by Miller, Mary
“We could pass out tracts,” Elise said.
“Like you would ever pass out tracts,” I said.
“I’ve passed out tracts before.”
“When?”
“You know, that time,” she said. “At that thing.”
From the highway, it didn’t look like much—a wide gravel lot and some makeshift buildings attached to other makeshift buildings, a few tents scattered around the edges. Our father parked and we all got out, our eyes adjusting to the brightness.
“Take some tracts,” he said, and I put a few in my purse.
At home the flea market our mother frequented was full of old people selling junk from their attics: stamps and clothes and Christmas decorations, porcelain dolls in yellowed dresses—the same things week after week that nobody seemed to buy, or else they had an unlimited supply. But this was a Mexican flea market, full of Mexicans, my father pointed out, but he got excited when we passed the first concession stand selling turkey legs and funnel cakes for two dollars apiece.
He bought a huge Coke and a funnel cake and we strolled the aisles, looking back and forth between the booths of refurbished washing machines, VHS tapes and serving dishes, cowboy boots and cowboy hats, and so many baby things: baby clothes and baby toys and baby strollers and baby bassinets. I watched Elise to see if her eyes lingered on any of it. Maybe she would pick up a tiny pale pink dress and it would change everything.
I stopped in front of a big-butted mannequin wearing an off-the-shoulder dress. They waited as I sorted through the rack and chose a shirt with Our Lady of Guadalupe on the front. It was gaudy, something I’d never wear at home. I paid for it and put it on over my King Jesus t-shirt, and we continued walking, pulling pieces off of our father’s funnel cake until he passed me the plate and bought himself a turkey leg. He was so happy with his turkey leg, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
I watched an older woman in a tight black jumpsuit put on mascara, her mouth an O and her eyes wide. She was looking in a mirror and didn’t care who stopped, mid-aisle, to gape at her. Her booth was selling miscellaneous electronics, VCRs and cassette players, things that had become obsolete.
Our mother detoured into a pottery booth and our father stopped. Elise and I kept walking, men forming a loose circle around us, talking to each other in rapid Spanish. A teenager swept the pavement in front of us while we pretended not to notice. I dared her to say something to him, thought it would scare him if she actually spoke.
“I wonder if they’ll sell us a margarita,” she said, digging around in her purse. “Give me some money.”
“You have money.”
“No, I don’t,” she said.
“You can’t drink here, anyway.”
“The drinking age is eighteen in Mexico.”
“We’re in Texas.”
“I know we’re in Texas but do you see any white people?” she asked, but then she became distracted by a man drawing a caricature of two teenage girls. Next to the man, a sad woman in full-on tiger face sat at a card table. Her sign said, SMALL DESIGN $4 WHOLE FACE $9. She had a boy haircut and was wearing regular clothes. I wondered why someone would paint her face like a tiger and drive all the way out here to sit at a card table, looking so miserable that no one would ever go near her.
“Maybe we should get our faces painted,” I said, nodding at the woman. “Or just go over there and talk to her. Drum up interest.”
“She’s so sad,” Elise said.
“I know. It’s making me sad.”
“Don’t ask her if she’s been saved.”
“I’m not going to ask her that,” I said. “I don’t ask people that anymore.”
“Since when?”
“Since now.”
The woman’s head turned toward me, so slowly that I had time to look back at the drawing of the two girls without getting caught. In real life, one of the girls was fat and the other was thin, but in the drawing they were the same size. The thin girl, however, was given sexy eyes with long eyelashes.
Our mother and father shuffled past. Our father was still working on his turkey leg, and our mother was smiling and looking about excitedly.
Elise approached the tiger woman, who didn’t acknowledge her until she sat across from her in the blue plastic chair. I went over and stood next to my sister.
“We both want full face,” Elise said.
“I was thinking smaller,” I said.
“Full face. What can you do besides tigers?”
“Zebras, lions—” the woman said.
“I’m not feeling very safari animal today,” Elise interrupted.
“Elf, mermaid, Smurf, cow, snake, chimpanzee,” the woman continued.
They decided on a snake, its mouth open wide above one eye.
“See, you do like snakes,” I said.
Her snake was awful, a coral snake or the snake that looks like a coral snake but isn’t poisonous. When it was finished, the woman held up a mirror and Elise said it was amazing.
“I want the tiger,” I said, sitting down in the seat Elise had warmed for me. The woman stared at me with no expression whatsoever—it didn’t seem to please her like I’d imagined it would—and picked out the colors.
Her fingers were cool, papery. I liked the feel of them on my cheek.
“How long have you been doing this?” I asked.
“Awhile,” she said.
“Do you get much business?”
“Sometimes,” she said. “It’s been slow lately.”
“The recession,” I said, like I knew what I was talking about. I had heard talk of this recession for years. I must have been born in a recession.
There was something about the face-painting woman that made me achy. It felt a little like love, though I’d never been in love and couldn’t say for sure what it was. I wondered if it would always feel like pain.
Elise wandered off and I watched the men gather.
“Do you live nearby?” I asked.
“Not far,” she said. “A few miles.”
She didn’t have a ring on her finger. I could nearly always predict who would have a ring on their finger. If they were young, they were usually pretty and had positive attitudes. The ones I would want to marry myself if I had to marry a woman. They would drag you out of bed in the morning and say what a nice day it was, even if you were sick or sad or it was raining and you’d get up and do things and feel better. They’d make lunch and dinner, put clean sheets on the bed.
I concentrated on her fingertips pressing into my cheek. Just feel this. There is only now. I kept telling myself to be in the present, which kept me from being in the present. I wanted her fingers on my face forever, or at least a very long time.
She handed me the mirror, and I hesitated long enough for her to know that whatever I said next wouldn’t be the truth. “I love it,” I said. I had the urge to wash it off immediately. I paid her and then took out my phone and snapped a picture of her next to her sign.
“You didn’t ask if you could take her picture,” Elise said. “Maybe she didn’t want her picture taken.”
“What?”
“You should always ask first.”
“It’s not like this is a third-world country and she’s naked and covered with flies.”
“You should always ask.”
“Back off,” I said. I saw our parents turn a corner, and we ran to catch up with them.
“What’d you buy?” I asked my mother.
“What’s all this?” our father said. He had another funnel cake, a fresh hot one. Powdered sugar caked at the corners of his lips. Elise told him about the woman we’d met, a sad woman whose spirits we’d lifted by having our faces painted.
“Was she saved?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I gave her a tract anyway.”
My mother showed me her purchases—two soap dishes and a delicate gold bracelet. My father stopped at a covered pavilion with a lot of tables. He sat at one and I sat across from him. M
y mother and Elise kept walking.
A band was setting up, a Mexican band in Mexican costumes. I looked at my shirt, felt the paint on my face. I was in disguise.
“How are you?” he asked after a while.
“Good,” I said, stealing glances at his cake.
“Are you having fun?”
“Yeah, I’m having a good time.” I had a friend at school, more of an acquaintance really, who was always asking everybody how they were feeling. “How are you feeling?” she’d ask, because someone had labeled her the caring friend. I always told her I was fine, but what would she do if I said I wasn’t fine? Next time she asked, I was going to tell her I was terrible and see what happened.
The band began to play a traditional Mexican song, the kind of song that sounded like every other song, but maybe it didn’t to the Mexican ear. Maybe it was like the faces of a different race, how it was harder to tell them apart. I wondered if they’d play “La Bamba” but figured they only played it for white people. Once I’d decided they weren’t going to, I really wanted to hear it.
“I need a picture of you in that getup,” my father said.
I got out my phone and tapped the camera button. “Just press here,” I said, passing it across the table. I noticed the number 2 on his hand over yesterday’s faded 3. He took my picture, shook his head a little, and smiled.
“Are you hungry?” he asked.
“No, I’m good,” I said. He was trying so hard and I wanted to give him something but couldn’t. I felt totally incapable of it.
“Your mother’s worried about you.”
“Why?”
“You’ve been mighty quiet.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “We’ve all been pretty quiet.”
“Not Elise.”
“She doesn’t know how to be quiet,” I said.
I reassured him that everything was fine as the band played the first few notes of “La Bamba.” What did he want me to say? He always asked such big questions, questions that there was no way for me to answer.
“Why don’t you go tell them we’re ready?” he said, wiping his hands on a crumpled napkin.
I went. My mother had made a few more purchases, her hands full of bags. I took them from her and we met my father at the car.
We drove for hundreds of miles with nothing to see but a bunch of low, craggy mountains. Mostly they were in the distance, and didn’t seem to be getting any closer, but then I’d look up and we’d be driving through slices of smooth stone.
“Is there a map of Alabama somewhere?” Elise asked.
My father pulled the stack of maps from his car door and sorted through them, his other hand moving back and forth on the wheel like somebody driving on TV. Our mother reached out to steady it and he waved her hand away.
He found the map and passed it back, and Elise looked up the elevations of our mountains so we could compare them to the ones in Texas, but there was no comparison—the mountains in Texas were six times the size of ours.
We drove through a series of small towns, one of them an actual ghost town. Sanderson was by far the most desolate place I’d ever seen: dirt and power lines and signs advertising propane, a Kountry Kitchen restaurant. There were a few two- and three-story buildings right next to the highway, buildings that could have held a lot of people, but none of them appeared to be open and there were few cars in the lots. Elise got out her phone and started filming. She tried to talk our father into stopping so we could walk around, but he said we were done stopping. We were behind schedule.
“What schedule?” she asked.
“You know what schedule,” I said. “California.”
“I’m still not sure why we’re going there,” Elise said. “Why are we going there?”
“You know why,” I said.
“Remind me.”
“Because that’s where Marshall is,” I said.
“It’s not like we’re going to meet him.”
“We might,” I said.
“That’s not the reason we’re going to California,” our father said.
“Then why are we going?” Elise asked.
“Because it’s in Pacific Time,” I said.
“I’m not asking you. I’m asking Dad.”
“We’re preparing,” I said.
“Shut up, Jessica,” she said. Nobody called me Jessica. I didn’t like the sound of it. It had too many syllables. “Dad?”
“We’re on a pilgrimage,” he said calmly, but his ears and neck were red and he was shaking.
I watched him fade back to his normal color and thought about how he’d sold the trip to us in the first place. We were at home, eating my mother’s meatloaf and my father’s cornbread, when he’d pitched the idea: a pilgrimage to California. We didn’t need a caravan—we could be our own caravan. And hadn’t we always wanted to see the country? I’d wanted to go to Disney World as a kid, and I’d wanted to see some caves once, after watching a program about Mammoth Cave, but we only went to Destin year after year because one of my mother’s sisters had a condo there.
As the trip had been over a month away, I agreed easily. It was easy to agree to things when nothing was required of me at the moment, or in the very near future. I regretted it later, of course, when getting out of the thing I had agreed to was much more difficult than not having agreed to it in the first place, but I knew this wasn’t like that. If my father wanted to go to California, we would go. If he wanted a pilgrimage, we would be his pilgrims. Our mother reminisced about a cross-country trip she had taken as a child. It was a story I’d heard many times, all centering around one bathroom stop in which her father had embarrassed them, and the geysers at Yellowtsone. It was like she had no memory at all, like she’d taken photographs so there’d be no need to recall the actual event. Elise was the only one to resist, saying she had cheerleading practice and might need to retake a class. When that didn’t persuade him, she said, “The last shall be first and the first shall be last,” but this seemed to strengthen his argument. We would wait our turns, he said.
I looked out the window. There was no grass, no trees. My father drove faster and faster, the land so barren it was easy to imagine the world had already ended and we hadn’t heard.
“These are some of the least populated counties in the country,” our father said, breaking the silence.
Elise’s phone beeped and she smiled at it. Then she leaned over and said, “Dan dropped his phone in the lake. He had to get a new one.”
“I told you,” I said, though it didn’t explain why he hadn’t emailed her, or why he hadn’t borrowed someone else’s phone to call her. Any one of his friends would have had her number.
She touched her hair, as if to remind herself she was beautiful.
“I told you he wasn’t in a ditch.” I scratched at my tiger face, getting yellow paint in my fingernails. “Which lake?”
“I don’t know which lake,” she said, and stopped typing to give me a dirty look.
They spent the next half-hour texting. I wanted to text someone but no one was expecting to hear from me. I had friends but they were mostly school or church friends. We didn’t play with each other’s hair or tell each other our deepest secrets. It wasn’t at all what I’d thought junior high friends would be like—I thought we’d be sleeping in the same bed, shopping for clothes. I thought we’d tell each other everything. I knew it was my own fault. When someone lightly touched my arm or leg while we were talking, I flinched. I didn’t know how I could want things so badly while making it impossible to ever get them.
In Valentine, we insisted on stopping so we could get a snack.
I went to the bathroom—my tiger was all smeared and there were little trails of flesh peeking out. I washed it off, the paint leaving behind a sticky yellow film.
I bought a package of gummy bears—250 calories, no fat—and Elise bought a bag of popcorn, a giant pickle, and a Sprite. She never drank Sprite because it had a lot of calories, and I took it as a sign that she w
as starting to think about the baby.
“A little old for face-painting, aren’t you?” the man behind the register asked Elise.
“I still trick-or-treat, too,” she said.
I thought about Elise’s Halloween costumes: she was always a dead slutty something, same as her friends. She seemed too cool to be a dead slutty something but she wasn’t.
Back in the car, I ate all of the red gummy bears first, followed by the orange and yellow, and then the white and green. I poked my mother and dropped my empty wrapper into her lap. She opened her eyes and turned to me.
“Do you have a headache?” I asked. She liked to call them cluster headaches because it made them sound more ominous. She said they were very serious and that more than 20 percent of the people who got them killed themselves.
“I’m just resting,” she said. “I didn’t sleep well last night.”
“Me either.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, squeezing my hand.
We usually stopped by four o’clock, but my father drove past four o’clock and past five o’clock. We grew antsy, counting down the miles to towns that quickly came and went. Finally, he took an exit for a rest station.
We got out and stretched, looked around. The vending machines were protected by bars.
“Not even the vending machines are safe here,” I said, but no one laughed. The rest stop was pretty nice, actually—the lawn was freshly mowed and there was a fountain. People walked their dogs.
My mother, Elise, and I went into the bathroom.
“Men have sex in rest-stop bathrooms,” Elise said. “I read an article. They call them something—I forget what they call them.”
“You’re always filling your mind with trash,” our mother said. “If you fill your mind with trash, that’s what you’ll think about.”
“You mean if you fill your mind with trash, you’ll be trash,” I said. I was in the middle stall, could see their feet on either side.
“That’s not what I mean,” my mother said.
“That’s exactly what you mean,” said Elise. “You think we’re trash.”