“Would you be here if you could be not here?” our brother asks the slut.
“Isn’t this the south?” she says.
“There’s the south and there’s the south and this is one south where no one wants to be,” our brother says and so they rent a car and drive over winding roads, passing walls where cars have lost control, breaking through and smashing down below. The slut holds our brother’s arm in fear the whole time that he drives.
“Let go,” he says. “I can hardly steer.”
“Stop the car,” she says.
“Here?” our brother says.
“We’ve got to look over the edge, check if we can see him in a crashed-up car below.”
“Oh, no,” our brother says, “we’re not even sure he’s here in Spain, we’re not going to start imagining him here in unimaginable accidents on top of it all.”
“You could be the godfather,” the slut says.
“I’d be the brother already,” our brother says.
“Perhaps it’s a boy, you could teach him what you know,” the slut says.
“And what would that be?” our brother says.
“Teach him not to learn what you never bothered to learn,” the slut says.
It’s morning gym and dodgeballs have been let loose from the cinched necks of canvas bags and they bounce in all directions on the dusty gym floor.
“Go get them, girls,” Miss Turd calls and then she whistles her whistle because we girls aren’t making moves to pick them up and instead we are listening to them bouncing, their sounds hitting the ground getting weaker until finally they are at a roll and then a standstill.
“Girls!” Miss Turd yells and we still don’t start picking them up until she starts naming names, telling who to pick up what ball. The boys are up above. They are running on a track that is creaking with their footsteps. Occasionally they stop and lean their red faces over, looking at us girls, shaking their hot heads all over us. Sweat showers down on us, slicking up the gym floor. Miss Turd is yelling for Mr. Caravello.
“Mr. Caravello, get those boys away from the rail. Off the rail!” she says from down below to the boys and she points at them saying, “You, with the T-shirt, off the rail,” but they are all wearing T-shirts and the boys laugh and Miss Turd starts to make her way up the stairs, but the boys start running again, joining a pack where Miss Turd will never know which boy was the boy she wanted. Down below the Puerto Rican girls are trying to sit on the balls instead of the dirty gym floor they are disgusted to touch. It’s not working, and they keep rolling off and laughing and Miss Turd sees them trying to sit on the balls and she comes running at them, yelling, “The air, all the air will go, get off, get off,” she yells. “The air, my God!”
In the locker we are all Miss Turd. We are all screaming, “The air, my God, the air.” Later, in lab, partners whisper to each other over split-open frogs, “The air, my God, the air.” Slides of crucifixions are shown in art appreciation, the teacher tightening the lens on Jesus’s thrown-back head, his mouth agape, the girls in our class giggling and filling in Jesus’s words: “The air, my God, the air.”
John’s face is all red. He says it happened on the walk back home with his cart. Some boys took his money and then stuck his head into one of the hot dog bins filled with hot water.
“Even my ears are burnt,” he says. He has put some kind of salve on the tips and lobes and curled-up creased places that glisten with yellow globs like axle grease.
“I’ll find them for you,” I say. “What did they look like?”
“Like fish,” he says. “I saw them when my head was underwater.”
“I’ll tell the cop,” I say. I walk into the park to find my stallion, who is swishing his tail by the jungle gym.
“Excuse me, sir,” I say, but the cop doesn’t look down at me and instead he urges the stallion forward and they walk out of the park.
“Excuse me!” I say louder, and only the stallion turns his head around to look at me, his bending neck rippling with wrinkled chestnut glossy hide.
“I need more,” I tell John. “Their clothes, the way they wore their hair. Do you remember?”
“I thought about my ears when I was under,” John says, “I thought, shit, I bet they’ll burn and curl up like pork rinds.”
“Is that all? Did you catch any names?”
“No,” he says and then he says, “What about my eyes? Are they all right?”
John sits down on his milk crate. I think he’s going to ask me to sit on his lap, but he doesn’t, he just looks up and says, “Come fishing with me, would you?”
We go fishing. He brings a pack of hot dogs for bait and a fold-up rod he keeps next to the Hersheys in the bottom bin of his cart. We sit at the end of the pier. We don’t catch anything, but all our bait gets eaten. We leave and on the way back John says, “I fed the whole goddamned fish population of the Hudson.”
We are hungry all the time. We chop up onion and eat it between sliced bread spread with mayonnaise. Jody makes pancakes with just flour and water and fills them with sugar because we have no syrup. She pours grated cheese into a bowl and adds milk and stirs and holds the bowl up with both hands and swallows it like hot soup, too shallow for the dipping of a spoon. Our mother pulls at the fat of her belly.
“If I could slice this off and feed it to you, I would,” she says. “Oh, your fucking, fucking father,” she says. “Is there any word? There is no word, of course not,” she says.
She shows us her hairbrush.
“It’s not getting any better,” she says and she throws the matted hairbrushed hair in balls on the floor where the cats take chase and bite the hair but stop to lick and lick and pull with their paws to get our mother’s hair loose from their teeth.
“Hah,” our mother says, taking a drink of her drink, “I could watch you cats all day.”
There is no more Wood. We are in Metal this year. Our Metal teacher is young. His smock is gray like metal and there is metal on him too. A thin metal pen and pencil protector he fashioned and uses in his shirt front pocket. We call him Mr. Metal. When our sheets of metal are pushed through the table saw, filings fly through the air and the room begins to smell of the hot cut sheet metal. Our teacher is covered in the little filings that sparkle his clothes and his hair and everywhere on his face where his goggles weren’t. We’ve seen metal on his tongue and his teeth. On stormy days when the sky outside our classroom windows is almost black, he glows with all his metal shining.
In the morning we stand where we are supposed to stand at our workbenches. Mr. Metal waves a sparkly hand to us. When he tells us our project is to make boxes, I tell him I have a box already from wood, and what do I need a box for anyway? Mr. Metal answers that he doesn’t give a goddamn what I use the box for, I could throw the box right out the friggin’ window when I’m finished for all he cares.
“Yeah,” the others say, “we don’t care what you use the box for, just shut up,” they tell me.
I get to work on my box. I make it bigger than I have to. I get the fat woman next door to help me. I build a box with a secret drawer in the back and weld things from the house onto the top. The tag for the dog’s collar and a buffalo penny and some mind-bent spoons and some knobs from our drawers and my mother’s wedding ring, which I find wedged in between the boards in the wall. I weld that in the secret drawer within the box. The fat woman helps me weld in her loft and sometimes I think I feel Jochen’s breath by my neck, but it’s probably just all the hot air from the torch the fat woman wields.
Rena glues her box with all her shells so that there is no metal left bare and the box could be made out of wood or metal and who would know. She is sending it to her father.
One night, when our mother’s working late, my sisters and I decide to take turns being Ma Mère.
“Let me tell you about your father,” Louisa says, sitting in a chair with a bathrobe belt we’ve tied around her so she really does look like Ma Mère, who is sitting next to us, s
leeping in her chair while we play our game.
“When you were a baby,” Louisa says, pointing to Jody, “He hugged you so hard that your eyes popped out of your head and rolled on the floor.” We all laugh and then Louisa points to me. “When you were a baby he hugged you so hard he crushed your bones and turned them into mush.”
Next it’s Jody’s turn. We unwrap the belt from Louisa and tie it around her.
“You, ma cherie,” Jody says, doing Ma Mère’s accent and pointing a crooked finger at me. “When you were a baby your father kissed you so many times you drowned in his saliva, you had to be rushed to the emergency room and, voilà! You were declared brain-dead for weeks! And you, ma cherie,” she says to Louisa, “your father threw himself in front of a train for you, and now he’s as thin as a piece of cardboard and disappears if he’s standing sideways.”
When it’s my turn to have the belt tied around me, I can’t think of what to say. I sit thinking for a moment and Louisa says, “She really is Ma Mère, she’s falling asleep.”
All that comes to me are things that already happened.
“I remember,” I say, “how he once lost his hammer. He couldn’t find it anywhere. He screamed at us to help him look for it. We searched a long time, then we noticed it was in his back pocket. We were afraid to tell him.” And Louisa and Jody nod, remembering that too. “I remember,” I say, “how he used to draw Mickey Mouse for us.”
Louisa gets up and unties the belt from around me. “I think I’d rather listen to Ma Mère than you,” she says.
“Me too,” Jody says. Then Ma Mère wakes up and looks down at herself where one of her belts is missing from her chest and she wants to know who stole it from her, who is it that will just let an old woman flop down to the floor and sit there in a pile of wrinkles and bones?
Our father has a sister we have never seen. Her name is Lydia and she lives in California. Every Christmas she sends boxes that smell of hickory and beneath the cellophane grass are smoky links of sausage and soft cheese in glass jars and bonuses of small cheap butter knives.
“This is what we get,” our mother says, ripping open the plastic on a smoked sausage with her teeth and dipping it into the cheese, “because they’re not blood. Poor adopted Lydia, she’s lucky though, not to be related to her brother.”
I can mind-bend the flowered butter knife in half so that it breaks in two. “You’re really getting good at that,” our mother says, pointing with her sausage at my bent knife.
Maybe Lydia knows where he is, we start thinking. “Let’s call her,” I say. We brush away the cellophane grass, searching for the sunny address in L.A. The ringing phone we picture on a bright countertop next to bowls of ripe green avocados and a Mexican maid named Guadeloupe who is busy on her knees, her cross around her neck swinging back and forth on a chain with every arthritic movement of her well-worn scrubbing hand. Lydia in the garden. Birds of Paradise surrounding her as she sits in her painted white ironwork fanbacked chair, bringing to her lips a glass of fruity coolness, the sky a perfect blue above.
“Oh, Lydia,” our mother says, “you’ll never guess who.”
Lydia knows.
“Incredible,” our mother says. “After all these years,” she says. Our Aunt Lydia hasn’t heard from our father, not since a year ago when he called and begged to borrow money and she lent it to him.
Our mother comes home giggling. There’s a man from her office named Bob and she’s dating him and she’s going to leave us alone for two nights while she goes away with him for the weekend. We ask where she’s going, we picture New England, a wraparound porch with rockers rocking in the wind and the name of the B & B hand-painted on wood that hangs from a post, but it’s New Jersey, Newark, not far from his house, in a motel with curtains backed with foam as thick as rugs to keep out car lights from the nearby highway. We have a fear of New Jersey, we tell her, and she’s the one who gave it us.
“Not Jersey,” we say, “all the fires,” we say. She holds her hand to her mouth, she cannot stop giggling.
“Leave us the number,” we say. “Who knows what will happen while you’re away? Call us every day.” We look for her from the pier, sitting on the hood of Manolo’s car, leaning back against the windshield. We use binoculars and look for fires. We find smoke.
“Those could be the small beginnings of great fires or just what’s put out from smokestacks along the river,” Louisa says.
Manolo opens the car door and comes out stretching and yawning. In his waistband is a small bottle of scotch, which he pulls out and drinks and holds up in a toast out toward the water, saying, “To your mother, may she fuck her brains out.”
“How sweet,” Louisa says, and she lifts up her foot and kicks at Manolo’s bottle so that it falls and skates across the pier.
“Ah, carai,” Manolo says. “You remind me of a woman I was once in love with,” he tells Louisa.
“Tell me, did she look like this,” Louisa says and with her hand outlines in the cold air a curvy shape.
“Sí, sí, Maria was her name. She had a beauty mark, right here and here,” and Manolo points to places on his chest.
“They’re called nipples,” Louisa says.
Manolo laughs. “You girls know everything, don’t you? Well, she had nipples and she had the beauty marks too. I called her ‘cuatro pechos,’ four breasts, you know,” he says. He shakes his head and smiles, remembering.
She touches the foam-backed curtains, sees that they’ve been burned with cigarette holes. Bob has gone for ice, she can hear him filling the bucket down the hall. Car lights still make their way in where the curtains don’t quite meet the window frame. A circle of light shines on the wall, as if a home movie were about to be shown, but the lens isn’t focused yet. What is the film? she thinks. Is it of the Christmas where they drew the tree on the wall instead of buying one? Cal nailing small nails into the wall where he strung the lights and hung the decorations. One of the girls, she can’t remember who, touching the drawn bows on the drawn presents on the wall, trying to pull one of the ends, unwrap a gift that someday would be whitewashed away. From the street, through the window, it looked real, and they preferred looking at it from outside. She went out with Cal after the children were in bed. They stood side by side and she reached out to hold his arm in hers, and he lifted up his arm and she thought he was doing it to put his arm around her shoulders, to bring her close, but he was doing it to point, he was looking at lights from planes in the sky, marveling at how close two came to crashing, and when they didn’t, he was disappointed.
“Wouldn’t that have been something?” he said to her, “if those two planes had wrecked above us?” And she had thought they already had, she was sure any moment they would see suitcases falling, opening as they fell through the sky, folded clothing and toothbrushes raining down.
They went back inside and Cal turned off the Christmas tree lights and she tucked blankets up around her sleeping children’s chins and knocked twice for luck, lightly, on a wooden desk.
Bob wears glasses and says he is lucky he does because the ice machine shoots ice chips. The ice has left frosty shavings on his pants, at his zipper, where they melt and spread across as if the stain had come from him, as if he had, she thinks, and hopes, already done something without her back behind the ice machine in the dark corner of the hotel lobby. That over, now they could just have their drinks, sit across from each other in the room, watch the headlights from the cars pass over each others’ faces and then return again to darkness. But Bob comes close to her. Standing, he holds her hand and it’s cold and she pulls away and he says, “Sorry, it’s from the ice.”
He takes his glasses off and puts them folded on top of the television. They are so heavy, the frames and the lens both so thick, and she wants to tell him to put them back on, because how can he see without them? To him she must now appear as a blur. He wants to kiss her, she knows. She goes into the bathroom with her drink, saying she’ll be right out. In the bathroom sh
e looks at herself, at her bloodshot eyes, the small veins like red scattered roads and branching streams.
She runs the water so that he’ll think she’s washing her hands, but what she does is swallow her drink in gulps. When she comes out of the bathroom Bob is on the bed, his glasses still off, and he is patting the bed, asking why she doesn’t come and lie down next to him. She goes to the foam-backed curtain, tries to draw it closed closer to the wall to keep out the car lights, but the curtain won’t move. She goes behind the curtain, stands in front of the window, her hands on the cold glass looking out at the oncoming cars, and then she feels Bob behind her, he is reaching around her with the curtain still between them, through the foam she can softly feel what must be his hands moving over her breasts, trying to cup them and squeeze them, and then he is pressing her up against the glass, her face now turned to the side and he is lifting up the curtain and lifting up her skirt and pulling down her hose and her panties and she thinks it’s all right, she can do this. Her eyes open, she looks down at the cars, thinks what the drivers must see, some woman’s cheek pressed against glass, her hands pushing against the glass for balance, her hose around her ankles, the curtain moving back and forth behind her as if strange shapes were struggling, trying to find a way out, a way to breathe.
“I’d like to go out,” Ma Mère says.
“You can’t,” our mother says.
“Isn’t there a party? I hear music,” she says.
“That’s from downstairs, a movie is showing,” our mother says.
Ma Mère dances sitting down, her arms lifting as if partners would come by and take her by the fingertips. She closes her eyes and moves her head back and forth to the movie music. She opens her eyes, “Remember your father?” she says to our mother. Our mother’s cigarette glows brightly as we hear her suck her breath on it.
“Yes,” our mother says, her exhaled smoke a spiral fading upward to the far corners of our skylight.
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