Beverly Hills Maasai Read Online Free PDF

responses—everything from just smiling and agreeing to something approaching a full-fledged anxiety attack, complete with having to breathe into a paper bag to stop hyperventilating, taking a little blue pill, and having to lie down. If it went that way, I was going to end up feeling pretty guilty.
    Although, come to think about it, I couldn’t remember her having one of those anxiety attacks for quite a while. Either she wasn’t having them anymore or she was having them when I wasn’t around.
    For a split second I played around with the idea of not telling her at all. She was out a lot, and when she was home she hardly ever went to the guest house … No, I couldn’t do that. If she did wander out and discover them by accident she’d have a
heart
attack instead of an anxiety attack. I’d have to tell her, but I’d have to tell her gently.
    I opened the front door. The house was completely quiet. And big and sterile and empty. I felt a tinge of loneliness. It really was a big house for just two of us. In Nebala’s village there would have been lots of littlehuts, with five or six or ten people in each one—each about a fifth of the size of our foyer—and the huts would all be clustered together, in a little circle, with a big open space in the middle for the cattle to be safe at night.
    “Hello!” I yelled out.
    My voice echoing off the walls was the only response I got. Maybe my mother wasn’t even home yet. I walked through the foyer toward her “studio.” Well, that’s what she was calling it now. It used to be my father’s office—the place where he spent more of his time than any other place in whole house. Now that he wasn’t living here anymore he certainly didn’t need an office. That was one of the reasons my mother had given for choosing that room—that and the fact that it had a lovely view of the garden. I thought there might be more to it than that.
    Changing the office into a studio had involved a
massive
renovation. The room had been stripped down completely, with the floors and walls and even the ceiling ripped out. There was nothing left that gave even a hint of my father’s having been there. It was as if the whole room had been cleansed of his presence. I guess my mother needed that. But I missed the office—the familiar furniture, the smell of my father’s cigars and cologne.
    As I got closer I heard some kind of dreamy New Age music. That had to be my mother. Carmella’s music was loud and Latino.
    The door was open and I peeked in. While the rest of the house was clean and organized, this room wasnothing more than a big jumble. It was filled with paintings and statues and pots and vases and quilts. Some were finished, but many had simply been abandoned. There was a potter’s wheel, two easels, boxes of paints, a loom, and mounds of fabric and wool. All the equipment was the best money could buy, bought brand new and discarded even before the warranties could lapse. They were like the orphans of my mother’s previous hobbies, ventures, and plans.
    She started each new project with such enthusiasm—at first, it would be all she could talk about. She’d spend hours and hours, excitedly occupied, fascinated and focused. Then, time after time, all of that would be replaced by apathy, disappointment, despair, and finally … nothing.
    I knew what she was doing. Since the divorce she’d lost her way, lost her role. She was no longer a wife, and that was about all she seemed to know how to be. She used to say that she and my father were kind of a team—she would take care of everything at home, including me, so he could devote himself full time to his business. And she would arrange dinner parties with clients, organize fundraisers for worthy causes, and do all the other social things that helped give him status in this status-crazy city. Now, without that part to play, she was trying to “find herself.” But all she’d found out so far was that she wasn’t a painter, or a