Landlines
by Roberto Ontiveros
Three months after my father’s funeral, I started to wonder whatever became of my 8th grade crush Demi Mora.
“Demi” was, of course, not the girl’s real name. Her Lanza Middle School ID card said Diana Racine Mora, which is a pretty nice name if you ask me, but this girl thought she looked like the actress Demi Moore, or someone told her that when trailers for The Seventh Sign came out and she soon got a nickname.
I never thought Diana looked like Demi Moore and never lied to her that she did despite how much that would have been to my advantage. When I was a kid lying to people made me feel like a criminal. Thankfully, by the time Indecent Proposal and Stiptease came out I was no longer speaking to her.
Demi Mora preferred her fake name despite thinking she also looked like Jami Gertz, or that “Elaine” character from Seinfeld too. I could see “Elaine” a bit. I did not dash her dreams about her celebrity self-regard, that she looked much more like her mother who looked like the singer Gloria Estefan – and how could this be an insult? But it must have been because she preferred Demi Moore or the dark-haired lady who played a reptilian space leader on that NBC mini-series V, or Andie MacDowell; so I kept my mouth shut about the whole thing. “Demi Mora” did not look at all like Demi Moore. I would have been happy to tell her if she did.
. . .
Since my Dad died, and my Mom moved in with my sister and her kids, and I was out of work and out of a relationship, I had no problem accepting the job of getting my childhood home ready for rental.
I have been going through boxes of saved stuff that I know I should throw. I can trash most of the report cards and second place or GOOD TRY ribbons, no problem; school pics and hard to find Scratch ’N Sniff stickers, yeah, I’ll keep those and they won’t take up more than a MEAD folder to store. That was my routine. Then I go for a walk. Then I drink.
Deep into my routine of clean up and constitutional I kept walking past the Mora house and started to wonder about what looked like some serious neglect. The dead grass and the flecked off paint. I was surprised by the exterior suggestion of inner squalor. I used to think that Demi and her family were loaded, which shows you how broke everyone was all the time. Demi’s Dad had some kind of businessman job or he wore a suit and it was supposed to be big deal impressive. But my Dad wore a suit too when he worked as the Shoe Department manager at Joe Brand or when he sold insurance or when he sold cars for that one week, so to me the big deal was all about the pretense that the Mora family seemed to affect. Demi’s Mom did not have to work, so she fixed up the place with mirrors and vases; there was a den that was all bronze and wicker and blown glass, this sunken floor area of trinkets and objet d’art on display, and they had a maid who was about as old as Mama Mora, who looked like she could have just been related to them and who might have been a cousin too now that I think about it. The family went on a winter trip and a summer trip and were members of the McAllen Country Club, which was all golf and sandwiches really and right by La Plaza Mall, so not that far from Mexico either and the most Mexican looking parts of McAllen. The Mora home seemed to have a lot of fancy booze on display. My family did not have any booze in the house ever. Against our religion I guess, or my Mom’s Apostalic background. My Dad adopted an (in the house at least) abstinence when he got with Mom. The first of many refusals of familiarity for my old man. Dad grew up Catholic but converted for my Mom, and in the end our family attended one of those nondenominational mini-mega churches that would always have guest preachers and we did communion but it was seriously Welch’s grape juice. Back then drinking was a sign of class to me, and Demi would tell me about these dinner parties her family threw that she would sit in on to make me feel like I was missing out on some kind of high society down here in lowrider land, but really everything Demi bragged about was a TV joke, like she was describing a Dynasty episode. Materially speaking, I have to say, I was pretty jealous. The Moras had a big screen TV and they had that Porsche and Demi’s Daddy made like 70 grand a year, which sounds like nothing now, but which made him pretty well off in a the Rio Grande Valley where having HBO in 1982 made people think you were rich, and if you had a laserdisc player in 1988 it was like you were a big showoff. Demi’s aspirations were all based on movies like St. Elmo’s Fire and Oxford Blues, those catalog ambitions to the preppie look and the occasional John Hughes friendly dip into New Wave attire à la Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark. She wanted to play tennis or said she did, and invited me to the McAllen Country Club a few times. I never went and the invitation was extended to some other guy named Paul.
. . .
Nine months into being back in my childhood home, and asking myself why I was still here and was still walking past Demi’s old home, I was struck with a kind of impulse to walk up to the door of her old home and ring the bell. This was not any idea that made sense. I knew from Google searching all variants of Diana Racine Mora, that her father was dead, and that she had married someone in another city and changed her name to Frost. 101 Lucite really looked ruined right now, like no one could live there.
The mouth of the mailbox was open and letters were there ready for someone to take them if so inclined. Dry dead grass but there was a car in the driveway; covered in a black car cover. It was mid-morning enough that if anyone had to leave for work the car should be gone, and I was so curious. I walked up to the veiled vehicle and lifted the black car cover and recognized the maroon almost sugar ant-colored Porsche right away. Same car that Demi had been promised as 14-year-old she could drive when she got her license. My heart raced when I thought that Demi Mora could still be here in her childhood home – just like I was back in my old childhood home.
I approached the sliding glass door by the kitchen I knew so well and got a look at myself in the reflection. I remembered how much Demi liked that I, at fourteen, resembled the lead singer from Depeche Mode. I did, it was true, so scrawny and with that big sexy nose and black hair, but that was then. I looked like a demonic Richard Gere today.
I rang the bell and heard a little dog yelp and then silence as a door closed and the little dog was likely put away. I rang the doorbell once more, and stood straight like I was really supposed to be here before this door and at this hour.
The woman who opened the door was wearing black biker shorts and a sports bra like some fantasy I would have had in the 8th grade, when gym class erotics colored my daydreams. The woman had black hair with a few white wisps along her bangs, indicating that she was a contemporary and did not bother dying her hair. She had a very familiar face that I could not place. Could this woman actually be Demi? Demi Mora after some very specific Mia Sara-centered surgery? Mia Sara, the ingenue from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was yet another actress that Demi believed she resembled. But I was the only one she ever dared share this information with. The reason she was quiet about the Mia Sara thing was because there was another girl in our grade who really actually did, no joke, look like the actress and was just as innocent looking as her “Lili” character in Legend, right before “Lili” meets up with Tim Curry’s “Darkness” character and has that black lipstick dance with her shadow self. The true Mia Sara lookalike was a girl named Claudia Sanchez who I really believed was playing up the act of a kind of shy beauty that might make the resemblance more obvious, like she was in the know on her attractiveness and exploiting it. Then one day when I heard her talking to our teacher in Spanish, it dawned on me finally that the girl was an ESL (English as a Second Language) student and was very likely uncomfortable talking in class.
I said hello and felt my face smile in honest cheer. I was about to just start to lie, just make up a story about seeing an ad for a car for sale on this street and say that I thought this was must be house, but upon seeing the inside of the Mora home, it’s tan and oak color scheme, the bark brown carpet still there and evermore threadbare, I opted for a very basic honesty. “I know this might sound like a joke but a girl I used to know lived here in this very house like twenty-five years ago and I am feeling this certainty that she is still here.” I said this to the woman at the door, then I said my name and that I was very close at one point to Demi Mora, and I said that her real name was Diana Racine Mora but she might go by Diana Frost these days, unless she is divorced and then I don’t know. I made sure to signify that I did not know much. “I don’t know if you know where she has gone to, but I recognized the car out here and thought … Hey, I just had to make sure.”
The woman’s eyes widened but no lines appeared on her forehead. She looked still and like she could not move her face.
Then she started to nod and there was even what looked like sudden recognition. When she said my name I knew that this woman was somehow Demi. My heart started beating faster and I felt something close to fear but subsided when the woman at the door invited me in.
“Oh my God, Bob, I have not seen you in …,” and now the woman placed her left hand over her eyes as if closing them to truly consider the years, adding: “Well, you might know better than I how long it has been.” She walked over to the leather couch to sit, not looking at me at all now, as if she could not meet my eyes and speak her words at the same time.
I was shaking my head a little, smiling though because this all seemed like a joke.
I apologized for interrupting her during her workout, and she shook her head in what seemed like some sly mockery of my obvious unconcern for interrupting anyone: “These are just my clothes, Bob. The clothes I am wearing here, trying on old items from … Jesus, from back when we used to talk on the phone all those hours all those years ago.”
Standing by the bronze hat rack, not yet even trying to get comfortable in a room I had been in perhaps twenty times, I nodded at the information that seemed obvious and true and also dizzying to me.
“I was thinking about you, you know, all week.” she said. “Do you believe it?”
Now this felt like a genuine put-on and I said: “Why and just how … yeah, I want to call you, Demi, but something is holding me back.”
“Those notes, Bob, all of those dang notes we sent each other in Mrs. Malta’s English class. When we were kids we left notes all the time, and then all the phone calls. I was looking at my old journal and it seems I liked you a lot but that you liked me much more.”
This was the truth, but that did not mean this was the true Demi.
The woman went on: “Everyday we wrote notes and you … you even wrote poetry sometimes, sometimes even about me, and I still have all that, of course. So, I was thinking about you when I found the notes, just yesterday, just last week … I was reading the notes over and over thinking about what you would look like, or really who you would look like now. You looked like different people I remember. I have two pictures of you my Mom took when you visited. You look like a singer I don’t listen to anymore and an actor I have not thought of in like twenty years.”
This was approaching a mad plane of compliment and conspiracy. But I liked how this woman was talking to me and responded: “You know … you don’t … look like what I recall at all.”
“I had work done,” the woman said, very plainly, “and I will have more work done – it will take a while. It will take … I don’t know … another three or four years to be okay with what I am. So it is not quite my life’s work.”
My eyes went right to the bar.
“Ah, I see where you are looking,” Demi said and started walking over to the setup of decanters and high end Scotch. “I drank all the time then when we were kids, more than I ever do now that I am getting healthy. I drank on the phone with you and when you came over I drank but you never saw me drink because it was more fun you just thinking I was that kind of natural trippy-tipsy. I have not had a drink in a while, Bobby. Will you join me for a bourbon and water and we can understand all this together?”
The woman did not have to ask twice. When she walked over my eyes scanned her calves for an asterisk-shaped birthmark that always caught my eye when she wore this one black skirt I loved to see her in. I did not see the birthmark. Although she could have had it removed, I reasoned.
“Yeah, I will take that drink,” I said.
I was glad to have it, and was comfortable enough with it in hand that I joined the woman on the couch. When I got up to pour my second drink we moved to the kitchen area like I was getting a home tour. My simple questions were answered simply. Yes, of course, she had left home, but had decided that she really needed to take care of this place, now that her Dad was dead and her mother was having memory trouble. Watching the woman take a kind of pride in her sacrifice to spruce up her childhood home, it dawned on me that there was no way this woman was really Demi Mora. That twenty-some years since I had last seen her could not account for an increase in perhaps three inches of height. The real Demi was always wearing pumps to seem taller, and this Demi had a pronounced widow’s peak.
The girl I knew from Mrs. Malta’s 8th grade English class, did not.
I would have really known what she looked like too, all that time looking at her in class and at night I even drew her face from memory sometimes, sitting before the TV watching Cheers go to Night Court and scribbling out her face in my spiral notebook like it was some kind of important homework. I blushed thinking about this, and would make a point to find those pages and get rid of them now, but, yeah, I knew her face. This very attractive grown up lady I was sitting with was not her.
But I liked that I was talking to this brazen fake, and the fact that I did seem to actually recall a secret charm.
“Did you get into an accident or something?” I asked now tipsy enough to spill into speculation and have it be forgiven as a slippy style of chat.
“Oh yeah,” the woman said, “tons of work done, so much work. I am surprised you can even recognize me,” she said with zero irony while shielding her eyes and forehead from me with her right hand. I noticed – as she did this mock gesture of shyness, a gesture belied by the smile beneath her index; her thumb and forefinger poised a centimeter from touching as if holding an invisible cigarette – that her wrist was thin and her fingers were spidery-slender. Demi did not have those kind of fingers, and in fact would often bite her nails and get angry at her very bones; she wanted her cheekbones to show and would suck her cheeks in when she looked at mirrors, and she wanted specific cheekbones of certain models. She used to cut pictures out of what she joked would be her future face all the time. Her cosmetic surgery threats were obviously more about fishing for compliments than anything else, but they unnerved me, made me feel as if the girl I was staring at would soon disappear. As I was recalling all this, the woman I was drinking with held her palm out as if to frame her chin and said: “Don’t look at my scar; it never went away,” and she seemed to really mean it.
“I see no scar,” I said and the woman touched her left ear.
She put her palm down and smiled for nine seconds.
“Good. Very good. Maybe the Mederma I use worked,” she said when she was done smiling.
I wanted to leave suddenly, feeling that I was talking to a mad woman but I also had a curiosity to know more.
I asked her what her plans were for the day and then closed my eyes as she started to tell me her chore list and her evening aspirations, which includes organizing lots of old photos now that she was sure there was a reason she was going through middle school memorabilia, and then taking in a swim at 3 p.m. I kind of tilted my head in suspicion because I knew the Mora house had no pool, and the woman corrected herself by adding: “Above ground Jacuzzi.” I smiled at her clarification, making my desire to see this version of Demi again obvious.
With my eyes closed, listing to the woman talk I really got the voice of the Demi Mora I knew so well, from hours and hours of being on the phone with this person late at night and all the time talking, this forever middle school flirting that went nowhere and was really a kind of torture that taught me I was no masochist. Jesus, it was that same voice, but when I opened my eyes it was not the same girl: no way this was Demi. When I opened my eyes I looked at her lips. The pout on this pretender was nothing I recalled but that did not matter. If the real Demi ever had a problem with her lips she would certainly have no problem with them now.
“Do you have any pictures of us from when we were kids? I remember once when I was dancing with your sister in this very room, your little sister, who was like five-years-old, who wanted to dance in the room and it was like a trick you made her play so you and your mother could take pictures of me being silly and I was all upset when you showed me the secret pictures because of my intense profile.”
“I like your nose,”she said.
“I liked it for a while too,” I said. “It was better before it was broken, I mean,” I added, then felt wrong for not just taking the compliment from a woman who I knew had only just met me but was acting like she knew me for years.
Fake Demi shook her head, and said: “No one would know anything about your nose unless you told them, or right away they would not. No one knows anything at all unless you tell them,” she said like this was some hard won truth.
. . .
As soon as I was back home I knew this was not Demi Mora. I sat in front of the TV and put on some Family Ties reruns from when I had a big TV crush on Justine Bateman’s “Mallory” character. I pulled out a mostly blank spiral notebook from my Career Investigations class, which was a home for doodles anyway, and started to draw the woman I had just visited from memory with a ballpoint pen. I recreated the imposter’s features from my brief encounter and then looked at this fast sketch, saw the widow’s peak and the large eyes, the grin and did this woman have slightly pointed ears too or was I making her more and more elfin in some playful way of unwinding?
I pulled a few beers out of the fridge and then went online to cyber stalk the real Demi Mora like some jilted and now obsessed ex-lover in a movie. Pictures of her were around if I went for the real name: Diana Mora now Diana Mora Frost. Alive and not living on Lucite Street at all, but still in town, not very far from our old junior high, on Vine Street.
Someone rang my doorbell. I never got visitors and did not get up to get the knock to deal with UPS I was not expecting or pizza I never ordered. I kept typing around for more information and then I wanted another drink.
Close to what should have been dinner time, I opened the door to look outside for no reason, to just stare out onto the lawn of a neighbor I never spoke to, who had likely seen me for months now and also not bothered to say hi. I went back to the kitchen to drink water and wet my face and think about dinner options that would require little work.
. . .
The next morning I skipped any kind of morning walk and kept on doing those easy internet searches to figure out the Demi mystery. Her Dad died ten years back. Some casual social media searching led to family funeral pics where I saw the real Demi who always liked to wear black anyway, here in these shots wearing black for mourning purposes: she was thicker but recognizable; this was her, the exact same way she did her hair, no doubt her, and that was her little sister too who ended up looking just like her, and the brother, who looked now so much like the dead Dad, and a very tiny lady who looked like all the adult kids in the picture. I knew these people. This imposture in their house was not related in any way. I called up the landline number I still remembered later and when the woman pretending to be Demi answered I asked if I could meet her.
“Sure thing, Bobby. You could come by anytime and meet here,” she said. “You know where I live.”
“Yeah, I could do that and I would like that but I want to see you outside that house,” I said.
The impostor was quiet for a bit then said: “Can’t do that. Not for a while. I have to be here for some time. Call it a kind of house arrest.”
“Someone came over and rang my door last night. I did not answer. No one ever comes by,” I said.
“Ah, that was not me,” she said. “I don’t have any idea where you live.”
“I’ll come over,” I said.
. . .
I picked up a bottle of wine and a tallboy at the Circle store and then went into FedEx place next door to print out the most recent online pic of Demi Mora I could find. The image was thirteen years old and was taken at some marketing event where Demi dressed in what I recall she always wore: skirt and blouse and pumps in this picture. I could see even in this picture the insecurity that she was battling. There were no other pictures of Diana Mora Frost online and I had the strong hunch that if she could get rid of this one picture she would.
The impostor I came to confront smiled when she saw me and let me in and said: “Look, Bob, if you don’t mind watching me do some chores you could sit right here at the kitchen table and I will be done in about twenty minutes and then we can talk. For real, like even in fifteen I will be off the clock,” she said like she was a maid, and it then occurred to me that she must be in fact something very close to a domestic, someone hired to be in this house and keep it clean and keep it going.
The outside of the Mora home looked a horror of dry grass and neglect. No one was taking care of that, but here inside things were … what? Returning? Yes, returning to something familiar for someone who would know.
I heard a familiar little doggie yelp down the hall whereupon this version of Demi palmed some kibble from a cleaned out Whip Cream tub on the shelf and walked over to placate the animal, by leading it to the bathroom where it would be gently shut away with treats.
Feeling very comfortable and free I opened the fridge and noticed how bare it was, save for a whole side shelf of Slim Fast and fruit-at-the-bottom Yoplait and a single green glass bottle of Perrier on the top shelf. I recalled that Demi would buy these items when she was fourteen and often make a big show of purchasing fad diet foods and try to get me to compliment her purchases or tell me she did not need them. The items would just fill the fridge like trophies of body insecurity. There was no beer, which was what I tried to stick to these days, and I realized that, of course, there was never any beer here. This was a Scotch and soda house with the wine coolers for Mommie maybe, whiskey and wine and Gin and top shelf bourbon for Dad and for his sip-sneaking daughter.
I poured myself a glass of the booze I brought over and waited a few minutes while I saw Fake Demi motioning back and forth looking like she was vacuuming but she was not; it was some floor-roller device that just picked up lint and string or fortune cookies and confetti with no noise and no vacuum cleaner smell.
The Merlot I brought was this cheap brand I was always wanting to grab because when I was a kid I used to see the empty bottles of this brand in my friend Billy Thoren’s home, washed and sitting up on the bookshelves like decorations. Sometimes a candle, sometimes filled with little fish tank rocks or pesos or sand like the boozeless bottles were now art.
I took another sip and then poured Fake Demi a glass. I knew that as a kid the real Demi talked about having wine with her family, or lied about it to sound cool and sophisticated and also to disparage people who drank beer. I was convinced that this put-on all came from TV shows where some parody of a snob and a pastiche of a lout are arguing wine versus beer like it was all some deep discussion on the virtues of varietals. Almost always when a show tries to do this joke the cliché characters exchange drinks and end up appreciating each other’s palette.
Fake Demi sipped in gratitude then exhaled and started to flick her black hair from her widow’s peak back into place as if preparing to be seen.
I held up the picture of the real Demi Mora and kind of waved in front of me slowly like I was being carted down a ticker tape parade.
“Oh, Bobby, that takes me back,” she said and leaned in as if to study the picture. I thought we were all a little dressed for some retirement party,” she said. But Debbie’s last day, right? Let her see us looking like we are about to go clubbing, right?” She said this and laughed and then smiled like it hurt and placed her left palm over her eyes in happy fatigue, not trying to fool anyone at all.
I had no courage in my frown, and I wanted us to come clean, despite the fun I suspected could be had if I stuck with the lie.
“You’re not this woman,” I said. “This woman who when she was a girl used to write out lists of actresses she thought she looked like and ask me to rate them from like 1 to 5 who she resembled the most. You’re not this woman who when she was a girl was in ballet all elementary then quit when she was twelve and forever after blamed the lack of dancing for a perceived extra ten pounds. You are not this worried woman.”
“No, Bob. I am not that woman,” she said.
“But you work for her,” I said.
The imposter nodded, then shook her head, then clarified that she only worked for mother Mora now. “After Mr. Mora died I started working for the family. Doing … doing what I still do now.”
“Being a housekeeper? Or groundskeeper? Being ….”
“Being her daughter, being Demi Mora.”
“For her mother?”
“For her mother, yeah, but really for people who come by. For you. For everyone who needs Demi to be here now. For Demi, who is a very private person these days, who does not want to be seen, who I have not seen since her sister hired me for this gig after their father’s funeral.”
I took a sip and as the woman looked at the work picture of a woman she was pretending to be. She started trying to make her face the way Demi always did, to make her cheekbones more prominent for pictures, taking a deep breath then getting serious and stern with her lips, her full and naturally full lips, that were nothing like Demi’s despite the similar magenta lipstick that matched the color of the Porsche outside and under a black car cover.
The lovely imposter touched her widow’s peak, and I could see she was trying to push her head up and tilted it ln the way Demi would. That she had really studied her part.
“Where is Mama Mora?” I asked out of genuine concern.
“In her room, of course. Would you like to say hi?”
“No, I’m leaving. But you could tell her that Robert stopped by.”
The pretender shook her head. “She won’t remember you. I know she won’t. I have brought up ‘Robert’ and ‘Bobby’ and ‘Bob’ a few times. I asked her again last night but she does not know him. She does talk about a guy named Paul. She calls him that ‘good guy, Paul.’ I think she would really like to talk to Paul.”
I stood and walked over to Fake Demi and said, “Paul would like to talk to her too.”
“Then let’s go in and say hi,” she said, and smiled as if a bet that would deplete no one’s personal economy had been settled.
I held the pretender’s hand and we started to walk towards a door. I was fully prepared for there to be no one at all behind the door and that perhaps this girl was taking me to her bedroom or pulling some major prank but then she called out: “Mama, you’ll never guess who is here to see you?”
And a woman’s voice shot back, quick as if just woken from a nap, curious and glad to have a visitor and glad to have surprise. “Who, mija? Who came to see your Mama?”
My skin pricked with happy anticipation at the familiar voice of Demi’s mother.
I looked over at the caregiver for approval to commence the beneficent con and when she nodded back I said, “Mrs. Mora, it’s Paul. I am here. I came all this way to be here for you.”
BIO
Roberto Ontiveros is a fiction writer, artist, and journalist. Some of his work has appeared in the Threepenny Review, the Baffler, AGNI and the Believer. His debut collection, The Fight for Space, was published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press, and his second book, Assisted Living, was published by Corona/Samizdat Press, which will release two novels, Secret Animals and The Order of the Alibi, in a single volume.
