I wave my arms, and when the doors slide open, I walk through the front of the store to join them, past the four cashier stations, down the produce aisle, and back by the approach side of the checkout lines. When I turn the corner to the hallway where I saw them standing, they are gone. I see my mother where I just was, at the front, manning the third register. She is halfway through checking out a customer; how can that be?
“Olivia!” She scans cans of chickpeas in her lazy way, and the customer, a drab khaki man, stares at the hypnotic movements of her hands. “It’s so nice when you come see me.” This is her public voice, too bright.
“Who were you just talking to?”
“Hm?”
“That woman back there.” I point to the break room, but she doesn’t look.
“Sweetie, I haven’t had a break today.”
“But you were just standing over there.”
She hands the khaki man his receipt, and he trundles off. She frowns at me. Her arm snakes out to wrench my head in for a diagnostic forehead kiss. “Do you think you had another experience?”
I know what she means by experience. Neither is the subtlety of do you think you had instead of did you have lost on me. I saw the chestnut-haired woman with the precision of reality, but then, that is how my mother describes her vision of the twins, and that is how I have seen them, too.
“Nope,” I say, loudly enough to turn a few heads. I stare over my mother’s shoulder into the store, where women are mothering the produce. They run their fingers over the eggplants, checking for soft spots. They heft cantaloupes and heads of lettuce in their arms. They hold apples up to the light to inspect them for bruising.
My mother hands me a twenty from her back pocket, and I stuff it in my front one. Even this basic transaction galls me. She knows when I need some cash, and she knows how much. And she is telling me that things I see are not there. It makes the whole grocery store tremble like a sheet of water. I don’t want to think about it.
“You know, you were right before, about my sisters,” I say, a creeping malice in my heart. “I was mistaken.”
“Yes,” she says quietly.
“I’m not like you. I don’t see shit that’s not there.” If she can hear the talk underneath my talk right now, then she knows the depth of my contrariness, for my interior voice is compelled to speak for my sisters even as I slight them: Don’t listen to me! I see you, I know you!
My mother is rearranging a small display box of plastic penguin key chains, making them all face her instead of the customer. “Good.”
“Good,” I say, but it feels like she has won, so I add, “I’m not a fucking psycho.” Everyone in the store looks up.
My mother smacks the moving belt with her palm, and it comes alive, cycling slowly and inexorably toward the end of the checkout counter. Her eyes narrow, her jaw clenches, she sucks herself in and becomes somehow taller. I am struck motionless with a familiar little-girl terror. Having drawn herself up in such a fearsome way, my mother says only, “You are skating on thin ice,” which seems folksy and weak and insufficient to describe the peril I feel in my gut.
Following this feeble pronouncement, her mind closes on me with the slow absoluteness of those automatic doors, and I cease to exist. I punch the slanted shelf of grapefruit on my way out, and my fist is sticky with exploded pink fruit guts. A woman with a shopping basket stares at the mangled grapefruit and then at me. I get on my bike and pump the pedals until I am flying past lines of parked cars toward the ocean, away from my mother, and back out into my glittering, unsupervised life.
THE NEXT DAY around the same time, as if to prove themselves to me, my sisters reappear. I brake hard on the pebbly sidewalk. I was headed home for dinner, but my appetite whooshes out of me as soon as I see them. They are in a group of kids I don’t know, waiting for the third hole at Peter Pan Mini-Golf. Peter Pan is a few blocks off the boardwalk, a shoddy, bad-dream Neverland. You putt through Tinker Bell’s miniature house and past Tiger Lily’s forest, where crumbling, wild-eyed plaster Indians lie on their elbows in the grass and shoot retractable arrows onto the green, and finally through the crocodile’s great jaws, which open and close on the hand of a giant Captain Hook, his eyes widening over and over in surprise. The course is surrounded by a high chain-link fence, and within that, a wooden split-rail fence, a vestige from a more honest time. My sisters are sitting on the wooden fence, leaning back against the chain link, waiting for their turn to putt past the Indians. They are ten feet away from me, if that. I can see the diamond rumpling of their shirt backs through the chain link, the pink elastic around Courtney’s ponytail, the silver hoops in Laura’s ears, oval sweat stains beneath her arms. Ghosts don’t sweat. Do they?
I feel emboldened by the past month; I am no longer the timid girl on the beach. As I move toward them, I feel almost angry: Stop terrorizing me. Be or don’t be. Get off the fence. I let my bike clatter to the sidewalk. There is a little incline from the sidewalk up to the base of the fence, and I take it in a leap. One of their companions, a too-tan blonde, barks a warning “Hey!” that causes my sisters to twist around in their perches and then leap down. I am danger rolling in.
“You’re Laura and Courtney, right?” I ask. It’s the wrong question, but it’s what comes out.
A boy asks them, “You know this girl?” and though they shake their heads, they look at each other, and a message passes between them.
“Where do you live?” I ask. A serial killer’s question. “I mean, where do you come from?”
“Fuck off,” the boy tells me, and puts his arm around Courtney. She shivers him off, and she and Laura walk briskly away from me toward the interior of the park. Their putters lean up against the fence. Their hair swings. Their friends shift on the fence and glare at me. My sisters disappear behind the crocodile, where the park office is. The boy who spoke ambles over to leer through the chain link. His nostrils are wide and round, and his lip is hairless. He says, “Weird girl, I’m coming over the fence for you.” He mimes it, tensing his muscles as if to jump. “I’m coming. You better run. I’m coming.” It is beneath me to respond. I can hear him gloating as I collect my bike.
I wait for my sisters outside the gate, but they don’t emerge, and soon I see the manager’s big bald head bobbing toward me behind the rigging of the pirate ship. He doesn’t have to tell me to scram; by the time he gets to the gate, I’m gone. My sisters don’t want to talk to me. They disdain me. Maybe they are nothing more than normal city girls on vacation, like the girls who sometimes crash our parties, drink all the beer, and stand in a knot in the corner, laughing. Maybe their familiarity is only in my head, a healthy thing that everyone experiences, like déjà vu. Maybe the best, most sane thing I can do is to forget all about them.
I SIT IN the kitchen with my summer geometry catch-up worksheets, and my mother sits knitting me a cardigan, blue and brown. Blanche lies panting at her feet. I stare at a diagram of an isosceles triangle, and I think of how new everything is, how changed, how many-angled. But here I sit, reeking of kisses and the respect of my peers, grown five foot five, and still, the house is quiet and changeless. My mother hums over the crackle of the radio-broadcast news, and a pot of water for pasta boils over behind her, spitting and seething. If this were a photograph, I could cut myself out and replace myself with five-year-old Olivia, ten-year-old Olivia, any Olivia. I could paste in a picture of Laura, a picture of Courtney, and there would be my mother, knitting blue and brown stripes, ignoring the boiling water. It is difficult to bear.
until this summer, I have submitted to nonsensical obligations, as children must. I have cleaned empty cribs in the same spirit in which I have slapped the roof of the car at yellow traffic lights and worn nylon stockings: just following instructions. And in this spirit, I have submitted for as long as I can remember to church. James picks me up every Sunday in his algae-green Lincoln Town Car and drives me two towns over
to St. Michael’s Presbyterian, where I absorb very little theology, preferring to make up my own stories to explain the configurations of stained-glass saints on the great, glowing windows. The minister speaks with a cotton-mouthed rasp, and the other kids in the congregation all know one another from years of Sunday school.
Around the age of ten, I realized that church was something from which most attending kids’ mothers were not excused, and I started throwing weekly fits. “Mo-om,” I whined. “How come I have to go if you don’t go?”
My mother enjoyed this weekly chance to show me the breadth and depth of her sacrifice. I could say it along with her: “I didn’t move all the way out to Ocean Vista to raise a godless daughter. God doesn’t want me in that church, but He sure as hell wants you.”
When I was very young, I thought that meant she was going to hell instead of heaven. I had a nightmare in which I searched for her through a town built of brimstone, full of snakes and ladies in red bikinis. I woke up crying and asked my mother if she was really going to hell. She sat on the edge of my bed and told me how it was possible to cast aside all your sins on your deathbed and go right up to heaven. She tapped my chin three times, our special kiss, and said she had a trick up her sleeve. I asked why I couldn’t do that, too, why I didn’t have a trick. “You could, but it’s better not to have to. Sin hurts,” said my mother. I asked if it hurt like a bee sting. She said, “More.”
Today, James pulls up and I am hopelessly hungover. My mother is cutting coupons in the kitchen while she waits for a client. I can hear the zing of her scissors. I assume she has intuited my delinquency these last few weeks, but I am puzzled by her strategic pause. When will she pounce? At fifteen, I don’t consider the possibility that my mother has other things on her mind than me.
“Hey, kiddo,” says James as I sink into the passenger seat. He squints at my outfit: ripped white jeans and one of Pam’s screen-printed T-shirts, a giant ant drinking a Coke. Not church attire.
“Here’s the deal,” I say once we’re on the road, coasting inland. “I’m not doing church anymore. Maybe you’d like to go with your real family?”
He shakes his head. “Jewish. Busy.”
“Whatever. Drop me at the boardwalk?”
He gives me a long look as he makes his inevitable decision. Shrugs. As we U-turn, he asks me, “You been sleeping?”
“Yup.” I have been, though passing out more frequently than drifting off. It seems like an odd question until I recall that hot anxious sleepless time at the beginning of the summer. Amazing to think that it was only six weeks ago; my whole life has started up since then.
“Your mom been sleeping?”
“God, what is it with you and sleep? What’s your damage?”
He chuckles and repeats my new phrase, “What’s your damage,” in his soft, nasal voice, and it is so dorky that it makes me smile.
I shout out the window, “Sleep when you’re dead!” and we ride along in companionable silence.
We pull up to the curb by the big pedestrian boardwalk ramp, where Stan the Deserter and a few other crazies are pestering a busload of summer-camp kids in matching purple T-shirts. Kandy is walking up the ramp toward our usual arcade hangout spot and doubles back when she sees me getting out of the car.
“Hey, sugar tits,” she yells. “This your dad?”
James rests his arm in the car window and smiles broadly, which makes him look different—less slumpy-sad—than usual. “Just a friend,” he says.
Kandy struts over to lean against the car. She is wearing, of all things, a denim one-piece jumpsuit with a halter neckline. She sees me looking at it and says, “It’s vintage.”
“I remember that look,” says James before I can think of something snarky to say. “That was very hip. It suits you.” He turns off the engine.
Kandy’s lip curls with pleasure. “Thanks, old man. You coming up?”
I am horrified. James? Coming up where? The arcade? The boardwalk? What is she talking about? I slam the passenger-side door and pound twice on the car. “Oh, no, he has knee replacement surgery this afternoon, he can’t come.” They both stare at me, failing to pick up on my fine humor. “He has to have his dentures filed down. After his coffin fitting.”
James laughs, tucking his chin down turtlishly, back to the James I know. I look between them, waiting for Kandy to start walking or James to turn the car back on. Nothing happens, so I head up to the boardwalk alone, and when Kandy comes up twenty minutes later with a soda I bet she didn’t buy, I ask, “What the fuck was that?”
“He’s nice.”
“He’s, like, fifty.”
“Ew. I just said he’s nice. What are you, ageist?”
I shudder. I guess I am ageist.
Kandy leans against the boardwalk fence and throws her head back, takes a drag of her cigarette. “Jim thinks I could model,” she says.
“James.”
“Whatever.”
THIS IS WHAT we do at Emerald parties: We drink, we talk about ourselves, we make jokes, we catch each other’s eye and think, What if? We do a power hour—a shot of beer every minute, the minutes marked by song changes, a boy wearing eyeliner and army boots manning the boom box. Kandy invites new boys, always: shy JV athletes, stoners, philosophizing honors boys with facial moles and legs hairless as girls’, and they flutter around her while she postures for Jake. Inevitably, one of these boys passes out, and we put makeup and a bra on him, and I take pictures.
Tonight somebody brought an old childhood copy of Magic Telephone, a game where you figure out, from clues spoken by a giant pink plastic telephone, which one of twenty-five fictional boys has a crush on you. On laminated cards, they clutch surfboards and electric guitars; their skin gleams acne-free. We are playing ironically. We take shots of Jägermeister whenever we guess wrong. I am pulling for Will, the hot poet-athlete, because the other girls seem to like him most. I haven’t seen my sisters since the Peter Pan encounter, and I am feeling successfully normal.
“Look at that,” says Pam, and points through the doorway to the bedroom, where Kandy and Jake are slow-dancing, Kandy with her head on Jake’s shoulder and her eyes closed, looking like a doll; Jake smoking a cigarette. I snap a photo. Jake notices the flash and waves his pinkie at us. He makes a drinking sign with his cigarette hand, rolls his eyes, and points at Kandy’s head. I laugh. Pam stares at me and gets up.
The music is good, and the air is salty and cool, and everywhere people are laughing; it is one of the good nights. After our game has broken up, Jake comes over to where I’m dancing with a knot of kids. He lifts my hand, spreads it open, and drops a round pink pill into my palm. His eyes so blue they seem clear to me, like lenses through which I am seeing an interior sky. “But Doctor,” I ask, “what will it do?”
“It will give you joy,” he tells me, and that is good enough.
WE DON’T HEAR them come in. All of a sudden there are five giant cops flanking the door to the suite, yelling that we kids are in big trouble and this building is condemned and did we do this to the walls? I see it happen in slow motion, these men bellowing, pointing, striding into the heart of my new world, fluttering their fingers over the butts of black guns tucked into belt holsters. One of them pries a Barbie doll out of the gunked paint on the wall and shows it to another one. My eyes focus on a pink color behind the cops, such a familiar pink, moving, following them into the suite: That’s a dress my mother has. No.
That’s my mother.
There she stands, trembling, glassy-eyed. She followed me. It is one of the good nights, maybe the best night, and she is out to ruin everything. Her cheeks are flushed, and as she sees me take her in, her right hand rises to her hip and her jaw sets square. Rage blooms on her high cheekbones. Pam is suddenly beside me, her shoulder pressed to mine. Ready to defend. Everywhere, confusion. Some kids, too wasted to notice, keep on dancing, and some kids, to
o wasted to think straight, cry. The ratty boys make for the door, but a cop blocks them. They jostle my mother, who doesn’t seem to notice, her eyes locked on me.
The cops are yelling something, but it is hard to pay attention. I feel aware of the patterns of blood moving inside all of our bodies: Möbius ribbons of fluid rush. This is how I realize the drug is working. The room seems larger and everything more committed to itself: blue more surely blue, red more surely red, sofas as sofa as they can be. And my mother, more herself than I can stand, more tender and embarrassing and terrible, storms raining hail from her look, rearing up to smash me down, scrape me up from the floor, and pack me into a box to keep on her windowsill. A witch.
She comes toward me, talking fast. One of the cops says something to her. She throws him a gorgeous lit-up smile and says something, and he nods and turns back.
“Don’t you think I know what you’ve been up to?” she asks. “On this mission, do you think I am unguided? Do you think you are so smart?”
“Stop,” I hiss.
She pushes on without pause, into a dense field of anger. “These kids are trash, these kids will ruin you, you have to come home now, I can keep you safe but they cannot keep you safe, and if you don’t come home, how can I keep you safe?”
The music dies; one of the cops has found the boom box. My mother’s voice is everywhere, and everyone is watching us and realizing who she is and who I am and what it means.
“Is this her?” a cop says to my mother, and my mother says yes it is. “Go on.” The cop points me toward my mother.
The faces all around me sour. I will be the one who ruined the summer, the one who infiltrated the club just to narc on everyone. I will be alone again.
I feel an impulse to go with my mother, just to get it over with. I am unmasked. There is that eking feeling of burning eye socket and toddler contrition, that instant shame response that makes me want to lie facedown in bed and cry until she comes in to rub my back and tell me that it’s okay after all.
What I Had Before I Had You Page 8