Marrow

by Tarryn Fisher

  Like the emotional defeatist I am, I stop at the Quickie Corner when I get back to town. I eye the rack of my usual choices: Honey Buns, Pecan Wheels, Oatmeal Crème Pies, Cosmic Brownies, Ding Dongs, Twinkies, and powdered doughnuts. They’re all on sale, but I can’t eat that shit today. Or maybe ever again. I don’t want to kill myself that way. I walk over to the refrigerators at the back of the store and choose an orange juice. I grab a super-sized box of raisins and a box of matches that has a teddy bear on them, which reminds me of Nevaeh. I feel around in my pockets for my money.

  “What’s that for … you don’t smoke?”

  Joe. We call him Knick Knack because he collects porcelain figurines of the Virgin Mary and hides them all over the store. Sometimes you’d pull a loaf of bread off a shelf, and the Holy Virgin would be right there, staring straight at you

  “I’m going to commit arson,” I say, pushing it toward him. “I’ll need a gallon of gas, too.”

  Knick Knack Joe reaches below the register and puts an empty gas can on the counter. It’s red with a spout, and someone’s written I’m Gassy on the side in sharpie. “You’ll need this, too,” he says, grinning. “Who you burning?”

  I roll my eyes. “Everyone,” I say. I leave a crumpled ten on the counter and start to walk out. “You forgot your can!” he calls back.

  “What?” I say, turning to look at him.

  He pushes it toward me. “It’s a gift,” he says. “For your project.”

  I don’t know why, but I take it.

  I don’t take the normal way home, on the sidewalk, past the houses. I walk along the grass next to the highway, wearing my glasses, carrying my gas can. Winner, winner, chicken dinner, I think.

  “Hey Gassy.” A rusted, brown pick up slows down next to me. Two men sit in shadow in the cab of the vehicle. An arm covered in red flannel hangs limply out the window, a single finger tapping the side of the door in time with the music on the radio. I can see the outline of a baseball cap on the driver. “Want a ride?”

  I poke up my middle finger, letting them know how much I want a ride.

  “Don’t be like that, baby. A girl like you has to take what she can get.”

  Their laughter is like fingernails on a chalkboard, the keys of a piano being pounded on by a toddler. I am the joke. The hapless fat girl who needs two strangers to give her a ride and feel her up in the smelly cab of a truck. Fuck them. I throw my bottle of orange juice at their car. Fuck the whole world for making me feel like a loser when my life has barely begun. One of them throws a can out the window—beer. It hits the ground near my feet and sprays my legs. There is a kench of laughter as they speed off, kicking up gravel a few feet ahead of me, before swerving back onto the road. The back of the truck fishtails for several seconds, then the tires cling to the tar and propel them forward. I can see two heads through the back window. Two drunken idiots polluting the planet. I wish I had the power to flip their truck before they flipped someone else’s. Life is all about allowing people choices to be who they want. But the majority of people choose to be worthless. Not me, uh uh.

  I’ve never been to the ocean, never heard the waves lick the sand in that quiet shushing you read about in books. I’ve never been to the zoo, smelled the elephant piss, and heard the cries of the monkeys. I’ve never had frozen yogurt from one of those places where you pull on the handle and fill your own cup with whatever you like. I’ve never eaten dinner at a restaurant with napkins that you set on your lap and silverware that isn’t plastic. I’ve never painted my nails like the other girls at school, in bright neons and decadent reds. I’ve never been more than ten miles from home. Ten miles. It’s like I live in the forever ago, not where buses rumble and trains have tracks. I’ve never had a birthday cake, though I’ve wanted one very much. I’ve never owned a bra that is new, and had to cut the tags off with the scissors from the kitchen drawer. I’ve never been loved in a way that makes me feel as if I was supposed to be born, if only to feel loved. I’ve never, I’ve never, I’ve never. And it’s my own fault. The things that we never do because someone makes us fearful of them, or makes us believe we don’t deserve them. I want to do all my nevers—alone or with someone who matters. I don’t care. I just want to live. Nevaeh never had any of those things either—and now she never will.

  I can’t stay the way I am. I don’t remember what it’s like to be free. To be wide open without fear. I need something to break me. Just enough so that I have new pieces to work with—make them into something else. I don’t want to give anyone the right to treat me like a loser. I don’t want to be fat, I don’t want to live in the Bone, I don’t want to be without knowledge. I won’t be the girl who people laugh at. Not anymore. Good thing I memorized their license plate. Just in case.

  A WEEK LATER, a rusted brown pickup truck sits in the parking lot of Wal-Mart. I am supposed to be buying more granola, and shampoo for my mother, but all I can do is stand on the curb and stare. The license plate matches the one in my memory. I stare into the window; it’s filthy—trash and mud everywhere, a waterlogged copy of a nudey magazine lies on the floorboards, a piece of blue gum stuck over the model’s exposed breasts.

  The door is unlocked. I climb into the driver’s seat and place my hands on the wheel. It stinks of manure and stale beer. I breathe through my mouth and try to picture what goes on in a jackass’s head. Probably everything that’s littering the floors of his truck: sex, food, and beer. I bend to retrieve the magazine, paging though the pictures, flinching past spread legs, and hard, round, baseball tits. Glossy lips, parted to remind men of all the places a woman’s body can accommodate them. I tear off one page, then another. I keep tearing until the magazine is a ripped pile of tits and ass and feathered hairdos, then I scatter them across the cab of the truck. There is a hammer in a toolbox on the seat next to me. A fix it man! I pick it up, weigh it in my hand, then I swing it at the windshield.

  Crack!

  The glass splinters straight across. I like the way it looks, so I hit it again to make sure he won’t be able to see when he drives. As an afterthought I look around to see if anyone is watching me. There is a mother a few cars away, wrestling her screaming twins into her car, but she is too distracted to notice me. I dig around the toolbox until I find a box cutter. Climbing out of the truck, I lower myself to my haunches, flipping the switch to draw out the blade. An old station wagon is to my back, and beyond that the field of lilacs. If the driver of the truck leaves Wal-Mart now, I won’t be able to see him coming. I should feel something, fear or anxiety, but I don’t. I don’t feel anything. On the side of the truck I carve the words: I DRINK AND DRIVE, AND I HAVE A SMALL DICK. When I’m finished I toss the box cutter into the back of the truck. Dusting my hands on my pants, I head into Wal-Mart to do my shopping. Until the windshield cracked, I hadn’t realized I’d been holding such a grudge. The minute the hammer hit the glass it was as if everything surged out of me all at once. Anger, so much of it. I decide that there must be more grudges hiding in me. I wonder what it would feel like to exact revenge on people.

  My mother has left me a note to get cigarettes. I sit at the kitchen table and tap it with my forefinger as I stare out the window and watch a jay until it takes to the sky. Cigarettes, it says. No smiley face to soften the command hidden in those neat, curlicue letters; no lopsided heart. Just Cigarettes.

  She is floating around the kitchen in her red gown—right in front of my face—but she left me a note rather than tell me herself. I’ve long stopped asking why? Why, as it turns out, is the most self-indulgent waste of time. There is no real reason for her to be in the kitchen. We are out of the crackers she likes, and I stopped buying coffee to piss her off. I’m comatose, watching the linoleum like it’s Fargo. I saw that movie once at Destiny’s house. We were supposed to watch When Harry Met Sally, but someone had already checked it out at the video store. So we watched Fargo instead. All that snow and those weird accents. It was just a different kind of ghetto from the one where I live�
�full of hopeless, worried humans. I’ve never met anyone from Minnesota, and I don’t want to. That’s what I’m thinking as my mother floats around the kitchen demanding cigarettes. I think about Jean Lundegaard. Running around the house covered in the shower curtain until she falls down the stairs. She was stupid, and she wore ugly sweaters, but she didn’t deserve that.

  She wants her cigarettes, and I just want to sit here and think about Fargo. I wish I had a better movie to think about. All that snow…

  If she asked, I would tell her about Nevaeh. How I’m grieving for a little girl I saw around the neighborhood. Children shouldn’t have to suffer. To be alone. To feel unloved.

  I get up and walk out of the kitchen. Out the front door. I’ll go get the cigarettes.

  When I walk past Judah’s house, he’s sitting outside in his chair, slapping at the bugs landing on his arms.

  “Hey Margo!” he calls. “Where you going?”

  “To say goodbye to Nevaeh.” And also to buy cigarettes.

  “Take me with you.” I don’t question him. I just walk up the pathway to his house and push his chair toward the street. He’s wearing one of the shirts I bought for him from the Rag—the one with the little hearts. It looks good on him, which makes me sour. I can’t even take him down when I try. He’s quiet as the wheels of his chair squeak across the pavement. One of his hands is up and under his chin as he looks off to the side. His eyelashes are black and thick. They remind me of broom bristles, and then I feel ashamed that I’m comparing a man’s eyelashes to broom bristles. He must have gotten those from his dad since Delaney is as fair as I am.

  “Do you have your groceries and shit bag?” he asks me suddenly.

  “Yeah.” I move my body so he can see it hanging at my waist.

  “Good,” he says. “There is a memorial for Nevaeh, over at her mom’s house.”

  I’m quiet for a moment. I wonder if he wants to go. I walk past the corner store where I usually buy my mother’s cigarettes and turn toward the main road. “Let’s go get her some flowers,” Judah says. There’s a Wal-Mart a few blocks up. I tell him that’s where I’m going. He points out a secondary pathway that’s not quite as bumpy as the one we’re on, and I wheel him over. As we walk, people call out to him.

  “Hey Judah.”

  “What’s up, Judah.”

  “What’s up, man. You look good.”

  “Wanna come hang out tonight? We gonna play poker, and Billy is bringing over his shit.”

  Judah declines multiple invitations to “hang out” and tells them he’s going to Nevaeh’s memorial.

  “Who?” they ask.

  “The little girl they found by the harbor. Man, where the hell is your head?”

  Their eyes darken at that point. Yeah man, that’s some shit, they say. Fucked up, that’s what it is. That shit happening to a little kid.

  Judah tells them to come to the memorial. He tells them she was one of us, and we have to go remember her.

  Everyone knows him. They give me strange looks, like I’m the one in the wheelchair. It’s because they don’t see his chair. Judah is Judah. How large does a person’s humanity have to be to look past their big, clunky wheelchair? I wonder how large I can make myself so that no one will see my fat, or my mother, or my ugly face? Then they’ll call out.

  “Hey Margo.”

  “What’s up, Margo.”

  “Looking good, Margo.”

  I give the back of Judah’s head a dirty look.

  We go straight to the toy aisle in Wal-Mart. I choose a stuffed unicorn, because I’d like to believe Nevaeh is somewhere better—magical. Judah wants to get flowers. He asks me to grab a bunch of rainbow carnations that he can’t reach. I hand them to him, and for a little moment our hands are wrapped around the same bunch of flowers. He squeezes my fingers like he knows I’m hurting.

  “Can you hand me the roses too?” he asks.

  He holds the flowers and the unicorn while I wheel his chair to checkout lane. After we pay, he hands me the roses.

  “These are for you,” he says. A woman walks by, her arms loaded with blue and white bags, and looks at us strangely.

  I must look dumbfounded, because he presses them into my hands and says, “I’m sorry about Nevaeh.”

  I clutch the roses, my eyes brimming with tears. No one has ever bought me flowers. I try to be normal as I wheel him out the door and back into the street. I won’t let go of the roses even when he offers to hold them for me. I don’t let my tears spill, or my heart spill. Tonight is about Nevaeh, and I won’t be selfish.

  Since the local news picked up Nevaeh’s story, there is a bigger turnout than I expected. There is a large crowd gathered outside the squat, blue house she shared with her mother and eight other people. I see her grandmother standing in the swamp of humans, crying into her hands. People have stuck letters and pictures into the chain link fence around the house. Nevaeh’s school picture is there in the middle of the chaos. I stare at it long and hard so I won’t ever forget her face. There are piles of teddy bears, and bouquets, and toys that her classmates have left for her—some with letters scrawled in little kid handwriting. I push Judah’s wheelchair to the front of the crowd so he can give her his flowers. He lays them down gently, in front of a note that says, We love you, Nevaeh. You’re safe in God’s arms now.

  It’s my turn next. I kneel in front of the fence and bow my head so no one can see my tears. It’s just a stupid unicorn from Wal-Mart, but I want Nevaeh to see it and know that I love her. Loved her. Love her still.

  “This isn’t right,” I say. Judah looks at me earnestly.

  “No,” he says. “It’s not. So what are you going to do about it?”

  “Me?” I shake my head. “What can I do? I’m no one. The police—”

  “No,” he says. “You know how the police handle things. We’re nobodies. A little girl dying in this neighborhood isn’t anything new.”

  “The way she died is,” I say. “And somebody has to pay attention.”

  His jaw tightens, and he looks away. “If only I weren’t in this goddamn chair.”

  That makes me feel hot. I get a tingling in my fingertips, and I want to shake him.

  “I hate to break it to you, Judah, but everyone in the Bone has a wheelchair. One way or the other, we are all fucked.”

  He glares at me, I glare at him. I wish I could glare at someone and look as if my cheekbones were carved out of marble. I look away first.

  The tension between us is broken by Neveah’s mother, who at that moment walks out of the blue house carrying a candle. There wasn’t enough money to hand out candles to everyone, so people take lighters and hold them toward Nevaeh’s picture. Judah lets me hold his lighter. It’s a pink Zippo.

  “My mom’s,” he says.

  “No judgment.”

  He chews on the inside of his cheek; I’ve seen him do it a few times now. I sort of like it.

  We all huddle around Nevaeh’s school picture with our lighters and tears. Someone starts to sing “Amazing Grace,” but no one knows the words to the third verse, so we just keep singing the chorus over and over. When the Grace runs its course, one of the local pastors steps up in front of the crowd. He hugs Nevaeh’s mom and says a prayer.

  “She isn’t crying,” I whisper to Judah.

  “Shock,” he says.

  I look over at Nevaeh’s grandmother. She has people on either side of her, holding her up. She can barely breathe, she’s sobbing so hard. In the dim light of the streetlamp, I can see the tears smudged all over her cheeks and chin, the blue bandana on her head pushed crooked so the knot stands out above her ear. A grieving woman, her pain clear and sharp like the vodka I once tried at Destiny’s house. I reach for Judah’s hand. At first he looks surprised, his gaze passing over my face and then our clasped fingers. I don’t look at him. I fix my gaze straight ahead. He squeezes my hand and looks back at Nevaeh’s picture.

  He does not ask me to push him home. He never does. Some
times he needs help past the dents and ruts in the sidewalk, which I do without comment. Our relationship is seamless so that no one need feel guilty. I help him up the ramp to his front door, and he asks me to wait outside. I stand on the porch looking out over Delaney’s yard, her pretty flowers and bushes a shock of beauty down an ugly street. When Judah comes back, he’s holding a bottle of something brown.

  “I’m too young to drink,” I tell him.

  “You’re too young to have seen such ugly things, too.”

  I take the bottle from him, my only memory of alcohol being that one sip of vodka Destiny and I took from her father’s bottle when no one was home. I lift it to my lips. The rum is spicy and sweet. I prefer it to the vodka. There is a pirate on the label. He reminds me of the Indian chief on my mother’s healthy cigarettes. Indians and pirates—societal derelicts representing American addiction. I’d much prefer their company to the rest. We pass the bottle back and forth until I am too dizzy to stand up, then we sit quietly and look at the stars.

  THE EATING HOUSE IS OPPRESSIVELY HOT. I carry my book outside and sit on the step. Mo is pushing Little Mo up and down the street in a hot pink stroller. He has his phone between his shoulder and his ear, and he’s punctuating every sentence with the F-bomb. F-bomb this, F-bomb that. The stroller has a wonky wheel, so every time he hits a crack in the sidewalk, it veers to the right, and Little Mo is thrown sideways, a startled look on his face. I watch him circle the block, past the bad people house, past Mother Mary’s house, right until he reaches Delaney and Judah’s house, where he turns the stroller around and heads back. When he approaches the eating house for the third time, I jump up and block his path.

  I mouth: I’ll take him. Mo walks away without a word and leaves me with the baby and the stroller. I hear him F-bombing his way back to the crack house. I unbuckle the baby. He barely looks at me. I know there’s something wrong with him, but they don’t, and you can’t very well tell people that their baby has a disability. His diaper is soaked through. I find a spare and some bottles in the basket at the bottom, and carry him inside. My mother is in the kitchen, leaning against the counter, smoking a cigarette, and looking out the window. Look at you, wanting to see shit outside, I think, as I kick the door shut.