Like Mandarin

by Kirsten Hubbard

  “Want to hear something wild?”

  Her voice startled me. I had to calm my body again and recapture my float.

  “This water,” she said slowly. “Sure it’s dirty and cold and all that. But if you think about it, it’s really a little piece of ocean.”

  I held my tongue, because I didn’t want to be a know-it-all. But wasn’t that obvious? We learned about evaporation and precipitation in elementary school. Didn’t all water come from the ocean at some point?

  “Let me explain. This canal goes into the Bighorn River, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And then the Bighorn becomes the Green River. And somewhere the Green River becomes the Colorado River. And eventually, the Colorado River goes into the Pacific Ocean.”

  An unseen animal crashed away in the undergrowth. Maybe another pheasant. Or a jackalope. I held back a giggle.

  “The Pacific Ocean,” Mandarin repeated. “That’s where I’m going when I leave town.”

  But I don’t want you to leave. “When you turn eighteen?”

  “Sooner. My birthday’s not till fall. And I won’t be any freer when I’m eighteen than I am now. I ain’t getting into any colleges, that’s for sure.”

  She was quiet after that. I thought about what she’d said. Though Momma hadn’t gone to college herself, I’d grown up knowing that it was a certain part of my future.

  What would I do if college wasn’t an option?

  I tipped my head toward Mandarin, studying her. Her hair drifted like seaweed, blacker than the water around it. She reminded me of Ophelia, floating down the river with the sky reflected in her eyes.

  “You see,” she said, “I’ve got a plan.”

  “You do?”

  “I just need to get some pictures taken. There’s lots of agents out there, in California—that’s where I want to be, by the beach and everything—and so I was thinking I could get into modeling. The pay is real good.”

  Modeling. Mandarin a model. How come I’d never thought of it before? No future was worthy of Mandarin but one strobe-lit with camera flashes.

  I realized I had grabbed her arm. Before she’d even righted herself, I yanked my hand away and hid it behind my back.

  “You have to,” I said. “It’s perfect, Mandarin. It’s the best idea I’ve ever heard.”

  “Do you really think so?” She sounded genuinely hopeful, like my opinion was of the utmost importance, maybe even decisive. “You think I could make it out there?”

  I could picture it. On the covers of magazines, Mandarin’s torso carving the space behind article titles. Her profile in ads for dangerous products—silver sports cars, cigarettes, liquor served in drawing rooms bloated with wine-colored tapestries. Her cheekbones slashed with bronze. Her bed hair perfected.

  California was the farthest possible place from our Washokey life. But didn’t small-town-girl success stories make the best headlines? What sweet revenge against everyone who called Mandarin worthless, a piece of trash. Not just a slap in the face, but a punch. A dropkick, an elbow to the gut. A stiletto between the legs.

  Of course, I knew that the odds of making it big were slim. And I knew that Mandarin in California meant no Mandarin in Washokey. But I wanted so badly to please her.

  “You’ll be great!” I exclaimed. “They’ll love you. You’ll be on the cover of everything.”

  “Well, that’s it, then! That’s my plan.”

  Mandarin laughed and spun like a water sprite, hands slicing the water, splashing me in dark sheets. I giggled and splashed her back, savoring her joy like a glass of icy water after a long walk in the badlands.

  As I crept through the living room, I glanced at the clock above the mantel. It was twenty minutes after four—the latest I’d ever been awake. But I was the only one.

  Nobody had noticed I’d been gone.

  The day before, it might have bothered me. But now I didn’t care. It didn’t matter anymore what Momma thought, whether Momma cared. Everything seemed to make sense as I lay under my single sheet, screaming silently and pounding my feet on the mattress, my wet hair fanned out over my pillow, the gray light in my window growing brighter with the arrival of day.

  Maybe I wasn’t anything like Mandarin right now.

  But I could be.

  I forced myself to forget the things that didn’t quite fit. Like the map of the Bighorn River I remembered from my Wyoming geography book. As far as I knew, it never led to the ocean. It went as far as the Rocky Mountains. And then it stopped.

  Alexis & Co. crammed themselves on the cafeteria bench across from me, watching me extract my sandwich from its petals of pink tissue paper. Ziploc bags were too pedestrian for Momma. Sometimes she used the funny pages from the Washokey Gazette, or holiday wrapping paper, even in the spring. I took a bite, chewed, and swallowed, as if there weren’t a panel of judges scrutinizing my every bite.

  “That sandwich looks real good,” Paige Shelmerdine said.

  I glanced at it. Tuna salad with diced green apples, slathered on a fat french roll. One of Momma’s better creations.

  I wasn’t surprised Paige had broken the silence. She was the girl whose voice rose above any collective din. Even when no one else was speaking, she felt the need to shout. Physically, Paige reminded me of a lima bean. She had wispy red hair and skin so pale it looked greenish, and she stood the way Taffeta did: swaybacked, with her stomach sticking out. Paige’s older brothers were responsible for some of the most momentous keg parties in Washokey history. Her older sister, Brandi, was even louder than Paige, though she mainly used her voice to flirt.

  “Grace’s ma’s a real good cook,” Alexis said. Only because she loved to eat so much. When we were in elementary school, she insisted on coming to my house most of the time, because our cupboards were stocked with better snacks. “If you think her sandwich looks good, wait till you see one of her ma’s big ol’ fancy dinners.”

  “I’ll bet,” said Samantha Dent, baring a grin filled with rubber bands. She’d worn braces for the past four years. “Maybe she could give my mother some ideas.”

  The Dents owned the Buffalo Grill, where Samantha worked as a hostess. She looked like a scrawnier, washed-out version of Alexis and tended to weep over the most trivial things, from ant bites on her ankles to grades with minuses. She was definitely the least offensive member of Alexis & Co., though she went right along with the other two in anything controversial.

  I took another bite of my sandwich, delaying the inevitable. Paige’s face pinched and pulled, as if something crawly was trapped inside her cheeks. Samantha kept peering up at me from under her thick blond bangs and then looking away when I caught her eye.

  “Aw hell, Grace,” Alexis said at last, “I can’t stand it anymore. My mom told me her cousin’s stepmother saw you at Mandarin Ramey’s house last week. That’s not true, is it?”

  My insides became a clamor of fireworks.

  Four days had passed since my afternoon at Mandarin’s and our subsequent late-night swim. And in those four days, Mandarin and I hadn’t spoken to each other once. Not the day after, when I’d staggered into math exhausted but ecstatic. My searching smile found her seat empty. By now, I’d lost my nerve even to look her way.

  The one time I’d seen her outside class, we’d locked eyes. We stared for two, three seconds. Too late to look away. Maybe she’s been waiting for me to come to her first. The thought tapped against my brain like a windblown pebble. Cautiously, I lifted my hand to waist level, wiggled my fingers. Mandarin nodded back. And that was it.

  As if none of it had ever happened.

  Now, it seemed like some fantasy I’d had. Like I’d dreamed it all up in bed, intoxicated by wildwinds and mosquito poison. I forced myself to take another bite of my sandwich, to chew and swallow before I answered Alexis’s question.

  “She needed help with her schoolwork,” I said.

  All three girls let out gusty sighs. “So that explains it,” Paige said.

&nbs
p; Samantha nodded. “Makes perfect sense.”

  “I should have known.” Alexis leaned in my direction. “I mean, we’re, like, real close, you and me, Grace. Of course you wouldn’t be going over there of your own accord. It’s not like the two of you could be friends.”

  “But we are.”

  I continued to eat, pretending to be unaware of the lengthy silence that followed.

  It was a big gamble, making a statement like that. In Washokey, lies were like secrets—they didn’t last, unless the town collectively overlooked them. Like Mandarin’s serving cocktails while being underage.

  “Well,” Alexis said, “why aren’t you eating lunch with her?”

  “Yeah, Grace,” Paige said tauntingly. “Why aren’t you?”

  I hadn’t thought they’d call my bluff so soon. I tried to think of an excuse: Mandarin has a cold, so she told me to stay away. Or I’d rather sit with you guys! How lame.

  “Thought so.” Alexis squeezed open a bag of chips with a pop.

  I tried to scowl. “I don’t have to explain myself to you.”

  “What does that even mean?” Paige said.

  Then Samantha gasped. “There she is!”

  My eyes followed the direction of her index finger. Mandarin had just emerged from the kitchen, carrying an orange and two bananas. There was something provocative about the way she held them, with her wrists bent back.

  Alexis smirked at me. “Why don’t you go to her?”

  “Fine,” I said. “I will.”

  I tucked my half-eaten sandwich into my lunch bag and stood up, trying my best to look confident. But the knots in my stomach were back full strength: Palomar knots and Trilene knots and Triple Alpine Butterfly loops, like in the Eagle Scout guidebook I’d found at the junk shop. No one ever approached Mandarin. Not even the bolder kids.

  And I was not, by anyone’s yardstick, one of the bolder kids.

  Besides, if Mandarin had wanted to eat lunch together, she would have sought me out.

  I took two steps, then hesitated.

  “See? She’s not friends with her,” I heard Paige whisper.

  “What did I tell you?” Alexis whispered back.

  I pretended I didn’t hear them. One hand went to my pocket, my fingers folding around a tourmaline stone. I waited just long enough for Mandarin to disappear through the doors. Then I headed across the cafeteria.

  As soon as I stepped into the hallway, I ran all the way to the girls’ bathroom.

  I finished my sandwich inside the end stall. For the remaining twenty minutes of lunch, I stared at the scribble of red words, reading them over and over: School is horseshit. School is horseshit. Whether Mandarin had memorized it or written it there herself, I had no doubt she believed it. And right now I believed it too.

  When I went downstairs at dinnertime, Momma was sitting with her chin in her hands at the kitchen table, which was covered with pageant paraphernalia instead of food. Taffeta sat in the corner with her legs splayed out, coloring her thumbnail with a purple crayon.

  I hovered in the doorway, wondering whether Momma was adrift in pageant-related contemplation or she had come down with one of her gloomy moods.

  The moods were rare, but memorable. I could always tell when they were coming on. She’d stand at the sink and stare out the window, or sit silently in the wingback chair in the family room, the only significant item she had left of her mother’s, for hours and hours. I never knew what triggered Momma’s melancholy. Thoughts of her parents? Nostalgia for the days before Jackson Hole? The lonesomeness of bringing up two daughters on her own? Not that she’d go for a Washokey man, even if she desired a husband.

  “You can’t fall for someone when you know all their stories,” she often said.

  Many times when she came out of her moods, she would start to ramble, recounting old stories that left both of us spooked. She spoke of human pelvises dug up in the empty hills. Children who had disappeared. The ghastly way that drifter had killed those hippies in the 1968 “massacre”—with an old lasso, Momma said. All sorts of afflictions and insanities she blamed on the yearly wildwinds, blowing the ozone out of the air and driving everybody mad.

  Including her.

  “Momma?” I asked warily. “Do you need help fixing dinner?”

  It seemed to take a moment for her eyes to focus. “Dinner. I forgot about dinner.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I’ve just been so preoccupied with the pageant coming up.… How about we go to the Buffalo Grill? We haven’t been there in a while.” With each word, her faux British accent increased. “Let’s all get changed, shall we? Taffeta …”

  Taffeta sat on her hands.

  “Wash off that crayon first.”

  Going out to dinner meant piling into Momma’s pink hatchback and journeying four blocks to the Buffalo Grill. With Momma, walking was never an option. It also meant seeing Samantha Dent. Better Samantha than Alexis or Paige, though.

  Besides more classic carrion, like beef and chicken, the Buffalo Grill really did grill buffalo. It also grilled emu, elk, and jackrabbit. For a while it had grilled rattlesnake, until the local serpentine population dwindled so much there weren’t any snakes left to catch.

  Prairie oysters, however—more commonly known as “bull balls”—were the kitchen’s specialty. Even before I fully understood how boys and girls were different, the appetizer had disgusted me. Little brown spheres, deep-fried to a crisp. Served with three kinds of dipping sauce. And parsley.

  The trophies were worse. The heads were displayed all across the restaurant: stuffed pronghorns with glass marbles instead of eyes, bobcats frozen in death yowls, a massive male elk with a film of dust on his antlers. Everyone stayed away from the table underneath the elk, so as to avoid the fleas that allegedly fell from his beard. There was even a black bear, not quite a cub, but small enough that his murder had probably erred on just the wrong side of legal. A stuffed ground squirrel rode on its forehead—another instance of a Wyoming sense of humor.

  Most people frequented the Buffalo Grill because of the questionable appetizers and taxidermy. One night I’d even seen Mr. Beck at a back table, eating soup alone.

  Samantha led us to a booth by the window. I watched her warily as she handed us our menus, but she wouldn’t meet my eye. Sometimes I got the impression that Samantha disagreed with Alexis & Co.’s antics, though I knew that—like me—she’d never be brave enough to speak out against them.

  “Wanna hear about our specials?” she asked. “We’ve got—”

  “Not really,” I interrupted.

  Samantha looked stricken.

  “Grace!” Momma exclaimed. “Sure we do, honey. Go right ahead.”

  Samantha mumbled about beef stew and deep-fried onion blossoms and then scampered away.

  Momma glared at me. “That wasn’t like you, Grace.”

  “I’ve had a rough day.”

  The waiter appeared, and I ordered a fruit salad. As soon as he left, Momma turned back to us. “We need to talk hairstyles.”

  Of course she didn’t ask about my day. I should have learned to stop hoping. Not that I would have told her anything—God, no. I crossed my arms and slouched in my seat.

  Watching me, Taffeta slouched in her seat too.

  “I read an article on extensions a couple mornings back,” Momma said. “At first I just passed it off as nonsense talk, since Taffeta’s got such lovely locks and we could hardly ask for anything better.” She reached out and buried her fingers in Taffeta’s hair. Taffeta made a face. “But then I began wondering if the other mothers are doing it, and if so, are we at a disadvantage?”

  Momma paused a second, as if waiting for my opinion, but I knew she wasn’t, not really. She only prattled on like that when she’d already made up her mind.

  “Problem is, the only extensions Shirley Colby’s got at the salon are those awful clip-on kind, like Barbie-doll hair. I’d never spend my hard-earned money on that garbage. But then I g
ave a few Park County salons a call, and one of them said …”

  We’d just gotten our food when another family came in. The man wore a black and white checkered shirt that ballooned around him, as if he’d lost weight since he’d bought it. Or maybe he’d donated all the pounds to his wife, who was twice his size. She balanced a toddler on one generous hip. I didn’t recognize them, which was pretty unusual around here.

  “Those are the Franks,” Momma told me. “Tom and Winnie Frank. Moved back a few weeks ago. Winnie used to be Winnie Hildebrandt. She was in my year at school. One of the only ones to leave the state for college. She thought she was so smart, and look! Now she’s back.”

  We watched them strap their toddler to a high chair. Right away, it began to bawl.

  “What a hassle,” Momma remarked. “But pregnancy’s even worse, you know. Especially my first time around. I think I must have spent the first six months sobbing in the bathroom with my arm wrapped around the toilet.…”

  I picked at my fruit salad and tried not to listen.

  Momma had told me about her pregnancy so many times I knew the story backward and forward. At eighteen, she’d been just a year older than Mandarin was.

  Being pregnant was humiliating, she claimed—the morning sickness, the medical examinations, the ugly protruding belly no amount of padding would obscure. But worst of all, Momma had told me so many times the phrase seemed tattooed inside my skull, was the awareness that this stranger was growing inside her.

  I had to remember it was me inside, the baby Momma hadn’t wanted in the first place. Taffeta was a different story. One hundred percent wanted, even if the marriage that had created her had been a joke. With me, Momma still claimed she’d never considered abortion or adoption—though whether God or my grandma was her reason, I never knew.

  I was afraid to ask.

  And yet I couldn’t help feeling sorry for her, that girl my mother had been. She’d tried to escape Washokey. Because of me, she didn’t make it.

  On Friday morning, the wildwinds thundered down from the Bighorn Mountains. Dust and grit swirled over the ground in currents, stinging our ankles as Taffeta and I stumbled toward school. The chain-link fence surrounding the school yard quaked and rattled. My sister hid her face in my side at every gust, which made it even more difficult to walk.