In the morning and before and after gym, she said.
Yeah, the tall one said, pinching her lips into the corner of her mouth.
Oh, I know, Danny said. I do.
Right, well, any kind is okay, the blonde one said. Baby powder scent is good.
The tall one looks like a dumb Olive Oyl, Danny decides. She is stupid, and Danny’s mother is stupid too. Danny can’t stop running her fingers through her hair, her hands are someone else’s hands, and outside the door, the floorboards shift. Danny turns, and there is a blinking eye in the slit of light. Her stepbrother’s chopped-up laugh rips out of him.
Get out, get out, Danny says.
She holds the accordion door to the frame with her hands.
Dad, she says. Dad. But he is all the way downstairs. She calls for her older sister, her stepbrother pulling against the door, squealing.
Stop it, she cries. She hears a thumping run.
Cut it out, you little shit, her older sister says. The tension on the door disappears, and Danny peeks out into the bathroom, where her sister has her stepbrother pinned against the wall.
Go, go, go, she says.
Danny grabs her towel off the hook, wraps it around her, and rushes out through the bathroom to the loft bed, where she’s stacked her clothes. Her sister has her stepbrother with his arms behind him, his back and torso jerking against her.
You guys are little bitches, he says. Danny picks up her fold of clothes and hugs it to her chest and starts to run back into the bathroom. Her stepbrother wrests free and clamors to her, tugging on the back of her towel.
Stop it, she says. She screams and starts laughing, laughter like being tickled, like someone jamming their fingers into her armpits, about to make her pee, and her stepbrother tugs, and behind him, Danny’s sister tugs back on his T-shirt, stretching it into a point. Danny pushes her clothes against her chest and lets the towel drop, lunging forward and shutting herself up inside the bathroom.
I saw you, her stepbrother says.
Piece of shit, Danny’s sister says on the other side of the door. Get out of here. The floorboards creak, and Danny hears the empty drumming of steps on the stairs.
Are you okay in there? her sister asks. He’s gone, she says.
The floor is wet. Danny’s body is wet. She puts her clothes on.
My private area itches, she whispers.
* * *
THE LIVING ROOM is warm and wet, the air dense with mist. Through it all, Danny can see her younger sister curled up in the corner asleep, a Red Vine glistening between her lips, while on the couch beneath a pile of blankets, two shapes squirm and turn, grumbling and grunting like an old man, hungry. Once, in the yard at her mother’s, Danny and her sisters watched a mole move beneath the earth, the ground rising along its path. They had not known what was pushing around down there, and it made Danny sick. When the mole emerged at the edge of the sidewalk, its long, oblong nose twitching and sniffing the air, its fleshy, humanlike hands grappling greedily, she contracted, felt as though a smaller Danny were falling inside herself. She couldn’t tell if it was worse to know what the hidden thing was or not.
Dad.
The blanket shapes shift and freeze.
Dad?
Scram, kiddo, his gangster voice says.
Dad, I was in the shower and—
I hope you used soap this time, he says, and he and Danny’s stepmother laugh.
No, I was going to say that—
You drive a hard bargain, he says, and from beneath the blanket, a handful of bills float to the floor. Danny crumples the money into a wad and shoves it into the back of her jeans.
Go buy yourself something nice, the voice says, and a string of smoke snakes up from beneath the wool.
* * *
MARGARET HAS DECIDED THAT she is just going to tell Danny what the older boy who’s maybe a man said to her. He told me that I’m the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen. And I even showed him a picture of Elle. He said she has nothing on me. He told me that I’m special and that he wants to be with me and that maybe the reason you don’t write me letters is because you’re jealous but it’s totally normal to feel jealous when you don’t have a boyfriend and your best friend does. But don’t worry Tommy said that he would drive me down after school next Friday to see you for the weekend and that he would help you find a boyfriend too! It is so awesome. Don’t tell your mom it’s a secret, we’ll call you from a rest stop when we’re an hour away Tommy says.
From the desk in her bedroom, Danny takes out a sheet of loose-leaf and a pencil. Dearest Margaret, she begins.
Thank you so much for your letters. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to respond to your many, many letters. I’ve been very busy with new friends who always want to hang out. Congratulations on your wonderful new boyfriend. He sounds amazing and actually reminds me of your dad. I’m sure Tommy sees all the same wonderful qualities in you that your dad did. I can’t wait to hear all about it during your visit!
Your best friend,
Danny
* * *
SATURDAY DANNY DREAMS she is flying over her town. She floats above the tree line with God’s view of people walking to the grocery store and driving cars and chucking bread chunks to ducks by the river. Her hair is long and golden, rippling behind her. As she flies, her body inflates, growing large; she floats higher and higher, until she reaches the sun and it whites out her vision. She wakes feeling warm and full of breath.
Downstairs, her mother is doing the dishes and sighing.
I just got off the phone with Margaret’s mom, she says, turning. Have you heard from her lately? Her mother says she didn’t come home after school yesterday.
No.
She told her mom that you and I were going to come get her to stay with us for the weekend.
I don’t know anything about that.
She didn’t mention something in one of her letters?
Maybe she ran away. She doesn’t have any friends. She’s not popular at all.
Oh, dear, what an awkward girl. Danny’s mother sighs and sighs and shakes her head. It’s terrible not to be popular. Now collect your things to go to your father’s, she says.
As Danny walks back upstairs, she hears her mother say, I am oh so lonely when you girls aren’t here.
* * *
AT HER FATHER’S HOUSE, Danny takes the wad of his money and runs across the street. She buys red sugar ropes and crunchy corn shards and double-glucose snack cakes. When she gets back, she dumps the bag of food behind the bar and calls out dinner. She watches her stepbrothers and sisters wake and crawl and scramble over and divvy it all up, popping open the plastic packages and scooping candies into their mouths. In the living room, the couch is empty. On the television, a man and woman are exploring a dark cave, the man holding a lit torch aloft behind them. The woman wants to turn back. There are bugs with many legs crawling everywhere, sneaking up under her pant leg, disappearing behind her neck into her long hair, but the man insists her forward, spreading the cobwebs open before them.
Danny creaks upstairs. In her stepbrother’s room, she takes the waste basin in the corner and, getting down on her knees, pushes it into the crawl space, leaving a crack in the door behind her. She takes out Margaret’s letters from the back of her pants and drops them into the bin. She unscrews the silver cap and nozzle from her father’s cologne and pours the pink-red liquid over the paper. She takes out a bottle of her mother’s perfume called Fallen Fruit and dumps it in. She takes out a bottle of her older sister’s perfume called Plum Pickens and dumps it in. She takes out a bottle of her own perfume called Whoopsie Daisy and dumps it in. She strikes a match, the sulfur pinching her nose hair as she drops the lit stick in, and a flame jumps out of the bin, enveloping her face, heating her eyebrows and hairline. Danny falls into the door, clicking it shut behind her, and kicks the bin away. The fire pours onto the floor and crawls up the wall. Danny turns and tries to open the door, pinching at the flat screws on
the blank side of the handle. She kicks and punches the door. She kicks then turns to push herself against it, drawing her knees to her head and putting her head down and making herself small. The fire blackens the wall of women, their tan legs and flat stomachs and round tits, their eyes and ears and mouths and private areas. They wave in the heat then curl up blank and disappear. When the flames finally whisper into Danny’s hair, licking her ears and tickling her neck, she knows she’s been given a great gift, one that most girls wait their entire lives for.
INTERMISSION
I.
HERE’S THE OLD STORY: A man goes out for a pack of cigarettes and doesn’t return. He begins inside a home, announces his purpose to a woman, rises, and then leaves. Never to be heard from again. A to B, here to there, easy as pie. This was before everyone stopped smoking and started running. Before phones were four-hundred-dollar rectangles in people’s pockets.
We know it’s not the cigarettes (though the man is a smoker, though he’s most certainly addicted), but a summer claustrophobia at his neck. Theirs is a short, carpeted nothing of a house with curling kitchen tile and all manner of moldy life in the bathroom. The living room and the bedroom are as hot and cluttered as an attic, as used up as an old hotel. The smoke of their endless cigarettes (both his and hers), bits of themselves they’ve discarded into the world, has soaked into the walls, become a stale reminder of a recent past.
No, not so much the cigarettes, but the woman on the couch, as there needs to be someone to leave, someone to (later) relate the leaving to others. The man closes the door behind him, and she stays on that beige and brown flower-print couch drinking whiskey or eating butter pecan ice cream from the carton, watching late-night TV, and waiting, if not for those cigarettes herself, then at least for the man’s return.
There are any number of explanations for why he leaves, besides or in addition to those cigarettes. They are not the reason, but the prop, the key that turns the car on, gets the engine running.
The woman is pregnant. He gets into his car.
He never loved her. He gets into his car.
The woman cheated on him. Once, a long time ago. He gets into his car.
They don’t even fight anymore. He gets into his car.
She no longer sparks him, irks him, turns him on, makes him ache. He gets into his car.
See you soon, she says with a smile.
From the couch, he standing before her, she wraps her blue-jeaned legs around his or unzips his zipper, looking up at him and then down, bemused, reaching in, digging, as though drawing a name from a hat. Who’s our lucky winner tonight? Half-aroused, he gets into his car.
He gets into his car just as he did the week before and the week before that, occupying those tired movements as an extra might pantomime a gesture in the unfocused background of a movie scene. The car he gets into is a faded olive-green Pontiac Bonneville or Chevy Impala, a two-door car, heavy doors, low-slung and hard-topped. Any car that will take him from his neighborhood and into the world, from one life to another, because though the young man knows nothing about what going out for cigarettes means, he knows that he is not long for this life. What he would call his habits. The young man knows he needs another smoke just as sure as he needs to get into his car, addiction as inevitability, as following along with the story. It’s a voice that says, Again, again. A voice that says, And now.
In every version of the story, he gets the cigarettes. We see him, from a distance, from the country road outside the lonely convenience store. He is inside beneath the fluorescent lights, taking part in that (to us) silent exchange with the male clerk. There is the turning away from the counter, the walking out of the door and back toward his car. The night air thick with cicada song, we imagine how it feels to him, throbbing hot like an open wound. And then—
Whether or not he means to leave her, whether or not the car actually breaks down.
In the simplest version, he just keeps driving. His car joins the highway in the opposite direction of his house, the taillights growing distant, their red snubbing out like the spent cigarette he tosses from his window.
In a different version, the car dies. Windows down, the man’s hair loose and dancing and then the wheel going heavy in his hands. A moment, less than a second, of Aw, shit, Oh, no, Come on, not now, and then something like relief, like giving up.
Some kind of strange magic or any song that sounds like another song in that last snap of radio fuzz before it too blinks off. It’s 1976. The cars are longer; the jeans fit better. The country is celebrating, but our guy thinks only of slumping deep into that uncomfortable couch in his home and feels no part of this party, feels like he’s outside of time. And isn’t that what getting in the car is all about in the first place? Stepping outside of some present? Moving into a different one? He feels himself cracking open, shedding some old skin. His brown hair hangs greasy to his shoulders and his mustache needs trimming, but these are only details—nothing of him cannot be changed. The car and himself in it are set on a sweeping arc to the gravelly shoulder of the road, and he relinquishes himself to its pull, the car rolling slower and slower, he feeling, knowing, that when the car stops completely, he will entirely enter his fate. A disappearance, but at the same time, a kind of birth. What better—to become part of something grander? The night is open, black and blank, and he (the car completely dead now) grabs his cigarettes, gets ready to take his first steps into it.
II.
SOMETIMES SHE GOES ALONE. As much as she likes sitting next to someone during and dissecting the whole thing afterward, she hates being whispered to, can’t listen, doesn’t want to miss anything. She would say that she knows when a piece of dialogue can go unheard or, better, when there is no dialogue and she can lean over and whisper hotly into her friend’s ear or run to the bathroom, get another diet cola, and hurry back. When alone, she slinks down and puts her feet up on the chair-back in front of her, slipping on the glasses she’s supposed to wear for driving but doesn’t. She wishes they still played those old cartoons, the ones with the dancing bag of popcorn and soda, a vision of oversized candy boxes inside an illuminated glass case like a display for rare books or dinosaur bones. She always buys something, thinking that her extra three dollars will save the little theater. Sometimes it’s a box of Dots that she’ll dig out of her teeth the rest of the night, her molars throbbing; other times it’s a waxy bag of popcorn in place of dinner. If she’s not alone, she’ll suggest to whatever date she’s dragged along with her that he get something too. What do you mean you don’t like popcorn? What about Good & Plenty?
Tonight the man next to her, with only the gentlest nudging, bought a box of Milk Duds. With her eyes on the screen, she puts out her palm, and he shakes a few into it. But this man is not her lover. JD is a married friend from work who also visits the little theater with a frequency he might call often, though he is not the kind of man who tries to convince anyone of anything about communal movie watching or historical landmarks. He is the kind of man whose wife knows just where he is tonight. She tells him as he’s leaving the house, Have a good time. See you later. Tell Cheryl I said hello. JD’s the only one Cheryl will really talk to at the printing press where they work—or rather roll her eyes to, flash a friendly middle finger to—the pair of them speaking the same quiet, sarcastic language, their jokes swift, easy things. The other day in the break room Cheryl sighed, flipped shut a magazine, and, looking over to him, said, The whole world is crazy except for you and me. And I’m beginning to worry about you. She sometimes worries that he’ll get a better job and leave her there alone and stop going to movies with her.
On the screen before her, the man, after leaving the convenience store, after his car has broken down, walks along the shoulder of the midnight highway. There is only the darkness of his body against the blue dark of the night and the sound of his feet crunching over gravel. Then a car, low and long like his, slows down and stops ahead of him. The camera shows the man, from a quiet distance,
approaching then leaning down into the passenger window. He opens the door and gets in, the car heading west, though east, the viewers know, is where the man’s home lies. The camera retreats as the car moves forward, its red taillights growing dim, the scene fading to black. A beat, a breath for the viewers to wonder if this (after over an hour of film) is it, but the dull blackness of the screen then blooms into the reflective impenetrability of a pair of aviator sunglasses. The camera pulls back to include the rest of the man’s face—the ruddy brown of his mustache and jawline stubble, a cigarette raised to his lips—giving nothing but the bright image of the man, the close sound of his dry breath. A further withdrawal reveals his head of hair paling to a West Coast blond and the man’s open denim shirt, the wooden handrail he leans against, the boardwalk he stands on. Girls in knee socks skate past, while an old man on the ground whispers a song from behind a six-string.
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