedroom, to see if it contained dirty socks (my bet) or sex toys (hers), knocked it over with her foot, on purpose, while cackling, but it wasn’t even a basket but a hassock or something instead, so it didn’t open, and you could see the disappointment on her terrible face. Dad had stopped noticing; he was a foot and a half away, trying to get the Internet to work. His paternal duty (of yelling at us) done, we were free to go on our horrible way.

“We are poor but full of spirit,” my sister said to me grandly and happily, as we picked fat ripe lemons off the guy’s tree.

“I’m not full of spirit!” I said. “I’m mad at everything!”

“You’re full of bad spirit,” she told me sweetly, “and that is just as good!”

It was a pretty good Father’s Day, even though we didn’t go to the track.

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