Skylark

by Sara Cassidy

  On the way back into town, we stop for supper. We never do drive-through. We take any chance to get out of the car. We’ll go into A&W or Denny’s. Last payday, we went to the Old Spaghetti Factory with a two-for-one coupon. Mom has gotten really good at clipping coupons. Clem and I ate every last bite of the minestrone soup, spaghetti and spumoni ice cream. Mom had a Caesar salad.

  “Too bad Dad isn’t here,” I said. It just came out. Dad always used to be with us when we went to the Old Spaghetti Factory, which was usually for someone’s birthday. He’d moon over the old farm tools on the walls and explain to us what they were used for. “We had one of those. I remember my poor dad working with it, colorful words flying out of his mouth. That part always came loose, see?” Mom would have a Caesar salad then too. Through-line.

  “I wish he was here too,” Mom said quietly. “He misses you two, you know that.”

  “Yeah, I know that,” I said. “He misses you too. He says so every letter.”

  “Does he?”

  I gulped. “He tells me to look after you,” I said.

  “He tells me the same thing,” Clem said.

  Mom smiled. “And he tells me to look after you two.”

  After supper at the Old Spaghetti Factory, we drove along the ocean to the terminal where the cruise ships dock on their way between California and Alaska. We parked as close as we could to MS Amsterdam. The giant cruise ship towered over us. Mom pointed out the disks on the giant ropes tying it to shore.

  “They stop the rats from getting on board and traveling port to port,” Mom said. “If they’d had those a few hundred years ago, there wouldn’t have been the bubonic plague.”

  A station wagon was parked next to us. A couple sat in the front seats, and there was a kid in the back, about twelve years old. They were eating supper—it looked like burritos—from takeout wrappings. The car was packed with stuff—clothes and books and dishes.

  I was up front with Mom. I angled the rearview so Clem could see me. We often adjust the mirror so we can see each other as we talk. In the early days, we’d crane our necks and look back, but we’ve evolved. I gestured toward the car next door. Mom was going on about how ship design changed after the plague while Clem and I just stared. Another family living in a car. They could have just been traveling on a road trip, but I didn’t think so. They looked too much like they had nowhere to go. How many of us are there?

  We gawked for a while longer at the cruise ship looming over our heads and at the passengers coming and going, all of them looking overfed and slow.

  “These folks pay a thousand dollars for the joy of being cooped up,” Mom said. “I’ve heard that after the first two days of all-you-can-eat and swimming in the pool, they get bored and start to drink.”

  “They should have a BMX track on the top. That would be wicked,” Clem said.

  “I thought we’d sleep at Marifield tonight,” Mom said, turning the key in the ignition. The red dashboard lights went on and the engine revved high. “It’s like starting up a submarine,” Graham had said when he first showed us the car. “The red glow, the dials and gauges, engine revving like it’s going into the unknown.”

  Marifield is just a block long, with small houses and an apartment block. One of the houses seemed to be abandoned. We parked beside it and peed in the back-yard bushes. We like Marifield because it’s close to school. Mom often drives us to school while we’re getting dressed and eating breakfast—that’s one of the perks of living in a car. Of course, she drops us off a few blocks from school—I would die if anyone at school saw me being dropped off.

  On our way to Marifield, we passed the parking lot where carriage horses are led after a day pulling tourists through the city. They’re fed there and watered as they wait, restless, tails flicking, to be loaded onto a trailer that will take them out of the city for the night, to the farm where they belong, where they can sleep. I watched them standing in the moonlight, free of the carriage and their cumbersome bridles. They stamped their feet every so often, shook their manes. I felt sad as I watched them. I felt wistful. They were like me and Mom and Clem—they had each other, but they weren’t quite home.

  Scars

  I’ve gone to eight slams so far and placed second or third in three of them. I’m careful each week to come up with something new, something no one else has done. Mercy Girl made me anxious about imitating others, but that might be a lucky thing. It means I’ve got to figure out exactly what the other performers are doing so I don’t just do the same. I especially don’t want to imitate the hollow, empty delivery a lot of the slammers use, ending their lines with a rise in pitch as if they’re asking a question. Clem can’t stand it. Somehow, he figured out the problem. “They’re just saying the words,” he said. “They aren’t thinking about what the words mean. Here’s some advice. Every word you say, make it real. Like, if you’re saying fridge, picture a fridge.”

  So I do. I even imagine my hand on the sticky handle of that fridge. I invest energy in every word. If a word can’t take any energy, then maybe I need to cut it.

  I’m also careful not to use words that keep coming up in other people’s slam pieces. Shards is a favorite of theirs, and scars.

  I think about scars all the time. Scars are zippers—you open them up and a story tumbles out. When Mom is done putting on her makeup and brushing her hair in the morning, she turns the mirror so I can use it from the backseat. Sometimes, the morning light bounces off and brings to my eyes the shining dots on my forehead where the rose thorns went especially deep that day I went through the arbor and Dad kneeled before me.

  The scars remind me of the day Mom fell off the ladder. Mom was on the couch with her hand on her forehead, and Dad kneeled on the floor beside her. She told Dad she’d fallen while washing windows at the big house in Fairfield and how, luckily, the woman she was working for drove her home.

  “Didn’t she take you to a hospital?” Dad asked.

  “She said I didn’t need a hospital. Said I was fine. And I am. I will be.”

  Mom tried to sit but couldn’t.

  “I’ll make supper,” Dad said.

  We had grilled-cheese sandwiches and cucumber slices for supper, all of us in the living room, since Mom wasn’t about to move to the table. Dad had to fish around in the junk drawer for a bendy straw so she wouldn’t have to lift her head too much. Clem and I sat on the floor, and Dad pulled the armchair up close to Mom. Dad was still in his work clothes, the dust all over him glowing white as the sun went down and the living room darkened. Mom never moved off the couch that evening. Dad got her painkillers from the drugstore and fed her a couple every few hours. Mom fell asleep, and we tiptoed around.

  In the morning, Clem and I got our own breakfasts and made our lunches for school. After that, Mom didn’t work for over two months.

  When I think about it, that was the evening everything changed. That’s when the swerving and the veering started, the fighting between Mom and Dad, then Dad selling his truck, the truck he was so proud of.

  That last night Dad was home, when he said “I do” and Mom burst into tears, Dad said, “That woman should have taken you to the hospital. We should have sued her for having you work on an old ladder that was about to break.”

  “She didn’t know it was going to break,” Mom said between her tears.

  “It wasn’t right,” Dad argued.

  “You could have taken me to the hospital,” Mom said. “You could have gotten angry with her. I was down for the count.” Her voice was quieter as she added, “And I didn’t want to cause trouble.”

  “Me neither,” Dad confessed. “Neither of us is really the fighting kind. We’re too gentle, Rebecca. One of us has to start making some trouble.”

  Mom laughed at that.

  “I mean it, Rebecca,” Dad said. But he put on a funny face and repeated, all Humphrey Bogart, “One of us has to start making some trouble.”

  The two of them laughed. Mom reached out and squeezed Dad’s han
d. As she did, my heart hurt like it had never hurt before, like it was being clenched by the whole cold universe. Both my parents had tears in their eyes.

  A few weeks ago, as Mom laid the cutting board across the console for the night to join the front seats into a kind of bed, her necklace got caught in her hair. “Sweetheart,” she said. It was all she had to say. When you live in a car, three of you in a space the size of a closet, you don’t have to say much to get each other’s attention. I leaned over and untangled the necklace as gently as I could. Mom was wearing a new blouse, something from the Single Parent Resource Center clothing exchange, something too big, too loose. I could see down her collar. That was the first time I saw the scars on her back—two thick, red scars. I’m sure they’re from her fall that day when the ladder rung broke. What I imagine is that the broken ends of the rung dragged against her as she went down.

  I keep thinking I’ll ask Mom about the scars, but I don’t. The scars are Mom’s secret. There are other secrets she doesn’t tell. I know this because she is often quiet and because she greets us with a smile every morning and every afternoon after school and when she reaches over the driver’s seat to lay her hand on our foreheads and say goodnight. She never talks about painful things, like about her father dying when she was ten. Or about not finishing school. Or about making so many mistakes on the till at Sandwich Shack that they replaced the words on the buttons—tomatoes, olives—with little pictures of the different vegetables. Or about her husband leaving her to find rough work in an unknown place. Or about sleeping in the front seat of an old car each night, her hip supported by a thrift-store cutting board.

  Semifinals

  Clem has had it. He won’t come to the slam tonight, and Mom says she can’t make him.

  “He’s gone with you lots of times, Angie. He’s done his duty.”

  “He likes it,” I say.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You like the free food.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Clem,” Mom scolds. “What free food?”

  “The food he—”

  “Shut up!” Clem repeats.

  “What food?” Mom asks again.

  Clem gives me a sharp look. “Just because you want me there,” he hisses. “It isn’t all about you.”

  I relent. “They put out snacks once in a while.”

  “Oh,” Mom says. “Well, Clem needs an evening to rest. He has time trials coming up.”

  “I know,” I say. “But I’ve got semifinals this week.”

  “You’ll do fine,” Mom says. “I know you will.”

  So Clem gets dropped off at the park to practice, and Mom leaves me outside the Spiral with two dollars and fifty cents. Surfer and Mercy Girl are sitting at a table near the front, but they don’t invite me to sit with them. In fact, I’d swear that Surfer sticks his foot out for a split second as if to trip me. Every table is taken, so I stand at the back. I try to go through my poem in my head, but I can’t concentrate. I feel nervous and exposed without Clem.

  Mercy Girl gets called up to the stage. She approaches the mic with a sheet of paper in her hands. Her poem is about a girl who thinks her boyfriend has cheated on her. After a few lines, Mercy Girl tears the paper in half. “Why would you trample my innocence like that, why would you be so guilty?” To find out if her boyfriend is sneaking around, the girl reads her boyfriend’s diary.

  Mercy Girl continues to tear the paper in half and half again as she continues the story. After reading her boyfriend’s diary, the girl says she feels “torn” for having been so sneaky and untrusting. She’s also “torn up” by the words on the page, which—this is a funny bit—“are not all about another girl who’s more fun than me. They’re not about how quiet I get sometimes, or how worried, or that pimple I had last week. What you write in your diary, oh sweetheart, is the score of every game your basketball team played this season. That is all.”

  Mercy Girl tears up the last bits of paper. “I’m the guilty one. I have torn us apart. Now we are nothing but pieces. Pieces of the past.”

  Aaron is up next. His piece asks, what if there was Facebook during the French Revolution? It’s funny. “Like if you think we should storm the Bastille. Comment if you think we should continue with the beheadings.”

  Surfer tells a magical story about a whale who cannot sing. Then it’s my turn. My piece is about Skylark’s glove compartment, about how small it is but how I like to imagine it’s a portal to somewhere enormous. “Every time I pinch the latch, I think this time, it will let me in, let me through, to a ballroom, or outer space, glittering and expanding.”

  But I stumble over my words. I forget my lines. People snap their fingers, but I eventually have to reach into my pocket and, for the first time, read my piece. The paper shakes in my trembling hands. The tears in my eyes don’t help either.

  “Hey,” Mercy Girl says when I’m finally off the stage. “Everyone has a tough night. Why don’t you sit with us?”

  “Thanks,” I say.

  Surfer doesn’t move his backpack from the other chair. I slide a chair over from the next table. Surfer stares at me, smiling tightly. Gloating.

  “That was terrible,” I say.

  “You just—lost your confidence,” Mercy Girl says. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. This game has its highs and lows. And a bit of fear isn’t a bad thing. Better than always thinking you’re God’s gift, you know?” Mercy Girl shoots a glance at Surfer and winks at me.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I think I do.”

  We smile at each other like old friends. Surfer misses it completely. He just sits there with his nose in the air.

  “Your piece was good tonight,” I tell him.

  “Uh. Yeah.”

  He doesn’t look at me. He never does, except when he nails a good line onstage. I realize that except for the first night, I’ve placed ahead of him every time. Is that why he’s so put out?

  “What did you think of Angie’s piece?” Mercy Girl asks Surfer.

  “Interesting,” he answers. “Another poem about a car. That’s three now.”

  “So?” Mercy Girl asks.

  “So I know something about Angie that she probably wouldn’t like people to know.”

  My body stiffens. I try to smile. “Oh, yeah?” I say, trying to sound light and breezy.

  “I saw you last night, Angie. On Marifield Avenue. I saw your—your house.”

  “You did?” I can hardly talk.

  Surfer’s voice turns bitter. “Your house is close to the road, isn’t it? Like, super close, squished right up to the curb?”

  If Clem was here, he would rescue me. He’d get Surfer talking about something else, like surfing at Jordan River. Luckily, Twig is at the mic to announce tonight’s winners. Even though I froze onstage, I come in third. Aaron comes in second—it’s the first time he’s ever competed and not won first place. Mercy Girl wins. Her prize is a fondue set. Aaron wins a pair of fuzzy dice—lucky him—and I win a deck of cards and a cribbage board, which are actually things we could use. Our deck is missing two cards, and we keep score with paper and pen.

  Twig reminds us that summer is around the corner and Slam Night will soon be winding down for the year. She’s tallied our standings for the season. Aaron, Mercy Girl, Surfer and I and three others are to compete next week in the year’s finals.

  I’ll have to work hard, but Clem needs help with a time-trials event on the weekend. He has borrowed a camera from the school’s camera club and wants me to shoot him and also be a one-person pit crew, ready to change a tire if needed. And he wants me to bike the course and give him my take—where to take things easy, where to go for broke.

  “Everyone’s asking for you at the bike park,” he told me. “They’re calling me The Kid now. There’s no more The Kids. When was the last time you got on your bike?”

  I can’t remember.

  It’s a warm spring evening, still light. I don’t need my flashlight to reach the car, which is parked in our ne
w favorite place, a quiet road close to a bicycle trail. Mom is in the front seat, knitting, and Clem’s in the back, bent over a textbook. I whistle as I approach the car to warn them.

  Mom and Clem look up, smiling. Smiling big. They’ve been waiting for me. They have news.

  “Our name reached the top of the list,” Mom says.

  I’m still holding the car door wide open.

  “Hit the top and rang the big fat bell, Angie,” Clem says.

  I give him a look.

  “It’s true, Angie. I swear.”

  “Yes, sweetheart,” Mom says. “It’s true.”

  I’ve imagined this moment so many times. I’ve pictured myself whooping and laughing when I hear the news. But now that it’s really happening, I burst into tears.

  Composing on the Fly

  I compose my performance piece for the finals all week. A few times, Clem waves his hand in my face to get my attention.

  “You’re helping me at the time trials, right?” he asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Angie, I need you.”

  “I’ve got to write this poem.”

  “Do it while you’re at the park.”

  I take a deep breath. “Okay.”

  Clem smiles. His teeth are the wildest teeth you’ve ever seen. They poke and dart. Some are thin, some wide, some low, some high. They’re like words, each one of them different. I think of Surfer, arrogant and threatening. How different Clem is from him.

  “You’re awesome,” I blurt.