Mom was in top form, dancing around the kitchen with Macho. She was channeling Marlene Dietrich in elegant dress pants with flared legs, a white button-down shirt with the collar open, thin black tie hanging loose around her neck and a black fedora tipped over her brow. She and Macho attempted some kind of tipsy salsa, feet stuttering on linoleum to the syncopated beat. Occasionally she would lean too far to one side and Macho would catch her, keeping her upright, saying, All right, Dana, don’t hurt yourself, darlin’.
Dad stood in one corner of the kitchen and watched, a smile nudging at his lips, his eyes blurry from liquor and happiness. I watched Dad watch Mom and thought: He loves her. That’s what love looks like.
Late that night after the last guests had left, Mom lurched up the stairs, drunk but cheerful. She stumbled over a pile of laundry in one corner of the hallway and nearly went sprawling. This time I reached out and helped steady her with one arm. Mom looked down at me, gratitude in her eyes, and smiled wide.
Oh, baby, you shouldn’t see me like this, she said. I’m a mess.
You look beautiful tonight, Mom, I said, and it was true; with her cheeks all rosy and eyes bright and blond hair falling in waves around her face, she looked gorgeous, alive and amazing. She looked how I wanted to look, like the kind of person who could hold the attention of a room full of people, who could dance badly around a kitchen and laugh and make people laugh with her. My mom brought warmth wherever she went like some kind of human fireplace.
Thank you, sweetheart, she said, pressing one hand to my cheek and smoothing her thumb over my cheekbone. You’re the most beautiful, you know.
I shook my head no, but she forced me to look up, hand under her chin, and with her eyes shining she said, Mel, you are, don’t ever let anybody tell you different.
People say strange things when they’re drunk. My mom would never have said something like that sober, I’m pretty sure. Not because she didn’t mean it, but because it never would have occurred to her. She never seemed to do it on purpose, but she was always the star of the show, the most beautiful, a magnet for the spotlight. This made the rest of us the supporting players, not just on her birthday, but every day.
How could I ever be the most beautiful when she was the sun and I was the moon, pale and only seen because of her reflected light?
And what does that make me now, with her gone?
You’re not supposed to think these things about dead people, though, are you? Dead people are supposed to be perfect. Perfect and gone.
That night my dad was in charge of wrangling her.
I best get this woman to bed, he said, appearing at the top of the staircase. He wrapped his arms around Mom’s waist and yanked her backward, making her squeal as he tugged her into their bedroom and tossed her down on the bed. They were like little kids, giggling and teasing and tickling each other, and then Dad kicked their door closed.
Suddenly it was too quiet in the hallway. I felt itchy. I padded into my bedroom, went to my bed and sat down on top of the quilt, flicked on the radio and listened to the DJ on WPGC 95.5 dedicate sultry R&B songs to lovers. I lay on my bed, still in all my clothes, and stared up at the ceiling. The songs melted one into the next, steady rhythm ticking away like a metronome. Soon the voices all sounded the same. Outside my window it started to rain and a chill seeped through the wire mesh screen window. I wrapped my arms around myself and lay still, so still, impossibly still.
Alone, I thought. This is what alone feels like.
When my mom got so sick she lost her hair from the chemo and became pale and thin, there were no more parties. She stopped seeing her casual friends and didn’t go out hardly at all. With her hair all gone and her skin the color of wax paper and her shaking hands and bloodshot eyes, she wore her secret on the outside now.
I began bringing her ice cream from a neighborhood place we’d discovered together, packaged in their plain white pint cartons with simple black-and-white printed labels: Cookies & Cream. Mint Chocolate Chip. Chocolate. Mango. Coconut. We’d sit on her bed and eat straight out of the container, spoonful by spoonful, until one day she told me she couldn’t, that her stomach couldn’t handle it. Later I would learn that she hadn’t been able to taste for weeks, that the chemo had taken that away from her too.
And then the cancer took her away, period.
My mother wore top hats just for the hell of it, knew how to curse in twelve languages, took a class in tarot card reading on a whim and spent days offering to read the fortunes of everyone she met. She was crazy and unpredictable. Your mom, people would say to me, is such a character. She’s fabulous. Unique. Gorgeous. Sometimes they would look at me skeptically and say, You’ve got her eyes, like they were trying to figure out what I possibly could have inherited from her. Not her charm, or her talent, or her vibrant personality, no. But I had her eyes, my genetic consolation prize.
My mom was so wild, in fact, that I’d always figured she’d be offed in a duel at dawn, or in a freak bungee-jumping accident, or beheaded by a low-flying hot-air balloon.
Cancer? Really?
But death doesn’t make sense, does it?
God, just stop. Why can’t I make it stop?
My stomach rumbles. It’s dark now, and cooler—nearly 8:00 p.m., my watch says. I get up and go inside, wondering why Dad hasn’t called me in for dinner. The rare times he’s home for dinner, he’s usually a fascist about when we eat. It’s strange he’s not in the kitchen or upstairs.
“Daddy?” I call down the basement steps.
I can see light emanating from below, but no sign of him.
“I’ll be up in a minute, sweetheart,” comes his voice, low and strained.
I hop down a few steps. I can see the basement more clearly now, crowded with canvases and boxes containing jars of paint and brushes and palettes, all the tools of an artist. Mom’s studio lies disassembled here, exploded with no structure or system to it. It’s not unlike when she was still using it, except now it’s packed away in the dark rather than laid out upstairs in her sunny office off the living room.
Dad began moving stuff downstairs a few weeks before she died. That was when I knew she wasn’t coming back from the hospital.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
At the reception after the funeral I’d found my father in the kitchen, making toast.
Dad, I’d said, what the hell are you doing?
He looked up at me with bleary eyes. They were dark brown and red at the corners. Bread popped out of the toaster. He looked at it like he didn’t know what it was.
There are people out there, he said.
Yeah . . . I prompted.
She’s not here, he said.
I thought, Oh, great, now Mom’s gone and Dad’s lost his mind.
Dad, are you okay? I asked, and the moment I said it I regretted it, because of course he was not okay. There was no reason he should be. He’d just buried his wife.
He blinked, then wordlessly handed me a piece of toast. I took it and we chewed in silence, the toast dry and crusty and sandpapery and tasteless. He wrapped one arm around my shoulders, squeezing.
I trip down the rest of the stairs to find my father sitting in a broken wooden chair, running his fingers over a large canvas. In the low light I can make out the swirled colors of a figure, abstract but oddly familiar.
“She gave this to me,” he says softly, “on our one-year anniversary. Seventeen years ago.”
I flick on the light so I can see. The figure is my dad—visible now—hunched over a stove, cooking. Steam rises in white clouds from the pan, and the flames glow orange fanned out around the burner. His hair is a mass of curls, mostly gone now as he approaches middle age, and he’s holding one hand above the pan, sprinkling some powdery substance into it.
“She knew before I did,” my father whispers. “She knew what I was meant to do even when I though
t, Oh, be an accountant, that’s practical, everyone needs an accountant—”
He stops, rubbing a palm across his face. I let one hand fall to his shoulder, wanting him to feel me there, close.
“Everyone needs food too, Dad,” I whisper.
Laughter bubbles out of his throat, a surprise.
“That is a good point, Melly.”
He presses his hand against the canvas over the image of his own face, spreading out his fingers. In between the Vs I can see snatches of color, slivers that don’t make sense, color without context.
Damon, boy with the green eyes, standing between the trees—
Who are you?
My brain is such a fog.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
Everybody apologizes.
“Sorry for what?” I say.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t—”
He stops. I get it. Save her. Keep her here. Fix her. Sorry I didn’t see that she was sick. Sorry I didn’t know until it was too late.
But there are things we can’t prepare for, things we don’t see.
“Don’t be sorry,” I say.
• • •
Chipping paint, red brick and an underlying aroma of asbestos. Mmm. Welcome back to school, D.C. public-style.
I adjust my bra strap and press my way through the metal detectors. The lockers look pristine and graffiti free. They’re only this way during the first few weeks, chartreuse paint glaring and awful but still unblemished. Outside the auditorium is the same display of photos of our sports teams that I’m pretty sure has been there since the building was erected. The photos themselves are universally boring, all depicting past athletes posed to look heroic and fit in uniforms that are almost comically dated at this point. I guess the display remains there to remind us all that sports are great, even as the photos grow increasingly yellow with age.
The hallways hum with the collected energy of fifteen hundred teenagers steeped in a potent hormonal infusion, gabbing about the swampy D.C. August heat and their part-time jobs from hell and who got a new car, new house, new boyfriend or new clothes this summer.
My summer involved waiting tables and lots of bad late-night TV and indie rock played loudly through crackling speakers. There were also endless hospital visits and terrible sludgy cafeteria pudding and many sleepless nights. My mom died, and no one knows that but the one friend I told.
No one else cares.
It’s amazing how high school works—people spend so much time gossiping, but know so little about each other’s lives. My classmates are not so much ships passing in the night as they are bumper cars, constantly crashing into each other but never connecting, never taking the time to see beyond the collision.
“Melly!” Tristan grasps me around the waist and lifts, spinning me in a tight circle.
Nobody is immune to Tristan’s hugs. They’re like cinnamon toast, good any time of day or night.
Tristan’s grinning huge and toothy, braces glinting and blue eyes shining. His hair is dark and messy and falls over his face like rain.
“Happy to see me?” he says.
I sigh and give in, letting him hug me close; he presses his face into my hair. He smells like green tea. God, only Tristan would come to school smelling like a Japanese beverage. I love him.
The bell rings, shrieking and loud. When we separate Tristan makes a face, twisting one hand through his hair. It peaks in front like soft-serve ice cream.
“I have to go see a guy about a thing at lunch,” Tristan says. “When will we meet again, my darling?”
“Is this a legal thing? Who is this guy?”
Tristan arches an eyebrow but says nothing.
“After school? You don’t have play practice yet, do you?”
Tristan laughs. “Maybe I’ll try something else this year. Maybe . . . basketball.”
I snort. “Mmm-hmm. Magic eight ball says, ‘Not likely.’”
Tristan flips me off good-naturedly. I blow him a kiss.
• • •
Bio happens, then English, then study hall. My classes are uneventful and uninteresting, and I spend most of bio making tiny origami birds out of pieces of my schedule. I applaud my own productivity.
After school I settle down under a tree and watch my fellow students stream out of the building like noxious gas, off to pollute the rest of the world for the evening. Say what you will about the American education system, but at least it contains my worthless generation for eight hours a day. I like to think of school as not so much a prison as a mental hospital, a holding cell for those plagued with the unfortunate pathology known as adolescence.
“Melly!” Tristan collapses onto the ground next to me, pulling me into a tight embrace. “It’s been years.”
“Jesus, Tristan,” I say, coughing. “Leave some oxygen in my lungs, please. I need it for respiration and, y’know, not dying.”
Tristan’s all sunny smiles when he lets me go.
“Oh my God, okay, so I was talking to Mr. Granger, right,” Tristan says, “and he thinks I might be right about that thing about the Illuminati—”
I try to pay attention to Tristan’s rambling account of how the Catholic Church was possibly allied with some crazy evil secret society, but I tune him out after the first thirty seconds and watch the procession of human traffic instead. It’s a never-ending stream of jeans, T-shirts and sneakers, disrupted occasionally by random piercings, ugly possibly fake tattoos or ill-advised dye jobs.
But then my eyes catch and hold.
Damon.
I’d wondered when I would see him.
At the restaurant, I didn’t get a chance to check him out for real. I take a moment to just look. He’s tall, lanky, wearing a black T-shirt and baggy jeans over beat-up Pumas. His skin’s the color of a latte, with dark, wiry hair and eyes so green, they’d make Kermit jealous. Serious cheekbones too, high and angled and sharp. He’s got a camera case slung over one shoulder. He’s leaning against a wall in front of the school, chatting with some guys on the basketball team. He holds up one long-fingered hand and forms it into the shape of a gun, pointing it at one of his laughing friends.
I watch as he talks to one of the ballers. At first they seem to be joking around, but then Damon shrugs off the other boy and turns away. He slides down the wall into a crouch and pulls a camera out of his bag. He raises it to look through the viewfinder and his fingers tighten around the lens, adjusting.
Is he looking at me?
“. . . and that’s how they killed Jimmy Hoffa! It’s so totally fascinating, Melly . . . Melanie?”
Tristan has to nearly throttle my arm to recover my attention. I blink and turn away, focusing on Tristan’s face.
“You all right, Mel?” Tristan cocks an eyebrow.
“M’good,” I mutter, brushing strands of my hair out of my eyes. “But I got homework, so I’ll catch you later.”
“Bye, babe,” Tristan says, then hops up and gives me yet another hug. He feels warm and smells sweet. We’ll talk about this later, missy, his eyes are saying, but it’s more of a promise than a threat.
• • •
At home, safely ensconced in my room, I slip a Nina Simone CD into my stereo, curl into a ball and listen to her wail about the world’s woes. But when I close my eyes, I think of Damon: Damon who drinks black coffee and has green eyes, Damon who goes to my school. When he told me he was starting at Hamilton, I didn’t think about what that really meant.
I make up a life for him. Maybe he’s the only child of two very attractive parents. He plays basketball and thinks Sports Illustrated is great journalism. He’s never read a poem in his life. He’s polite, but not very smart. He only likes action movies, watching people get blown up. On weekends he goes out with his friends and they drink and knock over trash cans and laugh like it’s the funniest thing in
the world.
But that doesn’t seem right.
You never give boys a chance, Melly, my mom used to say. She’d be sitting in the kitchen with her paint-stained fingers wrapped round a cup of coffee, looking at me through the thin, wire-rimmed glasses that were sliding down her nose.
I give them a chance, I’d say.
Girls either, she’d say.
Maybe that was fair. It’d been me and Tristan forever, bonded by our mutual love of Spider-Man coloring books in the first grade, but I haven’t had a really good girlfriend for years. I know exactly when I stopped trying to make them: middle school. That’s when everyone got mean, when the jokes turned cruel and the insults got personal. My clothes were never stylish enough. My hair was never cute enough. Hey, Melanie, 1974 called and it wants your flared jeans back, Sophie Angelino said to me once. It felt like the whole room laughed.
Who wants friends like that?
My mom couldn’t possibly understand, because I wasn’t like her: everybody’s buddy, so charming and easy and pretty. I didn’t make instant connections with people. I didn’t fit in. I couldn’t just flirt and toss my hair and flutter my eyelashes and make the boys come to me. Boys didn’t look at me that way. They didn’t look at me at all.
Sometimes I wondered if that was because there was nothing to look at.
I’d give them a chance, I’d think, if they’d give me one.
I riffle through my purse to find the photo Damon gave me of Carlos. It’s beautiful. I don’t even know this kid and every time I look at it I want to smile.
Maybe that was Damon’s way of giving me a chance. Letting me in.
What is up with that camera? It seems like his constant companion. I feel like there’s a story there, and I want to know it.
Speak of Me As I Am Page 3