Girlchild (18 page)
M
aybe that was the one time Mama smiled crazy, smiled wide. Maybe shame won’t let you smile with your mouth like a lantern until you know that your sons’ safety rides on you making it past inspection and you see flashes of blinding white sheet and smell the shock of a stranger’s sex in a hot Mexican hotel room.
aybe that was the one time Mama smiled crazy, smiled wide. Maybe shame won’t let you smile with your mouth like a lantern until you know that your sons’ safety rides on you making it past inspection and you see flashes of blinding white sheet and smell the shock of a stranger’s sex in a hot Mexican hotel room.
I want to see that smile now, and so I say, “That’s pretty cool, Mama,” but she barely laughs.
“I don’t know about cool, R.D. I don’t know what, but when we’d made it through safe and we’re parting ways, the Driver shook my hand. He said he’d work with me again anytime. I was proud of that, I don’t know about the rest of it.”
And that’s about where Mama’s story ends. My RC can is empty, our windshield is yellow with bugs, but Mama’s not adding on a moral here. She lets her entire story of strength and guts and crazy risk fade in the rearview mirror, like telling it was nothing more than a way to pass the time. She leaves me to make up my own moral, so I do. Forget her telling tales for sales, I’m a liar for hire and I learned from the best.
My ending is as sweet as a crisp stack of hundred-dollar bills, and begins with Mama putting her dentures back in her mouth and pulling off the muumuu. As she does, she catches herself in
the Van’s side mirror. When she sees her face there, she opens her mouth and smiles a big, wide-open smile, and her store-bought teeth are as straight and sure and welcoming as the white lines of the freeway rushing her toward home.
the Van’s side mirror. When she sees her face there, she opens her mouth and smiles a big, wide-open smile, and her store-bought teeth are as straight and sure and welcoming as the white lines of the freeway rushing her toward home.
G
randma is sick. We sit all day in the front room of her trailer while the trains roll through the trees, just like the letters she’s sent back to the Calle promised they would. Mama and her play rummy, then cribbage, while I roll skeins of yarn into balls so they won’t snag when Grandma uses them to make her afghans or her toys or whatever she’s making now. There’s no asking her about her health because the cards are out of the box, pulling all of her attention, spades and clubs working at her like magnets, diamonds and hearts full of the promise of their names. The talk around the table is regular gambler stuff, bravado from the loser, “Come on, double or nothing,” even though they’re only playing for beer tabs. Teasing when the win is too easily come by, “Do you smell skunk, Ror? I swear I just got a whiff of skunk.”
randma is sick. We sit all day in the front room of her trailer while the trains roll through the trees, just like the letters she’s sent back to the Calle promised they would. Mama and her play rummy, then cribbage, while I roll skeins of yarn into balls so they won’t snag when Grandma uses them to make her afghans or her toys or whatever she’s making now. There’s no asking her about her health because the cards are out of the box, pulling all of her attention, spades and clubs working at her like magnets, diamonds and hearts full of the promise of their names. The talk around the table is regular gambler stuff, bravado from the loser, “Come on, double or nothing,” even though they’re only playing for beer tabs. Teasing when the win is too easily come by, “Do you smell skunk, Ror? I swear I just got a whiff of skunk.”
There’s no need to ask her if she’s sick, anyway. Her body tells the story. She’s lost so much weight she put three pillows on her chair, “to save my bony ass,” she says, and her hair has fallen out in patches. The exertion from shuffling the cards sends her coughing all through the next hand until finally Mama says, “You want me to shuffle?” But Grandma’s only answer is, “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Now shut it and cut it.”
When all the yarn is rolled, I get up and dig through the newspapers and crochet hooks and scraps of fabric that have been pushed together on the table to make way for the card games.
When I find Grandma’s brush and I start on her hair, I’m surprised when she doesn’t shoo me away. Instead she says, “Let’s make this the last game, Jo,” and beats Mama easily before sweeping the beer tabs back into their jar. “We don’t want to miss the sunset,” she says. Then, “Help me to the couch, R.D., and open that door wide.”
When I find Grandma’s brush and I start on her hair, I’m surprised when she doesn’t shoo me away. Instead she says, “Let’s make this the last game, Jo,” and beats Mama easily before sweeping the beer tabs back into their jar. “We don’t want to miss the sunset,” she says. Then, “Help me to the couch, R.D., and open that door wide.”
The couch is Grandma’s bed still, and Mama moves the blankets over to make room. With the door open, we have a view of the Sierras and the sun setting on their ridges. I’m sitting on the floor, leaning against Grandma’s knees, and it’s a good thing because when Grandma says, “Pink sky at night, sailor’s delight,” she can’t see me roll my eyes.
The saying may be as old as the hills but tonight it feels brand-new. The sun settles into the mountaintops so gently through the frame of Grandma’s screen door you’d think the Sierras were made to be seen just this way: on shag carpet with bony knees behind, cigarette smoke and the sound of shuffling cards fading in the air.
It feels like the whole town’s followed the sun over the mountain, it’s so quiet. We sit until the sky’s almost all returned to blue. Grandma finally breaks the silence in the near dark, “You’ll have a good ride home, Jo.” And when Mama answers, “So will you, Ma,” I don’t wonder what she means.
M
ama is quiet on the way home and I miss the sound of her voice and the excitement of her Mexico story from the morning, but when I turn to her I see by her eyes that she’s thinking about Grandma, and before I know what I’m doing, I reach for her hand that, for once, isn’t smoking, but sitting on her lap.
ama is quiet on the way home and I miss the sound of her voice and the excitement of her Mexico story from the morning, but when I turn to her I see by her eyes that she’s thinking about Grandma, and before I know what I’m doing, I reach for her hand that, for once, isn’t smoking, but sitting on her lap.
“It’s hard to say good-bye, Mama, you told me that once.” I squeeze her hand and remember the rest of it, Mama’s advice to me about Viv. “You’ll see her again.”
She squeezes my hand back, our hands almost the same size now. “What a wise young lady I raised,” she says, and holds on until we get on the dark highway. “Keep your eyes open for deer,” she says then, and I try to keep my eyes open, look for the frozen reflection of our headlights in eyes peering from the shoulder, but the window is cool underneath my cheek, and before long I’m back on the Calle, only instead of trailers, we all live in huts.
The streets are still dirty, the pond still grows frogs and shopping carts and still smells. A retired taxidermist is in Grandma’s space now, his work on display at the Truck Stop. From the same barstools where they stare at Mama’s tits, the glassy-eyed drunks stare across the bar at a glassy-eyed moose, their future reflected. But in the dream, Grandma is dead and men are coming to confiscate her bones. The men are officials. Grandma’s bones are contraband.
The men will be in uniform and they will be fearsome. I am sitting outside of my shack on Calle de las Flores and I’m afraid. Grandma’s bones are in a bag tied to my belt loop. It is a small bag. They are small bones. Like those of a bird. I am feeling Grandma’s bones through the cloth of the bag, I have already rubbed them smooth as river stones, but my fingers continue to seek the sharpest edges, to wear them down, and they are doing this when I see the fearsome, official drab of uniforms approaching through the dust being kicked up on the Calle.
I run for the pond and roll down the embankment, hoping the dust on the Calle confuses the men long enough to let me set Grandma free. I make a small hollow in the muddy shore and push the bag inside just before the men holler at me to stay where I am, hands above my head. I’m about to do as they say when the sound of gravel crunching under tires wakes me to the familiar sight of our headlights against the Nobility and Mama saying, “Come on, girlchild, let’s get you into bed.”
W
hen I grab the wire I can’t keep my eyes open and my body shakes and my teeth chatter and then I let go of the fence somehow, or maybe it lets go of me, and I slam on the ground, and when I open my eyes, there is Horse. He is finally noticing me—me, a person with feelings who needs some attention. And I think I understand him better, I think I understand him better every day. And I think we are making friends.
hen I grab the wire I can’t keep my eyes open and my body shakes and my teeth chatter and then I let go of the fence somehow, or maybe it lets go of me, and I slam on the ground, and when I open my eyes, there is Horse. He is finally noticing me—me, a person with feelings who needs some attention. And I think I understand him better, I think I understand him better every day. And I think we are making friends.
I am lying on the far side of the pond, as far as I can go from the Calle without permission. Not that Mama wouldn’t give it, but getting permission would mean asking for it so I skip it. I’m lying under the fading roar of an engine. I open my eyes in time to see a plane disappearing, the white trail it leaves behind, and watch as the streak separates into the rattle of chain link. It could only be Marc and DeShawn jumping over the fence into the field. I don’t even have to look. I know it’s them because they are just too strong, or too dumb maybe, to do anything quiet. But I look anyway and I see I’m right. Even from here I can see DeShawn’s belly button poking out from underneath the T-shirt he’s too big for and Marc, still too small in his dad’s leather jacket. And right behind them, a girl. She is new on the Calle, and her clothes are new too, and I think we could be in the same grade, but her hair has highlights and her earrings are long and shiny and her eyes are frosty. We
don’t have any classes together but she hangs out with Marc and DeShawn at breaks, distant at the edge of the quad, huddling by the exit, ready to be the first ones out. She made friends fast. She did not try to make friends with me.
don’t have any classes together but she hangs out with Marc and DeShawn at breaks, distant at the edge of the quad, huddling by the exit, ready to be the first ones out. She made friends fast. She did not try to make friends with me.
The three of them walk straight for me, laughing, but I flatten against the ground, hold my breath, they aren’t after me, I say, not after me. When they stop, barely a trailer’s length away, the girl disappears into the weeds at Marc’s feet, and then he disappears too, and then I’m sure I’m right. They’ve already got something to do.
The three of us lie on the ground together, in the same dirt and the same weeds, but they don’t even know I’m here. Not just here in the field, but here, on the Calle. They don’t think about me like I think about them, like I think about Marc. How the hair under his arms curls weird and silky like the
c
at the end of his name. Like how DeShawn keeps watch, stays standing, his eyes on the trailers behind the chain link, watching for the flash of cars coming up the Calle, and about how I keep watch too, on him and Horse and sky, everywhere but on the two in the dirt below him. How the streaks of white from the planes pick up pieces of each other and leave pieces behind, how they take the shape of zippers and hooks and unbuttoned flies.
c
at the end of his name. Like how DeShawn keeps watch, stays standing, his eyes on the trailers behind the chain link, watching for the flash of cars coming up the Calle, and about how I keep watch too, on him and Horse and sky, everywhere but on the two in the dirt below him. How the streaks of white from the planes pick up pieces of each other and leave pieces behind, how they take the shape of zippers and hooks and unbuttoned flies.
When the quiet is over and they’ve started talking again, the clouds are all broken into mist and DeShawn laughs without looking down, he never looks down, he makes their privacy happen even when they don’t need it anymore. He laughs in the direction of Marc’s trailer and then there is Marc, standing suddenly beside him, pounding him on the back, throwing punches at the air. The girl stands up too. She takes a long time smoothing her clothes and even when they are smooth, perfectly smooth, smoother even than when she climbed over the fence, she still does not raise her head,
and I see, even from here, where her highlights have grown out, and I begin to understand something about the high cost of upkeep.
and I see, even from here, where her highlights have grown out, and I begin to understand something about the high cost of upkeep.
They are gone and the chain link is still and I stretch my arms out and over my head, back and forth, back and forth, a dirt angel for the next plane. I push my hands up to the sky and spread my fingers wide apart, look at the thin, red groove that runs across both palms, from below my pinky to above my thumb, it cracks open and oozes, and when I stand up, brush off, and lift my head, I am face-to-face with Horse.
The clouds are nice, the planes are good, but Horse is the reason I come to the field because, just like the Girl Scouts say, in the Horseback Riding section of the
Handbook
, “A horse not only takes you over hill and dale, but he has a real personality of his own.” He is only one horse, but he and his personality have a ton of field, and only sometimes does he make his way this far, and only sometimes does he come close to the fence.
Handbook
, “A horse not only takes you over hill and dale, but he has a real personality of his own.” He is only one horse, but he and his personality have a ton of field, and only sometimes does he make his way this far, and only sometimes does he come close to the fence.
Horse moved in right after junior high started. I was sitting on the bit of wall at the end of the Calle near the cesspond the day two men came near it with posts and wires, and when I came back the next day the wires went farther than I’m allowed to go, but there was nothing on the other side of the wires for days and days, nothing for the wires to do, and when there finally was a reason for them to be there, things to separate, the thing to be kept on one side was a horse and the thing to be kept on the other was me. I was pretty excited about him but he wasn’t that excited about me. I came every day and stood in front of him, but he would move away or, worse, turn around. I told him all I’d learned from the
Girl Scout Handbook
, how close I was to being eligible for the Horsewoman badge without being able to do the four starred activities that require the use of an actual horse, the mysteries I had memorized about implements for grooming, removing stones, and
Western versus English saddles, but Horse had nothing to say. So then I’d sit down and look at him and he’d stare right past me. He wouldn’t even shiver or wiggle his ears, swish his tail. Until finally I was just done trying to catch his stupid brown eyes and hold their attention and I reached out and grabbed the bottom wire of the fence with both hands and shook it like I wanted to shake him, and that is the exact second when I found out that Horse lives inside an electric cage.
Girl Scout Handbook
, how close I was to being eligible for the Horsewoman badge without being able to do the four starred activities that require the use of an actual horse, the mysteries I had memorized about implements for grooming, removing stones, and
Western versus English saddles, but Horse had nothing to say. So then I’d sit down and look at him and he’d stare right past me. He wouldn’t even shiver or wiggle his ears, swish his tail. Until finally I was just done trying to catch his stupid brown eyes and hold their attention and I reached out and grabbed the bottom wire of the fence with both hands and shook it like I wanted to shake him, and that is the exact second when I found out that Horse lives inside an electric cage.
His owner must have learned enough about the Calle to protect his possession from the questionable types circling its streets, but not enough to know that fences won’t keep the criminals out, because the only real difference a fence makes is that jumping one is a crime and worry about that fades faster than the shock from the fence itself. The only thing worse than feeling pain around here is not feeling anything at all, so if we decide that we want to get at his horse, to tease it or feed it or ride it, if we decide this horse is the thing to do, a few volts aren’t going to stop us. But no one’s interested in the animal or the fence, except for me. Horse doesn’t cramp Marc and DeShawn’s make-out and smoking sessions, he’s not human enough to fight or fuck and not old enough to buy them beer. Still, he’s all I want, straight out of the storybooks. My very own pony.
L
ooking out the kitchen window, up the Calle, two cars are headed in this direction, two chances it might be Mama. Mama driving means she clocked out and walked out, but Mama walking means she took the long route home, through all the Calle’s bars, down all the Calle’s drinks. I watch the cars and hold the edge of the countertop tight, but when I look at my hands where the metal edge of the counter rubs the red electric lines running across my palms, memories of my visits to Horse, I forget to pay attention to where the rubber meets the road and my two cars rev by. The Calle grows quiet and I take the plastic butter dish into the dining room, sit down by the phone.
ooking out the kitchen window, up the Calle, two cars are headed in this direction, two chances it might be Mama. Mama driving means she clocked out and walked out, but Mama walking means she took the long route home, through all the Calle’s bars, down all the Calle’s drinks. I watch the cars and hold the edge of the countertop tight, but when I look at my hands where the metal edge of the counter rubs the red electric lines running across my palms, memories of my visits to Horse, I forget to pay attention to where the rubber meets the road and my two cars rev by. The Calle grows quiet and I take the plastic butter dish into the dining room, sit down by the phone.
“Is Jo there?” I rub butter across one palm. “Okay. Thanks.” I dial again. “Is Jo there?” I butter the other palm. “Have you seen her today?” Phone down. Phone back up. Hang it up, pick it up, hang it up. Pound the cradle so the bell shakes. There’s breadcrumbs on the phone and the nine button is sticking I’m pushing it so hard, but I put on my best I’m-a-normal-kid voice when the ringing stops. “Hi, it’s Ror.” The bartenders don’t even wait for me to ask, sometimes they don’t even wait for my name but interrupt me to say, “Haven’t seen her,” or sometimes there’s a hopeful pause while they hold the phone up high and look around before they say, “You just missed her,” and ain’t that the truth.
Other books
Downward Facing Death by Michelle Kelly
The Cruel Ever After by Ellen Hart
The Last Enemy by Grace Brophy
Of Gaea by Victoria Escobar
The Officer's Little Rebel by Ava Sinclair
Nonviolence by Mark Kurlansky
Command by Sierra Cartwright
Lethal Profit by Alex Blackmore
The Roswell Conspiracy by Boyd Morrison
Meatonomics by David Robinson Simon
