Kandy edges forward, curious, and I realize that Pam is here, too, and the public school girl. A few bums sit on milk crates, talking, a ways down the alley. At their feet are shreds of red wrapping paper.
“What’s that?” Kandy asks harmlessly.
My mother’s eyes travel back and forth as if she is reading a print version of Kandy’s motives scrolling across her face. She drops the ripped box into Kandy’s hands.“It’s a joy box. A person who finds one will have the best day of his or her life.” His or her. How she wrestles with language in a mood like this one.
“Mom? How many people are going to have the best day of their lives today?”
She bares her teeth at me. It’s almost a smile, but it’s not. “Full of deceit,” she says. “You are full of snakes today.”
“A hundred dollars!” I yell. “What if the garbageman took it?”
“Then bully for him, that’s the whole idea!”
“I mean, with the trash? And it got compacted?”
“God will guide it to its right person, and maybe it’s the garbageman.”
Pam, Kandy, and the public school girl have moved to stand behind me, whether consciously or by instinct. I appeal hopefully to the logic buried somewhere deep within my mother; I rattle off a list of things for which we need money: food, clothing, bills, the final two years of mortgage on our house. My school tuition. When I mention tuition, her forehead furrows.
“Maybe I should go to public school,” I say. “With boys.”
“Slut,” my mother hisses. The one word. The pure meanness of it. I have been her sweet pea, her puppy-face, her daughterling, her tiny bunny rabbit. I can feel the part in my hair growing pink and tender. I don’t realize how upset I’m getting until I’m almost overcome.
I thrust the bill I’m holding into my pocket. I dash down the alley and grab the little envelope out of an old man’s hands, hands that cannot hold on. One of the other bums tries to swipe at me. I skin a knee on the asphalt getting away, but then I am up. I hold the envelope up to the light and see the dark bill inside. Two retrieved. The bums call after me, “You bitch, you thief. You mean, mean little girl.”
My mother grabs me by the back of my T-shirt and spins me around. Her hand flies up and she slaps my face: a hot rush, a bee sting. Then she weeps there in the open, my friends looking on, and I feel tears coming, too, only I won’t share this with her, not even this. I could kill her. I imagine it. With my hands.
I turn and walk away as fast as I can until I am around a corner, and then I run. In my head, my sisters whisper: Get away, get away, get away. I forget where I am going and sit down on the sidewalk and close my eyes, and I don’t open them until Pam is beside me, rubbing her hand in circles on my back.
“Sweetheart,” she says, “you’re panicking. It’s okay.” She sits beside me and says that over and over, “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay,” until there is nothing but her and the sidewalk and a tuft of grass, and an ant making a long trek toward that tuft of grass, and the coolness of the places my shadow touches on the concrete, and the burn of the places in the sun.
WHEN I RETURN to myself, I am parched and it’s six o’clock, the shadows lengthening. Pam buys me a Coke slushie, and it is the nectar of the gods. Kandy had the presence of mind to grab the canvas bag, which I dump to find three wrapped boxes amid the detritus of the project: the ends of ribbon, the extra peat pots.
I go to the pay phone behind West Coast Video and call James. He says to stay by the phone, and I do, though I can hardly sit still, while Kandy rallies the Townie Army to our greater cause. They have found their quarry anyway, and are satisfied. James calls back to say my mother isn’t at the house, and then he shows up in the West Coast Video parking lot, hands in his pockets. We split up and fan out, hunting for red boxes. I know a few of these kids will pocket the cash, but what can I do?
Jake comes with me as I hunt breathlessly, following my mother’s logic. She wants to give joy to sad people—where do sad people go? I check dumpsters and alleys, I head south toward the crack houses and littered lots of the poorest part of town. It is a terrible Easter-egg hunt. I spot something red wedged in the mouth of a storm drain. When I get close enough, I see that it is just the wrapping paper and the box, ripped apart. The money is long gone. The plant, too, which softens me momentarily.
Jake points out a joy box on a windowsill across the street. We sprint. The window is open, and as we swipe the box, we see a fat woman sleeping on a low couch, an oxygen tank, tubes, an IV drip. We continue to hunt, fruitlessly, for I don’t know how long until Jake says he is going to get us some pizza and meet me at the boardwalk ramp in twenty. It is twilight, and the boardwalk crowd is changing: couples and prowling sunburned men and fearful little gangs of women in short denim skirts. I go to the ramp and hunt as I wait, peering in trash cans and kneeling to see between the boards and scan the undersides of benches, when the night veers off in another direction altogether.
My sisters emerge from a turnstile and turn onto the boardwalk, talking, holding beach bags. This time they don’t see me. They won’t know to run.
I will learn where they go. Jake will wonder where I’ve gone, but I don’t care. There isn’t time to wait for him.
I continue as before, only the hunt has changed character. My sisters stroll down the boardwalk, stopping once for Courtney to buy a box of saltwater taffy. I idle on a bench twenty feet away. Kids from Ocean Vista don’t eat taffy. Sometimes we spit gum into the giant taffy vats in the novelty stores, where mechanical paddles move in figure eights, twisting the candy, keeping it supple and warm.
My sisters walk a block west, then north on Allison Street. The streets in this section of town are alphabetical and female: Allison, Bettina, Catherine, Delia. Allison is a dusty little street where families from Pennsylvania and Connecticut rent tiny clapboard beach homes with outdoor showers. My sisters kick their way through the dust in flip-flops and I amble behind them, keeping my head down. I keep my head down for a moment too long; I lose them and worry—will they be standing around a corner with a baseball bat, waiting to confront me? No, there. A flash of red through a prickly hedge, and then, rising step by step above the hedge, those two auburn heads. I take in the house: a pink-trimmed white beach house with a small screened-in porch containing a clutter of chairs and tables, beach towels laid out to dry, packs of cards, left-out glasses. Old lemon slices in the glasses, sweating sticky juice, bees that have found passage through the screen.
As Laura and Courtney rise to the level of the porch door, I realize I am standing in plain sight. I dive behind a parked car and try not to breathe. My feet must be visible under the car, I think, and then stop myself. This is not an episode of MacGyver. Nobody is looking for me. My sisters move across the porch, and Laura knocks on the front door. Through the screen, they look as ghosts should look: filmy, remote. Sepia-toned. Laura yells, “Mo-oooom.”
The door swings inward, revealing the soft dark of an unlit daytime house, and a woman appears. My sisters move toward the woman with clear familiarity. They move as if they love her. This woman: the pale, tall woman with the chestnut hair. The grocery-store woman. “Did you lose your key?” she asks them.
Laura and Courtney step out of their flip-flops and smack them against the porch screen, showering sand. “No pockets,” says Courtney. “We rented a movie.” And then the house swallows my sisters, these sisters who are not my sisters, and I am an only child once more. The door shuts with the groan of heat-swollen wood, and I stand up in the street.
My sisters have a mother who is not my mother. The faith that I have held, the hope, magical or insane, that the tall tales of my childhood are true, vanishes through the closing door of a rented beach house. As I stand staring at the house in the failing afternoon, I clasp my hands together and squeeze because I have never felt so disconnected from people. There are no ghosts, there are no guardians, t
here is no God, no father, no whispers from a general consciousness. There is only this newly severed mind of mine, shivering with logic and with loneliness.
ALTOGETHER, WE RECOVER only nine of the joy boxes. When the utilities start shutting off, I dig through the piles of junk mail and bills on the coffee table and learn that what we have would only begin to cover what we owe. It takes all my willpower to speak to my mother, but I make myself ask the necessary questions: “Is there any other account? Is this all we have?”
She pauses for a long time, holding her scissors aloft above the coupon page of the Pennysaver, and then says yes, it is. The electricity goes first, and then the gas. She digs a fire pit in the backyard like a Boy Scout. She rings it with stones and fills it with sand. She cooks a risotto this way and sets the table with our holiday silverware just to show me that she will not be beaten by gas or light. Her strength, she says, comes from the earth itself, from the mercy and the will of God.
9
KANDY’S DAUGHTER, MELANIE, climbs onto her lap where we sit in the screened-in sunroom, braces her small bare feet against the wicker sofa, and nestles. Kandy nudges the plate of chips and salsa closer to me on the table. “You should eat something,” she says. All the unbroken chips are gone; we have delayed dinner for hours. I stuff my mouth obediently. Carrie takes a single chip and holds it in her hands. The cordless phone sits on the table, poised to ring. I feel irrelevant now that Kandy is here to take police phone calls, to make up our beds, to feed my daughter.
Every time I see Kandy, I have to relearn her: no longer the bleached-blond sexpot of my adolescence but this softened, effective brunette person. After she ran out of new drugs to try, after her father died, after she watched her disciples from our old Emerald crew burn out one by one and turn into parking-lot loiterers, assembly-liners, data-entry clerks nursing terrorist fantasies, she surprised everyone by applying to college at twenty-two. By her senior year, she was utterly changed. She went on to earn a master’s in social work, and now she is a grief counselor. Her mother still lives in Ocean Vista, which is why she came back to settle here after all her brothers fled. She married a gentle electrician ten years her senior, and she seems wholly satisfied with her life. It boggles my little mind.
When we got Daniel’s diagnosis, Kandy was the only person I told outside the family. It wasn’t that other people didn’t sympathize, but there was always that note of condescension in their “oh nos” and their “mm-hmms” when I told them that Daniel had bitten me or thrown a fit on the school bus. That twinge of not-my-problem. Kandy just listened. It’s possible that I was better able to talk to her because she’d known me when I was wild myself, and I’d known her when she was wilder still. For sixteen years we have talked on the phone most Sunday nights.
I make female friends rarely, but when I do, I find myself acting slightly different: bubblier or quieter or more intellectual, or less. These small calibrations wear me out; I am exhausted after spending time with women. With Kandy, I don’t have to recalibrate, and I feel the danger of that authenticity now. I am untethered.
In the backyard, among the artificial boulders and potted shrubs, Kandy’s son, Ricky, is tending an enormous propane grill. He’s a good-looking kid, quiet and quick with strength. A baseball kid, not a football kid, and just the right number of years older than Carrie to make her visibly nervous. She texts fiercely to prove she’s not looking at him.
Kandy gets up to check on something in the kitchen, and little Melanie stares at us baldly. “Maybe somebody kidnapped Daniel,” she says, and waits for the explosion of this idea into our unprepared minds. “At school we had an assembly about how sometimes there are kidnappers and they give you something, like candy or something, and they tell you they’ll give you a ride home.”
“And then what happens?” I ask. Carrie gives me a disgusted look.
“Then they take you away.”
“Where do they take you?”
“Their house.”
“What do you do there?”
Melanie watches herself point and flex her feet on the Hawaiian-floral sofa cushions until she thinks of an answer. “Watch TV.”
I laugh. Carrie gets up abruptly and storms through the screen door into the backyard. The patio is lit by a row of floodlights. I watch her wander along the dark perimeter, kicking small stones. The evening has turned chill, and she has put on a black hoodie with a glittering skull and crossbones on the back. Ricky turns and says something to her, and she ambles over, letting her hair fall in her face, gesturing dismissively toward the house. She hooks her fingers in her belt loops and hunches, trying to be shorter than he is. I want to call her back inside, but I can’t think of a pretense.
I DON’T KNOW when Carrie became this new person, and that is exactly what implicates me. Where was I? What was I doing? Slipping off in secret, driving from office to gym to store, over-occupied by the small things, worrying about Daniel, dealing with Daniel, placating Daniel? In what sand did I bury my head so deeply that I missed it? I imagine her writhing on her bed, shedding her skin, moving from a larval to a pupal state, Sam sitting at her bedside and me off somewhere, oblivious, fucking the bike-store guy.
I remember Carrie’s face as she got off the bus after her first day of sixth grade, gravely concerned. There was some kind of virus going around. It was a virus only girls could catch. It made the rims of their eyes all black. After I recovered from a long teary-eyed laugh in the backyard with Sam, I showed her a stick of eyeliner, how to put it on, what it looks like when you put on too much. We made ourselves into ghouls in the bathroom mirror. She wasn’t so tall then; the top of her head fit under my chin. We pretended to be a totem pole.
Now she highlights the tear duct; she knows how to blend and foil. She uses the cosmetics companies’ color language: aubergine, slate, champagne. I am not the kind of mom to forbid a little pigment, but the aggregation of this and other small changes has made Carrie difficult to recognize. She is embarrassed to use Kleenex in public and so just sniffles. The corners of her mouth turn down when she is aware of herself; she hides her face behind hair that she allows to tangle and muss. She wears legging jeans and belted tunics, and I have no idea where she gets them. I could never read her thoughts, or anyone’s, but I used to be able to read her face. In my mind, her true thoughts pour into her phone through her quick-tapping fingers, and every word she says to me is false.
What will I do the next time I eat Froot Loops and Sam is not there? Who will steer the ship? I had hoped it would be Carrie, but now I see that I can’t impose that on her, too. When there were four of us, she leaned heavily on Sam. Someone to share a grimace with when Daniel or I went snappish, someone to remind us all of rules and regulations. If she knew that I had been unfaithful to Sam, it would push her over the edge. She’d be his entirely, and lost to me.
Even before Daniel’s diagnosis, there was a sense that he and I were of a kind, and Sam and Carrie were something else. Daniel stepped on a bee when he was three just to see what it would feel like. Carrie was afraid of everything. She wouldn’t get on half the playground equipment. When I call Daniel into the kitchen for pill time, Carrie buries her face in a magazine. At first I thought she was ashamed of us. But I don’t think that’s it. Daniel and I get to blame our bad days on chemicals in the brain. There are pills for what ails us. But for Carrie there is nothing. She must soldier on through life, alone and normal.
WE EAT AROUND Kandy’s oval dining room table. Her husband, the electrician, plunges a fork into his chili with enviable resolve. Carrie is moving salad around on her plate and communicating nonverbally with Ricky. They are having a whole conversation of eyebrow twitches and mouth shapes. Carrie: incredulous grimace. Ricky: comforting shrug. Carrie, with her eyes: Did you see that stupid thing my mom just did? (What? What did I do?) Ricky, with a slight clench of jaw: acknowledges humor. Carrie manifests attractive sadness. I can see them drawn together by cir
cumstance. He will comfort her, she will pretend to need comforting. Later she will slip out some agreed-upon side door to rendezvous with him and roar off in someone’s parents’ station wagon for a night of empty and premature firsts.
Kandy is talking about Melanie’s recent school play, in which she played both Maria von Trapp and a piglet somehow. I missed the beginning. Kandy is trying to keep it light. The chili is mostly beans and makes me miss Texas-style. I keep spooning through, hoping for meat. It’s not working like food is supposed to work; each bite makes me hungrier. I push back my chair, and Kandy stops talking midsentence.
“I can’t stay in here when he’s still out there,” I say. The electrician is the only one who nods understandingly. “Come on, Carrie.”
“Mo-om!”
“What?” I feel sweaty and contradictory. It’s getting Carrie out of the house that I’m interested in, as much as looking for Daniel and getting away from this pleasant, claustrophobic home. My sisters glimmer at the corners of my mind, their hair under the street lamps, their forms receding into shadow.
“I’m staying here,” says Carrie in a sharp sliver of a voice. “That’s what the policeman said to do.”
“I need you to come with me,” I say. Ricky and Melanie watch our volley, fascinated. Disobedience is unfamiliar to them. How has Kandy pulled that off?
“Why should I?”
“I’m not asking.”
“Fuck you!” Carrie yells, and runs from the room, accidentally snagging the tablecloth so that her fork clatters to the floor and flecks the baseboard with chili.
Kandy sets her napkin on the table, though she has barely had a chance to taste the food she cooked. “Why don’t I come with you?” she suggests, and I know it is the kind of suggestion that nurses make on closed wards: Why don’t you take this pill? Though of course she is trying to help. Everyone is trying to help.
What I Had Before I Had You Page 11