Hot Springs

by Geoffrey Becker

  Tessa looked around at the few other customers, most of them reading at their tables, apparently not paying attention to this scene. “Why are you being like this?”

  “Because I can. Because I don’t care anymore. I mean, I’m past caring.”

  “How will you support her?”

  “I’ll manage. I’m sure as a single mother, I’m qualified for all kinds of special programs. If not, I’ll move to France. They have free health care, I hear.”

  “She’s starting school next week.”

  “School? Or Bible boot camp? I know what you people are up to with her. She’ll start school all right, but it will be someplace normal.”

  “You’ve looked into that, have you?”

  Bernice’s eyes were lit blue, like match heads. “It’s on my list.”

  Tessa took a deep breath. She had been both dreading and longing for this moment. Emily had removed all the sugar packets from their holder and was arranging them in patterns on the table. A waitress came to take Tessa’s order, but she waved her off. “You must see that, between the two of us, I’m the one with more to offer,” she said, quietly.

  “No,” said Bernice. “I must not. I used to think that. The whole time I was living with you, and for the next couple of years, that’s what I kept telling myself. I bought it—the whole package. Nice house, fresh air, squeaky-clean white people who owned mountain bikes and who would make sure she didn’t smoke and didn’t screw or do drugs. I almost believed it myself—almost. Then one day I realized it wasn’t true.”

  “What wasn’t true?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “What?”

  “That you were better than me.”

  “I never said that.”

  “You did just now. ‘I have more to offer.’”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “Sure, you did. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. It’s practically leaking out your pores.”

  “I thought it was the opposite, that you felt you were better than us.”

  Bernice drank some of her coffee, spilling a few drops down the front of her shirt in the process. She dabbed ineffectively at them with a napkin, then tossed it to the table. “I didn’t finish college,” she said.

  “What does that have to do with anything? Finish now. No one’s stopping you.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Bernice. “Sorry, sorry. All right? I said it. Now, couldn’t you just go home to your husband and forget about us?”

  Neither one of them said anything for almost a minute. Tessa did think about David, but for some reason, what she imagined was his running socks, laundered, lying neatly in little white balls in the top drawer of his dresser where she’d placed them. “He’s cheating on me,” she said, quietly. Emily continued arranging the sugar packets.

  “I heard him tell you once that God must have been watching out for him because he’d found a place to gas up for three cents less a gallon than usual. Do you think God cares how much it costs for that creep to fill his tank? It’s so . . .” searching for the word, she held her hands out, fingers apart, as if she’d just released an invisible bird.

  “Did you hear me?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I heard. That’s what guys do. They cheat, and they lie. Are you really surprised?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes.”

  “Well, I can’t help you there.”

  “Two weeks ago, everything was one way, now it’s another, and I don’t see how it can go back. The only thing I’m really certain of is that I have a daughter.”

  “So do I. Right? Just go ahead and hate me.”

  “My mother always said to hate the deed, not the person.”

  “That’s nice. My mother always said, ‘Fat over lean.’”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s a painting thing. For oils, you want to make sure that your outer layer doesn’t dry before your inner layer does, or else you’ll end up with a cracked surface.”

  “I still have all of the artwork you did at our house,” said Tessa. She didn’t mention that David had insisted it be kept in the closet. “There’s the still life with the lemons, and the one of the backyard, with Pikes Peak in the distance.”

  If this made any impression on Bernice, it didn’t show. It was a gift to be able to see something and then make an image of it, Tessa thought, and she was envious of Bernice’s ability, just as she was envious of the biological ordinariness of Bernice’s body, where reproduction had simply happened. Bernice drank more coffee. “This stuff isn’t even hot.” She pushed the cup away from her. “You look tired. Where are you staying?”

  “A hotel,” said Tessa.

  “Why don’t you go back there, get some rest.”

  “I won’t go without her.”

  “It’s OK, Mommy,” Emily said. “You can go.”

  “Maybe tomorrow, we’ll go to the aquarium and see the sharks,” said Bernice, swiveling in her chair. “What about that? You’re a shark fan, aren’t you?”

  “I’d like to,” said Emily.

  Bernice touched the girl’s hair briefly, then turned back. In the years since Tessa had last seen her, Bernice’s features had taken on a new definition, an adultness that Tessa found almost surprising.

  “I’m going to think about this, OK?” said Bernice. “Give me tonight. You can do that. I know there’s no reason for you to trust me, really, and you shouldn’t—you shouldn’t trust me. But it will mean something to me if you try. You have to give me status here. I’ve had one miracle in my life, and that was the day my daughter recognized me. That’s my religion, and you have to respect it. Without ever seeing me, she knew. Right, honey?”

  “We have a photo,” Tessa said, feeling a sudden need to hurt her, if only a little. “From just after you first came. You’re in shorts and a bathing-suit top, out on the deck. She’s seen it—I let her. That’s how she recognized you.”

  “I don’t care,” said Bernice. “I don’t care what you say. I know what I know.”

  The marbled pattern in the plastic tabletop gave Tessa a sudden realization. “David’s drums,” she said.

  “What about them?”

  “Pearl. That’s the brand. It says it right on the front of them.”

  “Well, what do you know?” said Bernice to Emily. “You named yourself after a set of drums. I hadn’t put that together. I guess it’s better than Ludwig.” She leaned forward toward Tessa. “Christian rock? Isn’t that like ‘military intelligence,’ or ‘jumbo shrimp?’ Aren’t you just a little, I don’t know, embarrassed?”

  “You shouldn’t put something down when you don’t know anything about it,” said Tessa.

  Bernice’s face flushed. “Look, I’ll stay here. You go back and get Landis to drive you to wherever it is you’re staying. I won’t run away with her again, I promise.”

  “How do I know that?”

  “You don’t. It will be an exercise in faith.”

  “Why do you hate me so much? What did I ever do to you? We took care of you, we fed you.”

  “I was tricked,” said Bernice. “We were never friends.”

  A fire truck passed by outside, its strobing light and blaring siren momentarily pausing time inside the coffee shop.

  “You said you didn’t want your baby,” Tessa whispered. “That’s what you said! And you took our money.”

  “I can’t believe you just said that in front of her,” said Bernice.

  “We could have been friends. I wanted that.” She hesitated. “Look, was there anything else that happened? Anything I don’t know about?”

  Bernice blew her nose into another napkin. “I have no idea what you mean.”

  “With David.”

  “Could this wait until tomorrow?”

  “Never mind. I already know the answer.”

  “No, you don’t. You don’t know anything.”

  But Tessa was starting to feel a strange separation from herself, a feeling that, had she been in church, she m
ight have attributed to something else entirely. “I will,” she said. “Because you ask, and because Emily seems all right, I will go back to my hotel. But I want you to understand something. You may have given birth to her, but Emily is my daughter. I changed her and got up with her in the night and held her when she cried. I took her to the doctor and bought her things to wear and taught her to speak and to dress herself, and I fed her and tucked her in at night and loved her. I did that, not you. We did it together, she and I. Now you’ve changed your mind, and maybe I can understand that—I can even respect it, I guess. But you can’t change any of those other things, because they are facts.” She reached out for Emily’s hand, and the girl took it. She knew each tiny finger. A waiter brought a beer to the table next to them, where a man sat by himself writing in a notebook, and she waited for him to leave. “I don’t think I’m better than you. I never thought that. If you thought I thought that, well, then that’s some problem you have. I’m not. I’m just a person who really, really wanted a child and couldn’t have one.”

  “And God sent you me,” said Bernice.

  “That’s what I believe,” said Tessa.

  “Then all I can say is God must really have it in for you.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Bernice saw her mother only one more time after her make-out session with Craney Crow Devereaux. In March, they went to the Woman’s Industrial Exchange for chicken salad with tomato aspic and homemade mayonnaise. They talked about Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon and even a little about what Bernice was doing at school. It was all remarkably normal. Afterward, they went for a walk up Charles Street until they were outside an enormous art deco building with the words “Monumental Life” on it, way up high, spelled out in gold lettering.

  “Look,” her mother said. “Ever notice that?”

  Bernice took in the front of the building, where two massive fluted columns were centered inside a larger granite box shape. She did not know what any of this was about, although she felt nervous. Her mother had told the school that Bernice had a doctor’s appointment, then picked her up.

  “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” her mother went on.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Sex. Or maybe you know already.” She smiled pleasantly. Eve Click was still pretty, prettier than Bernice would ever be, but she was starting to look a little weathered, and at lunch, Bernice had thought she detected a skunky hint of dope smell about her clothes, though she couldn’t be certain, and she’d never known her mom to smoke.

  “I’m not having sex,” Bernice said.

  “Of course you’re not. But you will. So this is the talk.”

  “The talk? What talk?”

  “The one we’re supposed to have.”

  Bernice said nothing.

  “Do you know why the Woman’s Industrial Exchange got started?” her mother asked. “Confederate widows, after the war, needed some way to make money. They worked together. Women helping other women.”

  “Hear me roar,” said Bernice.

  “No one else was going to help them.”

  “Leading directly to that fat old broad who served us lunch,” said Bernice. “She had a monumental ass on her.”

  Her mother laughed. “You know,” she said, “I’ll always love you. You’re my little Chili Bean. You can’t weasel out of it.”

  “Who said I wanted to?” asked Bernice.

  “So, anyway, I just wanted to show you this.”

  “Which has what to do with the Industrial Exchange?”

  “Nothing.”

  “It’s a nice building. I could imagine Superman flying around it.”

  “It’s art,” she said, “of the unintentional sort. It’s a big reminder. Monumental Life. That’s something to think about. We might all be better people if we kept that in mind, you know?”

  “Unintentional?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Mom,” Bernice said. “I think it’s just the name of a company.”

  “Does that matter?” she asked.

  “I guess not.”

  “Exactly.”

  They were both quiet for a moment.

  “And that’s the talk?” asked Bernice.

  “Yup,” said her mother. “That’s the talk.” She stared up at the building, then held one finger out in front of her as if testing the wind.

  “What are you doing?” Bernice asked.

  “Taking away a letter.”

  Bernice squinted up at the words, then looked back at her mother, who seemed now to glow in the cold afternoon sun.

  “Monumental Life and Monumental Lie,” said her mother. “Hardly any difference at all.”

  That August, once she heard what had happened, even just the stilted, vague version of events that her father gave her, Bernice came to the conclusion that she had killed her mother. Not on purpose, of course—it wasn’t the same as bashing her head in with a brick, or poisoning her slowly with arsenic in her soup—but she’d done it nonetheless. MDMA, her father said. It’s also called Ecstasy. Her mother had found out about Bernice and CC. And while perhaps it was CC who had told her, it was more likely that her mother had just felt it, in that same way she’d known Bernice had been mean to another girl at school one day, and had made her stand in the closet for twenty minutes when she got home, despite Bernice’s protests. The way she’d always known everything, as if Bernice’s head were made of glass.

  In May, there had been the card that said, “I’ve moved!” on it, with her new address in Fell’s Point, and a ten-dollar bill stuck inside. Then her mother had been accepted to a small arts colony in New Mexico. “Not a real place,” her father had sniffed, although Bernice sensed his jealousy. “Just some for-profit crap.” An antique linen postcard had arrived for Bernice at the house. On the front it read Driveway Across Elephant Butte Dam, and there was a picture of an old-fashioned road with no cars on it and what appeared to be regularly spaced lampposts receding toward a vanishing point. On the back, her mother had written, “I found this and thought of you.” Bernice had no idea what she meant. Found what? The card? The dam itself? And thought of her why? Thought of her how?

  And then, in August, a couple of hippies on their way for a soak and a smoke in the hot springs outside of Jemez had found her.

  Her father, with whom her mother had barely spoken in years, made calls, made arrangements, flew out there, dutifully fulfilling his role. They were still married, after all. Seeking someone to blame other than herself, Bernice decided he shouldn’t have let his wife make the terrible mistake of moving out in the first place, even though at the time it had been a relief. She’d thought this all along—it was part of the distance between them, that and the fact that he was, obviously, completely unsure of what to do with her, and resentful that this responsibility had fallen to him. Her mother had never been up for life without him, not remotely. He should never have pretended otherwise.

  Bernice’s blood thickened, her brain slowed. She hadn’t done it with CC. She hadn’t. She told this to her mother at night, lying in her room, staring up into the darkness. Why should nothing lead to something? She tried blaming her mother, and sometimes it worked, but more often it didn’t. At her summer job selling watches from a cart in the mall, she started stealing money, and was surprised to find that she simply got away with it. There were no consequences. In an effort to change who she was, one night she went out on the roof and burned her envelope-lining collection. Afterward, she felt no different. The ashes floated over the rooftops like tiny insects.

  There was another year of high school to get through, and she managed it, dressing in oversized vintage clothes, hanging out in gay bars in Mount Vernon that were unconcerned about ID and in some of the new, grungier clubs opening up near North Avenue, where Ecstasy was as easy to come by as Budweiser. She took it a number of times and it did not kill her, but it didn’t make her feel good, either, or inspire the shit-eating grins she observed on other people. She began to suspect they were onl
y faking it. She stayed far away from Fell’s Point. She applied to and was accepted at Georgia State—picking it because her gay English teacher, whom she liked a lot, had gone there, and because it was supposed to have a good painting and drawing program, and because it would be warm and far away from her father.

  In the fall, through the university, she found an apartment near campus to share with three sorority girls in a complex called Peachtree Village. She knew nothing about Atlanta, but thought it was probably as good as anyplace else. Her first semester, she dated a creative writing student with a bunch of piercings and tattoos, but she had contempt for him and eventually stopped returning his calls. She went shopping for new clothes, a new identity, something more southern and feminine. She dyed her hair blonde. A history grad student asked her out, and tried to reach up her skirt while talking to her about Savonarola. Her father sent her a subscription to Art in America, which she studied carefully each month, alone in her closet-sized room. It was the only thing she studied. She was failing nearly everything, going to bars nightly, crashing on her new friend Gillian’s couch two and three nights a week. But then Gillian moved away. Bernice, abandoned again and convinced by now that what she was experiencing was probably depression of some sort, still managed to suck it up enough to manage a few Ds. She was allowed back for a second year, though on academic probation. The sorority girls were not so forgiving. They politely but firmly let her know that they wished her well but that they were turning her room into an actual closet. She found herself another place in Little Five Points, this time with a possibly gay guy named Tim who programmed computers and played video games and lived almost entirely off Wheaties—he consumed bowl after bowl of the stuff. His used bowls sat in the sink, the uneaten flakes hardening and clinging to the sides like barnacles.

  In the spring of her sophomore year, she stopped going to class entirely and took a job at Noon Pie Bakers, working the register. Often, she found herself with so little ambition, so little sense of purpose, that it seemed she ought simply to drown herself, too. Then, one day, she’d read in Creative Loafing that Texas Flood would be playing at Blue Mondays, and she decided it was a sign. She scrutinized the poor-quality photo of the band. It was definitely him: CC. There was pollen everywhere that week, a light green dusting changing the colors of cars, causing people to sneeze and wheeze. The whole world seemed to be waking up and coming alive.