Please Proceed to the Nearest Exit

by Jessica Raya

  “You’ve got me there. Husband number three was president of the Young Republicans in college.” Vera tapped the button on her dress with a French-tipped nail. “He almost had a heart attack when he saw this. It was wonderful.”

  “So a vote for McGovern is a vote for revenge?”

  “The volunteer meetings are full of divorced women. There’d be no campaign without us.”

  “Now there’s a slogan.”

  “You should help out. Join our divorced women’s club.”

  “I’m not divorced, Vera.”

  “Technicalities.”

  “That’s my life. One giant technicality.”

  Vera turned to me. “Is this one old enough to vote yet? You’re American, aren’t you, honey?”

  “She’s sixteen,” Mom said wistfully, I thought, like the heroines in the novels I never managed to finish.

  “Too young to worry about the promises of old men,” Vera said.

  “Or the complaints of old ladies.”

  “Who are you calling a lady?” Vera said.

  She stood up and came over to where I lay, aerating the grass with her kitten heels. She bent down and put her hand under my chin, lifted my face to hers. Her eye makeup was running and powder had settled thickly in the lines around her mouth, but not even Mom’s coffee could budge her sly red smile. “Sixteen,” she said. “Not a woman but not a child either. It’s the limbo of life.”

  “More like purgatory,” I said.

  “Talk to me when you’re my age,” Mom said. But I could no more imagine being her age than I could imagine being a parakeet.

  “Dominic Savio was fourteen when he died,” I said.

  “Who’s that?” Vera said.

  “The patron saint of juvenile delinquents.”

  Vera let go of my face and picked up my magazine, fanned herself with it. It was open to the quiz “How Good a Daughter Are You?” I’d passed with flying colours, because I’d lied on nearly every answer. “I’ll have to remember to tell Moody he’s got his own saint,” she said.

  Vera settled back into her chair. Nobody said anything for a while. I laid my head down on the blanket and closed my eyes. Maybe I could learn how to feather my hair by osmosis.

  “Did you hear about those kids camped out in front of that doctor’s office?” she said. I opened my eyes. I was wide awake now. “You know—that doctor.”

  Mom jumped up. “Well, I could sure use another coffee. More coffee, Vera?” She didn’t wait for an answer. Vera kept talking, only louder.

  “They’re just a couple of kids,” she called out. “Waving signs around or some nonsense. What do you make of that, Elaine?” When Mom didn’t answer, Vera turned to me. “They’re about your age. Can you believe that?”

  “No,” I said, which was true.

  I’d met Carol at the end of my block every morning for the past two weeks. Every morning for two weeks, I’d thought about staying in bed, but that would have meant saying no to Carol and, worse, trying to explain why. I didn’t need a magazine quiz to tell me I was a crappy daughter, but I was trying, at least, to be a good friend. I wasn’t sure I believed in destiny, but it was important to Carol to be in that parking lot and for me to be with her, so there I was. Mrs. Closter would be back from Colorado any day now anyway, and Carol didn’t take buses because they were teeming with germs. Soon this would just be another summer memory, something to throw away with the clothes I’d outgrown. In the suffocating heat of Mrs. Closter’s station wagon, it was easy to convince myself that it didn’t mean anything, that maybe it wasn’t even happening. Maybe we were just two normal kids on summer vacation playing I spy. Except that we weren’t.

  “You don’t know anything about it, of course,” Vera said, squinting at me. It might have been the sun in her eyes, but maybe not.

  An answer scratched at the back of my throat. I wanted to tell Vera everything. Melanie had hated going to confession, but I could see the value, to purge yourself of sin, to say your Hail Marys and be neatly and efficiently absolved. But absolved of what? What had Carol and I done wrong? Most days, sitting outside Dr. Winkelmann’s, it didn’t seem like we’d done anything at all.

  “Vera?” I started. If anyone would understand, it would be Vera Miller, who seemed to me to be the kind of woman who’d done things she regretted but still managed to coordinate her shoes and handbag. She was the closest I was going to get to a priest.

  Vera’s left eyebrow twitched. “Yes, sweetheart?”

  Then again, I wasn’t Catholic.

  “Were you really a roller-skating waitress?”

  “Who was a roller-skating waitress?” Mom said, stepping through the sliding door with a carafe of brown sludge.

  Vera leaned back in her chair, something like a smile twitching at the corner of her red mouth. “Nobody you know,” she said, holding out her glass for a refill.

  15

  One Saturday, Mom drove downtown with Vera Miller and came home with a box of McGovern pamphlets. “I guess I’ve joined Vera’s divorced women’s club,” she said and laughed like it was some big joke. It was hot, even by Golden standards, the air so dry it tasted of dust. But Mom didn’t let that stop her. She knocked on doors every evening, sometimes with Vera and sometimes alone. When she got home she gulped water like she’d been wandering a desert and grumbled about where our neighbours could stick Nixon’s promises.

  “You don’t think McGovern will actually win,” I said.

  “Stranger things have happened,” she said, which was true.

  Like me walking to the gas station every couple of days, whether I needed a new lighter or not. If I got there around four-thirty, Jamie Finley was usually there after work. I’d stop and talk to him while he checked the air in his tires or rubbed the hood of the Pinto with a chamois. He was a teenaged boy and all teenaged boys love their cars, butt-ugly or not. If Jamie was putting in overtime, I’d sometimes stand in the shade of the gas pumps and watch him work from across the street. Moving rocks from one pile to another was probably the world’s worst job, but at least he had something useful to do. I’d spent almost a month sitting in a station wagon outside Dr. Winkelmann’s office, and I was still really bad at parallel parking, though I had gotten better at I spy.

  “Everyone needs to feel they have a purpose,” Mom told me. She was still working full-time at the hospital, but instead of bringing home medical records, now she brought home McGovern paraphernalia to hand out on her evening walks. When she ran out, she would bring home more. It reminded me of Jamie’s rocks. Maybe that was all life was, moving things from one place to another.

  Around the time the heels of Mom’s shoes wore down to the metal nubs, the campaign office promoted her to the call list. She’d sit on the stool under the kitchen phone for hours, reciting the same platitudes she’d once used with Dad’s clients. Every cloud has a silver lining. It’s always darkest before the dawn. You can’t make omelettes without breaking a few eggs. When one of Dad’s clients did call to worry over a policy, she’d give them her McGovern spiel. “You can’t insure against everything,” she’d tell them. “Who’s going to cover the damage we’re doing in Vietnam?”

  They gave her more pamphlets, more numbers to call, her very own clipboard with a pen attached by a chain of rubber bands. They told her she was a real asset, they wished they had ten more like her. The senator appreciated everything she was doing. Keep up the good work. Your country needs you more than ever. Your country needs you. Oh, how Mom loved that line. She said it to the people on her call list, to the cashiers at Lucky’s, to the man who came to fix the pool pump. “America is in pain. America is broken. Your country needs you. Your country neeeeds you.” The more she told people how miserable things were, the more hopeful she seemed.

  Between calls, she stuffed envelopes and made buttons with a nifty machine the campaign office had lent her. Nobody could turn out buttons like Elaine Fisher. They found their way into cupboards and drawers. What furniture we had was cove
red with them. We had purpose up the wazoo.

  Vera came over some evenings to help. She’d spike their coffee with Irish whiskey and rant about husband number three. I sat at the table with them or on the floor, stuffing one envelope for Mom’s five or six. She had developed her own system, threading the pamphlets between her fingers and firing them into a cascade of open envelopes. “That could be the vote that wins the election,” she’d say, squeezing one last fattened envelope into another full box. “You never know!”

  Mom said if I liked volunteering, there were girls who came to the hospital once or twice a week to help out. They handed out flowers or fed the elderly patients. I said I’d think about it, and she smiled at me as if I’d been shortlisted for the Nobel Prize. But really what I liked about those hours stuffing envelopes was hearing Vera’s stories, the sound of her and Mom’s laughter in the warm air like our own laugh track.

  Vera would usually stay until dinner. She was never very eager to leave. Furniture or not, she liked our house better than her own. “There are all kinds of empty,” Mom said one night after Vera finally went home. When it was just the two of us again, Mom would put away the envelopes and study for her citizenship exam, eating whatever I put in front of her, never complaining about burnt edges or cold centres as she turned the pages of the little booklet with paper-cut fingers. Later, I’d quiz her on dead presidents and she’d quiz me on speed limits, the two of us firing questions back and forth between her evening laps.

  —

  Some McGovern campaigners came to the plaza one day, knocking on doors and stopping to talk to people in the parking lot outside Dr. Winkelmann’s office. “Take a good look at the enemy,” Carol said, but all I saw were people shaking hands and handing out pamphlets. What they were doing seemed a lot like what we were doing, only they were happy about it. It was the seventies and everybody was having a great time telling everybody else how to live.

  I was disappointed when they left. It was the second most exciting thing that had happened in that parking lot all month. The most exciting thing was when the town put up a No Loitering sign. The nurse had come outside to watch two men in reflective vests jackhammer a hole in the sidewalk and stick a signpost in it. When they were done, she’d yelled across the parking lot, “You’ve got thirty minutes and then I’m calling the police.” She was either just trying to scare us, or the police didn’t care about a couple of dumb kids with glittered signs, because we didn’t see so much as a cruiser drive by. I kept waiting for somebody to make me and Carol go home, but nobody ever did.

  I usually drove Mrs. Closter’s station wagon around the parking lot when we got tired of I spy, but it was too hot to be in the car that day and the air conditioning triggered Carol’s asthma. While she walked to the mini-mart to use the bathroom and buy another cold pop, I sat bored and sweaty under the pet shop awning with my DMV booklet on my lap and quizzed myself. When the road signs started to blur together, I leaned my head back against the stucco and closed my eyes. Traffic hummed sweetly in the distance. I could almost see the steering wheel and that long, cool road north.

  The hairdresser with copper hair came outside and taped a hand-lettered sign to the salon window. It took her a really long time to get it straight. Taping up banners was apparently the kind of skill you perfected in school, then promptly lost, like algebra.

  When she was done, she stood back and scrutinized her work. SPECIAL!!! 2-for-1 PERMANENTS!!!

  “For people with two heads?” I said.

  “You kids are bad for business,” she said.

  “Sorry.”

  “Are you Mormons or something?”

  “I don’t think so. What’s a Mormon?”

  She pulled out a cigarette from behind her ear and stuck it between her lips. She patted her smock and, finding nothing but a comb, sighed loudly. I took out my lighter. As the hairdresser leaned in, her copper hair fell forward, glinting in the sun like a wall of fire. I cupped my hand around the flame so her hair wouldn’t catch fire for real.

  “I’m from Utah,” she said. “Everybody in Utah is always sticking their nose into everybody else’s business, and not a single one of them with good hair. Says something, don’t you think? How I’d love to get my hands on some of those heads now. I couldn’t help your friend with the hat though. Hair like that won’t even take to straighteners they use on black girl hair. You’ve got good hair. You just need a little volume at the crown. Ever try sleeping with Coke cans?”

  “In my bed?”

  “In your hair.” She gave me a look. “What are you doing here, kid?”

  I opened my mouth to answer her, but I wasn’t sure how. What I wanted to say was that I thought I once knew the difference between right and wrong, but lately all the choices on offer seemed as dubious as the sea monkey families advertised in the backs of magazines. What I said instead was, “Is it hard to be a hairdresser?”

  “It’s not brain science, but you have to pass a test.” She took a drag from her cigarette. “What I really wanted was to be a nightclub singer. My mother was the one who signed me up for hairdressing school.”

  “Maybe you could sing to your customers.”

  She shook her head. “I never said I was any good.”

  “I’m going to volunteer at the hospital,” I said. “They give you your own old person to feed.”

  “That’s nice,” she said and smiled like she meant it.

  The guy with the golden retriever came back. The plastic cone was gone now, but the pet store was still closed. Someone had put a new sign on the door. It would reopen next month as a shoe store. He studied the sign for a while, as if he was trying to understand why someone thought dogs needed shoes.

  “You’d think they’d have worked it out by now,” the hairdresser said.

  “You’d think,” I said. I thought she meant the guy and his dog.

  “I mean, you take trash out the back, don’t you?” She exhaled out the side of her mouth. “Oh hell, what do I know? I came to California to get away from all that. Right. Wrong. Who’s to say? I mean, Dr. Mengele over there isn’t so hot for business either.”

  The hairdresser stubbed out her cigarette and went back to work. Carol came back from the store. She’d brought me a root beer.

  “I think I’m starting to burn,” she said while I drank. Her entire face was the colour of cooked ham.

  “This isn’t working,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “Let’s go home.”

  “Okay.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, but you don’t have to look so happy about it.”

  There wasn’t really anything to pack up. We didn’t bother to take the signs out of the back anymore.

  “They were really good signs,” I said.

  “You can’t go wrong with glitter.” Carol popped the latch. “No point keeping them, I guess.”

  She gathered the signs in her skinny arms and went around back to look for a garbage bin. Carol was a lot of things, but she was no litterbug. I opened my booklet, and tried to remember what a squiggly black line meant. It was a minute before I heard the shouting.

  I ran toward the sound of Carol’s voice. The back of the plaza was a lot like the front, except there were no windows, only a series of grey doors every thirty feet or so. Carol had somebody pinned against one.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “I’m saving them,” Carol said.

  “Well, stop.”

  Carol stepped back from the door. The girl crumpled to the ground and sobbed into her hands. She was wearing a sweatshirt with a D’Angelo Dry Cleaning logo on the front. Where cleanliness is next to godliness.

  “Melanie?” I said.

  “I told you!” Carol said, hopping up and down. “I told you this was my destiny! Now do you believe me?”

  A row of black garbage bins squatted against the wall beside us. I wrapped my arms around my stomach, imagining a dead baby in one of those bins, mixed in with the hai
r clippings and cans of expired cat food. I thought of my mom, how she had cried alone behind her bedroom door for days.

  “I’m sorry,” Melanie whimpered. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay, Mel. It’ll be okay.”

  “What do you mean?” Carol said. “It’s not okay! Why are you even talking to her?”

  “I can talk to anyone I want to,” I said, but then I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  Carol stared hard at me, her hands curling into tight little fists. “I knew it,” she said and launched herself at me.

  She was heavy enough to send me flailing a few feet before I slammed down on the concrete. Then she was on top of me, knees digging into my ribs, hands scratching everywhere—at my hair, my clothes, my face. Melanie was shouting at her to stop. I covered my face, but I didn’t fight back. I deserved it, if not for this then for other things. Carol would wear herself out soon enough anyway. I could already hear her asthma rattle. I was more worried about her than me.

  Somebody laid on a car horn. Carol’s fists froze in the air above me. We turned our heads and saw a red Mustang idling on the side street. The driver honked again. Melanie rose and bolted for the car, mashing her hands into her eyes. She’d barely shut the passenger door when Troy hit the gas.

  “That does it!” The nurse stood in the doorway behind us. She tugged on her lumpy cardigan. “That’s assault. This time I’m really calling the police.” The hairdresser was at her back door too. She shook her copper head as though she’d expected this from me all along, good hair or not.

  Carol climbed off me. Her face was shiny with snot and tears. She’d lost her hat in the shuffle, and her hair sprung out in every direction, like a dandelion gone to seed. She stuck her inhaler in her mouth and took a sharp breath, then another. “Your nose is bleeding,” she said, giving me her handkerchief. “Pinch it and tip your head back.”

  We walked back to the station wagon. She took another puff from her inhaler, but her breath still scraped inside her lungs. I thumbed my lighter, but it didn’t make me feel any better either. Carol got in behind the wheel and started the engine. I stood beside the passenger door.