Gem & Dixie

by Sara Zarr

  She folded her arms. “He’ll be pissed.”

  “We just keep pretending we don’t know anything about it. Anyway, so what. Come on, Dixie.”

  I told myself I was doing it for her, even while thinking: Choose me. Choose me over them. Let’s go to the forest, let’s go to space.

  “He owes it to us,” I said, knowing I almost had her. “They both do.”

  She glanced down the street toward where we would get a bus if we were going home. “I just want things to be like they were.”

  “Like they were when?” I asked.

  “You know, when Dad was going to have a club and we would dance around the apartment, all four of us, and . . .” She shrugged. “I don’t know. Like it was.”

  I knew what she meant and I understood how she’d come to believe it. We lied to ourselves as much as anyone lied to us. You have to, when you’re a kid, if you want to get through it.

  I held Dixie’s wrist and expected her to jerk it away. But she kept still.

  “Dixie,” I said. “It was never like that.”

  When I told Dixie “never,” I really meant never.

  The second part of the family history I wrote for Mr. Bergstrom was about our grandparents. Or grandmothers, I guess. Before I read it to him, I said, “This is the end because this is all I know, and I only know what my mom and dad and uncle talked about, or what they told me, or what I heard my mom tell her friend Roxanne.”

  “Looks like you have a lot to say,” he said, noticing again how many pages I had.

  “I don’t know if it says anything,” I told him. “Or if it’s even true. It’s just what I know.”

  Grandma Alice, my mom’s mom, raised her and my uncle Ivan mostly by herself. She worked as a bank teller and they had a little house in a suburb of Portland. Mom and Ivan ate frozen dinners in front of the TV, and Grandma Alice gave them each a list of chores to do so that she didn’t have to spend all her time after work cooking and cleaning. When she came home, she’d make a drink and put her feet up and smoke cigarettes while they all watched TV, and she’d make another drink and another, then go to sleep. On Friday and Saturday nights she went on dates. On Sunday mornings, sometimes she took Mom and Ivan to the Greek Orthodox church and sometimes she let them do whatever they wanted as long as they didn’t bother her while she slept. Sunday afternoons she’d phone her own mother and make the kids talk to her, and then take the phone back and end up talking loud in Greek and crying, and Sunday nights after these conversations she’d go to her room and stay there until Monday morning, when they’d do the whole week over again.

  I don’t think any of that stuff made her a bad mother or person. Not food from a microwave or going on dates or anything. She provided for her kids way better than my parents ever provided for me, and she never walked out on them. But she still left them. Because of how she went to her room or drank when she was sad, how she carried pain all by herself and didn’t show them how sometimes other people could help. How she fought with her mother in Greek and never told Mom or Ivan what they fought about or what made her cry. That’s the same as being left, in some ways, or it feels like it. I know.

  Grandma Alice hated my father from the first time my mom brought him home. She saw the grunge clothes and long hair and told my mom she’d wind up getting left, like her. Mom married Dad anyway and Grandma Alice still hated him; three years later, when I was two, she found out she had pancreatic cancer, and four months after that she died.

  So that’s my mom’s mom.

  My dad’s mom, Grandma Jacobs, never had a career or anything. She depended on the men that came and went—including my dad’s dad—to give her enough money to get by. She fought and scratched for it. “Fought and scratched” was how my dad put it when he talked about her to me and Dixie. Sometimes he’d say it with pride, like she was his hero, and sometimes he’d say it like he hated her.

  The other thing I know is that she cooked. She got up every day and made breakfast for my dad. He was an only child. She packed him lunches for school and made his dinners.

  Grandma Alice didn’t tell Mom and Ivan anything, but Grandma Jacobs told my dad everything. I don’t know which is worse, because when she didn’t have a man around to take care of her, my dad was supposed to do it and she told him so. “You’re all I’ve got, Rusty. Me and you.” She wrote up lists of careers my dad could go into that paid a lot. That way he could take care of her. Pilot. Dentist. Investment banker.

  “How about rock star?” he’d say. “Don’t forget to put rock star on the list.”

  He said she told him he didn’t have that kind of talent, or that kind of luck. She got older and had fewer boyfriends, and the ones she did have were mostly married. For my dad, being the man of the house meant he stayed home with his mom when he was in high school even if he wanted to be with his friends. Being the man of the house meant breaking his date for his junior prom because his mom was getting over being dumped by a guy and needed him home with her. It meant coming up with money somehow when they were short and bills couldn’t wait.

  When Grandma Jacobs got mad at people, she cut them off. That’s what she did with her parents. She used to give my dad the silent treatment if he did something that made her unhappy. Usually what made her unhappy was my dad not giving her enough attention, or him caring about anyone other than her. She must have thought there wasn’t enough love, to take or to give, like there was always a shortage one way or another.

  When my dad met my mom, Grandma Jacobs thought all the love that belonged to her was going away, and she gave him the permanent silent treatment. To her, my mom was just the person who took away her son and then ruined his life by encouraging his rock star dreams. After they got married, Grandma Jacobs never talked to my dad again. I don’t even think she knows Dixie or I exist.

  I guess both my parents learned from theirs that men leave, and women stay around but don’t really want to. They wanted to be different, but there was no one to show them how.

  13.

  DIXIE AND I walked the avenues. At each corner, I looked down toward the water. You’d think someone who spent her whole life in Seattle would get sick of seeing water, but we couldn’t see it from our apartment, our neighborhood. I always knew it was there but it was for other people: tourists, professionals, people with money.

  We were people with money now and we could claim it, too—the view, the blue-green expanse of the Sound, the slice of crystal-clear sky between the water and the layer of quilted clouds.

  Dixie got slower and slower until I realized I was walking alone. I turned around. She was on the phone. I went back to her.

  “. . . so I told her I’m staying with you tonight, okay?”

  Lia.

  “Thanks. Not like she’s going to ask, but.”

  She listened, and glanced at me.

  “Me and my sister have to take care of something. We won’t be at school tomorrow, but don’t worry. Just say we’re sick if anyone asks.”

  Then she spent a long time mostly listening and came to a total stop, leaning against a building. Laughing, saying “I know” and “What?” and “Oh my god.”

  I hadn’t had a best friend since seventh grade, when I’d go to Miriam Reed’s house all the time. Our favorite thing was closing her bedroom door and putting on music and dancing around, singing into our fists like they were microphones, and buying enough candy for ten people and eating it all. Then, in the summer between seventh grade and eighth grade, she stopped inviting me over and made a whole new group of friends, and I’d still see her at school all the time but it was like our whole history had been erased.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” Dixie was saying. She put her phone back in her pocket.

  “Don’t tell her about the money,” I said.

  “No shit.”

  We started walking again. We passed three hotels before Dixie asked, “What’s our plan?”

  “I’m just checking them all out.” Which wasn’t true. Every
time we came near one, I thought, This is the one, but then I had no idea what to do next. “It has to be the right place.”

  “Okay. When we find the right place, what’s our plan?”

  “Go in and get a room?”

  “You can’t just walk in and get a room.”

  I stopped. “Why not?”

  She sighed. “It’s a hotel, Gem. Have you ever been in a hotel?”

  Of course I’d never been in a hotel, she knew that. “Have you?”

  She dug around in her bag and handed me a driver’s license with her picture on it. Only it said her name was Amy King and that she was nineteen and lived in Shoreline.

  “Where’d you get this?”

  “Me and Lia both have them. We wanted to get into eighteen-and-over clubs. Like Mom and Dad used to do when they were our age. Come on.” She started walking back in the direction we’d come from. “It has to be somewhere not too businessy. And not too nice but still nice enough. Hang on.” She stepped to the edge of the sidewalk and crouched over her schoolbag. She pulled out a hairbrush and handed it to me, then a scarf that she twisted around her neck to cover the skin her V-neck left exposed. “We don’t want them thinking we’re, like, teen prostitutes or something. There are a lot of them down here.”

  I brushed my hair, but there wasn’t much else I could do other than wipe bagel crumbs off my sweater. We started walking again, and I let myself fall behind, suddenly feeling uncertain and incapable. I watched her walk with the confidence she always had at school. I don’t know if she’d copied it from other people, or if she created it out of thin air by sheer force of will. All I knew was she didn’t get it from me.

  She talked over her shoulder. “Let’s go back to that one we passed a couple of blocks ago. With the fountain in the lobby.”

  I hadn’t noticed it.

  “Let me do the talking,” she added.

  Dixie led us into the place she deemed most likely to take our cash. The thing that she’d thought was a fountain in the lobby turned out to be a big stone sculpture, no water. We walked around it and then Dixie stepped right up to the counter. I lurked behind her, ready to pull a bundle of fifties from my bag.

  The woman working the desk wore a neat blue suit and had shiny black hair pulled into a tight bun and one perfect curl gelled just in front of her ear. “How can I help you?”

  “Do you have any rooms available? We don’t have a reservation.”

  “How many nights?”

  “Just tonight.”

  Her eyes flicked from Dixie to me, and back to Dixie.

  “We missed our ferry,” Dixie explained. “All we have is cash, okay?”

  “It’s early. The ferries run all day, and late at night.”

  “Well, we missed the one we were supposed to get and now no one can pick us up on the other side until tomorrow.”

  “We don’t normally . . .” The woman glanced behind her. “You’d have to put an extra three hundred down as a deposit, is the thing.” She said it like she was certain we wouldn’t have that much.

  “Okay,” Dixie said.

  The woman lifted her dark eyebrows. “And I need to see ID.”

  Dixie slid her license across the shiny black marble. “How much total?”

  She looked at the license, looked at Dixie. I don’t know if she believed Dixie was nineteen, but I’d already stepped forward to start counting cash onto the marble. She clicked some things on her computer. “With the deposit and the cash-rate room . . . Two queens all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And taxes and fees . . .” She watched me. “Five ninety-seven.”

  I stopped counting. It was so much. Dixie nodded her head at me. “Put extra,” she said quietly. “For room service and everything. Anyway, we get the deposit back.”

  “If the room is in good condition at checkout,” the woman said. “No smoking anywhere in the room. That includes the bathroom. And checkout takes a little extra time. You’ll need to plan for that.”

  The woman handed a piece of paper over for Dixie to fill in and sign. I watched her write Amy King and the address from the ID. I counted out the money and the woman whisked it away with another glance over her shoulder, and in a minute we had two key cards.

  “Thank you, Ms. King. Enjoy your stay.”

  Dixie’s eyes narrowed in a certain way and I knew something had happened that I hadn’t noticed. “I need a receipt. For the deposit.”

  “I’m sorry?” The woman stared at us.

  “I need a receipt,” Dixie said again, her voice raised.

  I sensed someone behind me and thought, This is it—we’re caught. But when I turned, it was only a couple with suitcases, waiting to check in next. Dixie turned around to them and said, “I’m just waiting for my receipt because she took our cash.”

  The woman behind the counter smiled tightly. “I’m sorry. Of course.”

  Dixie double-checked everything on the receipt before we headed to the elevator. Once we were inside and zooming up to the eleventh floor, she said, “That bitch was going to try to keep our deposit.”

  It hadn’t even crossed my mind that could happen. What other kinds of stuff didn’t I know? “Where did you get that ID?” I asked her again.

  “Nowhere. I got it. I mean, you have to ask around and then you get a name or an address and you go do it.” She shrugged, as if it was just that easy.

  The doors swished open and we found our room. Dixie used her key card, and before I could see what was inside, she turned to me with a smile and said, “Okay, this was actually a really good idea.”

  14.

  THE ROOM had striped wallpaper, cream and gold. I’d never seen anything like that. Each bed seemed twice as big as our beds at home, and each was covered with pillows. There were an armchair and footrest by the window, a fancy wooden desk, a huge TV on top of a dresser, bedside tables with glass lamps, and a beige-and-brown flowered carpet.

  “I’m taking this one,” Dixie said, throwing her bag and jacket on the bed closest to the window. She pulled back the gauzy curtains. “Check out the view.”

  I went over to her. From as high as we were, we could see the whole waterfront, from the Ferris wheel turning over Elliott Bay to the green of the parkway on the other end and all the way across to the islands. I didn’t know which island was which, or the names of all the things I was seeing. I knew about as much as a tourist.

  Dixie tapped my foot with hers. “Say something.”

  I wanted to be happy, like her. Excited. Instead, looking at the incredible view left me hollowed out. All I could see was what wasn’t there. I touched the window. “We’ve lived here our whole lives and Mom and Dad never took us to the Ferris wheel. Or the market. Or any of this stuff.”

  I felt her eyes on me. Then she said, “Dad took me on the Ferris wheel once. It’s not that great, trust me.”

  Something pinged around in the hollow inside me, bouncing painfully between my stomach and heart. “When?”

  “I don’t know. Whenever. I was little. Probably when you were in school but I hadn’t started yet.”

  I stared at her and knew from her face that mine showed everything I felt.

  Dixie flopped onto her bed. “Please, don’t go all negative and sad right now, Gem. This was your idea. You’re the one who wanted to have one great night, and now I want to enjoy it. If you spend the whole time moping, I’m going to be pissed.” She swung her legs over the side of the bed and unlaced her boots. Dixie and Dad, on the Ferris wheel. He probably took her to the market, too, and who knows where else.

  I turned my back on the window, on her, and went to the other bed. I slipped the backpack off my shoulders and took my jacket off, and I explored the rest of the room. There was a little nook where you could put your suitcase, I guess, if you were a normal traveler. I studied the emergency escape route information on the door. “Don’t go in the elevator if there’s a fire,” I said over my shoulder.

  “Alrighty.” Dixie had tur
ned on the TV and was flipping through channels with the volume low.

  I opened the closet. There were extra blankets and pillows, an iron and ironing board, and two fluffy white robes. I put one on over my clothes. “Look.”

  “What.”

  “Look!”

  Dixie turned her head to see me running my hands up and down the robe, smiling to prove I didn’t really care about the Ferris wheel thing. I waited for her to roll her eyes, tell me I was being dumb. But she sat up. “I want one.”

  I got the other one out of the closet and came close enough to her to throw it.

  “It’s so soft.” She spread it over her like a blanket.

  With the sleeves of the robe hanging down to my knuckles, I went into the bathroom. It wasn’t huge the way I thought a bathroom in a hotel like this should be, but it still impressed me. Everything was this white marble, swirled with a different kind of white that seemed to glow. White floor, white sink, white toilet, white tub and shower with a white-and-gold curtain.

  “I’m taking a bath,” I said.

  Dixie’s eyes were closed, but she’d left the TV on. “Mmmkay,” she said drowsily.

  I took off the robe, got out of my clothes, and put the robe back on. I folded my jeans and my sweater, my underwear and socks, into a neat pile that I put on the table closest to my bed.

  Then I thought, Maybe I should take the backpack into the bathroom. It’s not that I thought Dixie would take it, I just . . . I don’t know, maybe I did think that. I wanted it with me. I laid it on the bathroom floor, then started running hot water in the tub. A basket on the sink held four rolled-up washcloths and little bottles of shampoo, conditioner, lotion, and shower gel. I opened the shower gel and smelled it. Lemons. I squeezed the whole bottle into the running water and adjusted the temperature. Soon the tub was all bubbles.