Tina stands still for a while, listening.
Last week, her school held a homecoming dance. She didn’t go. But if she had gone, she probably would have danced. She half-closes her eyes to picture it better, sees herself spinning and undulating in a watermelon-pink satin dress.
The index finger of her right hand taps against her thigh.
She would have worn high heels and tossed her hair so it rippled with the rest of her body. She would have thrown her arms in the air.
The shadow of her, on the wall, is much larger than life. Even so, the twitches of her hips are barely detectable. Back and forth, the tiniest bit, steady to the music.
“Hey, girl! What are you doing in here?”
Tina shrieks as she spins around, knocking he radio off the nightstand so that one of its batteries tumbles out and rolls under the tattered pink bed.
Rudy laughs loudly, as if he just watched someone fall down on TV.
“What do you want?” she says, crossing her arms in front of her chest to stop its heat from shooting into her face.
“Nothing. I just came to see if you were in here writing love letters.”
Tina’s lip curls but she can’t think of anything to say to this. Rudy takes a step forward, forcing her to take a step back.
“I thought you were gonna be writing love letters to your new boyfriend, but you’re doin’ a little dance for him, instead.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“Yeah, you were. What are you gonna do for him, huh?”
Rudy moves forward again. Tina leans back as far as she can towards the nightstand and the wall.
“What are y’all doing in here?”
Rudy whips around and, at the same time, takes all his steps backwards again in one big jump. Then he sees that it’s only Eddie, Tina’s younger brother. The smart ass.
“Shut up, punk. None of your business.”
“You shut up,” says Eddie.
“Say what, man? What’d you say?”
Eddie looks into Rudy’s eyes, or at a spot between them, and doesn’t look away.
Rudy turns to Tina, whose eyes are wide on her brother, and then laughs. “Man, you’re lucky I don’t feel like kicking your ass right now.”
He pushes past Eddie and ruffles his hair hard enough to shove his head forward and then back again.
“Man, fuck you!?” says Eddie.
He turns to slap Rudy’s arm away, too late to hit it very hard. Rudy quickly turns back and slaps Eddie lightly on the face.
“Man, fuck you!” he mimics. “Watch your mouth, boy!”
Eddie swings a fist at him and just misses as Rudy jumps away again, now hopping on his toes like a boxer on speed and, of course, still laughing. Eddie balls both fists and stays where he is.
“Asshole. Why don’t you go back to jail with your dad?”
Rudy gets still. “Say that to my face, faggot.”
“You heard me.”
Just like in her dreams, Tina is frozen, only able to watch, not to scream. But, just like in her dreams, she can eventually whisper. Quit it. . .
And then she talks. “Quit it . . . .”
And then, finally, she wakes up and yells for help. “Quit it! Quit! Grandma!”
Her grandmother’s already shuffling down the hall. “What in the hell are y’all making all this noise for?”
Tina says nothing. Eddie says nothing. Their brown eyes are matching blanks in their faces.
“Nothing, Grandma,” says Rudy.
“Don’t you nothing me. I heard y’all fighting.”
Tina sees her youngest brother Jesse standing in the hall, watching.
“Shoot, I don’t know,” says Rudy. “I just came up here to tell Tina she needed to go help you with dinner. Then this little punk came in and started trying to hit me for nothing.”
Their grandmother looks at them, one by one. Tina and Eddie still say nothing.
“Well . . . Well, y’all better behave. Unless you want me to get the broom on y’all.” She shuffles towards the door. “And, Tina, I do need you to help me. Come on.”
The minute she disappears around the corner, Rudy slaps Eddie across the top of the head. “Y’all better behave.” He turns and lightly runs out after their grandmother, giggling.
Eddie is breathing hard enough for Tina to hear. She swallows hard and doesn’t cry. Jesse practically hisses.
“I hate that motherfucker! Let’s go get him, Eddie, when he gets in his room,” says Jesse, his voice not even breaking. His eleventh birthday was the week before.
“Nah, man. Nah,” says Eddie. “He’s just a punk. Forget his stupid ass.”
He stands still for a while, visibly becoming calm, then turns to Tina. “How come you don’t have a lock on your door?”
“A lock? I don’t know,” she says.
He goes away, Jesse following. He comes back with a hammer and a thin block of wood about a half foot long.
“You got a nail?” he asks his sister.
Tina crosses the room to where a defunct sink sits on a cabinet in the corner. She yanks open one of the cabinet drawers, which has become stiff with many layers of pain and humidity, and finds a long rusted nail.
Eddie takes it from her hand. He goes to her room door, closes it and hammers the block of wood into the molding at its side. He swivels the wood, across the door, and then counterclockwise up again.
“There’s your lock,” he says. He leaves the room. Jesse, who’s been waiting, follows.
“Check this out, man. Check it out!”
“Aw . . . Damn. Where’d you get that, man?”
Tony takes a sip of his beer and pushes away the crumpled magazine nudging his arm. It’s opened to a picture of a naked chick doing something nasty with a banana. Rudy brought it to the store in a brown paper bag, and he’s handing it around for all the guys to see. Tony doesn’t touch it. He doesn’t want to know where it’s been.
“Hey, man . . . Look what else I got,” says Rudy.
He sticks his hand in the paper bag and pulls out some weed, holding it close so the kids and old ladies passing by won’t see it, even if they hear him talking about it loud as hell.
“Aw, man!” says Chuy, who’s not even old enough to buy his own beer.
“Hell, yeah. Check this shit out. This isn’t the same old shit from Manuel . . . I found out a way to make it better.”
Tony knows Rudy’s lying, but he doesn’t care enough to argue about it.
“Come on, man. Let’s go to the lot and roll a joint.” Rudy puts the weed back in the bag along with his magazine.
“All right, man.”
“Hell, yeah!”
They head towards the empty lot two blocks down that’s conveniently outfitted with vine-swarmed trees and an abandoned couch.
“You coming Tony?”
“Nah, man. I got stuff to do.”
“Yeah, man, let him go. He gots stuff to do. Like jerking off!” says Rudy, laughing and slapping Tony’s arm.
Tony pushes his hand away. “Hey, man . . . I already told you. I don’t play that shit.”
The other guys stop laughing. Their tones and faces are somber as they say, “Hey, man” and “Come on, man” and “Come on, Tony man.” Rudy tones his cackling down to a smile.
“Yeah, man, Tony. Why you gotta get mad? Come on, man.”
“It’s cool,” says Tony. And so it is cool, and they let him take off.
It hasn’t rained in a while so it’s too humid to walk around. Tony goes home, thinking he’ll watch Donahue with his mom. When he reaches his empty house, he remembers his mother talking to her friend the night before about getting a ride to the doctor’s.
He goes to the kitchen and looks in the refrigerator, then takes out the ham and the cheese and sets them on the counter. He picks at his teeth for a moment.
He goes to the bathroom. Then, he goes to the room that he used to share with Manuel and Danny and sits on the edge of the bottom bunk. He chews his nails f
or a while. He spits out his results and lies down.
That picture of the chick with the banana was pretty disgusting. Normally, he doesn’t think about stuff like that, but sometimes you can’t help yourself.
His legs are jittering and his eye is twitching worse than usual. Finally he gives up, reaches for a dirty t-shirt on the floor behind his head and then unzips his jeans.
The stupid banana chick was obviously high. Worse than that, though, she won’t stay still in his mind. First she’s herself, with the weasel-looking face. Then, her face turns to Rosario’s from down the street. Rosario in torn, short shorts. Then she’s someone else altogether: someone else in a pair of jeans. The back of those jeans, walking away from him. Just the other day. Tight jeans. No, it’s not Rudy’s cousin. She’s too young.
It must have been Rosario’s jeans. She walks by Happy Land about five times a day.
“Stupid!” she says when the guys whistle at her. “Stoopid!”
Actually, they said she’s pregnant now. So he can’t think about her anymore.
There’s the girl who works at Happy Land. She’s nice, but sort of scary at the same time, with her black eyes, lips and nails. Not her either, then.
Sweating now, Tony thinks of the banana chick and does what he has to do. Her face flickers like a slide show and transforms from one girl’s to another’s. When he’s finally done, he feels the beer messing up his stomach. He makes himself go spit in the sink.
Tina helps with dinner, like always. Her grandmother shuffles through the kitchen, muttering.
“You shouldn’t spend the night at Melissa’s house so much. Her mother probably wishes you’d go home. You spent the whole weekend there. I need you here, helping me. I’m getting too old to do everything by myself.”
Tina chops pickles. The old lady shuffles to her room to answer the phone. At the same time, the front door bangs open and slams shut. Tina hopes it isn’t Rudy, but knows it is.
“Hey, I just saw Crazy Tony. He says he wants to meet you tonight by the store. I told him you would go.”
He moves closer to Tina. She turns so that the big bowl she’s holding is between them.
“Grandma, did you want me to put pepper in the tuna fish?” she calls.
Her grandmother’s still talking on the phone.
“I told him you’d go see him because you’re always going to see your boyfriends at night. Beto told me he saw you and your little friend at Studewood Park with two guys. He said y’all had on short little skirts and shirts with no bras. . . .”
He leans as close to her face as he can in order to say this last part softly. His hands move forward, floating on either side of her like hot, sweaty blimps. She leans back as far as she can against the stove.
Her grandmother comes through the sheet that hangs between her bedroom and the kitchen.
“Here . . . let me taste it and see.”
Rudy calmly stands up straight, takes a pickle off the cutting board and eats it. His grandmother slaps his hand.
“A little bit more pepper. That’s all. What are you doing home, m’ijo? I thought you were going to see Manuel.”
“I did, Grandma. I’m gonna start working with him again. He said he’s been waiting for me to come back, since I’m the only one he can trust to drive his delivery truck.”
“Well, that’s good,” their grandmother says. “That’s what I figured.”
“As soon as I get my first paycheck, I’m gonna go to the flea market and get you that ashtray I was telling you about . . . the marble one from Japan with the Virgin Mary on it.”
Tina turns back to her cooking. She’s glad Rudy will be out dealing again, no matter what he tells their grandmother.
It’s Monday morning, so everyone in the house is asleep, except for Tina. Her brothers have been gone since dark. Whether they went to school or not, she doesn’t know.
Her grandmother never wakes up when Tina sneaks into her bedroom, a room that could almost be considered pretty. In the bathroom, faded roses surround her. Tina reaches across all the dusty toiletries on the bureau to take the bottle of Emeraude. Muffling it with her t-shirt, she sprays a tiny bit down at her stomach, where she can be sure no one will smell it. This ritual complete, she gazes into the smoky mirror.
She examines her chin, forehead and the corners behind her nostrils. She runs her hands through her hair, then gathers it all on top of her head. She purses her lips and raises one brow and then the other.
The light coming through the room’s tiny, whitewashed window shows that there’s still a bit of time before the bus comes. Tina crouches down and slides open the bottom bureau drawer.
Under the embroidered handkerchiefs and buttoned gloves that no one will ever use again, there’s a very small amount of makeup. Tina ignores the crusted black pancake of mascara, the stale-smelling pancake of “pancake” and the siren song of the blue eye shadow that has gotten her in trouble before. Her fingers go directly to the tiny sample tube of Avon Pink Sails lipstick. This morning, she will be brave.
The lipstick is the exact color of her lips. But something about it makes her face different in the mirror. Her chin tilts and her eyes wink knowingly all on their own. Tina slips out of her grandmother’s room and then out the front door.
On the way to the bus stop, hugging her books to her chest, Tina imagines what Melissa will say. Her parents never let her wear makeup. Poor Melissa. She’ll be very, very jealous.
All of a sudden, Tina sees a cat.
She jaywalks across the street to the bus stop near the old fire station, where the tabby cat is rubbing its chin against a bent corner of the garage door. It looks up as she arrives, pupils dilating against the morning sun. Tina gets all the way up to it and then bends down and extends her hand. The cat minces away, slipping through the space between the fire station and the chain-link fence surrounding the neighboring weed-filled lot.
“Aw . . . come on, kitty. Here, kitty, kitty,” Tina calls.
It watches with narrowed eyes. She reaches for its face through the fence.
A car honks behind her, but Tina doesn’t notice. She stretches her fingers through one of the fence’s pewter diamonds and touches a single whisker. The cat never takes a step back, but its somehow able to pull its head a remarkable distance away without seeming to move at all.
“Hey,” says a man’s voice. Tina spins around to see who’s there. It’s a bald business man in an old blue Buick, idling right there at the bus stop sign.
“Good morning. You’re looking real pretty today. Need a ride?”
Tina averts her eyes, looking toward the neon bail bonds signs in the distance. There’s a lot of traffic, so the man is forced to drive on. Relieved, she turns back to the cat. It’s gone. She sighs and turns back towards the street, leaning her back against the fire station wall. It looks like she missed the 7:55. She’ll have to wait for the 8:06 now.
After a while, the blue Buick comes back.
“Where are you going? To school? Get in and I’ll give you a ride.”
The man is leaning far across the bench seat to peer at her out of his passenger-side window, ready to open the door.
Again, Tina looks down the street as if she doesn’t hear him.
“Come on. Get in.”
She stares steadily down the street, waiting for the bus to come around the corner three blocks away.
The car behind the Buick honks and the man has to drive on again. Out of the corner of her eye, Tina sees him turn the corner to come around the block again. She squints down the avenue to her left, eyes watering. She can almost see . . . she sees it. Here’s the bus.
Also, here’s Crazy Tony.
He’s coming towards her. A block away.
Tina strains her eyes to read the lighted name on the top of the bus as it effortlessly catches up with Tony and then passes him by. H . . . A . . . Wrong one. It passes her, too.
Tony comes closer and closer. He’s walking quickly, with his hands in his pocket
s. He’s looking down at the cracked sidewalk, but Tina can see that his lips are moving continuously. He’s talking to himself. She steps back into the four inches of shelter provided by the recess of the fire station’s garage door, flattening her back against it.
Meanwhile, the blue Buick is cruising up to the bus stop once again. No one’s behind it this time, so the bald man comes to a complete stop. He leans towards the passengerside window again and opens his mouth to speak. But Tina speaks first.
“Look, I don’t want a damned ride, okay?”
The man shuts his mouth. He’s silent for a second, staring at her. Tina looks at a yellow stain on his blue-stripped tie.
When he finally speaks, it’s loud. “Hey, you little bitch. Who do you think you are? Someone needs to teach you some manners.”
Tina decides to go back to ignoring him.
He talks louder. “I’m over here trying to be a gentleman, offering a ride to a little slut like you. The least you could do is say thank you. Do you hear me? I ought to get out of this car and slap your little face.”
Tina looks away to the right, eyes stinging.
Crazy Tony’s reached the bus stop by now. He might have heard the whole thing. She puts her hand up to her mouth, fights the urge to completely cover her face.
But Tony doesn’t seem to have noticed anything. The man twists in his seat to look at him, and Tina considers taking the opportunity to run away. Her hands fall to her sides. Her legs tense.
“Look, why don’t you just get in the car and I won’t be mad.”
By then Tony has gotten close enough for Tina to hear that he isn’t talking to himself. He’s quietly singing “Born in the USA.” But now he stops singing, stops walking and looks at the man, who says to Tina, “You coming or not?”
Tony looks at Tina as if he’s just noticed her standing there.
“Tina, is this guy messing with you?”
To the Last Man I Slept with and All the Jerks Just Like Him Page 8