by Mary Miller
I take the boy’s hand as we walk out to the car, and he lets me hold it a second before pulling away. And then he jams his hands into my sides while making a sound like chicka chicka chicka. I laugh but it doesn’t tickle. His father likes to stick his fingers in my ribs. That doesn’t tickle, either.
“Stop it,” Richie says. “Don’t play so rough with her.” I look at the boy, place my hand on top of his head, and he looks up at me. I shrug. I don’t know how to act around him. Richie wanted us to like each other and now that we do, he wants us to like each other less.
At the house, I put my swimsuit back on and go into his mother’s room to use the bathroom—she’s in Tupelo this weekend, at a beauty pageant with Richie’s sister and her two girls. The toilet across the hall from the guest room doesn’t flush right and sometimes I have to fill the bucket with water and pour it into the tank and I don’t like to stay in the bathroom that long. If I don’t shit, if I’m pretty and don’t ask too many questions, he’ll love me. He’ll tell me things—his thoughts and ideas, where his money comes from, what he does when I’m not around. Now he just tells me the worst things that have happened to him, same as he tells everyone, like the story of his father’s race car going round and round the track and then crashing into a wall in a burst of flames as his entire family watched. He gets angry when people touch his arm, or look at him a certain way, and it makes everyone fall in love with him.
I peel the avocados with my fingers while he marinates fish, cuts the steak into strips. I dice onions and tomatoes and mash it together with a fork, add garlic salt and lime. Richie uses a separate bowl for everything: one for the sour cream, one for the chopped tomatoes, one for the shredded cheese, one for the salsa.
The boy dips an edge of a tortilla chip into the salsa, careful not to get any chunks.
“You don’t like tomatoes?” I ask. He doesn’t respond. “Tomatoes are the most amazing food ever.” He’s watching Wolverine versus the Incredible Hulk on the small television.
“Try the guacamole,” Richie says. “Alice made it for you.”
“Noooo,” he says. He looks at me and then looks back at the TV: the Incredible Hulk smashes Wolverine with a boulder, and after the Hulk walks away, Wolverine—fully recuperated, not a scratch on him—surprises him from behind. Then they switch off.
“Which one is the good guy?” I ask, and I think about this guy I used to like, a former coworker I’d hung out with on breaks, and how I thought he was going to be my boyfriend but then he started dating a twenty-two-year-old—schooling her in his various interests: scotch and acupuncture and Tai Chi, things I might have actually liked to know something about. I think of the time I straddled him at a party, how I hadn’t felt anything.
“Wolverine,” the boy says.
“I thought the Incredible Hulk was a regular person, like a researcher or something.”
“They’re both government experiments gone wrong,” Richie says.
“Wolverine versus Thor is next,” the boy tells me, and Richie takes the fish outside to the grill. I watch him from the window, look at the sky: it looks like rain. I wonder what we’ll do then, how we will entertain each other.
That night, the three of us watch a show on the Discovery Channel about a prehistoric creature that lived in the water. From above, they show a ship and then a humongous black thing swimming into the picture; it could tump it easily if it bothered: everybody dead. They tell us how the creature lived, how it might have died: diseases, sharks. Then they move on to a bird that was shaped like a flamingo but much larger, that could run fast and crush an animal’s skull with one crack of its beak, but it hunted alone and every time it laid its eggs, wolves would eat them. The scientist-people recreate the bird in steel and show its beak coming down on a honeydew melon. They tell us that the honeydew melon has the same consistency as the gray matter in our brains, which impresses the boy, but Richie and I get bored with the repetition, the same few scenes that stretch the show into an hour-long time slot. He reads Time magazine, a winding line of laid-off people on the cover, and I pick up one of his mother’s watercolor books. It’s an old lady book with step-by-step instructions and boring still-lifes. His mother probably paints fruit bowls and pastoral scenes—she is probably happy painting fruit bowls and pastoral scenes. I wonder what it would be like in her head—occasionally there’d be a thought like I am nearly out of detergent and then she’d write it on a list and it would go away. And then maybe an hour later, another thought would come along, something like I wonder what comes on television tonight and she’d get out the TV Guide. I wonder if she ever closes her eyes and sees the car going around the track, slamming into the wall.
When the show is over, Richie takes the boy to use the bathroom. Lately the boy has been peeing in the bed and they wake up with their legs wet. Every time he tells me about the boy peeing on him, I recall a drunken night in high school when a friend and I slept in my twin bed and I peed and blamed it on her. I told the same girl that the Ouija board said she was going to die in an accident nearly a year into the future and gave her the date. Only in retrospect is it possible to see I was a bully. I never thought of myself that way at all.
I pick up the remote control and flip stations, check out the reality TV shows I’ve been missing. At home, I don’t have cable; I only have a small stack of DVDs I’ve seen so many times I have them memorized: The Virgin Suicides, The Big Lebowski, American Beauty, Thank You for Smoking. Sometimes I consider how The Dude would react, how he’d adhere to a strict drug regimen and go bowling.
They come back into the den and I look up at them and smile.
“Tell Alice good night,” Richie says.
“Good night,” the boy says. He puts his arms around me and I smell his soapy-clean hair and skin, then they go back to their bedroom where Richie reads to him from the book the boy gave him for Father’s Day. On the cover, a father bear squeezes his cub, a pink heart above their heads.
I watch the dogs at the door, Richie’s dumb friendly one and his mother’s old deaf one that can’t hear itself whine, and tiptoe into the kitchen to get a beer, open the drawer to look for a bottle opener. I’m trying to be quiet because I want the boy to go to sleep but I’m making a racket. Finally I find one and open the bottle, leave the top on the counter. Then I go back into the den and read about the laid-off people, everyday people who probably did their jobs as well as all of the other fuckups out there, but I can’t concentrate because I start thinking about Richie and how I told him I loved him again—an accident—and how he held my face so I’d have to look him in the eyes and said, “And you know how I feel about you.”
When I’m sure they’re both asleep, I creep over to the doorway and find them facing away from me, Richie’s arm around the boy. I touch my boyfriend and he opens his eyes. He follows me into the den, puts his arms around my waist and rests his head on my shoulder.
“Walk me out?” I say.
“You can stay here,” he says.
“I know, but I need to go home.” I don’t like sleeping in his mother’s guest room, waking up alone in a bed decorated with seashells, paintings of boats and empty beach chairs on the walls.
We stand in the driveway and kiss. Then I get in my car and roll down the window.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he says.
I wonder if leaving will make him love me more. Maybe he’ll feel like I’m slipping away, that I’ll find someone else to watch television with and wander through the aisles of Winn-Dixie. I back out of the driveway, my windshield so foggy I can barely see. I try wiping it with my hand and then put the defrost on full blast and still nothing.
A policeman turns out of the gas station and follows me slowly across the bridge before turning off. He stays in his town, which is a nicer town separated from mine by a bridge.
Richie has an interview for a job teaching troubled kids, teenagers who have been taken out of regular school and put in a smaller, remedial school with the hope of tran
sitioning back. He finished his degree in May and wants to use it, to stop working with his hands. Once, I overheard him tell my friend Gretchen that he was a carpenter by trade, which was something I didn’t know, which was possibly a lie. He says the house he moved out of, the one in Florida where he lived with his family, was full of furniture and art he’d made and now it all belongs to his ex-wife. But his ex-wife lives here so I’m not sure what has happened to this house, if it’s been sold, if it was ever theirs to begin with.
While I’m in class, he goes to the mall and buys a tie, dress shirts.
“I don’t know how to tie a tie,” he tells me over the phone.
“Ask your mother.”
“I’ll Google it,” he says, and I wonder about his handshake. These are the two main things my brothers learned from our father: handshakes and ties.
I’m at home when he sends me a full-length picture he takes in the mirror: clean-shaven, collared shirt, tie, khaki pants: Disguised as the enemy. He calls immediately after to ask if I got it.
“You look like a regular boy.”
“You mean man.”
“Of course, a very manly man in a pair of Duck Heads,” I say, which reminds me of an ex who wore khakis to work every day at his engineering job. We’d buy his Duck Heads at Kohl’s and once a week, I’d iron a stack of them.
“Come over,” he says.
I put my swimsuit in my purse, my toothbrush in case I spend the night. Then I drive across the bridge while listening to a Deer Tick CD he burned me. He burns me dozens of CDs he wants me to like, brings them over in envelopes with the songs neatly labeled. I stop at the gas station and pick up a six-pack, and then pull up to his mother’s house, where he’s mowing the lawn with his shirt off.
I pretend to read while watching him ride back and forth on the mower.
I think it’s a night he doesn’t have the boy but then his ex-wife pulls up in her shiny late-model SUV, and Richie drives the lawnmower over to the edge of the grass to greet them. I wonder where the money comes from, how there is always money when nobody works, and look at my old Honda parked on the street. His ex-wife: skinny with fake boobs and dyed red hair, a viney tattoo climbing up the back of her neck. She goes around to the passenger side and takes the boy out of his car seat, holding him on her hip like a baby. He has a camcorder in his hands. She puts him down and he shuffles over to where I’m sitting, drinking a beer.
“Does it work?” I ask.
“Of course,” he says. He punches a button and the red light blinks on.
“Do something,” I say, taking it from him. He climbs onto the lawnmower, hops off and kicks a tree. I point the camera at Richie’s ex-wife, who says she’ll be at the boy’s soccer game tomorrow.
After she leaves, the boy goes inside to put his swimsuit on and Richie sits on the diving board, takes the pipe out of his cigarette box. The weed is dry now. He offers it to me and I shake my head. A couple of boyfriends ago, the other one I really liked, smoked pot every day. I smoked with him the first time and never did it again; it was something that made me different from the other girls he’d been with, the sad-childhood girls who’d had to be hospitalized after taking too many pills.
“You can come to the game if you want,” he says. “Did I show you the shirts?”
The other coaches were happy being red or blue but Richie had his green shirts printed with a cumbersome, ridiculous name, something like Ninja Jujitsu Warrior Robots. “I don’t want to be around her,” I say. The way they constantly swap him has little to do with the boy or the boy’s needs—I want to say this but can’t. “Pass me that pipe.” He covers up the hole on the side with his thumb as he lights it for me and then his thumb moves on and off while I inhale. I think about the circular box with metal teeth that my ex-boyfriend had, the nubs of joints in his ashtray, how he would collect a bunch and then smoke them, too. All of these things were called something.
I take another hit and the boy comes back out, walks over to the plastic storage bench and throws boards into the water: various sizes, with various superheroes on them. He doggy paddles to the deep end and grabs onto the diving board, shows me how he can pull up. His arms are so small and thin. I like the way they feel when he hugs me at night, before he goes to bed, before I fuck Richie quietly on his mother’s couch.
“What do you want for supper?” he asks the boy.
“Tacos,” the boy says, which is what he always says before he’s reminded of his other options.
“What about hamburgers?” Richie asks.
“Yeah!” the boy says, pushing off.
“That okay with you?”
“I can feel all the muscles in my face,” I say, touching my forehead, pulling at my cheeks.
“It’s because you’re smiling like that.”
“I’m smiling?”
His mother comes out with one of her granddaughters, the younger pageant girl. She’s blond and blue-eyed, wearing a lavender swimsuit with a ruffle around the waist. She walks over to me and points a tiny finger.
“Who is her?” she asks.
“Who is she?” Richie says. “Alice.”
The girl turns and walks back to Richie’s mother, who puts floaties on her arms. It makes me want a sassy beautiful little girl who will be a cheerleader and Homecoming Queen and Sigma Chi Sweetheart, all of the things I rejected outright because they weren’t options.
“She’s amazing. I want to steal her.”
“I’ll sell her to you,” he says. And then, “I got something in the mail that says I’m supposed to get fingerprinted on Wednesday.”
“That’s good.”
“I assume.”
“They’ll probably drug test you, too,” I say.
He tells me he’ll get something to flush his system, that he’ll pass. I like this kind of confidence; even if he failed, I’d be impressed. He starts messing around with his plants, pulling off dead leaves, so I go to his bedroom and sit on his bed, take my swimsuit out of my oversized purse. I’ve slept in his bed once. The sheets smelled clean but felt dirty, just like I’d imagined. The next morning, he had to get up early to help a friend move but before he left, he kissed me and told me to sleep in and I felt loved.
I look at the guitars hanging on the walls, an expensive stringed instrument he brought back from India. He couldn’t check it and had to hold it in his lap through the entire flight. There are bookshelves full of books, camping equipment, a piano, stacks of pictures and letters and clothes, his son’s toys scattered across the floor. A life that once filled a house compressed into a room.
I swim breaststroke, counting to ten laps before letting myself rest. I know Richie thinks I should be playing with the kids or throwing the half-deflated ball to his dog instead of swimming back and forth. I try to keep the count straight in my head, but then I lose track and start estimating and then the boy pushes a board at my head and I stand in two feet of water. It feels strange for so much of my body to be exposed.
I hold the board steady while he kneels on it and then I let go and he attempts to stand while he’s still wobbly and falls off.
“Get your balance first,” I say. He tries again and again, doing the same thing each time, and then gives up. I look over at the girl.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
“Keeton,” Richie’s mother says, and I watch her happily admiring her legs as they chop the water. If she were mine, we’d go everywhere together; we would never be lonely and she would renew my faith in humanity.
The boy hasn’t done this for Richie.
“I hear you were in a pageant,” I say, and she says something I can’t make out and Richie says, “Tell her about your trophy, Keeton.” She uses her hands to show me—round as a globe and tall as a skyscraper. I get out and lay a towel by the side of the pool, lie on my side and watch her drown the boy’s dinosaurs while the water dries on my skin.
The next afternoon, Richie picks me up in his Bug and we drive out to the country. We pass con
venience stores with handwritten signs advertising meat and cigarettes and God.
“I have anxiety,” I say. My hair blowing everywhere doesn’t help. I gather it to one side and hold it.
“Why?” he asks.
“I don’t know why.” Because we drink all the time, I think. Because I’ve been having panic attacks for years but you wouldn’t know anything about that because you don’t know anything about me. Lately I’ve been buying books about it: The Worry Cure, The Chemistry of Calm. The books say I have distorted thoughts, that these distorted thoughts create feelings, and these feelings result in my body’s responses—shortness of breath, shaky hands, upset stomach, rapid heartbeat.
“Do you want my hat?”
“I’m fine.” I twist my hair into a knot and tuck it into my shirt but it keeps blowing and I keep fooling with it and finally he takes off his hat and hands it to me. It’s an old-man hat that has come back into style, a button on top and a mesh back. I saw Brad Pitt wearing one in a picture; he was on a child’s bicycle, playing with his son in a lush green yard.
“Is my camera in the backseat?” he asks, as we pass another dilapidated barn. I try to breathe and look out the window at the wide flat yards and skinny pines, the houses set back from the road; three grubby children play on a stack of mattresses beside a mailbox. Other than the children, the country is eerily empty.
“Fuck it,” he says, turning around in someone’s driveway.
He drives up and down the main drag, my town laid out flat and ugly as a strip mall.
The patio at the Hog is mostly empty. We talk about a young lawyer-type in a suit, how pretentious it is to be wealthy and employed. Richie buys expensive shirts and then turns them inside out or cuts the labels off so he can pretend he doesn’t care about money. When the waitress comes over, we order two-for-one screwdrivers and two dozen raw oysters.