“And whose fault is it that you don’t have any money? I’m not the one who turned up his nose at a full-time job. I’m not the one who spends his entire paycheck down at the hobby shop.”
“I understand that.”
“Well, good,” she said, and then we began to wrap the breakables.
In my version of the story, the problem began with the child next door, a third-grader who, according to my mother, was bad news right from the start. “Put it together,” she’d said when I first called to tell her about it. “Take a step back. Think.”
But what was there to think about? She was a nine-year-old girl.
“Oh, they’re the worst,” my mother said. “What’s her name? Brandi? Well, that’s cheap, isn’t it.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but aren’t I talking to someone who named her daughter Tiffany?”
“My hands were tied!” she shouted. “The damned Greeks had me against the wall and you know it.”
“Whatever you say.”
“So this girl,” my mother continued—and I knew what she would ask before she even said it. “What does her father do?”
I told her there wasn’t a father, at least not one that I knew about, and then I waited as she lit a fresh cigarette. “Let’s see,” she said. “Nine-year-old girl named after an alcoholic beverage. Single mother in a neighborhood the police won’t even go to. What else have you got for me?” She spoke as if I’d formed these people out of clay, as if it were my fault that the girl was nine years old and her mother couldn’t keep a husband. “I don’t suppose this woman has a job, does she?”
“She’s a bartender.”
“Oh, that’s splendid,” my mother said. “Go on.”
The woman worked nights and left her daughter alone from four in the afternoon until two or three in the morning. Both were blond, their hair almost white, with invisible eyebrows and lashes. The mother darkened hers with pencil, but the girl appeared to have none at all. Her face was like the weather in one of those places with no discernible seasons. Every now and then, the circles beneath her eyes would shade to purple. She might show up with a fat lip or a scratch on her neck but her features betrayed nothing.
You had to feel sorry for a girl like that. No father, no eyebrows, and that mother. Our apartments shared a common wall, and every night I’d hear the woman stomping home from work. Most often she was with someone, but whether alone or with company she’d find some excuse to bully her daughter out of bed. Brandi had left a doughnut on the TV or Brandi had forgotten to drain her bathwater. They’re important lessons to learn, but there’s something to be said for leading by example. I never went into their apartment, but what I saw from the door was pretty rough—not simply messy or chaotic, but hopeless, the lair of a depressed person.
Given her home life, it wasn’t surprising that Brandi latched onto me. A normal mother might have wondered what was up—her nine-year-old daughter spending time with a twenty-six-year-old man—but this one didn’t seem to care. I was just free stuff to her: a free babysitter, a free cigarette machine, the whole store. I’d hear her through the wall sometimes: “Hey, go ask your friend for a roll of toilet paper.” “Go ask your friend to make you a sandwich.” If company was coming and she wanted to be alone, she’d kick the girl out. “Why don’t you go next door and see what your little playmate is up to?”
Before I moved in, Brandi’s mother had used the couple downstairs, but you could tell that the relationship had soured. Next to the grocery carts chained to their porch was a store-bought sign, the NO TRESPASSING followed by a handwritten “This meens you, Brandi!!!!”
There was a porch on the second floor as well, with one door leading to Brandi’s bedroom and another door leading to mine. Technically, the two apartments were supposed to share it, but the entire thing was taken up with their junk, and so I rarely used it.
“I can’t wait until you get out of your little slumming phase,” my mother had said on first seeing the building. She spoke as if she’d been raised in splendor, but in fact her childhood home had been much worse. The suits she wore, the delicate bridges holding her teeth in place—it was all an invention. “You live in bad neighborhoods so you can feel superior,” she’d say, the introduction, always, to a fight. “The point is to move up in the world. Even sideways will do in a pinch, but what’s the point in moving down?”
As a relative newcomer to the middle class, she worried that her children might slip back into the world of public assistance and bad teeth. The finer things were not yet in our blood, or at least that was the way she saw it. My thrift-shop clothing drove her up the wall, as did the secondhand mattress lying without benefit of box springs upon my hardwood floor. “It’s not ironic,” she’d say. “It’s not ethnic. It’s filthy.”
Bedroom suites were fine for people like my parents, but as an artist I preferred to rough it. Poverty lent my little dabblings a much-needed veneer of authenticity, and I imagined myself repaying the debt by gently lifting the lives of those around me, not en masse but one by one, the old-fashioned way. It was, I thought, the least I could do.
I told my mother that I had allowed Brandi into my apartment, and she sighed deeply into her end of the telephone. “And I bet you gave her the grand tour, didn’t you? Mr. Show-Off. Mr. Big Shot.” We had a huge fight over that one. I didn’t call her for two days. Then the phone rang. “Brother,” she said. “You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into.”
A neglected girl comes to your door and what are you supposed to do, turn her away?
“Exactly,” my mother said. “Throw her the hell out.”
But I couldn’t. What my mother defined as boasting, I considered a standard show-and-tell. “This is my stereo system,” I’d said to Brandi. “This is the electric skillet I received last Christmas, and here’s a little something I picked up in Greece last summer.” I thought I was exposing her to the things a regular person might own and appreciate, but all she heard was the possessive. “This is my honorable-mention ribbon,” meaning “It belongs to me. It’s not yours.” Every now and then I’d give her a little something, convinced that she’d treasure it forever. A postcard of the Acropolis, prestamped envelopes, packaged towelettes bearing the insignia of Olympic Airlines. “Really?” she’d say. “For me?”
The only thing she owned, the only thing special, was a foot-tall doll in a clear plastic carrying case. It was a dime-store version of one of those Dolls from Many Countries, this one Spanish with a beet red dress and a droopy mantilla on her head. Behind her, printed on cardboard, was the place where she lived: a piñata-lined street snaking up the hill to a dusty bullring. The doll had been given to her by her grandmother, who was forty years old and lived in a trailer beside an army base.
“What is this?” my mother asked. “A skit from Hee Haw? Who the hell are these people?”
“These people,” I said, “are my neighbors, and I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t make fun of them. The grandmother doesn’t need it, I don’t need it, and I’m pretty sure a nine-year-old girl doesn’t need it, either.” I didn’t tell her that the grandmother was nicknamed Rascal or that, in the picture Brandi showed me, the woman was wearing cutoff shorts and an ankle bracelet.
“We don’t talk to her anymore,” Brandi had said when I handed back the picture. “She’s out of our life, and we’re glad of it.” Her voice was dull and robotic, and I got the impression that the line had been fed to her by her mother. She used a similar tone when introducing her doll. “She’s not for playing with. She’s for display.”
Whoever imposed this rule had obviously backed it up with a threat. Brandi would trace her finger along the outside of the box, tempting herself, but never once did I see her lift the lid. It was as if the doll would explode if removed from her natural environment. Her world was the box, and a strange world it was.
“See,” Brandi said one day, “she’s on her way home to cook up those clams.”
She was talking about the castanets danglin
g from the doll’s wrist. It was a funny thought, childish, and I probably should have let it go rather than playing the know-it-all. “If she were an American doll those might be clams,” I said. “But instead she’s from Spain, and those are called castanets.” I wrote the word on a piece of paper. “Castanets, look it up.”
“She’s not from Spain, she’s from Fort Bragg.”
“Well, maybe she was bought there,” I said. “But she’s supposed to be Spanish.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” It was hard to tell without the eyebrows, but I think she was mad at me.
“It’s not supposed to mean anything,” I said. “It’s just true.”
“You’re full of it. There’s no such place.”
“Sure there is,” I said. “It’s right next to France.”
“Yeah, right. What’s that, a store?”
I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation. How could you not know that Spain was a country? Even if you were nine years old, it seems you would have picked it up on TV or something. “Oh, Brandi,” I said. “We’ve got to find you a map.”
Because I couldn’t do it any other way, we fell into a tight routine. I had a part-time construction job and would return home at exactly 5:30. Five minutes later Brandi would knock on my door, and stand there blinking until I let her in. I was going through a little wood-carving phase at the time, whittling figures whose heads resembled the various tools I worked with during the day: a hammer, a hatchet, a wire brush. Before beginning, I’d arrange some paper and colored pencils on my desk. “Draw your doll,” I’d say. “Copy the bullring in her little environment. Express yourself!” I encouraged Brandi to broaden her horizons, but she usually quit after the first few minutes, claiming it was too much work.
Mainly she observed, her eyes shifting between my knife and the Spanish doll parked before her on the desktop. She’d talk about how stupid her teachers were, and then she’d ask what I would do if I had a million dollars. If I’d had a million dollars at that time in my life I probably would have spent every last penny of it on drugs, but I didn’t admit it, because I wanted to set a good example. “Let’s see,” I’d say. “If I had that kind of money, I’d probably give it away.”
“Yeah, right. You’d what, just hand it out to people on the street?”
“No, I’d set up a foundation and try to make a difference in people’s lives.” At this one even the doll was gagging.
When asked what she’d do with a million dollars, Brandi described cars and gowns and heavy bracelets encrusted with gems.
“But what about others? Don’t you want to make them happy?”
“No. I want to make them jealous.”
“You don’t mean that,” I’d say.
“Try me.”
“Oh, Brandi.” I’d make her a glass of chocolate milk and she’d elaborate on her list until 6:55, when friendship period was officially over. If work had gone slowly and there weren’t many shavings to sweep up, I might let her stay an extra two minutes, but never longer.
“Why do I have to go right this second?” she asked one evening. “Are you going to work or something?”
“Well, no, not exactly.”
“Then what’s your hurry?”
I never should have told her. The good part about being an obsessive compulsive is that you’re always on time for work. The bad part is that you’re on time for everything. Rinsing your coffee cup, taking a bath, walking your clothes to the Laundromat: there’s no mystery to your comings and goings, no room for spontaneity. During that time of my life I went to the IHOP every evening, heading over on my bike at exactly seven and returning at exactly nine. I never ate there, just drank coffee, facing the exact same direction in the exact same booth and reading library books for exactly an hour. After this I would ride to the grocery store. Even if I didn’t need anything I’d go, because that’s what that time was allotted for. If the lines were short, I’d bike home the long way or circle the block a few times, unable to return early, as those five or ten minutes weren’t scheduled for apartment time.
“What would happen if you were ten minutes late?” Brandi asked. My mother often asked the same question—everyone did. “You think the world will fall apart if you walk through that door at nine-o-four?”
They said it jokingly, but the answer was yes, that’s exactly what I thought would happen. The world would fall apart. On the nights when another customer occupied my regular IHOP booth, I was shattered. “Is there a problem?” the waitress would ask, and I’d find that I couldn’t even speak.
Brandi had been incorporated into my schedule for a little over a month when I started noticing that certain things were missing—things like pencil erasers and these little receipt books I’d picked up in Greece. In searching through my drawers and cabinets, I discovered that other things were missing as well: a box of tacks, a key ring in the form of a peanut.
“I see where this is going,” my mother said. “The little sneak unlatched your porch door and wandered over while you were off at the pancake house. That’s what happened, isn’t it?”
I hated that she figured it out so quickly.
When I confronted Brandi, she broke down immediately. It was as if she’d been dying to confess, had rehearsed it, even. The stammered apology, the plea for mercy. She hugged me around the waist, and when she finally pulled away I felt my shirtfront, expecting to find it wet with tears. It wasn’t. I don’t know why I did what I did next, or rather, I guess I do. It was all part of my ridiculous plan to set a good example. “You know what we have to do now, don’t you?” I sounded firm and fair until I considered the consequences, at which point I faltered. “We’ve got to go…and tell your mother what you just did?”
I half hoped that Brandi might talk me out of it, but instead she just shrugged.
“I bet she did,” my mother said. “I mean, come on, you might as well have reported her to the cat. What did you expect that mother to do, needlepoint a sampler with the Ten Commandments? Wake up, Dopey, the woman’s a whore.”
Of course she was right. Brandi’s mother listened with her arms crossed, a good sign until I realized that her anger was directed toward me rather than her daughter. In the far corner of the room a long-haired man cleaned beneath his fingernails with a pair of scissors. He looked my way for a moment and then turned his attention back to the television.
“So she took a pencil eraser,” Brandi’s mother said. “What do you want me to do, dial nine-one-one?” She made it sound unbelievably petty.
“I just thought you should know what happened,” I said.
“Well, lucky me. Now I know.”
I returned to my apartment and pressed my ear against the bedroom wall. “Who was that?” the guy asked.
“Oh, just some asshole,” Brandi’s mother said.
Things cooled down after that. I could forgive Brandi for breaking into my apartment, but I could not forgive her mother. Just some asshole. I wanted to go to the place where she worked and burn it down. In relating the story, I found myself employing lines I’d probably heard on public radio. “Children want boundaries,” I said. “They need them.” It sounded sketchy to me, but everyone seemed to agree—especially my mother, who suggested that in this particular case, a five-by-eleven cell might work. She wasn’t yet placing the entire blame on me, so it was still enjoyable to tell her things, to warm myself in the comforting glow of her outrage.
The next time Brandi knocked I pretended to be out—a ploy that fooled no one. She called my name, figured out where this was headed, and then went home to watch TV. I didn’t plan to stay mad forever. A few weeks of the silent treatment and then I figured we’d pick up where we left off. In the meantime, I occasionally passed her in the front yard, just standing there as if she were waiting for someone normal to pick her up. I’d say, “Hello, how’s it going?” and she’d give me this tight little smile, the sort you’d offer if someone you hated was walking around with chocolate stains on the
back of his pants.
Back when our neighborhood was prosperous, the building we lived in was a single-family home, and sometimes I liked to imagine it as it once was: with proud rooms and chandeliers, a stately working household serviced by maids and coachmen. I was carrying out the trash one afternoon and came upon what used to be the coal cellar, a grim crawl space now littered with shingles and mildewed cardboard boxes. There were worn-out fuses and balls of electrical wire, and there, in the back, a pile of objects I recognized as my own: things I hadn’t noticed were missing—photographs, for instance, and slides of my bad artwork. Moisture had fouled the casings, and when I backed out of the cellar and held them to the sun I saw that the film had been scratched, not by accident but intentionally, with a pin or a razor. “Yur a ashole,” one of them read. “Suk my dick why dont you.” The spelling was all over the place, the writing tiny and furious, bleeding into the mind-bending designs spewed by mental patients who don’t know when to stop. It was the exact effect I’d been striving for in my bland imitation folk art, so not only did I feel violated, I felt jealous. I mean, this girl was the real thing.
There were pages of slides, all of them etched with ugly messages. Photographs, too, were ruined. Here was me as a toddler with the word shity scratched into my forehead. Here was my newlywed mother netting crabs with her eyes clawed out. Included in the pile were all of the little presents accepted with such false gratitude, the envelopes and postcards, even the towelettes, everything systematically destroyed.
I gathered it all up and went straight to Brandi’s mother. It was two o’clock in the afternoon and she was dressed in one of those thigh-length robes people wear when practicing karate. This was morning for her, and she stood drinking cola from a tall glass mug. “Fuck,” she said. “Haven’t we been through this?”
“Well, actually, no.” My voice was higher than normal, and unstable. “Actually, we haven’t been through this.”
The Best of Me Page 9