by Miller, Mary
Ten minutes later, he was still thinking about Elise’s donation to the one-legged woman. “How much did you give her?” he asked.
“A fiver,” Elise said. She flipped a page in her magazine, stopping to look at a woman lying on a floor in a matching bra-and-panty set, her rib bones sticking out severely. The woman was reading a book, advertising glasses.
“That’s a lot of money,” he said.
“She needs it more than we do, and her sign was funny.”
“It wasn’t funny,” I said, “it was sad.”
“You have no sense of humor.”
“I have a sense of humor,” I said, but I thought about it and decided that my sense of humor probably wasn’t very good. People had to explain jokes to me and I’d say they weren’t funny and the person would say of course they weren’t funny—you had to get them right away for them to be funny. I didn’t understand that, either, how getting them right away made them funny.
I watched the mile markers pass and then picked up one of Elise’s magazines. I liked them because they arrived in the mail full of slick colorful ads, smelling like perfume, and they told you how to do everything without even trying. I left it open on my lap and looked out the window again. Interstate miles were boring, though the font on the signs changed by state and sometimes it was hilly before it was flat again. I watched for Starbucks and Love’s gas stations. Starbucks had the chocolate graham crackers I liked, and Love’s had a good selection of baked goods and ripe bananas. I saw a sign for Chick-fil-A and wondered why I only wanted it on Sunday, when it was closed.
I readjusted my seatbelt and propped my feet on the tracts. We had passed out dozens of them, but the bundle didn’t seem to be getting any smaller and I wanted to throw them out the window: they’d get stuck in the branches of trees; prisoners would stab them with their pokers. I picked up one—the picture garish, Technicolor—a man and a woman sitting in a field surrounded by cows and horses and chickens. There were barrels of apples and pumpkins in the foreground. In the background, a nice house and lots of trees and a blue, blue sky. In a nod to multiculturalism, the man and woman could have been Mexican or Middle Eastern or Native American. I reread it for the thousandth time: God made Adam and Eve perfect, but He didn’t want them to be mindless robots so He gave them free will, which they used to disobey Him. As a result, God was letting us see how poorly we were able to rule ourselves by allowing this experiment with total freedom to continue, but it would soon come to an end because we’d messed it up big time—thousands of years of war and poverty and suffering.
I thought about it, God holding us accountable for something we hadn’t done and then letting us continue to rule ourselves so badly for so long in order to show us that we needed Him. I hadn’t ever thought about it before, really. The logic seemed sketchy.
I had handed out these tracts in shopping malls, left them between the pages of books in libraries and bookstores. I’d handed them out at parades and street festivals and I’d once gone door-to-door with an older boy from church but our pastor said door-to-door wasn’t our territory—we weren’t Jehovah’s Witnesses, we weren’t LDS. For all my time and efforts, I hadn’t saved a single person. Even the believers didn’t want to talk to me. They wanted to shop for blue jeans and summer reading books in peace.
Elise rested her head on my shoulder, and I smelled mint from whatever shampoo she’d used this morning. Then she took her makeup bag out of her purse and spread the bottles and containers around. I wanted to touch them, smell them. I loved going through her things. “Would you hold the mirror?” she asked.
I tried to hold it steady as she put on her base coat. She applied blush, eye shadow, eyeliner, and mascara, stopping every once and a while to adjust my hand or tell me I was holding it too low.
“I can’t believe you wear all that stuff. Doesn’t it feel like your face is melting off?”
“It makes me feel pretty,” she said, screwing the tops back on and putting everything away. “You want to play poker?”
“Not really,” I said, but she took the deck of cards out anyhow, shuffled them on one knee. A few fell to the floor. I counted out pistachio shells because we weren’t allowed to gamble with real money, not even pennies. Sometimes we gambled with the good bobby pins we were always swiping from each other, the ones you could only find at Sally’s, but we were running low.
I had a crap hand—2 of clubs, 10 of clubs, 6 of hearts. I put mine down and she put hers down, but then she picked hers back up and checked them again. She wasn’t good at cards, wasn’t good at games in general, but it didn’t make her not want to play.
A motorcycle gang roared past and we stopped to watch them go by, only one with a woman on the back, her long hair whipping itself into knots. I imagined the woman Indian-style on a bed, combing out her wet hair, and then I imagined the man combing it for her. He would tell her how beautiful she was even though she was old and had eye bags, even though her stomach was flabby from having his children. I wanted to sit on a bed with a man who would comb out my hair and tell me I was beautiful. No one ever told me this except for very old women who thought all young people were beautiful.
After the motorcycles passed, I spotted something large and headless in the road, a swath of bright red like a can of spilled paint. There were scavengers circling above, waiting for a lull in traffic so they could swoop down. Their shadows on the pavement were all wingspan.
I popped a pistachio shell into my mouth. It was still salty. I picked up another and another and tossed them in.
“Think of all the things those have touched,” Elise said.
I thought about the pile of them on the motel bedspread, right after I’d seen the pregnancy test, and spit them into my hand. One pink line and you’re okay. Two pink lines and your life is over. My sister was pregnant. I’d forget and then I’d remember and be shocked all over again. Not only had she had sex, but she had gotten pregnant. Months from now, we could be sitting here with a baby between us, its little baby hands and baby feet, its baby mouth trying to latch itself onto our breasts.
Our parents didn’t know, of course. Our parents were oblivious, Elise said, and quite possibly stupid, but I didn’t agree. I thought our mother might be psychic.
Elise picked up the bag of snacks and flung it at me. I tied it in a knot and closed my eyes. I hadn’t been sleeping well again. I wasn’t a good sleeper, my mother had said once, and I liked the way it sounded—as if sleeping was a talent, or a skill I had yet to learn. I’d wake up in the middle of the night from a bad dream or because I had to pee and lay there for hours thinking about things that didn’t bother me at all during the day. Other times, I forgot I was a bad sleeper, but I hadn’t forgotten since we’d left Montgomery. The secret to a lot of things was to forget, but I was always remembering.
“Welcome to Texas,” our mother said.
“The great state of Texas,” said our father.
Elise showed me a picture of an RV on her phone. It said HAVE YOU HEARD THE AWESOME NEWS? THE END OF THE WORLD IS ALMOST HERE! “Listen to this,” she said. “‘Greta Burrows, an obese, middle-aged woman who spent the morning leaning out the window shouting on a bullhorn, picked up some Visine and a box of Kleenex at the local Rite Aid.’ I bet she also picked up some Cheetos. And probably some MUNCHIES, too.”
“Which leg of the tour is that?” I asked.
“Florida. Greta’s the one that left the door to her house open—not unlocked, but wide open. And she won’t say how many kids she has or if she has a husband because the only thing that matters is warning people.”
“That’s hardcore.”
“I know, right?”
“I should get y’all a bullhorn,” our father said.
“I’d use a bullhorn,” Elise said. She tried to roll down her window, but it was on child-lock, so she cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted into the front seat: “Repent or die! The sun’ll turn red and drip blood! Your neighbors will perish in grizzly accide
nts!”
“Elise!” our mother said.
“They won’t be accidents,” our father said, “oh no, they won’t be accidents at all.”
Our father pulled off into a combination Pilot/McDonald’s truck plaza. He put the car in park and sorted through the maps on the side of his door. In a field next to the gas station, an oil derrick pumped lazily.
“What are we doing?” I asked.
“Change of plans—I know there’s one in here somewhere. Here we go.” He handed the map to our mother and put his elbow on the back of his seat, turned around to look at us. “I need to apologize,” he said. “I’ve been doing y’all a disservice. You can’t experience this great land of ours from the interstate. It’s all Taco Bells and Targets.”
Elise and I looked at each other. We didn’t feel we were being done any disservice. We liked Taco Bell and Target.
“From here on out, we’ll be taking the highway and eating at places called Restaurant,” he said. “I want you to experience the real America before it’s too late, the places where real people live and worship.” He didn’t care if it was going to cost us time. Time would soon be made irrelevant.
“Okay,” Elise said, “but I’m not staying in any fleabag motels with a bunch of drug addicts. I want to stay at Holiday Inns.”
“We haven’t stayed at a Holiday Inn yet,” I said.
“We won’t be staying with drug addicts,” our mother said, taking the clip-on part of her sunglasses off. Cleaning her glasses was a nervous habit, like our father pausing to survey his surroundings, like my fake yawning.
“And I’m not going to any roadside zoos, either,” Elise said, looking at me because I’d wanted to see some Cajuns feeding alligators in Louisiana.
“What if there’s snakes?” I said. “You’d want to see snakes.”
“No, I wouldn’t. Why would I want to see snakes?”
“You used to have a snake.”
“It was a tiny little garden snake,” she said, “and I was like seven.”
“We aren’t going to any zoos,” our father said. “We don’t have the money for that kind of stuff.”
“I bet we could save some people,” I said.
“That’s the idea,” he said. “That’s the spirit!” I thought of our cousin, a blonde on his side with a haircut our mother had called a Mary Lou Retton. When I was eleven, I’d gone with him to pay for a motel room for this cousin. He’d been out of work again and we’d scraped together the money in loose change and small bills.
This woman was dead now. She had been beaten to death in a different motel room, in a different city. I remembered the name of it because it was odd—the Admiral Benbow in Jackson, Mississippi. I had no memory of her except from pictures and family reunion slide shows, though my mother said she’d babysat us when we were little, when she was just a high school girl.
Our father got out and slipped three quarters into the air machine.
Elise opened her door. “Oh my God,” she said. “It must be a hundred and ten out here.”
“Hundred and four inside the car,” our mother said. “And don’t let your father hear you say that.”
“It’s a figure of speech,” she said.
“You don’t mind if we say ‘oh my God?’ ” I asked, and my mother said of course she minded, it was sacrilegious. Then she took out her phone and called one of her sisters, but I couldn’t tell which one—their voices all sounded alike: loud and slow with accents we had somehow escaped. She had three sisters and one brother and they were always calling each other, even though, except for my uncle in west Alabama, they lived within a few miles of each other in Montgomery. They liked to talk about who died and who had cancer and who was getting a divorce. They liked to be the first to know so they could call each other up and relay the bad news. But whoever was on the other end got another call and had to go.
Our father often questioned her loyalty—asked whether she was with us or with them. Since he wasn’t close to his own family, his loyalty was unquestionably to us. We weren’t sure if he disliked our mother’s family because they were Catholic or if he just couldn’t stand for her affections to be split.
I found a spot of something on my t-shirt, guacamole maybe, that scratched off in flakes. The black King Jesus Returns! t-shirts did a good job of hiding sweat stains and mustard, and it made me appreciate this required uniform. Our mother was wearing one, too, a large that hung loose and shapeless over her hips. Our father had on one of his no-iron Brooks Brothers shirts; today’s was green-and-white striped. His sister gave him gift cards at Christmas. She got them for putting a lot of stuff on her credit card.
“Will we still get to eat at McDonald’s?” I asked.
“Your father won’t give up McDonald’s,” our mother assured us.
“I like McDonald’s in the morning.”
“We know you do, Jess,” Elise said, “we know.” She fanned herself with a magazine. It had the swim-suited bodies of celebrities on the cover, their eyes blacked out with rectangular boxes. My parents didn’t like Elise’s music or clothes or the TV shows she watched or the magazines she read. They didn’t like most of her friends or any of her boyfriends. They used to have long discussions with her about God’s intentions for her life, and our father would tell her she was going to hell and she’d be there all alone—she’d be in hell all alone—but now they pretty much let her do what she wanted as long as she maintained appearances. As long as we were all in church every Wednesday and Sunday, sitting quietly in our nice clothes.
The main difference between Elise and me was that I was a liar. I did things our parents disapproved of, but I did them quietly. I didn’t even have to be all that quiet about it because she made so much noise it was easy for them to overlook me altogether. I’d seen every episode of Jersey Shore and 16 and Pregnant. I read Elise’s magazines when she was finished, and I’d once sucked the gas from a can of whipped cream and gotten high for about thirty seconds.
“I’ll be right back,” Elise said, getting out.
I opened my door and ran to catch up with her. A boy watched us from the tinted window of a pickup, a cowboy hat in the middle of the dash and two dogs scrabbling over each other to bark at us from the bed.
The doors slid open and the cold air enveloped us.
We walked straight back to the bathroom and I stopped at the weight machine, tall and blinking. I hadn’t weighed myself since we’d left home and I’d been eating everything in sight. I decided I didn’t want to know and went into a stall. It had four locks, three of them broken. I pulled the top bar across and hovered while staring at a woman’s feet in the stall next to mine. They were wide and sunburnt and her toenails were too small for her toes. They were the ugliest feet I’d ever seen, but she was wearing expensive-looking sandals and the nails were painted and I thought it was nice that she did what she could with them.
I opened the door to a girl standing in front of the mirror, singing along to “Family Tradition,” which was being pumped throughout the building. I washed my hands while she took sections of her hair and sprayed it into different shapes with a giant can of aerosol hairspray. She was wearing tight black jeans tucked into a pair of leather boots, her face a smear of pinks and purples. She was probably a prostitute and would soon be caught up in a fireball, but now she was going about her business, making her hair as big as possible. I fixed my own hair in the mirror, running my fingers through it and then patting it down. I spent a lot of time looking at myself, trying to figure out what was wrong with my face.
I took my cell phone out of my purse and held it at different angles, but I couldn’t figure out any way to take a picture without her noticing. I read a text from my mother I’d already read—“American Idol is starting!”—and deleted it.
Elise came out of a stall and the girl froze, can of hairspray suspended in the air. My sister smiled at her, an open friendly smile that said she was no threat at all.
“How much money do you have?”
she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, glancing at the girl. “Fifty?”
“You have more than that.”
“You shouldn’t have given all your money to that woman.”
“Give me five.”
I gave her a ten and opened the door with my elbow. Money had become precious now that I was earning it myself. I was bad at my job, making snow cones at a candy store, and no matter how much I got paid, it didn’t seem like enough.
I walked back and forth in front of the drink cases a few times before selecting a Yoo-hoo. Then I stood in the candy aisle, trying to decide. The guy at the register was watching and I turned my back to him so it might look like I was preparing to slip something into my purse or down my shorts. I’d never stolen anything, but when people watched me so closely, it made me feel guilty, made me want to be caught and found innocent.
I chose a pack of Skittles and a King-Size Snickers, carefully considered a bag of caramel Bugles. Ever since our father had been diagnosed with diabetes, our mother had been trying to make us eat healthier—she’d stir-fry vegetables in PAM and bake chicken in corn flakes. She’d swapped the regular mayonnaise and cream cheese for low-fat versions that we immediately recognized and called her out on. And then she’d tried a different tactic. She began to make strange, foreign dishes we had no names for; the most recent had been a burnt-orange soup made with tomatoes, eggplants, and chickpeas.
“How much are these?” I asked the guy, picking a hard boiled egg out of a basket.
“Thirty-five cents,” he said. He was freakishly tall with stick arms crossed in front of his chest.
“Thirty-five cents,” I repeated.
He pushed his hair back from his face, and I placed the egg on the counter, stopped it from rolling. I paid for everything and loaded it into my purse, and he gave me sixteen cents back, which I dropped into the tray of leave-one-take-one pennies, which was maybe too much to leave in the tray of pennies.