by Mary Miller
“Come on. You need a bath.”
As soon as I turn the water on, she’s naked and stepping into the tub. “It’s cold,” she says, cupping her vagina.
“It’s going to take a minute to fill up.”
She sits and stretches her legs, knees locked. “I want bubble bath,” she says, but there’s no more bubble bath and I’m not allowed to buy any more because it’s not essential. Bubble bath is the good ole days, I tell her, and those are over, but she hasn’t known any good ole days. I soap up a towel and hand it to her; the water turns gray as she slops it over her body.
“When’s the last time somebody washed your hair?” I ask. She shrugs. “I know it wasn’t last night, or the night before, because I bathed you.” She shrugs again and holds her nose. My coworkers don’t like me to wash her hair because all I can do is brush it back into a bushy ponytail, but they don’t want to bathe her; they don’t want to deal with her. I feel like I’m in a marriage and we have too many children and all we can do is catalogue our efforts and it all seems like too much, like more than anyone could ever expect, and we’re being grossly taken advantage of.
She swishes her head from side to side. Her hair doesn’t want to absorb water, not like mine. I squeeze some shampoo on top and soap it up and she wants me to play with her but I just want to get her out and dressed so I can do meds and clean the kitchen, so I can relax for an hour before the next shift comes on.
She stands and bends over, makes her anus pulse.
“Very nice,” I say, “lovely. Now get out.”
I bundle her in a towel and hold her like my mother used to hold me, when she called me her little papoose and rocked me before bed. I sigh and she sighs in response and I’m reminded how smart she is, too smart for a seven-year-old.
I unlock the pantry and open the medicine cabinet, shake Diamond’s bottle of Adderall to see how many are left. I started taking them occasionally—though the occasions are becoming more and more frequent—because it makes the time go faster and nobody counts; we just refill the prescriptions when they run out. Along with the Adderall, Diamond takes half a yellow pill that melts on her tongue, a tiny white one she swallows with water, and a spoonful of a pink refrigerated liquid. I’m pretty sure the pink one is for her cough, though I haven’t noticed her coughing. The kids always seem to be taking medicine for problems they don’t have.
Diamond sits in my lap while I pass out small cups of water and pills. We were given a book that describes the medications—side effects and proper dosage—and the director said we’d be tested but I knew we wouldn’t so I didn’t bother to learn them. Had there been even the vaguest possibility of a test, I’d have studied.
There’s a knock at the door and we look at each other. A few minutes later, I’m buckling her into the backseat of a blue sedan.
I sit next to her while my boss talks to the woman. “You’ll be back,” I say, though maybe she won’t this time. Maybe she’ll flourish under this specially trained foster mother. Maybe this woman will adopt her and she’ll go to college and make good grades and have a lot of friends.
I hold her hand and we sit quietly until the woman gets in her car and looks back at us. I don’t know her name, though I’ve met her a dozen times. The social workers are all pleasant and cheaply dressed and we only see them when they’re shuffling the kids around. Like the girls, I ignore them unless I need something.
“Well,” I say.
“Well,” the woman says.
“Well,” Diamond says, so I open the door.
She’s gone five days. The only difference is she has less stuff now.
She runs and jumps into my arms and I carry her around the cottage on my hip. She bucks up and down and I tell her to stop and then we sit at the kids’ table and color, occasionally looking up to comment on each other’s pictures. I color the sky red and the grass blue and Strawberry Shortcake gray but I stay within the lines. Diamond colors everything the right color but doesn’t stay within the lines. When we finish one, we tear it out, make a neat stack on the table.
“I want that one,” Diamond says, so I give her my coloring book. She looks at the picture I was working on—Strawberry Shortcake taking a bubble bath while her cat paws at a bubble—and says she doesn’t want this one, she wants another one. I sort through the shelf of coloring books she can’t reach and hand her Beauty and the Beast and Spider-Man and Blue’s Clues and they all go skidding across the floor, open-faced. Then she shoves the baby, who falls, cushioned, on her ass. The baby looks at me to confirm that something terrible has happened to her before screaming.
I drag Diamond to her room and push her in, hold the door closed while she tears it apart. There’s only so much damage that can be done: chairs topple, shoes hit the wall. She sticks her fingers through the vent and reaches for my legs and says she’s going to tell her daddy, that her daddy is big and mean and he is going to kill me.
“You gone die,” she says.
“Okay.”
“My daddy gone kill you.”
“That’s fine,” I say, each of my responses sending her further out of control. I remember the time she was admitted to Beech Grove. I went to see her and she was bloated and looked at me like she’d never seen me before, and the nurse acted as though it was normal for a thin, energetic child to turn fat and unresponsive in the span of two weeks. After that I threatened to quit and my boss agreed to bring her back because I do certain things that the others can’t, or won’t.
Diamond finally tires herself out and slides to the floor, and I sit against the other side for a few minutes before letting myself in. We right her chairs and put the covers back on the beds. She puts her shoes in the closet, brings me her trash can to show me the busted plastic. Then we lie in the bed by the window, facing each other. We alternate closing our eyes, looking at each other in turns. Next month, she’ll go to court and testify against her father. Already, she spends so much of her time talking to therapists about the things he has done to her. I want to take her out to my car and drive until we find a nice little house in a nice little town. We’d watch movies together at night in our pajamas and I’d forget about my husband and my growing dependence on Adderall and she’d forget about all of the bad things that have happened to her.
“Come on,” I say. “Let’s go outside.”
I push her on the swing and she tells me to push her higher, higher. I push her so high the swing set starts jumping. When I get tired, I sit next to her and she trails her foot across the oval of dirt to slow herself before jumping off. Then she climbs into my lap, facing me, and I help get her legs into position. I’m too old to swing—it makes me nauseous—and I’m certainly too old for spider, but I hold still as she places her hands on either side of my face as if she’s going to kiss me, or take my temperature, and tell her to hang on.
Back inside, I put in The Nutty Professor and we sit on the couch. Diamond watches the movie as if she hasn’t seen it thirty times, bursting into laughter at all the right places, while I look out the window, past the pile of bikes and wagons, to the street. Whenever I tell someone I work here, they say they never see kids outside, that they didn’t know kids actually lived here.
The next day I’m not working but I go in anyway and pick up Diamond. My boss doesn’t care and no one else knows what goes on. I’ve only seen the director twice. Both times he gave us a packet to study for tests that were never administered and then went around the room asking us to toot each other’s horns.
Diamond has a stain on her shirt so I take her to her room and sort through her drawers. I hold up a shirt and she shakes her head. Night shift does laundry and they never see the girls so they don’t know who wears what. Finally I find a shirt that’s hers, that she doesn’t mind wearing, and put her in it. It’s yellow with flowers around the collar and a small pocket. I give her a quarter for the pocket and then we go out to my car and I buckle her into the passenger seat of my Toyota.
She leans forward and pun
ches buttons—1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6—before we can hear what’s playing.
“Chill out,” I say, grabbing her hand.
“I want ice cream,” she says.
“There’s ice cream at my house.” I think of all the things at my house—big-screen TVs and dozens of DVDs and fresh food, three different kinds of Blue Bell—and how they don’t mean anything because I’ve always had them.
I park in the driveway and wave to my neighbor watering his lawn. He’s an old man who still calls black people “Negroes.” I once saw him methodically drown a possum in a trash can full of water. He pulled the thing out and it was still alive so he plunged it back into the can and held it there before pulling it out again. He did it over and over, so slowly it was like a horror movie.
My husband has his straw hat on, the khaki elastic-waist shorts he always mows in. He turns the mower off and says hey and I say hey and he turns it back on. Diamond and I go inside and stand in the living room.
“Where your dog?” she asks.
“In the backyard.”
We walk into the dining room and look down at the dog. She has a shock collar around her neck—a recent development. She is an unpredictable animal that barks at nothing and doesn’t like people but loves other dogs and even cats. As a puppy, she seemed fine, normal even, and then she turned into a creature that scratched itself bald and would eat until it threw up and then eat that.
I had wanted a dog for years and felt certain it was my fault despite what the vet said—that some dogs are born bad, like some people.
“What her name?”
“Roxie, but I call her Shiggydiggy. She only knows one word and that’s bath. Shiggydiggy wanna bath? And then she goes and hides under the bed and I have to fish her out with a broom.”
We watch Roxie run up and down inside the path she has worn, full speed, no way out. My husband hates to mow back there because it’s full of shit.
I pick up the remote control and press a button, a warning sound that means if she keeps barking she’s going to get shocked. The dog doesn’t respond to the sound at all. She doesn’t respond to the shocks, either. Despite her problems, she has a few charming qualities. Some days, before my husband gets home from work, we lie in bed and spoon. Every time I open my hard drive, she comes running to see the CD make orbs of light on the walls. When I wash dishes, she likes to watch the water ripple on the cabinets, the pots flash.
We go into the kitchen and look at the refrigerator: coloring book tear-outs with Diamond’s name in jostled letters at the top, a photograph of Roxie in reindeer ears.
“It took us forever to get a couple of good ones to use as Christmas cards.”
I take the rocky road from the freezer, and she eats a bowl while looking around at the cheerful wallpaper and plum-colored curtains, the clean white appliances. The woman who lived here before decorated the house and my husband moved in and then I moved in.
We listen as he comes clomping up the basement stairs and then he’s standing with us in the kitchen, filling a glass with ice. His shirt is soaked through and there are flecks of grass and dirt all over him.
“What do you want to do?” I ask Diamond, who is gazing up at my husband. My husband is tall and good-looking but insecure about his looks because of his high forehead and too-thin chest. He lifts weights in the basement four times a week. He likes beer and football and reads motorcycle magazines with bikinied women on the covers, though, to my knowledge, he’s never been on a motorcycle. But this makes him sound like a dick and he’s not a dick, not at all. He spent weeks combing the nits out of my hair when I caught lice from one of the white girls—a tedious and time-consuming ordeal—and insisted on sleeping next to me in bed.
I drive Diamond across town to the mall; it’s the kind of place I hate but drive to without thinking. There’s a park next to the mall, a walking path around a lake, and sometimes I put on my tennis shoes and go there. Sit on a swing and look at the ducks. If I take the dog with me, I have to keep her on a short leash so she doesn’t try to bite anyone.
At the food court, I order a box of chicken nuggets and a small Coke and we sit at a table and eat while the other children play on the plastic tree, a replica of the one at Disney World. I look around—sometimes we run into girls who are back home with their families. We talk to them with our eyes and hands when their people’s backs are turned.
“I’ve seen the real tree,” I say. “It was fake, too. I ate Moroccan food and went on a safari and there were lions and tigers and bears, oh my.”
She stops chewing and cocks her head at me.
“I wish you’d been there,” I say, as I help her take off her shoes.
She walks over to the tree and climbs the trunk, sticks her head out and waves before sliding down. She befriends a Mexican boy and slaps him on the ass once, good and hard, but nobody seems to mind. I move to the bench with the other parents and watch them ride a squirrel together, Diamond in front like the man. After a while, she gets bored and pushes him off and then stands and waves at me with her whole arm.
The woman next to me, a blonde in spandex, asks if she’s mine and I tell her no. She’s the kind of woman who comes on Wednesday nights to bring movies and popcorn. These women smile too much and won’t use the bathroom, and it makes me want to steal their husbands so they can see how quickly life can rearrange itself into unfamiliar and unpleasant patterns.
“I work at a temporary shelter for abused and neglected children,” I say, hating myself for wanting this woman to say I’m good, that what I am doing is a good thing.
“I bet that’s very rewarding,” she says.
“Not really.”
I close my eyes long enough to imagine the world dark and full of noise, and then open them and find Diamond. I stare at an old man eating an ice cream cone, spinning the swirl of vanilla over his tongue. I watch him the same way he watches me—blankly, without interest—and wonder if Diamond will remember that someone loved her once, if she’ll have any memory of me at all.
UPHILL
The RV park is nice and shady. The residents are mostly older and quiet, but the bugs are loud. There are all sorts of bugs and they are all so loud.
I’m sitting at the picnic table next to the trailer he has just bought, carefully avoiding the piles of bird crap while watching him fashion a wooden chute for the sewer hookup. He’s impressed with himself, using nails he’s found on the ground and wood from a scrap pile. Every few minutes he stops to admire his work.
“Our shit travels uphill,” he says.
“That’s amazing.”
He sits across from me and I watch him dig around in his box full of small tools.
Before the trailer he lived on his uncle’s boat, but he sank it, and before that he lived in a van in his boss’s garage. When I get drunk, I yell at him and call him homeless and we don’t talk for weeks but then I find myself with him again—just a cup of coffee, just as friends—and the cycle repeats itself. We’re at the beginning of the cycle now.
“So I got this call earlier,” he says. His voice has the high, strained quality it takes on when he’s lying or asking to borrow money. “This friend who lives in Hawaii wants me to drive to Biloxi to take a picture of a lady.”
“A picture of a lady?”
“I haven’t talked to this guy in a long time.”
“Who is he?”
“He sells dope,” he says. “He’s a bad guy.”
A lot of his friends sell dope, but I’ve never heard him call any of them bad guys before. “He sells weed?” I ask.
“Huge quantities of high-grade stuff. Mostly legal.”
“That sounds like a bad idea.”
“Yeah, it’s probably a bad idea,” he says.
I’m surprised to hear him agree with me. He stops digging around in his box. I turn a page in my magazine. “How much did he offer to pay you?”
“He said to name my price. I was thinking a thousand.”
“A thousand? If someone t
ells you to name your price you don’t say a thousand. Did you tell him you couldn’t do it?”
“I said I’d call him back.”
“Why didn’t you tell him you couldn’t do it?” If I wasn’t here, or we were in a fight, he would already be on his way down there.
“I’m not gonna do it.”
“They’re going to kill that woman,” I say, because I want to hear what it sounds like. I want him to say no, they’re not, but he doesn’t. There she is—eating a tunafish sandwich or watching a game show on TV, not knowing she will soon be dead. It’s kind of thrilling. I wonder what she looks like, if she’s pretty.
“I’ll call him right now with you sitting there and tell him I can’t do it. I’m going to have to make some stuff up.”
“Of course, make some stuff up. I don’t care.” I flip another page in my magazine, a Cosmopolitan from November 2002. I found a whole stack of them in his Laundromat. “Wait,” I say. “Hold on a second.”
“What?”
“Let’s think about this for another minute.” This is not my life, or it is not the life I’m supposed to be living, and so I can pretend that it is. I don’t consider the actuality of my situation, which is that every day I live this life it becomes more and more mine, the real one, and the one I’m supposed to be living falls further away; eventually it will be gone forever. “Whether or not you take the picture, somebody’s going to do it and the woman’ll be dead, right?”
“That’s right,” he says.
“So either way she’s dead and all he wants you to do is take a picture. And you’re broke.”
“I’m not broke.”
He takes a sip of his beer, the beer I bought. I know exactly how much money he has because he empties his pockets out on the counter as soon as he gets home, balled-up ones and fives, sometimes a couple of twenties. He never has more than fifty dollars on him.