“I know, right?” I sounded like such a dumbass. When I panicked back then, I tended to imitate Dani. I even said, “right?” in a slightly higher pitch, something that used to drive me crazy when she did it.
“Sea cows,” her mom said, “huh.”
“Right,” Dani said, “or that when they have to pass gas it comes out of their snort hole.”
“You enjoying this game, Lynn?” Mrs. Dunham said, turning her skeptical squint on me. “About dolphins passing gas?” This last bit sounded more than a little sarcastic. I chewed my lip. Mrs. Dunham’s eyes got even squintier. She yanked on Dani’s earlobe. “You all aren’t looking at naked sex pictures, are you?”
“No, ma’am,” we said in a ragged chorus.
She let loose of Dani’s ear.
“Well.” She peered over Dani’s shoulder at the photo of the dingy dolphin and its diseased-looking lunch. “Make sure you let Lynn have a turn, honey, and pipe down. Your father’s going over his sales numbers.”
Once her mom closed the door at the top of the stairs, Dani counted to thirty and then we got rid of Mr. Scabs the dolphin and went back to Hank, who seemed almost deranged by our short delay in answering his instant messages. We explained it away as a break for personal needs. Despite his growing clinginess, Dani had to work surprisingly hard to get him to admit why he really cruised around sites like this. Hank claimed to be tired of the singles scene, tired of going out to bars to meet people, and tired of going to work with a hangover. He’d only moved to Chicago for his job a couple of months before, so he didn’t know anyone yet. Dani thought there was more to it than that. She was right. Finally, Hank admitted, he felt homesick for his hometown of Pana, Illinois, and these city women he met in the bars here intimidated him. “I’m always afraid they’re laughing at me behind my back,” he wrote. That’s why he was so excited to meet a small-town girl like us. Dani laughed so hard the strawberry Yoo-hoo she was sipping on came out of her nose. I knew exactly how Hank felt. Well, almost.
“What a stupe,” Dani said, unable to stop giggling. “Let’s mess with him a little.”
And thus we came to Rule #3, which was to be the rule that changed our aimless pranking into The Game: Use the info you get from rule number two to make them do your bidding or simply to mess with their heads. We decided to make Tabitha’s life somewhat similar to our Algebra teacher, Ms. Oliff’s, with some small adjustments. Like her being cool, for one.
Us: I’m twenty-five and there’s not a soul in this crappy little nowhere burg to date. Everyone’s either a kid or a geezer. I’m bored most of the time. Sometimes I sit up all night flipping through the Sears catalog and fantasizing about the men in the thermal underwear section.
Hank: I know the feeling. Even though I’m in a big city and there’s lots to do, I don’t have anyone to go out and do stuff with, so I end up at home most of the time. Sometimes I fantasize with magazines too.
“I bet you do, big boy,” Dani said, snickering. “Probably spends all night in the bathroom with a copy of Juggs.”
I considered pointing out she’d often done the same. Dani was fascinated by Juggs magazine. She even talked me into buying a copy from the Texaco station the summer before, and we spent an evening scrutinizing the various boobs on display, discussing their design flaws. Six months later I discovered the magazine in her closet, tucked under her sweaters, even though she’d made a big production of throwing it away in disgust the same night we bought it. It looked wrinkled and well read. Some of the pages were marked with dog-ears and had handwritten notes like my boobs would look like this if they were a cup size bigger.
“I think we need to spice it up some,” she said. “This is boring the hell out of me. I think the problem here is he’s a loser. I don’t believe I want to know his darkest secrets.”
She sat down, scootched me out of the chair and set to typing.
Us: That sounds pretty pathetic. You live in one of the biggest cities in America with lots of cool nightclubs and places to go. It’s not your imagination. Those women are laughing at you!
Hank wrote back that we were a nut-cutting, ball-busting bitch and then put a block on our name and stopped sending messages. We laughed.
“What the hell is a nut-cutter?” Dani asked.
“You,” I said.
Rule #4
Don’t get played.
The Bad, The Badder,
and The Ugly
Here are my mom’s five ADD (After Dad Disappeared) boyfriends in the order they showed up:
1. Roy—This guy came into the emergency room one Sunday afternoon after an engine he was working on cracked the tree branch holding it up and broke five bones in his foot. He and my mom were only together for three months. I have no idea why it ended and I wasn’t about to ask.
2. Joe Carey—I was never supposed to know about this one because he was married. Joe Carey was an insurance salesman. He came into the emergency room on a rainy Wednesday evening after slicing open his palm with a broken wine bottle, wearing a disposable diaper wrapped around his hand. He got seventeen stitches and my mom for about six months.
3. Keith—My mom discovered Keith rolling around and groaning on the floor of the emergency room one evening after he’d gobbled an enormous Mexican buffet dinner. He thought he was having a heart attack but was actually only suffering from heartburn. Three months later she told me not to mention his name again, explaining, “He’s king of the rat bastards. I’ll never eat a summer squash again.” (I didn’t ask.)
4. Duane—One day in November after school, there he was, sprawled out on the sofa drinking beer and looking at an afternoon talk show. He had short black hair with a streak of gray above his left ear and eyes the color of rain clouds.
“Who the hell are you?” I asked.
He waited a full thirty seconds before he patted the cushion beside him and said, “I’m your new daddy. Come sit down over here with me and I’ll let you have a sip of my beer.”
I walked straight over to the hospital and found my mom. She told me he’d only be there a night. One night became a month. And like a bad roach infestation, she needed the help of pros to get rid of him—two orderlies from the hospital. He broke my favorite lamp as they dragged him out. It had a picture of a mermaid made from colored bits of stone.
5. Hayes—She met him long before he met her. Hayes was unconscious for several days, after running his truck into a ditch. When he came to, the first thing he saw was Mom changing his IV bag. “My old, sweet mama was wrong about me,” he said. “I knew I’d go to heaven.”
I tended to agree with his mama, but sadly, he was still here with mine.
Soap Opera Villain
Dani made me take the empty beer bottles with me. When the knock came, they were sitting in a plastic bag right there on our kitchen table. I should of tossed them in the grass on the bike ride home, but A) I was paranoid someone would see me and tell my mom or the police, and B) that’s littering. I was still trying to think how I could dump them before my mom got back where there’d be zero chance of getting caught.
A decent breeze was blowing outside, so I’d left open the front and kitchen doors. Our window AC sucked rather than blew. It was a clear shot from the front door, down the hallway to the kitchen, and out the back door beside the sink, so I saw right away who it was. I thought about jumping over the breakfast bar that separated the kitchen from the living room, but it was too late. I’d been spotted.
“Your mama leave a package for me, cornflake?” Hayes asked through the screen door. He tapped again at the wooden frame with the Lucite cane he sometimes had a need for. He was the cutest of my mom’s boyfriends, I’ll give him that: short brown hair gelled up in spikes and a face like an oversexed soap opera villain. He must of done lots of sit-ups each morning because the times I saw him with his shirt off, his belly looked flat and tight and tan. On that day, however, he looked like the dog’s dirty ass. When I let him in, he took off his sunglasses and his eyes were half
hidden by puffy, greenish skin. His feet were bare and moist and blackened. Wherever he walked, he left behind gray moisture prints.
“I don’t think she did, hoss,” I said. I talked through my teeth, so he wouldn’t smell the beer on my breath. I’d had four to Dani’s two.
“Are you positive?” Hayes did a jittery little dance in the kitchen doorway. He lifted his arms and sent out whiffs of nastiness that smelled like the rotty juice that sometimes collects at the bottom of the fridge’s produce drawer.
“If she did, she didn’t tell me about it,” I said, finding myself unconsciously imitating his weird jitter dance.
“I’m just going to go back and have me a look.” He pushed past me before I had a chance to answer and kind of loped through the kitchen, favoring his short leg and wincing each time he took a step. I watched from the doorway and held my breath. He knocked over the sack of bottles on the kitchen table I’d tried to hide with newspaper, and I thought, Oh shit, now I’m doomed, but he didn’t seem to notice or care. Hayes spent a few minutes rummaging about in the kitchen cabinets, before giving up to stumble through the living room, bumping into the shelves that held my mom’s boat-in-a-bottle collection and almost knocking some down. He set them straight before going back into her bedroom. After shutting the door, Hayes commenced to tossing shit around in there and making a sound like a raccoon in a dumpster.
Our house was smallish, five rooms if you counted the bathroom, six if you counted the carport, and seven if you counted the little attic access between my closet and the living room. The front hallway, lined with elementary school photos of me from Kmart, led to a junction at the kitchen, forward took you past the sink to the kitchen door. If you took a right, you went into our biggest room, the living room, which stretched across the middle of the house from front to back like a saddle. From there, a worn trail in the carpet led straight past the couch, along the front windows, to the side hallway, a bathroom built for one, and on to our two non-spacious bedrooms. Mom’s was on the left and had a good bit more moving-around space than mine. At the end of the hall, across from our rattletrap washer-dryer, was the door to my perfectly square, perfectly tiny sleeping box.
Five minutes of mayhem later, Hayes went limping into the bathroom, mumbling “fuck” over and over again like a prayer. What sounded a lot like my Suave Wild Cherry Blossom conditioner fell and rattled around in the shower. When he came out again this time, he had orange stuff on his upper lip. I thought for a moment he’d been drinking the liquid soap. Then I noticed the prescription cough syrup bottle in his hand. Hayes tossed it with a clatter into the sink.
“Bad cough,” he said.
“Ah,” I said.
I didn’t remember him coughing once since he’d come, but if he had a craving to gulp syrup, it wasn’t any skin off my behind.
“When’s your wrinkled old ma get off?” he said
I didn’t answer, since I’d heard her tell him this information twice already over the phone. I sat on the couch and looked at a man wrestle an alligator on the television. Hayes sat down beside me, stretching his back until it cracked. “Yu-up.” He turned this into two long syllables. “So you playing the silent game with me here or maybe you just need a couple Q-tips? Huh? What’s the good word, Little Flipper?” He made a dolphin sound. I edged away from him on the couch.
Without looking away from the TV, I told him she’d be home tomorrow morning. This was a trick my mom had taught me after I’d complained about him bugging me. “Just stop paying him any mind,” Mom told me, “and he’ll quit after a while. He just wants a reaction, any reaction.”
“Okay,” he said, almost to himself, and yawned wide enough to make his jaw pop. “That’s alright. That’ll work.” He sat there for a few more seconds, breathing loudly and tapping out a complicated beat with his fingers on the back of the couch. Eight loud, wet sneezes came out, one right after another. Then he jumped up all of a sudden, banging his knee against the coffee table.
“Well, I’ll be shoving off then.” He limped over to the hall and looked about in a dazed way. I knew what he wanted.
“On the floor in the kitchen.” I pointed to where his cane rested under a chair. “See you,” I said.
“Yeah.” He furrowed his forehead at me. “Thanks.”
The hole in his muffler must of grown a good bit bigger, because I could hear that crap Toyota truck of his until it got out to the state highway. Hayes had a tendency toward moodiness, worse than my mom sometimes, but even for him this was whack-a-doo behavior. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, but I knew better than to ask my mom for an explanation. I figured I’d be better off not saying anything at all unless she asked.
Types
Dani put her Shins CD in my mom’s boom box. I’d been resistant to it at first because a senior girl at school had got her into them. An ex-cheerleader burnout named Barbara Ann that Dani idolized for some reason. Dani’s Shins thing started with a Zach Braff movie, Garden State, that Barbara thought was pretty intense. She got so worked up over it she must of watched it a dozen or so times. The Shins were one of the bands on the soundtrack, so Dani bought the album. I didn’t care all that much for the movie, or Braff’s show. Even my mom hated Braff’s goofy hospital show. In my experience, people at the hospital looked worn and grumpy. No song-and-dance numbers, just kids crying. It came as a surprise, then, when the album grew on me. I sometimes found myself humming along without realizing it.
“So,” she said, raising an eyebrow, “what’s your type?”
“I’m not sure I have a type,” I said.
“Of course you do,” Dani said. “Everybody has a type. You might not know what it is yet, but you’ve got one. Believe me.”
Dani and me were sitting around the kitchen table at my house drinking stolen beer and looking at her rock star collection. My mom worked a double shift that day and wouldn’t be home until seven the next morning, so we could do pretty much whatever we wanted. In this case, doing whatever we wanted meant drinking my mom’s beer and talking about boys. The week before, my mom had come across a sale at the Quik & Eazy convenience store in Statesboro, which everyone called the Quick & Sleazy. They were getting rid of their whole stock of a beer called Wanker. Each bottle had a different picture of a girl in a bikini on the label. For some reason they were selling it for $8.23 a case. I imagine there must of been something wrong with it, but it tasted alright and it gave you a buzz. My mom went ahead and bought ten cases of Wanker and stacked them up in the carport. She had to make two trips in her little ’89 Ford Festiva to get it all home. So now we had hundreds of beers, but no cereal or bread. For breakfast I’d roll pressed ham and American cheese into little tubes and eat them with my fingers.
“So what’s your type, then?” I said.
“I have complicated taste, so I actually have more than one type, but all my men pretty much fit in the same category.”
“All your men?” I laughed hard enough to make beer fizz into my sinuses. Dani frowned. “Alright,” I asked, “what category?”
“Well, for example, I only like men with brown hair. The darker the better. But not black hair, because you don’t want someone who looks too much like you do, and not blond hair, because I’m a Leo almost on the cusp of Virgo.”
“But, wait, I thought you liked Eminem? How’s he fit in if you only go for brunettes? He’s got blond hair.”
“See, that’s where it gets complicated. Eminem has blond hair, but it’s bleached blond. His actual hair color is brown, so he fits into my type.”
“How do you know he has brown hair? Whenever I’ve seen it, it’s always yellow.” I opened another warmish beer. It foamed over and made a mess of the tablecloth.
“It’s so not yellow,” she nearly yelled. “It’s platinum blond.”
“What do you go by then? The eyebrows?”
She calmed herself with a sip of beer and settled into the vinyl cushion on the kitchen chair. “That’s a good clue, but you can’t alwa
ys tell for sure from the eyebrows. Sometimes they’re lighter or darker. Look at my eyebrows.”
I did. She’d plucked them into arches that gave her face a startled look. When she really was surprised, they looked like hand-drawn rooftops over her eyes. There was nothing realistic about them. In fact, one was just the tiniest bit higher than the other. But I saw her point—her eyebrows were a couple of shades lighter than her head hair. With the August sun pouring through the window onto her face, they seemed almost brown while the hair pulled back into pigtails was shiny black. The color of wet tires.
“Do you see?”
“Yeah,” I said. “They’re almost brown.”
“Exactly. If my hair was bleached and you didn’t know any better, you might think my hair was brown.”
“So how do you know then?”
“I’ll show you.” She opened her rock star collection and flipped through it.
The rock star collection was a three-ring binder filled with sheets of heavy black construction paper. She organized it alphabetically by band, and then by the individual members of the band. Each page was covered with photographs of rock stars clipped from magazines or printed up from websites. Beneath each picture was a handwritten explanation of the photograph: name of the rock star, band, date of the photograph, location, and the name of the magazine or fan site it came from. She had subscriptions to about eight music and movie magazines. Sometimes she also added a personal note like, “Eddie has looked much better in other pictures, but this one shows off his wrists. They are amazing and tan and strong here. However, those dark circles under his eyes make me worry about his health. Drugs?” The binder we were looking at that day was volume two. She’d been collecting rock stars since before I met her, and by the end of eighth grade, she had filled up her first binder. Nearly three hundred pages, back and front. She hardly looked at the old one anymore since she believed her taste in music had matured a lot since then. The first volume was mostly filled with boy bands from the nineties. “I only put men in the new collection,” she’d told me. All in all, there must of been at least two hundred pages and ten times that many pictures in volume two. You could spend a whole day looking at it, and we often did.
Caring Is Creepy Page 2