In my early twenties I lived under the flight path. From six-thirty in the morning until eleven at night, a plane descended over my apartment every fifteen minutes or so. I was a block away from Laurel Street, the one that incoming pilots use to line their planes up on the sudden dip toward the airport. San Diego has one of the most dangerous airports in the US, located right next to the bay, with houses and businesses built right up to the razor-wire fence around the runways. Twice in my time there, a plane overshot the landing and ended up with its nose in the water.
My apartment was the maid’s quarters at the bottom of an Edwardian house. With every plane, the walls shook as if my little cave would collapse onto me. That possibility felt right, inevitable, and like something that would make a good story on the nightly news, which was a goal I occasionally had.
One big plus was that there weren’t a lot of ways to store food or to cook it.
The stove was taken from a small-size RV. It looked orphaned and confused at the end of the Formica strip I had for a counter, and its oven did not work; it burned everything on the bottom and left the top doughy. The refrigerator was of similar provenance and had no freezer, just room enough for a couple quarts of juice and a small drawer of vegetables.
Twenty or so years earlier, someone had tried to make the place look larger by adding mirrors everywhere. This was helpful to me. If I felt like eating something, I could take off my clothes and stand in front of the closet, which took up and entire wall and had three sliding mirrored doors. A plane would pass and my reflection would shiver, horrified at the sight of itself. If that wasn’t enough, the bathroom was tiled in mirrored panels with the faux-antique gold spotting that was popular in the 1970s. There my reflection looked as if it had been run over, marked, crushed with its own worthlessness. I turned around and imagined those gold splotches as the dirt being cast over my body after my job used me up and abandoned me.
When a plane passed, my dishes rattled; sometimes a drinking glass would burst into shards. That happened twice while I was standing in front of my dish shelf, thinking about water.
The maid was lucky to have had an enormous cast-iron tub. I savored the moment when I turned on the faucets and got into the bath, then let the water creep up my body. The drought was not as bad then, but I was careful about water use in other ways. I told myself that if I stayed in the tub for two hours, I had earned the right to it. I had stacks of books and magazines to read while I soaked, not eating anything.
Sometimes if I was afraid I was going to eat, I emptied the contents of the mini fridge into a paper bag and took it to the canyon at the end of the cul-de-sac. It was only three houses away; despite the prime location, somehow nobody had figured out how to stabilize the earth and build on it. Instead the hills were covered in eucalyptus trees, which prevented anything else from growing there. At the end of the nineteenth century, promoters had planted eucalyptus as windbreaks, shade trees, timber for railroad ties (but the wood was too hard and also had a tendency to crack), usefully thirsty roots that could drain a malodorous swamp and ward against disease. The dirt in the canyon was always dusty, even after a rain.
It was rumored that a colony of homeless criminals lived somewhere in the dry folds and that it was a dangerous place for young women, but I never saw anyone there, just some old beer cans. In the places where I saw beer cans, I would leave my shopping bag. It was always gone by the next time I brought something to offer. When I stood in my bathroom and imagined dirt thrown at my naked body, it was usually among these trees and hills that the imaginary shaming occurred.
Nothing of the sort ever happened to me. Only my bike was stolen, the one I’d had since I was thirteen; I left it parked by my door, as there was no room for it inside, and someone must have climbed over the back fence and tossed it over into the parking lot back there. It was only a three-speed; it can’t have fetched much. The policeman on the phone was very nice to me about it, very sympathetic, and I started to fantasize about dating him and getting my bicycle back, then feeling as I used to feel at thirteen, the temporary freedom of the bike and the way its tires both clung to the pavement and pushed me along it, as I circled my suburban neighborhood until I had to return to my parents’ house.
I did not go to see my parents on Christmas. I took a long walk down Laurel Street. The planes were still landing, and I followed their path up the hill and away from the airport. I wore leggings and a T-shirt, a sweatshirt around my waist. I intended to look athletic. I’d had my appendix out in a disastrous no-insurance surgery that year, and the scar tissue had adhered to my ovaries, my stomach, places I could not identify but felt pulling against me as I walked. I liked the pull in my abdomen; it made me feel less hungry.
Laurel became a long, beautiful bridge into Balboa Park and its cluster of whipped-creamy Spanish Colonial buildings from the Panama-California Exposition of 1915. Museum of Man, Museum of Art. The park was greener then; the city could still spare water for grass and flowers. A glittery Santa’s sleigh was taking off from the center of the plaza, with reindeer climbing into the sky. It was crowded with families, of course. Some of them would go to the zoo for the day, as I did one Christmas with a boyfriend.
I left and looped back around to my own neighborhood, to the old grand houses and bungalows built from the 1910s through the 1930s, some looking very Hollywood, most alternating with cheap apartments put up in the 1950s as the city compacted—ugly, boxy buildings that had also acquired a little old-TV glamor by then. I was glad I had such a nice bathtub.
As I was on my way home, a station wagon pulled up next to me. I saw myself reflected in the window, and then the passenger door popped open a few inches. I got a glimpse of a man, probably a nice family man who might just have dropped his wife and kids off at the zoo. He leaned across the gearshift and called through the window, “How much?”
The day’s memory stops with How much, with my body distorted by the curve in the car window and a plane descending fast, engines roaring so loudly that even if I had chosen to answer, nobody could possibly have heard.
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