by Miller, Mary
It was eight-ten and eight-twenty and eight-thirty and my parents would be back any minute. I was tired but knew I wouldn’t sleep well because I was thinking about how tired I was and how much I needed to get a good night’s sleep, which was exactly what you shouldn’t do. You should go about your business like you’re not even tired. You should stay out of bed as long as you can. I’d probably get four or five hours and wake up when it was still dark out, lie in bed waiting for the birds. Every morning the birds sounded different because they were different birds.
A man in a room across from me opened his door. He was black and muscled, tall and bald and handsome. He looked like a soap opera star.
He stood there for a moment with the light behind him, and then turned and said something to the woman in bed. She was plump and white with long dark hair, wearing only her panties. The woman gestured to the man to close the door, but he left it open, walked over to his car, and took something out of the trunk. Then he walked off in the same direction as Elise—toward the bar and gas station. The woman got out of bed with her breasts swinging and slammed the door.
A minute later, Elise came walking back across the parking lot with a paper bag in her hand, a cigarette burning brighter as she inhaled. She had a fake ID that said she was twenty-one. Once, she’d had me quiz her on the new facts of herself: height and weight and date of birth. She’d even memorized the license number, a long number that would only look suspicious if she rattled it off.
She sat beside me.
“You look homeless,” I said.
“A homeless man bought it for me,” she said, taking a swallow. “Or maybe he wasn’t homeless. He had a debit card.”
“Where’s your ID?”
“I don’t look anything like that girl.” She spread her legs, nearly to a full split, and I recalled the uncomfortable positions I used to sit in as a child, when my body could easily bend itself into different shapes.
“I thought we were going to order pizza,” I said.
“There’s a whole counter of fried shit over there—I could go get you something. Taquitos, chicken fingers, potato logs . . .”
“That’s okay.”
She swiped her cigarette on the bottom of her flip-flop and tossed it into the parking lot. “Don’t mess with Texas,” she said.
The bald man came into view, cradling a sack in his arms.
“When I passed him in the store, he grunted at me,” she said.
“What’d you do?”
“What do you think I did? I ignored him. You have to ignore them or they’ll be encouraged.”
The man opened his door and looked over at us before closing it. I wondered what he was saying to the woman—if they were kind to each other or if they yelled and said horrible things. They were probably on drugs, like my dead cousin. Like her, maybe they’d once had normal lives, with normal families who’d loved them and they’d just gotten off on the wrong track. Or maybe things had always been like this and they didn’t know any other way. Life was mean and people were mean and there was no room for kindness.
Elise lit another cigarette and called Dan. He didn’t answer, so she left him a message, said she was having a terrible, awful time. Then she checked to see what the Florida leg was doing. “Greta had a fender-bender,” she said, “smashed a headlight. And everybody’s giving her the finger today.”
“I bet she loves that.”
“Seriously, though—why are all these people so unattractive? Being religious is no excuse to be this unattractive.” She passed me her phone and I looked at the woman, overweight with messy gray hair, wearing a raincoat.
“Maybe she’s just unattractive and religious and the two don’t have anything to do with each other,” I said.
“I don’t know about that.”
“I’m sure there are a lot of ugly atheists out there, too.”
“She could at least dye her hair—she’s only like fifty or something. Or maybe forty.”
“Some women don’t care about being beautiful.”
She looked at me like I was insane. “The agnostics have to be the best-looking group,” she said. “Extremists rely too much on their extremism.”
I went inside and flipped through the stations until I found Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. It was my favorite scene, the kids lost in the grass. They were so small a stream of dog pee was a river, a baby ant the size of a Volkswagen. They were so small, an oatmeal cream pie could sustain them for years. It was every kid’s dream, like finding a house made of candy in the forest. The older boy, Little Russ, was hot, even with his eighties hair, and I wanted to sleep in a Lego while he kept watch over me. No—I wanted him to forget his guard duty and climb into the Lego with me so I could run my fingers through his soft, feathered hair.
When I went to get Elise, she was gone. The lights were off in the bald man’s room and I imagined the woman straddling him while he held her hips, rocked her gently back and forth. At home, we had a set of my mother’s old encyclopedias and I would read and reread the entry for Sex: “A man and a woman lie next to each other and the man places his penis inside the woman’s vagina. This is usually pleasurable for both parties.” It was the dirtiest thing I had access to. We didn’t get the premium channels and I didn’t look at porn on my computer because I might forget to clear the history. Of course I wouldn’t forget, but it was possible, and I’d never live down the shame.
My mother looked nearly girlish with her hair loose, smiling. She gazed up at my father and he leaned down and kissed her head. Occasionally, I caught glimpses into their world and it bothered me that I could never be a part of it, that I couldn’t know them in the way they knew each other. We all knew each other completely differently, in ways that would never overlap.
“Where’s Elise?” my father asked.
“I think she went to the store,” I said.
“What are you doing out here by yourself?” my mother asked.
“The moon is nice.” We all looked up at it, big and fake-looking with clouds snaking across it. My father had a book called We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle that he liked to quote from. The book alleged that the moon landing had actually taken place in Nevada, and in between shooting footage the astronauts had visited strip clubs. Elise showed me a full-page spread of an exotic dancer as evidence that our father was an idiot. It was his thing, not believing in anything but God, as if to believe in anything else—man’s landing on the moon, global warming—would be disloyal.
My mother opened the door and I took off my shoes and got in bed. I watched my father take an envelope out of his bag. He unfolded the purple-and-orange prayer rug and knelt on it, facing the window. Before we’d left, he’d told us we each had to kneel on it at some point and circle our prayer needs and then he’d mail it to another family and they’d mail it to another family like a chain letter.
I’d knelt on it the first night and circled every single need: spiritual revival, devotion, monetary concerns, temptation, health and well-being, stress and anxiety, salvation.
On one side of the rug was a picture of Jesus’s face. His eyes were closed, but it said if you continued to look at them, they would open. They hadn’t opened for me and I wondered if they were opening for my father. I’d only glanced at them because it reminded me of standing in front of a mirror chanting Bloody Mary, something I’d done at a sleepover once that had freaked me out. It would have been horrifying if Jesus opened his eyes, same as it would have been horrifying if a Bloody Mary had appeared in the mirror. Had anyone in the history of the prayer rug seen His eyes open? And if they hadn’t, and no one was ever going to, why did it say that we would?
“Call her,” my mother said.
I liked the picture that popped up, Elise’s face in the plywood body of a meerkat at the Atlanta zoo. It rang and rang. I hung up and tried again, but there was still no answer so I left a message, trying to make it sound like she was on the other end. But then my mother asked where she was and I had to tel
l her I’d left a message.
“Maybe her phone’s dead,” my father said. Elise was always letting her phone die. I didn’t understand how peoples’ phones were always dying—all you had to do was plug it in at night. Who were these people who couldn’t even manage that?
“It’s not dead, it’s ringing,” I said.
“Well, try again.”
It went straight to voicemail.
My father sat at the table. “I need a pen,” he said, holding out his arm to my mother. She couldn’t find one and his arm stayed there, outstretched with his hand waving, while my mother dug around in her purse.
He looked at the prayer needs for a long time before circling one. I wondered which one. I didn’t like that our needs were going to get all mixed up, or that he knew I’d circled all of them. He left it on the table and took his robe into the bathroom, came out a few seconds later with it on.
“Turn it to the news,” he said, getting into bed.
My movie was almost over—Big Russ getting test-zapped by the machine—but I flipped around until I came to the news, the weatherman giving tomorrow’s forecast.
“I kinda miss that ole fat boy,” he said, which is what he called Brett Barry, the weatherman at home.
I plugged my phone into the charger and looked at my mother. I knew we were both thinking about last summer, in Destin, Florida, when Elise left the condo and didn’t come in until three o’clock in the morning. She’d come back to us so drunk she couldn’t stand or speak, and my mother had undressed her and put her in the bathtub.
We slipped on our shoes and went outside.
“Let’s pray real quick.” She took my hands, bowed her head, and closed her eyes. She asked for His protection and compassion and guidance. She asked Him to watch over us and keep us safe. “Mother Mary—” she said.
“Mom?”
She kept her head bowed, a tight grip on my hands. She was quiet for a moment. “Elise is too beautiful and naïve, Lord,” she said, and then she squeezed my hands once hard before releasing them. I wanted to be too beautiful and naïve. No one would ever apologize for me because I was too beautiful and naïve.
We walked slowly across the parking lot. It was quiet and the few lit-up rooms somehow felt lonelier than the dark ones.
Before entering the bar, my mother turned to me. I thought about the bottle of whiskey and how I’d put too much water in it. How I’d done it on purpose. My father would take one sip and ask what she’d done to his drink.
She opened the door and we stepped inside. The place was small, with a couple of video games on one side and a pool table on the other. I stood in the light of the cigarette machine and watched my mother approach the bartender. There were a dozen men, leaning and sitting around the bar, the kind of big, sad men who told a lot of jokes. There was only one other female in the place, a skinny woman playing pool with a short, tattooed guy. While taking aim, the guy met my eyes and I crossed my arms in front of my chest. I’d forgotten to put my bra back on. He took his shot, balls knocking into the pockets.
Though everyone else had noticed us, the bartender pretended not to. He was doing something below the bar I couldn’t see, washing glasses or drying them. When he finally acknowledged my mother, they spoke a few words and then she walked back over and stood next to me.
“She was in here, but she’s gone,” she said.
“Where’d she go?”
“She left with someone. He doesn’t know him.”
“I bet he knows him,” I said. “I bet they all know each other.”
“Maybe he’s just passing through.”
We went outside and looked up and down the street. I felt sorry for my mother. She probably wished she was still Catholic, that she didn’t have to kneel on prayer rugs or talk about the end of the world all the time.
I sat on the curb and stretched out my legs. I hadn’t shaved since we’d left Montgomery, and my legs were hairy, especially around the knees and ankles, spots I always missed.
“The barstools were toilets,” she said.
“Toilets?”
“Raised up on a little platform.”
“I didn’t notice,” I said.
The door opened and we were joined by the couple that had been playing pool. I was conscious of my breasts again. I had large breasts for my frame, which I found humiliating because the boys in my class had decided large breasts weren’t attractive, that more than a mouthful’s a waste. The man lit two cigarettes and handed one to the woman. She had terrible skin, her hair in a sad ponytail.
“We’re looking for my daughter,” my mother said, stepping toward them.
“Good-lookin’ girl?” the man said, but then he seemed embarrassed.
“About five-foot-seven, I think her hair was in a ponytail. Was it in a ponytail?” my mother asked me.
“She had it down. She was wearing a tank top with candy canes on it,” I said, thinking about how pretty she looked in her tiny shorts and tiny shirt, her long arms and legs.
“She was here,” he said.
“Do you know where she went?” my mother asked.
“She left with Jimmy,” the woman said.
“Who’s Jimmy?” I asked.
There was a pause and she said, “What do you want to know about him?”
“They should be back any minute,” the man said. I looked at his arms, which were littered with tattoos—small, individual drawings like someone had doodled them in the margins of a notebook. I wanted to sit with him, have him go through them one by one. I was sure each of them meant something. Trashy people had tattoos that meant things.
“The bartender wouldn’t serve her,” the woman said.
“Why didn’t they get beer there?” I asked, pointing to the gas station. The woman shrugged. I fake yawned, hoping she’d catch it, but she didn’t. It worked best if you yawned just as you were passing someone, if the person hardly noticed you at all. I liked the idea that I could pass it to someone and they would pass it to someone else and my yawn could travel, cross state lines.
My mother started breathing heavily, like she was going to hyperventilate, and I thought I should go get my father, that he’d know what to do, but he hadn’t known what to do. He’d just gotten in bed and opted out of the whole thing. She kept getting more and more upset, and the man tried to comfort her, calling her “ma’am,” reassuring her that Elise would be back any minute. He told her he knew Jimmy and Jimmy was a fine guy, a good guy.
“Sit down, Mom,” I said, taking her hand and pulling her down. She sat next to me, so close her legs and arms touched mine. She was unhappy with us and I wanted to do everything I could to make her stay, to keep her. There was a part of me that had always been afraid she would leave. If I behaved badly, if I wasn’t good enough, she might decide we weren’t worth the trouble. I felt like I had to compensate for my father and sister’s behavior. I didn’t know why this burden had fallen to me, why I was the one who was unable to be herself, but it had always been this way.
The couple eyed us as they smoked their cigarettes and talked about a woman named Tammy. We learned all about Tammy. Tammy had two kids and two boyfriends: one bad, one good. She’d been in rehab, prison, and, most recently, the mental hospital. Now she was out and the cycle was repeating itself. She was with the bad boyfriend, wasn’t answering their calls. Her kids were going to be taken away for good. I’d always thought that bad luck turned, but some peoples’ lives seemed to be one bad-luck story after another with no turn. I picked up my mother’s hand. I didn’t know what to do with it once I had it, so I examined it for signs of aging. It didn’t look too old. The bones felt nice under the skin. I turned it over and traced her head line, her heart line; her life line was weak, tapering off mid-palm.
“Do you miss being Catholic?” I asked.
“God doesn’t care where you worship him as long as you go to church.”
“But Catholics are different.”
“They’re Christians,” she said, “sa
me as us.”
“Dad doesn’t think so.”
“I know,” she said, putting her arm around me.
“I love you.”
“I love you, too,” she said. We said “I love you” a lot, and it hadn’t seemed like a big deal until my mother told me she’d grown up in a family that never said it. When her father died, she hadn’t heard those words come out of his mouth.
I was about to go get my father when we saw the car. We watched the headlights come closer and closer and then Jimmy pulled up right in front of us and my sister got out. The man looked at us through the windshield. He was old, at least forty, and didn’t look like anyone Elise would have voluntarily gone off with.
While our mother stood there with her hands at her sides, my sister dragged me into the bar; she led me to the bathroom and locked the door. The bathroom was one room with two toilets and no dividers between them. There was writing all over the walls: sketches of women’s faces, penises and liquor bottles, cats and rainbows and balloons. A sentence in blue marker caught my eye: IF YOU’RE READING THIS, YOU SHOULD GO HOME NOW. And then, underneath it in big block letters, LOVE ONE ANOTHER. This struck me as hugely profound—love one another. It seemed so simple. I was hardly ever even nice to people because I was afraid of them. It seemed ridiculous that people might need or want my love.
A red lightbulb over the sink gave the room a creepy feel, like we were being filmed, the camera’s eye turning slowly to follow our movements. It reminded me of a TV show I’d seen where seven people had been kidnapped and drugged. They awoke in separate hotel rooms on the same floor and couldn’t get out of their rooms until they’d found their keys, which were taped inside their Bibles. They had to kill the other six people in order to survive.
“I just wanted to see how pissed mom is,” she said.
“She’s really pissed,” I said. “She’s really upset. Why do you have to do stuff like this?”
She pulled down her shorts and sat on one of the toilets. “Like what?”
“You’re being an idiot.”
“Don’t call me an idiot,” she said. “I’m not an idiot. You’re an idiot.”