“Are you serious?”
She says, “I thought you might be glad to get away.” She sounds almost hopeful.
“This is supposed to be my home.” I strangle the T shirt I’m holding and imagine strangling Terrance, my small hands around his neck, like squeezing mud through my fingers. “Anyone else would make him leave.”
Mom says, “He needs me.”
My throat closes around a spike. “What about us?” I say. I lower my head and let my hair fall into my face. “We need you, too.” I collapse on the edge of my bed.
Mom sits next to me and uses the back of her hand to push my hair behind my shoulders. “You’re always telling me you don’t.”
A sob rises up in my throat like a geyser, and even if I could put this sorrow into words, all my voice manages is a garbled, “You’re our mom,” before I’m bawling like I haven’t done since I was a kid.
Mom gently draws my head toward her, and I close my eyes and surrender to my convulsing chest. I let her wrap her arms around me as I lean into her shoulder. She smells like gardenia perfume and Suave Fresh Rain shampoo just like she did years ago when she still played games with us and read us stories before bed and rented PG movies the three of us could watch together on the couch sharing a big bowl of microwave popcorn.
“Shh.” She wipes tears from my cheeks and says, “I’m still your mom.” She presses her hand over my ear and temple, hugs my head. “I will always be your mother,” she says and I cry harder because she doesn’t understand. A mother is a child’s home even more than where the child sleeps, and she is forcing me to give up both.
“It’s your job to take care of us,” I say, wiping my eyes.
“I’m trying,” she says. Mom opens her mouth like she wants to say something but doesn’t. In the living room, Terrance burps like he’s in a beer commercial and laughs. Mom sighs. “You always took such good care of yourself,” she says. “And of Jaime. I know you can handle this.” She squeezes me, and I ache to curl into her belly like I used to, sink into the safe softness of the body that made me.
But I duck out from under her warm arms and say, “That doesn’t mean I should have to.”
“We’re all making sacrifices,” Mom says. Terrance laughs again.
“He’s not,” I say.
She says, “How many times can I tell you I’m sorry?” She presses her forefinger and thumb to the bridge of her nose. “I don’t know what else to say.”
“Say you’ll let me stay,” I say, but I know she won’t.
She looks down at my flowered bedspread, shakes her head left and right over and over like a bobble-head doll, and tears trail down her spongy cheeks. I stare at her tired skin and developing wrinkles, the gray strands at her temple, her low-cut blouse, and wonder what happened to the whirlwind of force my mom used to be: taking beatings from Dad and walking with her bruised face held high. In the silence, our heartbeats start to sound like drums, the ominous thuds in movies that signal an execution.
“I love you,” Mom blurts out finally. She hugs me again and at first I remain stiff. But when she starts to pull away, I recognize this is good-bye, and I tighten my arms. Mom whimpers and holds me closer, her shoulder against my wet cheek, her strong hands rubbing my back. “I love you so much,” she says.
I wipe my nose on her shirt and let go. October wind breezes through my open window and I inhale the freshness, the earthy scent of dried leaves and wet grass and pine. Chilly air settles around me like a cloak, and I try to mimic that coolness. “Okay,” I say.
“Okay,” she says, patting my knee and half-smiling. Her eyes are puffy. She nods once like a judge after giving his ruling, so I guess these proceedings have concluded. I close my eyes and breathe deeply in and out, ten beats each, making my lungs expand and contract inside my chest.
When I open my eyes, Mom is in my doorway with her hand on the fake brass knob. “It’ll be okay, Liz,” she says. “God knows what He’s doing even if we don’t.”
She shuts the door and takes a deep breath outside my room. I picture her dolling up for Terrance, replacing her tight-lipped frown with a plastic smile, fluffing her hair, adjusting her boobs. She clears her throat and says with a cheerfulness that feels like lemons rubbed over my fresh wounds, “What’s so funny, handsome?”
I cross the room in measured paces, stand at the window with squared shoulders, and face the dark. As I watch the night sketch ghostly shapes in the darkness, a draft sweeps through the room, into my cramped chest, and plants a seed of ice deep inside. I shiver and feel my skin prickle like thorns are emerging from underneath, protective spikes to ward off predators. With my eyes slowly drying, I cultivate those goose bumps across the length of my skin, and wear them like scales of armor.
For two months I’ve lived with Terrance’s brother, Gary, and his wife in a small housing tract on the south side of town. I sleep in the bottom bed of a bunk set in their second bedroom and eat Top Ramen noodles, bagels, and once, a serving of Carol’s sausage and potato casserole. “You need to eat,” she said as she piled chunks of meat and starch onto my plate, a greasy heap that reflected the fluorescent lights above our heads. “You’re getting so skinny,” she said and covered the steaming mound in ketchup. I let their brown boxer, Rambo, eat all the sausage, and now we’re good friends.
I have a TV in my room and they don’t care when I turn it off so when I can’t sleep I watch Leno and Conan and infomercials for electric dehydrators, skin care products, and “all natural” waxing kits with guarantees of painlessness. Sometimes I read in bed with my clip on book light, magazines from Rachel or schoolbooks. I get sucked into the story of Lord of the Flies—children abandoned and forced to care for themselves—and stay up way too late reading. When the frenzied boys kill poor Simon on the beach, the words become blurry so I shove the green paperback under my pillow and remind myself that book characters are not real people. And my life could be a lot worse.
In the mornings I wait for Carol to finish her long, dark, wavy hair, which she first blow-dries straight and then re curls with a curling iron into tight, controlled ringlets. She wears a foundation too pale for her face and a red lipstick that looks like paint against the white powder on her cheeks. She sits on the bathroom counter and leans into the mirror, her breath leaving fast-disappearing circles of fog on the glass. “Gary!” Carol yells and blots her coated lips. She smiles at her reflection, checks for red on her teeth, and unplugs the curling iron. A few minutes later they’re gone.
I peer at my face in the bathroom mirror while waiting for the hot water, place my palms on the cold countertop. Dark purple-blue circles mushroom out from under my eyes and my skin hangs where there used to be cheekbones. My hair is scarecrow yellow and full of split ends. I blink, but the red still runs in jagged lines like lightning through the whites of my eyes. My eyelashes are every girl’s dream, though. I could start an infomercial for crying. New! All-day, all-natural mascara!
After I’m dressed, I often watch TV in the living room with Rambo’s brown square head and black jaw on the cushion next to me, snorting occasionally. Dad is supposed to pick me up, but most mornings he’s late if he comes at all. Since he lives closer than Mom, is unemployed, and already taking Jaime to school, Mom signed me up for the impending weekday train wreck. At least Jaime and I will be together.
While I wait for the honk outside, I work on my math homework, pushing through the equations step by step like assembling puzzles. Jaime and I spent hours in our shared room while our parents fought, putting together odd-shaped cardboard pieces until they formed Care Bears or forest landscapes. I taught Jaime to start with the edges and work her way to the middle, to find the joint that connects each piece to its neighbors. The concentration worked as a decent defense against Mom’s self-muffled cries and Dad’s screams, and algebra has a similar logic that keeps me focused.
Today when I finish, Dad’s white Toyota pickup still hasn’t appeared in the driveway. It’s already a half-hour into my fi
rst class so I call Crystal’s number. Jaime answers on the first ring.
“No school?” I say.
“Nope.” She yawns. “Dad didn’t even wake up this morning,” she says today. Other times it’s been, “He promised to take us tomorrow,” or “He really is sick, I can hear him throwing up.”
For two months we’ve talked in the mornings instead of going to school. I missed the day I was supposed to give my oral presentation on A Tale of Two Cities in English. I have a D in French, a C in math, and I was dismissed from my theater class project because I failed to attend required rehearsals.
“This sucks,” I say.
“If you lived here, Dad would let you take his car,” Jaime says.
“No he wouldn’t.”
“He said he would.”
“Well, he shouldn’t. I don’t have a license.”
“So? Neither does he.” I hear a wet, smacking sound so she’s either sucking her thumb or smoking. “He said lots of things would be easier if you just lived here.”
“Easier for him.”
“He’s mad at you for being stubborn and selfish like Mom.”
I shake my head. “He can’t keep his head out of the toilet long enough to take his kids to school.”
“He said if you lived here, he could afford to buy a bigger TV and he wouldn’t have to go to bars to watch sports so he wouldn’t stay out as late.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I say, but it worries me. I know inviting Jaime to live with him was not out of the goodness of his heart, but I’m not sure what he’s up to.
“Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could drive us to school?”
“Dad would do anything to avoid responsibility,” I say.
Jaime says, “He wouldn’t let me drive his car.”
Jaime likes skipping school. She’s done it for years but now, without having to pretend to go somewhere else, it’s much simpler. She steals cigarettes from Dad’s secret pack, pulls the ten-foot phone cord out to the shed in Crystal’s driveway, and talks to boys named Surge or Chilly whom she met at the liquor store up the street from the trailer park, exhaling smoke into the grooves in the metal roof.
“Can you wake him up?” I say and immediately regret it. I won’t risk sending Jaime into the minefield that is our hungover father, but I miss the order of school, the predictable routine, the obvious right answers. As much as I’m trying to keep up in my classes, I’m losing my teachers’ trust, and know that I’m falling behind not just with assignments but with important instruction as well.
I say, “Never mind” at the same time she says, “No way.” Catching up with school isn’t worth her confronting a half-asleep and possibly violent man twice her size. I’d chance it if I was there, but I’m glad to hear she wouldn’t.
“Are you okay?” I ask, because my other thoughts, Don’t trust him, Stay alert, would just piss her off. She’s heard it all before, and I think she’s enjoying being away from my mothering as much as Mom’s.
“I’m fine,” she says, and I hear a ding.
“Jaime,” I start but she says, “Gotta go, my Eggos are ready,” and then she’s gone, leaving the dial tone buzzing in my hand.
I take off my shoes, pull the comforter I brought from Mom’s onto the couch, and settle in for another day of watching the same movies on Gary and Carol’s black box cable channels. They’ve been cycling Casper, Apollo 13, and the second Ace Ventura movie. Today will be the eighteenth time I’ve seen Congo.
Rachel calls me when she gets home from school. “Where were you?”
“Here,” I say.
“Watching the telly?” Rachel says with a bad British accent and a deep voice.
I smile at her exaggeration. She’s already trying to cheer me up. “Not much else to do here,” I say. “Why can’t I have normal parents who force their children to go to school instead of refusing to take them?”
Rachel laughs. “If you were a normal teenager, you’d love staying home all day and watching TV,” she says in her regular voice.
“What did I miss in English?”
“Not a lot,” she says. “We discussed Lord of the Flies. People said stupid things.”
“I’m almost finished with it,” I say. “That book has some messed up stuff.”
Rachel says, “Yeah, we talked about some of the violence.”
“I had a math test today, too,” I say.
“Can you make up the test?” Rachel says. “I could pick it up from your algebra teacher.”
“Thanks,” I say. “But my first- and second-period teachers think I’m ditching since I miss those classes so often.” No school bus comes out this far. To take the public bus, I have to walk a mile and transfer twice. It takes two hours and I usually don’t make it to school until third period. My first-period French teacher told me through her hot pink lipstick and thick accent that if it was true my father wouldn’t drive me, I needed to tell the school counselor. She assumed I had been lying when I declined moving through “the proper channels” to get the “appropriate attention” and wouldn’t take any of my late work. I sigh. “If you asked for my test, Mr. Suarez would probably think I was trying to cheat.”
“My Liz Wiz would never cheat,” Rachel says.
“I don’t think it would even help at this point,” I say. Rachel already knows that without a scholarship, there’s no way I can afford college, and college is my only way out.
“My mom says the world always balances itself out,” Rachel says. “When she left my dad to follow her Wiccan path in Reno, she promised someone else would come into my life as a friend, to support me. And then I met you.” She sounds proud and certain, like that’s proof of her mom’s fortune-telling power.
“Well I hope something good happens soon.” I pick at my nails. “I think the next few years are going to get worse.” On the muted TV, murderous gray gorillas are bashing heads with their powerful arms.
“You are the strongest person I know,” Rachel says softly. I know she admires my ability to handle obstacles, but I also know she’d never trade her safety for my strength. “You know I’ve got your back, right?” she says.
“I know,” I say, smiling. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
We sit there for a few heartbeats, time that in person would be a hug. She says, “Enough mushy stuff.” She clears her throat. “Want to spend the night this weekend?”
“Maybe Friday night,” I say. “I don’t think my mom will let me out of church.”
“Ask, okay?” she says. “We can watch a good movie.”
“Okay,” I say, but I know Mom will say no. She does the exact opposite of what I want these days like she’s spiting me because I didn’t behave as she’d hoped.
“Righto, then,” Rachel says with the English accent. “Cheerio, old chap.”
I laugh. “Bye,” I say.
On Saturday night I watch Ultimate Fighting with Gary on their big-screen TV. Sundays are devoted to football at this house; tomorrow he will be watching at least three games and with Picture in Picture, sometimes two at once. When Carol goes to sleep tonight, Gary will make us tumblers of Jack and Coke, and we’ll watch late-night comedy sketches or movies with the lights off and surround sound on, and share a bowl of popcorn with Gary’s special mix of cayenne pepper and garlic salt coating the stove-popped kernels, Rambo at our feet. A few weekends we’ve gone next door to play darts with Gary’s neighbors after their wives also fall asleep.
The first time Gary took me, I was curled up on the couch watching SNL. He unlocked the door carrying a sloshing half-full jug of whiskey and a two-liter bottle of Walmart-brand cola. When I asked where he was going, he said, “Nowhere.”
I squinted at him. “Does Carol know about this?”
Gary sighed and said, “Come on if you want.” I jumped up and opened the door for him. He stuck his lighter in his back pocket and flipped on the porch light. “But just this once.” He didn’t ask if I needed a jacket, didn’t comment on my
bare feet. As we stepped onto Cody’s driveway he said, “You stay smart in here, okay?” I nodded.
In Cody’s garage I was enveloped in clouds of cigarette and cigar smoke, white swirls circling the room like ghosts, dancing into my nose and inflating my brain until my head felt swollen and weightless. I stood in the corner sipping my cocktail, watching the giant hands tick on Cody’s three-foot-tall Budweiser clock, and listened to alcohol-heavy breaths around me rally back and forth through the haze: Hey, man, wazzup? How’s the wife? How’s the job? Jobs blow. Fuck yeah! Wives blow, too. Not enough, man, right? Laughs faded in and out, the smell of motor oil mixed with smoke and cologne and my spiked soda, and Cody’s hanging tools reflected the spotlights he used for fixing cars like disco balls.
“Hey, Liz, you know how to throw darts?” Cody’s face crystallized right in front of mine. I blinked. “Darts?” he said and held up a blue-and-yellow-flagged metal arrow. “You ever played?” I shook my head. He took my hand. “Let me show you.”
I followed Cody’s Phish T shirt to the line of dirty masking tape on the cement floor in front of the dartboard while Gary watched us with narrowed eyes. From behind me, Cody lifted my elbow and placed it in his palm. He wrapped his other hand around my wrist and jiggled. “Loosen your hand,” he said in my ear. “Relax.” My knees already felt mushy, my body so light, it was easy to sink into his words. He skimmed his fingers down my torso from armpit to waist, squeezed my hip, and pushed me forward. “Lean into it,” he said and pressed his chest to my back. I let go of the dart. He held his breath. Bull’s eye. “Wow,” he said and hugged me. “You’re a natural.”
I smiled and it took thirty seconds for my mouth to catch up with my brain. “Cool.”
He smiled and brushed my cheek with his knuckles. “Cool,” he said. He draped his arm around my shoulders and tucked me in against his ribs. I settled into his warmth, leaned my head against his chest, and closed my eyes.
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