by Jessica Raya
My stolen clothes pulled at me, heavy with water. The blouse was nearly translucent, the jeans dark with water. There was rain in my eyes and in my ears. I wondered if it was possible to drown on a sidewalk. I thought of my mom, how she liked to stand outside on stormy nights and wait for the sky to empty itself. I found her in the backyard once, standing in the grass, her nightgown soaked through. I had watched from the safety of the awning, worried and curious, not quite Mommy’s or Daddy’s little girl.
A car pulled up in front of me and the window rolled down. From where I was standing, all I could see was the driver’s mouth.
“Did you win?” the mouth said.
“Win what?”
“The wet T-shirt contest.”
I crossed my arms over my chest.
“Yeah, I didn’t think so.”
I couldn’t see the guy in the passenger seat at all, but I could hear him laughing. They high-fived each other inside the car.
“I’m just kidding around,” the mouth said. “Hey, I know you, right?” He tilted his head so I could see the rest of him, right up to the buzz cut. He looked like one of the guys who’d terrorized us with garbage. I glared hard and tried to remember the zingers I’d thought up later while I flicked Mom’s silver lighter on and off in my room.
“Can we give you a ride? You look really wet. Do you feel wet?”
His friend snickered beside him.
I turned and crossed the meridian quickly, slipping and sliding inside my sneakers. My hair stuck to my face in clumps. I heard a door slam, then shoes slapping the wet road behind me. He grabbed my arm and spun me around. He was a foot taller than me and twice as wide. Behind him, his friend slid into the driver’s seat to watch.
“Hey, what’s your problem? I’m just offering you a ride home.”
“Thanks, but no thanks.”
“I’m trying to be a nice guy here and I’m getting fucking soaked.” His meaty hand tightened around my bicep. “Why don’t you be nice back, huh? My friend Troy says you’re a real nice girl.”
The name was like a gong ringing in my head. I pulled back but he wouldn’t let go of my arm.
Something small flew between us and hit him in the face. He yelped and tipped backwards, a hand to one eye. The other eye blinked at me. “What was that?”
His one good eye darted around. The parking lot was empty except for a few abandoned cars. The rain was coming down like it wouldn’t ever stop.
“Fuck, it really hurts,” he said. He took his hand away to show me. There was a small mark under his eyebrow, a magenta V where the corner had struck. The lid was already swelling. In an hour he’d have one hell of a black eye to explain.
“It doesn’t look too good,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He ran back to the car and shoved his friend over. “I was just screwing with you,” he said loudly, like he thought someone might be listening. He stuck his head out the window. “I wasn’t going to do anything. I swear.”
I glared at him until he was good and gone.
The rain stopped as suddenly as it had started, as if someone up there had turned off the tap. The sun broke through the clouds. What my mom liked most about storms was how sweet the air was after. “Makes you wonder how we breathed before,” she’d said that night I found her in the rain. “You get so used to the heat you don’t even know you’re suffocating.” What I liked most was how clean everything seemed, as if my whole town had gone through a car wash. Even the colours were brighter. I breathed deeply. Within a few hours, a layer of dust would settle and the heat would sink back in, but for now the air was fresh and cool.
I looked around for whatever had hit him. It lay beside a car, fanned open and swollen with water.
“I told you, you never know when you might need it,” a voice said.
Carol stood behind me, soaking wet. White petals stuck to her like confetti. She’d been hiding inside a rhododendron bush.
“It’s ruined,” I said, handing her the Bible. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay. I’ve got more.”
A horn beeped. This van was windowless and white, the kind kids called the Chevy Abductor. The side door slid open. Eyes blinked at us from the dark. A dozen kids in yellow T-shirts sat on the bare metal floor like illegal immigrants. Carol’s Ark.
Carol made everyone move over, and I settled in beside her on the floor. She gave me a yellow T-shirt to dry myself with. “You can keep it,” she said.
The van started up and we headed toward home, rocking lightly from side to side as we drove. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. It felt like I’d been trying to fight a flood with a spoon.
“I was handling things fine on my own,” I told her.
“I know,” she said. “But you don’t have to.”
I took a clean, clear breath and rested my head on Carol’s shoulder. I didn’t want to eat the dead to stay alive. “At least your aim’s getting better,” I said and closed my eyes.
9
The literary types called us Fire and Brimstone. Those who’d summered in Europe tried out Tart and Vicar. But Joyce preferred the names she had herself once bestowed. “Pyro Slut and Jesus Freak, together at last,” she crowed across the hall. “It’s a match made in hell.”
“Like your nose and my fist?”
That would shut her up for a while. Joyce was very careful about her nose.
“Why do you care what she thinks anyway?” Carol asked. The only answer I could come up with was that I hated to be the one responsible for Joyce’s happiness.
Melanie, mortified by any lingering associations, ignored me with renewed vigour, as if I was still capable of ruining her life from a distance. Troy Gainer, newly anointed senior, had perfected the art of looking right through me. After a while, kids mostly left us alone. In its own odd way, our friendship made sense, as did our partnership in Mrs. Maxwell’s home ec class. Nobody wanted to bake brownies with the girl who was actually capable of burning down the school, and nobody wanted to bake brownies with Carol Closter because she was Carol Closter.
I was not discouraged. I tried nowhere so hard as I did in Mrs. Maxwell’s class, where we were assured daily that our efforts would be rewarded with vital homemaking skills. Half the week we sewed, the other half we cooked. These were the days I looked forward to, the hours when I could, in theory, transform a few raw ingredients into something whole and nourishing. In practice, the glandular smell of oil brought bile bubbling up the back of my throat. Butter and mayonnaise were out of the question—the Girls had taken care of that. Eggs were the worst, those swollen globules bobbing in albumen, those yellow accusing eyes. They triggered a gag reflex that started in my knees.
“You have to get your hands in there,” Mrs. Maxwell would say, pushing mine into a bowl up to the wrists. “You can’t be squeamish about it. You are making something beautiful that will feed your family. The most important ingredient in every recipe is love.”
It was no use. As much bile as I swallowed, everything I touched came out flat, gritty, lopsided, and burnt. I julienned my fingertips, grated my knuckles into the batter, but no offering was good enough. My sauces were both lumpy and runny. I could’ve used the mashed potatoes to spackle a wall. Cakes simply gave up the will to live. My love, it turned out, was inedible.
“It comes naturally to some,” Mrs. Maxwell said, wiping her hands on a dishtowel so the egg never really came off, just got moved around. “Others have to try a bit harder.” I imagined the yolk drying under her nails until her next shower, and then I thought of teachers showering and it was all I could do not to run out the door. “There’s no shame in a nice TV dinner,” she said, shaking her head, because there was shame in it and we both knew it.
Carol Closter said I shouldn’t listen to Mrs. Maxwell. She was a dried-up old egg who couldn’t get anyone to marry her so she was stuck here teaching us for all eternity. Carol was happy to let me fail brilliantly day after day while she thumbed through
floured recipe pages and talked about her saints. Applying ointment from Mrs. Maxwell’s first aid kit to my tender skin for the millionth time, she’d ask Saint Lawrence to watch over me. The patron saint of cooks, he’d famously told his tormenters as they roasted him over coals that they should turn him over—he was done on that side.
At the end of every class, stuffing my handiwork into her dainty mouth like it was the most delicious thing she’d ever tasted, Carol would invite me once again to her teen Bible study group. “Everyone keeps asking about you,” she’d say. “We get free chocolate bars.”
I pictured them sitting in the back of the van, eating Kit Kats and praying for me. “Maybe next time.”
Carol would just tilt her head and smile. She said God had a plan for all of us. It wasn’t our place to question what that plan was. The world and everything in it was preordained, our stories already written in permanent black marker on that big locker in the sky. “You’ll come when you’re ready,” she’d say, glowing with the certainty of it.
Deep down I suspected she was right. I already had the T-shirt.
—
Saturday mornings, Mom and I drove to a Lucky’s where nobody she knew shopped. We sang along with the radio while we made a list of new and exotic foods she’d read about somewhere, added the ingredients for one of Mrs. Maxwell’s practice recipes I wanted to try. At the store, we abandoned the list and filled our cart with Kraft slices and Wonder Bread and bottles of discounted red wine. Back at the house, Mom would pull on her old swimsuit and do laps while I’d lie in the pale autumn sun, flipping through magazines and keeping count. Now and then, I’d look over at the pool house. Those afternoons were so perfectly uneventful, so wonderfully ordinary, I half expected to see cigar smoke escaping from the door.
When the Girls came in the afternoon now, they no longer exiled Mom in the kitchen with talk of contraceptives and coat hangers. Now it was their suburban fantasies that drove her from the room. What had Dad paid for the house? Were the schools in the area any good? Did Maytags really never break down? June versus September weddings? Niagara Falls versus Acapulco? Veil versus tiara? Their left hands were bare, but they were confident. They had hot dates later with men named Cliff, Carl, Ray, or Ron, salesmen from out of town who took them to Chinese restaurants near the airport. They counted down the days until they could quit their jobs.
“I enjoy my work,” Mom said.
Lorna laughed. “And we all know why, don’t you think?”
“Actually, I’ve been thinking of taking a correspondence course,” Mom said. In fact, she’d already driven to the university on the other side of town on her lunch hour and brought home a slim correspondence brochure that she’d pored over for days, underlining and circling things until it looked like one of my graded essays.
“What the heck for?” Suzanne said.
“Don’t you want to understand what you’re typing all day?”
The Girls scrunched their noses. They did not.
At five o’clock, they got ready for their dates. I’d bring them cocktails in Mom’s bedroom, and they’d give me old lipsticks they’d grown tired of. They liked me more when they needed me, which didn’t seem unreasonable. Between refills, I’d sprawl on Mom’s bed, thumbing through one of Suzanne’s magazines while they got dressed. Suzanne and Lorna were the most exciting thing that happened to me all week.
“Don’t you go on dates?” Lorna asked one evening, words garbled around the bobby pins in her mouth. I shrugged, pretending to read.
“A girl as pretty as you?” Suzanne said. “When I was your age, I was out every Friday and Saturday night.” She was setting her hair with Mom’s rollers, leaning toward the mirror in her bra and panties, both red but not a matching set. “What about your mom? Does Elaine go on dates?”
“She’s married,” I said.
“But not buried.” She grinned at Lorna in the mirror.
“She talks on the phone a lot, I guess. Mr. Grant calls here all the time.”
That look again, whizzing over my head.
“Is that so?” Lorna said.
“He says she has a lot of potential,” I said, rolling my eyes, trying to mimic the way they talked. I was enjoying the attention. We were in cahoots. “He admires her initiative.”
“I’ll bet he does.”
Lorna reached for the dress she’d hung on the closet door, slipped her legs inside the smooth red fabric, and shimmied into the bodice. Suzanne took Lorna’s place in the mirror. When her towel slipped she didn’t bother to cinch it back up, just sat there brushing her hair like that, smiling at herself in the mirror when I would have cringed. I felt the scratch of envy in my chest, sharp as the business end of a rat-tooth comb.
“She’ll probably get a raise soon,” I said.
Suzanne pursed her mouth sourly. “Oh, someone’s getting a raise, all right.”
After the Girls left, Mom spoke to Brian for twenty-six minutes. Every giggle was chalk on a blackboard.
“Are you fooling around with your boss?” I said after she hung up.
“Don’t be silly. We’re just friends.”
“Lorna says men and women can’t be just friends.”
“Your father and I managed it for fourteen years.”
But when Mom talked to Brian on the phone, she didn’t sound the way she had when she talked to my dad. She sounded sunny and eager, like a game show contestant being interviewed before a live studio audience. “Oh, yes, Brian,” she’d say. “Yes, of course. Yes, yes.” After, she’d smile like she’d won something, though to me it sounded like she’d given something away.
“You’re still married, you know,” I said. Her smile flattened. Cakes weren’t the only thing I knew how to ruin.
“How could I possibly forget with you always here to remind me,” she said.
—
That Friday morning, Mom gave me ten dollars to order a pizza when I got home. “I’m having dinner with Brian,” she said. “We’re going to discuss my future.”
“Is that what you kids are calling it these days?”
“Har har,” she said and made that awful kissing sound near my ear.
I was thinking about this during home ec while Carol talked about her saints. “First of all, you have to be a servant of God, obviously, and then you have to be venerable. That means you lived a life of heroic virtue. After that comes the hard part—the miracles. You need two miracles. That’s the way the Catholics do it, and if you’re going to be a saint, you definitely want to be a Catholic one. It’s the one thing they got right.”
“Sure,” I said.
“If you’re a martyr, you only need one miracle. And you don’t have to part the Red Sea here. You could cure a blind person or something like that.”
“Turn Joyce Peyton into a human being.”
“Exactly.”
As I wondered how many martyrs it would take to make my dad come home, Carol lifted her nose delicately to the ceiling and sniffed. It took me a little longer to notice the smoke. I was that used to it.
“Perhaps another elective,” Mrs. Maxwell said, holding my smoking dishtowel under the tap. I didn’t even remember leaving it in the oven. Kids fanned the air with their aprons. “You mean well, dear, I know. But you don’t respect your oven. You don’t respect the heat.”
The bell rang, and we filed out of the smoky room, down the hall to our lockers.
“If that old cow likes ovens so much,” Carol mumbled, “she should go put her head in one.”
I shoved my hands in my pockets. One held Mom’s silver lighter. The other, her ten bucks. I didn’t see how the evening could end well. When I asked Carol if I could come over to her house after school, she didn’t seem the least surprised. I guess it takes a lot to shock somebody who believes in miracles.
—
When you are young, other people’s homes are foreign countries where strange languages are spoken and private rituals are best left private. I assumed this would be doubly
true of the Closters. Not knowing what to expect, I prepared myself for crucifixes and rosaries, altars and shrouds. I pictured her mother in habit and wimple, her father with a white square at his neck. But the Closters were like everybody else. I tried not to feel disappointed.
They lived in one of Golden’s newer developments. Their house, like those beside it, had aluminum siding the colour of iceberg lettuce and a short porch shaded by a white canvas awning that you cranked in and out by hand. There was a basketball hoop over the garage and a flag over the front door. Two clay pots of bright pink flowers flanked the front step. String beans threaded a picket fence. I was met inside by fuzzy wallpaper, brown wall-to-wall, fake wood panelling, gold velvet furniture attired in plastic. The kitchen cupboards were dark orange, the avocado backsplash tiles hand-painted with the requisite fruits and vegetables. There weren’t even any crucifixes hanging around, though they did have an oil painting of Jesus in the hall where a mirror should have been. I guess the Closters trusted that God wouldn’t let them leave the house with spinach in their teeth.
“We’ve heard so much about you, Robin,” Mrs. Closter said. She stood at the stove where pots bubbled musically and filled the air with the heady scent of gravy. She looked nothing like Carol. A ruddy brunette, Teutonic and imposingly tall, she had to bend deeply at the knees to kiss her frowning daughter hello. “Robin this and Robin that. I guess I should ask you about yourself, but I feel as if I know you already.”
“Mother, you’re embarrassing me.”
“Oh, now. I’m sure Robin’s mother would say the same thing about you.”
“Sure,” I said. In truth, I’d never mentioned Carol to my mom. Carol rolled her eyes, and I smiled. She was horrible to her mother. We finally had something in common.
Mrs. Closter took Carol’s coat, asked about her day, her allergies, if she’d had enough to eat for lunch. Carol gave curt responses, pushed her mother’s fussing hands away. Mrs. Closter gave up and stood holding our coats, smiling as though she expected a tip. “Can I make you girls a nice snack?”