Beauty of the Broken

by Tawni Waters

  “I’ve only had it twice. Once on my birthday, and once on New Year’s Eve. If you drink it slowly, you can pick out the different flavors in it. My dad’s a total wine snob. This is how you do it.” She takes a drink of her cider and swishes it around in her mouth. “Hmmmm,” she says in a snooty voice, “I taste raspberries with an underlying oaky flavor, and perhaps a hint of smoked salmon.”

  I laugh. “Smoked salmon?”

  “Sure.” She giggles. “It’s really just bullshitting. You can say it tastes like whatever you want.”

  I take a sip and swish it around. “Well,” I say slowly, “I think it tastes like rainbows and flowers and every other perfect thing in the world. That’s what I think it tastes like.”

  Xylia smiles. “That’s better than salmon.”

  As we drink our cider, Xylia’s leg presses against mine. I feel close to her. I want to get closer. I want to tell her a secret.

  “I’ve never drank alcohol before because it scares me. Both of my parents are drunks,” I blurt out. As soon as I say it, I feel guilty. I backtrack. “I mean, it’s okay. My momma is a nice drunk. The worst thing she’s gonna do is cry.”

  “What about your dad?” Xylia asks. It doesn’t feel nosy. It feels like she actually cares.

  “My dad?” My throat tightens. “Watch out. He’ll kill you.” I can’t believe I said it. This is the first time I’ve ever told anyone about Daddy.

  “Does he hurt you?” Xylia asks quietly.

  “Not me,” I say. “Not yet, anyway. But my mom and my brother, yeah, he hits them. He’d hit me, too, if he knew what I was.”

  “What are you? Some kind of alien?” Xylia asks, trying to make me smile, but her eyes are still worried.

  I think about telling Xylia that I like girls, and then I decide not to. What if she hates me? What if she gets up and leaves me here with my cider? Tears sting my eyes. The last thing I want to do is end up blubbering like my momma. “I think you should teach me how to dance,” I say quickly.

  Xylia stares at her glass, watching bubbles rise. “You know you can tell me anything, right?”

  The heat from her leg seeps into mine. “I just told you more than I’ve ever told anyone,” I whisper.

  “Want to say more?” Xylia asks.

  “Not really.”

  Xylia grabs my hand. “Okay.” She lifts my fingers to her lips and kisses my knuckles. Then she puts her glass on her desk and stands up. As she pulls out her iPod and scrolls through the songs on her playlist, I watch her, feeling naked, wishing I’d said less and wishing I’d said more all at the same time. She holds out her hand to me. A man’s scratchy voice sings, “ ‘Come in,’ she said, ‘I’ll give you shelter from the storm.’ ” Xylia sings along for a minute, still smiling, and then says, “May I have this dance?”

  I should be nervous, but just being near Xylia makes me happy. I take her hand in mine.

  “First, you have to feel the music.” She grabs my other hand and pulls me to her. Her body bounces to the beat. “Feel that?” she asks. “Feel the rhythm?”

  I whisper that I do. I feel the rhythm. I feel the pounding drums and the gyrating air molecules and Xylia. Most of all, I feel Xylia. I feel her like she’s a part of me. I feel her soft skin and her pounding heart and her gentle breath. I think I even feel her soul. I’m almost sure that’s what the warmth wrapping around me is. She leans her head on my shoulder.

  “See, dancing isn’t so hard,” she says.

  “No,” I say, putting my arms around her waist.

  We stay like that for a long, long time, moving together, becoming the music. Becoming each other.

  CHAPTER 10

  IDREAM I’M TIPTOEING THROUGH a sunlit forest, smelling leaves, talking to deer and raccoons. Bob Dylan’s voice sings to me from somewhere far away. I’m ten again and boobless, wearing only a pair of jeans. I used to love to go without a shirt, back when Momma said I had a good eternity before my boobs came in, and why in heaven’s name should a little girl have to wear a shirt when there was no one to see her but God and the chickens, when the only men around were her daddy, who had held her naked since she was three hours old, thank you very much, and her brother, who couldn’t care less to look at her even if she did have boobs. In my dream, I’m a child, and I’m happy.

  But then the dream changes. The trees go black, and I see a face peeking at me from the branches. It’s bigger than the whole sky. It has slick hair and several chins. Its eyes burn with hate. “Reverend Winchell,” I whisper. I glance down, and my boobs have come in. I’m still topless.

  “Abomination,” Reverend Winchell says. His booming voice echoes through the forest, and he shoots a flaming arrow at me from one of his dead eyes. The whole dream shatters and falls around me like confetti.

  I try to scream, but nothing comes out. I look around my room. The sun’s shining. The picture of me and Iggy sits on my dresser. We’re both holding fishing poles, smiling. In that picture I am boobless and topless, just like in my dream.

  I can smell bacon, salty and heavy with grease, and Momma’s famous cheese eggs sizzling on the griddle. I yank on some jeans, leaving my bed unmade, like always. I haven’t straightened my sheets since my birthday party, and they’re nothing more than a wad of fabric at the foot of the bed. Momma used to try to make me clean my room. Then she gave up. She just closes the door to my room if company’s coming over, which is almost never, because Daddy doesn’t like to have people in the house.

  Today is Saturday, which means Iggy and me can go fishing. We’ve spent our entire lives trying to catch Paul Bunyan, a seven-pound trout that haunts the river, eating all the biggest lures and giving Barnaby’s best fishermen the slip. Lately we’ve been using corn for bait. I read in one of Daddy’s hunting magazines that’s what fish are eating these days, though I can’t figure for the life of me how they got a hankering for corn down under the water. If it was stuck on the end of somebody’s hook, you’d think they’d stay as far away from corn as they could get. But if corn’s what they want, then corn’s what I’ll give them.

  When I get to the table, Momma greets me with a smile that’s only now starting to show signs of age. The blue of her eyes is fading, like someone dumped bleach in them, but Iggy tells her she’s still pretty when she cries about getting old.

  “Made you breakfast,” she says, setting a plate loaded with billows of soggy eggs and bacon in front of me. Daddy’s already gone, maybe off to buy fertilizer for the fields.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  Momma scoots out a chair and plops down next to me. Resting her chin on her fist, she watches me eat. Every forkful I shove down seems to feed her. I can almost see her belly getting fatter. She smiles and nods at me, like we are carrying on a conversation, instead of me slobbering over a platter of eggs.

  “Quit looking at me like that!” I want to say. But I’m afraid that will send Momma into one of her crying jags, so what I really say is, “Why don’t you have some too?”

  “Oh, no,” she says. “I’m watching my weight.”

  I study her as I chew, trying to work out the puzzle that’s my momma. She hasn’t eaten since I was twelve, as far as I can tell. I don’t know how she’s still alive. Some days she has more energy than a whole troop of acrobats. She dances around the house, singing like Ethel Merman, who I think is her personal hero. Those days, if she’s not dancing, she’s working, scrubbing down this or that, or whipping up some dinner she thinks will turn out like the picture in her Betty Crocker cookbook, but usually ends up looking more like something a puppy might leave on the floor. But then she has her sick days. Those days, she barely moves. Those days, she’s as quiet as the universe before light. Inside my head I hear Reverend Winchell say, “Without form and void, when darkness was on the face of the deep.” Thinking of Reverend Winchell makes me remember my dream, which reminds me that I am an abomination, which makes my chest hurt.

  “You like your breakfast?” Momma asks.

  I nod.


  “Good,” Momma says. “You should have seen your brother go after that bacon. He ate more than your daddy, even.”

  “Imagine that,” I mutter.

  I take another bite of eggs, while Momma watches me. She lives through us, my momma. We’re her chance to make up for the life she lost when she got married. People say that you only live once, but that’s not quite true. You can live two, three, or even four times, depending on how many kids you have. It irritates me suddenly, like a mosquito buzzing my brain, the way my momma’s trying to steal my life away.

  “Iggy’s probably got an appetite since Daddy’s gone to town and he can’t try to kill him today,” I say through a mouthful of eggs.

  It’s mean-spirited, and I know it. She winces, and the color fades from her cheeks. Slowly, she pushes away from the table, wanders over to the sink, sagging like a deflated balloon. Sharp guilt stabs at my belly.

  “Good eggs,” I mutter, trying to make up for what I said about Iggy. She turns around again, wearing her beauty-queen smile. But her lips are trembling.

  “I tried, Mara,” she says. I’m not sure what she means by that. If she’s talking about the eggs, well, they are pretty good. If she’s talking about Daddy beating Iggy, I guess maybe she has tried. Daddy hurts her, too, when he’s mad. I bet she’s scared as a stinkbug in a hen house.

  Just as I’m shoving the last bite of eggs into my mouth, Daddy’s boots pound up the front steps.

  “Morning, Rosebud,” he says as he bursts through the door, all covered in sweat. He kisses me on the cheek.

  He’s carrying two rifles, the one he gave to Iggy in one hand, his own in the other. When Iggy comes down the stairs, Daddy tells him to dust off his hunting boots, they’re gonna go killing. I see the red fear flare behind Iggy’s freckles, but Daddy’s too busy shining up his barrel to notice. Not that he’d care if he did.

  I glance over at me and Iggy’s fishing rods propped up by the door, waiting for us to reel in the fattest, oldest trout anyone in this town has ever seen.

  Iggy’s hands tremble a bit. He shoves them into his pockets. “All right, Daddy,” Iggy says finally. “I’ll come.”

  I almost fall out of my chair. “I wanna go.” I gulp down my last bit of milk. Iggy won’t live through this without me.

  I suppose my chicken chopping is why Daddy doesn’t question me wanting to tag along. Instead he shakes his head mournfully, like it’s a shame the only son he’s been given has a full-grown set of boobs and nothing between her legs.

  “Well, put on some long sleeves then,” he says finally. “You sure can’t go scrambling through the woods like that.”

  I race up to my room and slip into one of Iggy’s torn flannel shirts, thinking that if God needed someone to protect Iggy, he sure should’ve sent an angel tougher than me. I hate chopping the chickens, and I imagine I’ll hate putting a bullet in some poor flea-bitten jackrabbit even more. But it’s go along or let Daddy kick the crap out of Iggy again, which is a boatload worse than killing rabbits.

  “Hurry up,” I tell Iggy when I reach the front door.

  He’s squatting on Momma’s lilac rug, lacing up his boots slower than a toothless old maid eats walnuts. “Coming,” he mutters.

  After what feels like a million years, he finishes with his boots, and we head down the winding driveway and into the hills by the river. The air is cool and clean, stuck somewhere between winter and spring, all the snow melting away, all the trees threatening to push out new buds. Even the frogs seem to be getting into the spirit of things, croaking away. I feel bad for them because I know this isn’t real spring. This is fake spring. New Mexico does that sometimes. Heats up so you start to believe winter is over, and then, bam, it hits you with another blizzard.

  While we tromp through the mud, Daddy’s expression is far away and hopeful, the kind of expression people wear when they know they’re about to win the lottery. The kind of expression people wear when spring’s on the way, and all of the animals are coming out of hiding just in time to be shot.

  Iggy isn’t so happy. His brow is wrinkled, and his nostrils are wide and searching, sniffing, I suppose, for a secret path that will lead him away from this torture. I try to forget about fishing and enjoy the scenery, enjoy the smell of the earth giving birth, which smells a whole lot better than a pig giving birth. I know from personal experience.

  Daddy’s rifle is slung over his shoulder, the butt sticking straight up behind him like a dog’s tail, and his hair is standing up on the sides like two ears. I yank on Iggy’s sleeve and slow him down a little, whispering, “He looks like a bird dog.”

  The fear bleeds out of Iggy’s eyes for a minute. I forget all about being mad about having to protect him after that. That’s the way things go when you share a secret with someone. You forget everything else between you except that sweet, golden, honey of a secret. Me and Iggy are thinking about Daddy looking like a dog and trying hard not to laugh about it when a rabbit shoots out in front of us.

  “Hot damn!” Daddy shouts, pounding along behind the rabbit. He’s losing the footrace miserably, but he still has the advantage, being that he’s carrying a metal cylinder loaded with enough lead to make soup of that little rabbit’s brains, even from a long, long distance. The rabbit disappears into a cluster of bushes, and Daddy drops down on one knee and raises his rifle.

  “Get down, boys,” he hisses, forgetting in his excitement that I’m one organ short of a boy.

  We do.

  Daddy cocks his head to the side, sniffs the air. His hands are steady. He waits. The bushes move. The rabbit’s trembling. Iggy and me feel sorry for it. We want to cuddle it and take it home for a pet, but Daddy wants to kill it, and whatever Daddy wants is the thing that’s gonna happen. So we watch the bushes and the barrel of Daddy’s rifle and wait for his finger to move. We pray that the rabbit won’t suffer too much, that the bullet will hit him in the head or the heart, not the leg. The bushes move again. The rabbit makes a break for it.

  Daddy’s finger moves. My ears are swallowed by echoing waves of black thunder. Boom, boom, boom!

  We wait for the rabbit to fall. He doesn’t. Daddy’s running again, and we’re running after him, still deaf from the gunshots, waiting for the rabbit to die, praying that it will be quick. Praying that he is really a he, not a she with a nest full of orphan bunnies, waiting with aching bellies for a mother who will never come, searching the air for the smell of her. We think and pray and run, but the rabbit never falls.

  When Daddy stops, we gasp, partly because it feels like our chests have been stuffed with exploding grenades, partly because we’re shocked that Daddy didn’t get what he wanted. The rabbit disappears into the thickest part of the woods. Iggy and me smile at each other, not with our lips, but with our eyes, so Daddy won’t know we’re happy.

  “Well, boys,” he grunts. “We tried. Can’t say we didn’t give it our all, now can we?”

  We both say that no, it’s such a shame, but we’ll sleep better knowing we gave it our all, now how about we go home and have Momma make us a tuna fish sandwich, because all this disappointment has got us aching for some kind of nourishment. Daddy thinks a tuna fish sandwich doesn’t sound nearly as tasty as a nice thick flank of fried rabbit, and he tells us so, plodding deeper into the woods.

  The joke’s old now, and me and Iggy don’t laugh about him looking like a dog anymore. We just watch our feet and try to avoid tripping on rotted logs. We pray even braver prayers, our confidence bolstered by Daddy’s failure. We pray that Daddy will miss all the rabbits, and that we’ll go home empty-handed.

  The logs keep tripping me, and by the by I forget to pray. I forget to watch for rabbits. I even forget that I’m hungry. The earth around me sucks me up. I’m swallowed by the sounds of the churning river and the mournful whisper of the breeze.

  “You kids doing okay back there?” Daddy asks, and his concern touches me.

  “We’re fine, Daddy,” I say, studying him. He’s tall an
d paunchy around the middle, and his shoulders are stooped a bit, like he’s tired from carrying his gun. But his steps are quick and smooth, made young by his excitement. I remember how he was when I was little, how he would whisk me up in his arms and spin me around and around in circles. I remember the blue skirt of my dress flaring out behind me. I remember screaming, “I’m flying, Daddy!” I remember his eyes, how they danced, bright with fireworks and stars. I remember how I felt, dizzy and so full of happiness, when he set me on the tile. All I could do was fall to the floor and laugh.

  Even though I promised myself I’d never forget what he did to Iggy, I do. I forget I hate him for a while. Right now I want to be his little girl. I catch up with Daddy, and say, “Hey.” Slowly I slip my hand into his, a little bit shy. He jerks some when I do, like he’s surprised, but he doesn’t pull away. His face flushes. He’s happy, my daddy. I made him happy.

  Me and Daddy walk together like that, hand in hand, with Iggy traipsing along behind us. The clouds whisper over us, making pictures of daddies dancing with their little girls. We’re so happy with the warmth coursing back and forth between our fingers, we forget all about rabbits until one runs right in front of us, practically steps on Daddy’s toes.

  Iggy grabs his rifle before I know what he’s doing. He shoves out in front of me and Daddy, hot on the trail of the rabbit.

  “I’ll get him, Daddy!” he shouts.

  Daddy gets so excited to see his boy acting like a man, he drops my hand and runs after Iggy. “That’s it, son. Get him!”

  He’s never called Iggy “son” before, and it’s like Iggy grows a whole foot. His footsteps get faster. He’s running so quick and smooth, I feel like I’m watching one of those athletes from ancient Greece instead of my very own brother. The rabbit freezes in the middle of an open field, and I want to shout at him how dumb he’s being, why in God’s name didn’t he find a bush before stopping dead in his tracks?