Baja Zuma

Chapter 2

LISA'S P.O.V.

Thirteen of us sat at the oak dining table for the evening meal, our traditional Sunday chicken parmesan being the main course. That means lots of dishes to wash afterward, and while we ate I tried to push it out of my mind that it was going to be my turn to do the cleanup in the kitchen.

Alex looked up from his bowl of cumin-freckled gazpacho and pushed his glasses up his nose. "Guys, I've been thinking about topological invariants in 24 dimensions and—"

"Stop it!" Christina cut him off. "You know our etiquette at the dining table. No politics. No religion. No mathematics."

Table talk drifted desultorily through new movies, possible  summer vacation destinations, and the music charts, before settling on our band's situation, at which time Dani took off her headphones. "Mr. Schnickenstein is so mean to us," she complained about our Los Angeles music producer Mortimer Schnickenstein.

Lauren chimed in, clapping her hands once for emphasis. "He thought he was SO clever calling Dad 'Billy' that time Dad went with us when we signed our recording contract."

I supported Lauren, saying, "Dad does not look anything like Billy Joel."

Dad couldn't resist getting in a jab at our portly producer. "Mort's width, height and depth are all the same measurement."

I brought up the thing that irritated me most about our producer. "We go into these long, intense songwriting sessions and sweat over material that is meaningful to us, only to have our song ideas and lyrics completely ignored."

"Well, complain about him all you like," Mom admonished, "but it doesn't do any good until you take action. Be thinking about how to change your situation. Be proactive, girls."

We were no experts on contract law, but some of us had some ideas on how to improve band-related things, up to and including going independent. We spent most of the remaining mealtime on that topic.

Joey grabbed the last slice of bread on the table and slathered it with mayonnaise. He had the mischievous gleam that told me wheels were turning in his head and I'd better keep an eye on what he was up to. He asked, "Would anybody like a vegemite sandwich?" in the Australian accent he had picked up somewhere, glancing at Christina sitting next to him. He held the oozing slice right in front of Christina's face. She poked him in the belly to get him to giggle and put his bread back on his plate—but not before he dabbed it against her face, the white gelatinous mass over her nostrils bubbling obscenely. I shouldn't have laughed. I really shouldn't have.

"No allowance for two weeks, Joseph," Mom said in her sternest voice.

"Okay, but it was worth it," I thought I heard Joey whisper to himself, grinning despite the cutoff of his only source of income.

Joey's indecorous behavior put Christian in a mood for telling one of his jokes. "Where do you find a dog with no legs?" He paused, eyes scanning around the table. "Right where you left it," he answered himself. Ha ha.

Pursuant to some postprandial burping (hey, don't look at me!) the others drifted away from the table, and I took the dishes to the kitchen. As I scraped them I took stock of where I was in life and where I wanted to be. The accolades, the parties, the insincere friends in the Los Angeles scene were not some fate worse than death, to be sure. I could continue like this for years and not be miserable. But my personal life had taken a step backward since our Northern California days, if I was honest with myself. Malibu is a small town of people with big money, and the residents here take the default position that folks new to the area, like my family, are not to be trusted—that we are going to find some way to leech off of them. I can't blame them in a way, because I've heard stories of that happening around here. But the personal consequence was that I struggled a lot with loneliness and isolation, and I knew some of my siblings did as well.

"If you wear the mask long enough, sooner or later you become the mask," Mom had warned us about the temptation to fit in here in Malibu by just going through the motions  and blending in by being superficial.

As compensation for having left the somewhat friendlier neighborhood of our previous house in another part of the state, we were now living just a quick drive from the beach. It was pleasant with the cool ocean breeze and some nice hillside scenery, but the implicit competition that went on there! My older brother Michael had once said on the topic of physical appearance while we were visiting family in Iowa, "A nine in Iowa would be a six on the beach in Malibu."

Maybe I needed a Plan B. Selling residential real estate is something I figure I would have a natural flair for. I had some idea of the training needed for it, the process of getting licensed to do it for a living. Also, along similar lines, I've seen people flipping houses for profit on television shows, and that could be Plan C. I always had ideas bubbling up on how to improve the looks and value of a place when I went for a visit. Just something to keep in mind as a fallback.