by Mary Miller
She looks at me and says, “Hey, Alice,” and I look at the pool, the blue water rippling. I didn’t know she knew my name. Of course she knows my name, but I didn’t figure she’d have the balls to say it. I wrap a towel around my shoulders and sit at the table, pick up an empty bottle and set it back down. She hands my boyfriend the boy’s bag, a tote that says EGGS MILK BREAD BOOKS and they stand close together and talk in quiet voices. Just get back together, I think. Just admit you still love each other and it’ll be a whole lot easier on all of us.
The boy walks over to me with a dinosaur in each hand. “Which one looks the scariest?” he asks. They are the same size with white, pointy teeth. He presses a button on the red one’s tail and it makes a pitiful roar.
“Does the other one make noise?” I ask.
“They all make noise.” He hands me the red one and presses the blue one’s button; it makes a slightly different pitiful roar.
“Not that authentic, really.”
“Which one is the scariest?” he asks.
“This one,” I say, indicating the one I’m holding. I open its jaw and stick my finger down its throat, make a puke sound.
After she leaves, my boyfriend sits next to me and squeezes my leg just above the knee. “This is how the horse eats the apple,” he says, which is something we say to each other, something we do.
I meet my boyfriend and his son for happy hour. Dinner, we call it, when it’s the three of us. Tonight the boy brings along an enormous book of every bird that ever existed. You press a button to hear the call of a cardinal, an eastern brown pelican, a mockingbird. I turn the pages and drink vodka and cranberries, two for one. We read about the dodo and how its extinction was due to a combination of its inability to fly and its fearlessness of humans. This seems profound: a large, unwieldy bird that couldn’t fly, a species that developed in isolation so it never learned to fear.
After ordering his son’s food, Richie goes inside to take a shot at the bar, or to use the bathroom—he doesn’t say—and I continue looking at birds with the boy, flipping the pages without interest now that he is gone.
“There’s an owl at my house,” the boy says, digging a matchbox van from his pocket. “My mom’s house.” He sets the Volkswagen on the table and looks up at me and I poke him in the stomach. He looks confused and then pokes me back, a little too low. I press a button and we hear the call of the great horned owl. He shows me the inside of the van, how there is a table and a sink, how it is just like a real one.
My boyfriend sends me a text: I met someone who knows you.
How interesting, I text back, sure it’s a girl, probably the hottest girl I know, begging to suck him off. Twenty minutes later, he comes back out, pays the bill and collects his son.
After he takes the boy home and puts him to bed, he comes over and crawls into bed with me.
“It was a guy named Darren,” he says. Darren tried to convince him that he believed in God, that all of his good deeds, which mostly involve helping stranded motorists, are based on his desire to get into heaven.
I went home with Darren one night from a bar.
“How do you know that guy again?” he asks, as if we’ve been over this before.
“I met him at 206.”
“He acted like he knew you pretty well.”
“He doesn’t. That was before you.”
“Yeah, but the guy is insane,” he says. “He’s crazy.”
After Darren and I slept together, he told me he was psychic. I was drunk and all I could think to ask was when I would die, if he could tell me when I’d die. He had no information.
“I can’t relax,” I say. “I can never fully relax with you.” When you leave me, you won’t really be leaving me, I think, you’ll be leaving the girl you thought I was, who was kind of like me, but not. He presses his lips to my forehead for a long time like boys do when they love you or want to convince you they love you so you’ll have sex with them.
“What can I do?” he asks, and I tell him he’s already doing everything, which is true. He calls me all the time and brings me gifts, drives across town to see me every day; it is more than anyone else has ever done. We kiss for a while. When we kiss, I don’t think about how it is for him, if he’s enjoying it—it is possibly the only time I am myself. I flip over and pull his arm around me. Then I push it off and get out of bed and open the window. I like to hear the trains pass through when I’m up at night with my hand on his chest, listening to him breathe and grind his teeth, thinking about what I might do differently in order to keep him.
BIG BAD LOVE
The roller skates are busted and the bikes have flat tires and the wagon is full of leaves and rainwater, but they’re used to these things. They pedal harder, skate without bending their knees. They make adjustments. I sit in a chair by the door and sweat. Fat drops race down my sides, cool and itchy as bugs.
Diamond pulls the wagon in front of me and the handle smacks the concrete. I ignore her so she shoves it into my legs and I continue ignoring her so she goes and stands in an ant bed. When she starts screaming, I run over and pick her up, move her to the sidewalk and take off one of her sandals, swipe at the ants while she stomps.
Inside, we sit on the couch under an enormous photograph of the former television star. The photograph is a head shot, black-and-white with a loopy signature at the bottom. The former television star comes at Christmas, brings presents and lets the children touch her arms. She wears her hair in a ponytail so we’ll think she’s a real person.
I put Diamond’s legs in my lap and smear Neosporin on her bites.
“My legs ashy,” she says, dipping her fingers into the Neosporin and rubbing.
“Don’t do that. I’ll get you some lotion.”
“Lemme do your hair.”
“My hair’s already done,” I say, though it’s only hanging loose, wash and go. I touch the darker spots on her arm, places that haven’t healed well.
In my boss’s office, I open the supply cabinet, which is full of Dial soap and Suave shampoo, a box of thin plastic combs in primary colors. I take out a comb, red and bendy, and hand it to her. Then I sit in one of the kids’ chairs and she sits on the couch and rests her legs on my shoulders. She brushes my hair back roughly with her fingers.
“Use the comb,” I say, “and be gentle. I have a sensitive head.”
She thinks this is funny, a sensitive head. She runs the comb through to the tips and twists it into a tight bun, announcing it Chinese style before letting go. After she’s gotten all the knots out, I tell her we have to check on the baby.
The baby room has five cribs, four of them empty.
The baby is asleep, snoring lightly because her nose is stopped up. Her scalp is loaded with what appears to be dandruff only the Indian doctor said it was fungus. He said in children it’s always fungus. Her diaper is so wet I can feel it breaking apart so I pick her up and place her on the changing table. Then I go across the hall to restock the diapers and wet wipes, knowing she won’t fall off. She isn’t like other babies, who fidget and need to be entertained.
“Don’t worry, this fungus thing’ll clear up and you’ll be good as new. It’s probably just psychosomatic.” She blinks. She understands me completely. She could be the child savior, the one come to save us all.
When she first got here the back of her head was flat because her fourteen-year-old mother never picked her up. I’ve been teaching her to roll over; I’ve been teaching her colors and shapes and the parts of her body.
I shove her dirty diaper into the Genie, which a rich volunteer brought over last week. The woman donated two of them along with a crib, though the extra crib only made the room crowded. The shelter hasn’t been at capacity in months. I don’t know why. We live in the poorest state in the country; we have an abundance of unemployed people and more illegitimate babies than we know what to do with. There’s something going on that I don’t know about but no one tells me anything because I established myself earl
y as someone who can’t keep a secret.
I place her back in the crib and push a ratty little doll next to her so she won’t feel alone, and then Diamond and I go outside to gather pecans in our shirts. We eat the good ones and chuck the bad ones into the street where a funeral procession is in progress, the cars passing slowly with their headlights on. The cars going in the opposite direction stop out of respect and I wonder if people do this in other towns. I wouldn’t want to live in a town where people didn’t do this.
“Maybe we could go to the pool later,” I say.
Diamond screams and tells the other girls and they all scream and I tell them they’ll have to ask Miss Monique and be extra nice for the rest of the day.
In the kitchen, Monique is flouring pork chops, an open number 10 can of black-eyed peas next to the stove. Because I have a college degree and I’m not obese, I’m in charge of nutrition, but she insists on frying everything. Even the vegetables have hunks of fat floating in them.
“The food bank didn’t come again,” she says.
“Oh?” I say. I’m relieved that the food bank didn’t come because I’m responsible for going down there and collecting it, piling the boxes onto a cart and pushing the cart up a hill that doesn’t usually seem like a hill but becomes a great challenge on food bank days. Sometimes Bruce helps me. Bruce is a young guy they’ve hired to help Octavio with maintenance but half the time he’s leaning against a truck, smoking. The older girls slip him notes. They ask him directly for the things they want: cigarettes, money, sex. It doesn’t seem like a strategy that would work but it frequently does.
The girls ask Monique if they can go to the pool and she tells me she can’t find the cornmeal. I know it’s because there isn’t any but I unlock the pantry anyway, the girls trailing behind me, and look around. It’s the end of the month and there’s hardly more than powdered milk and white-labeled cans of soup. Diamond plucks a half-sucked sucker out of a jar of party toothpicks and sticks it in her mouth. Angel finds an old peanut butter egg and I find a jumbo bag of marshmallows. I squeeze one and it’s still soft so I tuck it behind a big box of Bisquick.
“We’re out,” I say. “Put it on the list and I’ll get some next time I’m at Walmart.”
Monique curses under her breath, loud enough for me to make out the particulars but not loud enough for me to call her out on it, which I learned the hard way.
We leave her in the kitchen and go from room to room, rummaging through drawers and closets. I find swimsuits for Diamond and Tasia and Brie, but I can’t find one for Angel so I sort through bags of donated socks and nightshirts until I locate a stretched-out bikini.
“Rainbow print is really hot right now,” I say, tossing it to her.
She takes off her clothes and puts the bottoms on, turns around so I can tie the triangle top. Then she walks up and down the hall with her hard little stomach bulging, modeling it for us.
Right now we only have young girls—Tasia is the oldest at eleven—and they don’t hate me like the older ones do. The older girls threaten to beat me up, call the cops, leave this place and never come back. Our policy is to let them go; we watch as they run down the street with whatever they’ve managed to strap to their backs and then call the police and their social workers. We never see them again. Their names are erased from the whiteboards, their files shelved. It seems incredible, how easily they are forgotten, but this is also our policy: don’t talk about the girls who leave; it upsets the others, or encourages them.
I keep waiting for them to return, one by one, dirty and beat-up, or all together, like a group of alien abductees emerging from the fog as if nothing happened.
I sit on the edge and dangle my legs in the water. It’s a public pool in a park full of concrete. There are empty flowerpots and bathrooms with metal mirrors like they have at rest stops. The baby is in my arms, making me sweat. I lift her above my head and she laughs so I pretend like I’m eating her hand and she pulls the sunglasses off my face and drops them in the water.
Diamond paddles over with her Dora the Explorer floaties to fetch them. She hands them to me and I wipe the lenses on my shirt while she moves up and down on my foot.
“It’s impolite to hump someone’s foot,” I say, and she shows me her ear as if I misspoke.
In the shallow end, Angel holds Tasia’s head under water. They call each other motherfucker and then they’re calling each other baldhead and cross-eye and scarface, making motherfucker seem generous. Monique and I look at each other and look away. Sometimes she’ll pull them aside and explain hell—how hot it is there, how all the ice cream melts before you can get your lips on it—but today we don’t care. I want to lie in the grass under a tree and take a nap but there’s only a rectangle of concrete surrounded by basketball courts and parking lots, Monique sitting under the single umbrella reading a romance novel.
“I’m gone take these off,” Diamond says, yanking at her floaties.
“You’ll have to get out if you take them off.”
“I know how to swim.”
“I know you do,” I say, “I know,” though she doesn’t know how. They imagine all sorts of lives for themselves other than the ones they’re living and I try to let them have them.
When we get back to the cottage, I adjust the temperature control with a butter knife. I put soap and toilet paper in all of the bathrooms and then sit on the couch with the girls to watch The Little Mermaid. They are despondent, listless. I ask Tasia what she wants to be when she grows up and she tells me a secretary or a waitress at Outback Steakhouse and I don’t give her the speech I usually give them, where I tell them they can be doctors and lawyers and astronauts, where I tell them success has no bounds. I should try to mix it up a bit, anyhow—it’s not as if I could be a doctor or a lawyer or an astronaut, either. I took the LSAT but I did it out of a sense of duty, to prove I wouldn’t do well on it. There are other things besides doctors and lawyers and astronauts. And how many astronauts even exist in the world? A hundred? Five hundred? Perhaps there are thousands upon thousands of them, all waiting to go up into space.
“Who wants a snack?” I ask, and they perk up.
They follow me into the kitchen. Tasia opens the refrigerator and takes out a brick of government cheese.
“Ask first,” I say. There’s no door to the kitchen but they’re not supposed to cross the invisible line unless given permission. They’re not supposed to open the refrigerator or get a cup of water. I think about a border-crossing documentary I watched a few nights ago and how a man claimed he didn’t believe in borders, how stupid I thought that was. It didn’t matter if you didn’t believe in them—other people believed in them.
I pass out graham crackers and plastic tumblers of Kool-Aid and we go outside while Monique feeds the baby. I try pushing three of them at once, but Diamond is angry because I’m not pushing her high enough. She becomes more and more upset until I finally give up and go inside and get a chair, sit by the door with my book.
She throws her body to the ground while I ignore her, and then she comes over and climbs into my lap.
“Why do you have to get so dirty?” I ask, brushing her knees. She twirls a finger around a strand of my hair. I wait for her to yank but she just twirls and twirls and I think about the first time I took her home, parked the van in my driveway and introduced her to my husband. We sat on the couch and ate cold pizza.
“Ooh, that nasty,” she says, grabbing the book out of my hand. On the cover, two people are making out in the backseat of a car. They are thin and young and beautiful and the picture somehow implies that passion requires these things, that the rest of us are going to miss out.
“It’s not nasty. They’re just kissing.”
“You nasty,” she says. I kiss her forehead. My boss stands in the doorway and asks if she can see me for a minute.
“Sure,” I say, lifting Diamond off my lap. I follow her back to her office, a Styrofoam to-go box open on her desk: fried chicken and mashed potat
oes and green beans, a soggy-bottomed roll on top. She eats a wing as she tells me how much money it’s costing us to keep Diamond. “Each month, the state gives us less for her care,” she says. I look at pictures of her grandson, the framed certificates on the walls. She wants me to start collecting my own certificates—there’s a weeklong food service conference next month where I will learn how to weigh and measure, what constitutes a serving of protein. Where I will make friends with cafeteria ladies from all over the state.
“I found her a home where she’ll be the only child,” she says. “The woman’s specially trained to deal with problem children.” We both know Diamond isn’t the kind of child anyone can be trained for, but I don’t say this. She puts a wing down and picks up a thigh.
I find Diamond in her room, sitting on the bed she doesn’t sleep in.
“You’re leaving,” I say. “We have to pack your stuff.”
I fold her shirts and dresses while she kicks her toys into a pile. I haven’t seen a single suitcase since I’ve been here. I think about organizing a suitcase drive—people would get behind it. I hand her a garbage bag and she tosses the toys in, each one slamming the floor, while I stack her clothes into the other bag as neatly as possible. When we’re finished, I look around the room. The eight rooms in the shelter are identical but decorated with different lamps and bedspreads, different pictures above the beds. I can’t imagine anyone else sleeping under her ladybugs.
We sit on her bed and she runs her hand up and down my arm like the black girls do sometimes, imagining what it feels like to have white skin. Nothing special, I tell them—hurts the same, bleeds.
“You pretty,” she says, digging her nails into my arm. I don’t say anything so she digs harder, her eyes all pupil.
“Thank you.”
“No, you ugly.”
“That’s not nice.”
“I’m kidding—you pretty, you pretty,” she says.
“Stop.” I push her hand away.
Diamond is preoccupied with ugly. She wants to know if she’s ugly, if I’m ugly, if the baby full of scars and fungus is ugly. I tell her we are all beautiful. I tell her we are children of God.