by Amy Bryant
I set my backpack on top of the duffel bag at my feet. “They don’t even know your last name. Plus they think you’re in high school.”
“Have you called Theresa or Carrie? Why don’t you go over to one of their houses and call me from there?”
I banged the receiver down as hard as I could.
I walked one bus stop farther than my stop, in case Mom and William were looking for me. I had to wait almost thirty minutes for the bus to show up. I took it to the main bus terminal in Fairfax, which was deserted and smelled like urine and gasoline. There was a bus leaving for Charlotte at midnight. I waited near the ticket window, where the clerk could see me. A large clock over the vending machines buzzed, like the ones at school. I half expected Mom or William to walk through the door, but they didn’t.
The bus was mostly empty. I could have had my own seat, but instead I sat next to a heavy, middle-aged black woman. I felt safer with her next to me, even though she slept the whole way. I stared out the window at the black highway and marveled at how much trouble I was in. Mom and William had probably called the police by now. I wasn’t sure if I could be arrested for running away.
The bus made so many stops we didn’t get to Charlotte until eight thirty in the morning. It wasn’t until we pulled into the terminal that I started to worry about my father. Mom would have told me if he’d moved, but there was a chance he was out of town. Or at work. I decided to call him from the bus station but changed my mind when I saw a cab pull up out front. I ran toward it, waving my free arm.
I had to ask the cab driver to wait while I dug in my duffel bag for my spiral.
“You comin’ from a long ways away?” he asked. He was old and unshaven, and he looked like he’d been up at least as long as I had. A cigarette dangled from his mouth, and on a whim I bummed one from him. He gave me one of his Newports and lit a match with one hand. I read off my father’s address and we pulled out onto the road. I tapped my cigarette on the ashtray that protruded from the cab’s partition. This was my first ride in a taxi.
Dad didn’t live very far from the bus station. I had pictured him living in a high-rise, but his apartment complex was made up of several low, redbrick buildings that formed a horseshoe around a drained pool. As we rounded the horseshoe I spotted his white Mustang at the far end of the parking lot, gleaming in the morning sun. I had the cabdriver let me out in front of it.
“You want me to wait until you’re safe inside?” the driver asked after I’d paid him.
“No thanks,” I said.
I watched the cab pull back out onto the road, and then I sat on the curb next to Dad’s Mustang and rummaged in my backpack for my brush. The Newport had given me a head rush, and now I was nauseated.
I thought about the last time I’d seen Dad. He had come up the Christmas before last. We didn’t spend the actual day together, but the weekend before it. We passed Saturday at the mall among the hordes of shoppers, looking for a present for me. I let Dad hold my hand while we walked, even though it embarrassed me. Finally I picked out a few albums at the record store and we went out into the cold, dull parking lot, both of us unable to figure out what to do next.
His doorbell was broken. There were wires poking out from the brick where the button had been. I knocked. A copy of USA Today leaned against the door and I bent down and picked it up.
Dad opened the door and stared at me. “I thought this’d be the last place you’d show up,” he said. “Your mother is worried sick.”
He was wearing navy blue work pants and a white undershirt. His feet were bare. I handed him the newspaper. He tossed it on the floor behind him and pulled me into a hug. His cheek scratched against my temple.
“I have to make a couple of phone calls,” he said.
I stepped inside and he disappeared down a short hallway. His apartment smelled like cigarettes and coffee. I set my backpack and my duffel bag down next to a small table stacked with mail. I could hear his muffled voice from the next room. The rust-colored couch was strewn with newspapers. I moved them around until there was room for me to sit down. There were rabbit ears on top of the TV instead of a cable box. Next to the rabbit ears were an empty pack of cigarettes and a coffee mug that said KISS ME I’M IRISH. I wanted to open a window, air things out a little, but I stayed where I was. I tried to make out what Dad was saying, but he was speaking too softly.
He came out and stood next to the TV. “Your mother’s on her way,” he said.
I forced myself to breathe. “Oh,” I said.
“You mind telling me what’s going on?”
I picked up one of the newspapers next to me and set it down again. “I wanted to see you,” I said.
Dad chuckled. “That’s it? You wanted to see me, so you boarded a bus in the middle of the night and came on down?”
“Something like that.”
“Your mother says you’ve been skipping school and staying out late.”
“Did she tell you how good my GPA is? How well I did on my SATs?”
“Polly, your mother and I are both concerned. That’s all I’m getting at.”
“Everything’s fine.”
“What about William?”
I looked up at him. He’d put a gray sweatshirt on. It was tight in front where his gut was.
“What about William?” I said.
“He treats you okay?”
“He’s fine.”
Dad came over to the couch and sat down, right on top of the newspapers. He put an arm around me and the newspapers crinkled underneath him. I had to pee, but I didn’t move.
“I didn’t want to give you up,” he said. “Not ever.” He tightened his arm around me.
I started to cry. “I know,” I said. I sobbed harder. Dad put his other arm around me and I buried my face in his sweatshirt. His skin had the bitter smell of alcohol.
“I still go by Polly Clark,” I said.
He took me to Friendly’s for breakfast. When we got settled at our table, Dad peeled a photograph out of his wallet and showed it to me. It was a picture of the two of us. I was about three years old in the picture, and we were sitting on the front porch of our old house. The house was tan, but the porch was painted dark green. We sat with our backs resting against the screen door. It was summer, and I had on peach-colored shorts and a royal blue T-shirt with a rainbow on it. Dad had puffy seventies hair and big sideburns. His face was tan but his legs were stark white sticking out of his shorts. We were both laughing, probably at something Mom was saying as she took the picture.
I didn’t really remember the house we lived in then, but I told Dad I did. After we were finished eating he pulled a camera out of his jacket pocket and asked the waitress to take a picture of us standing up by our table.
“It’s about time I updated my wallet,” he said when the waitress was gone. He touched one of the curled-up edges of the old picture. “You keep this one,” he said. “You probably don’t have too many photos of us.”
“I’ve got a few.”
“I just can’t believe you’re graduating from high school soon and going off to college,” he said.
“I know,” I said. “Me neither.”
“You’re still my baby, you know. You’ll always be my baby.”
I took a sip of my coffee.
“I still remember the night you were born as clear as if it happened yesterday,” he said.
“Well, it was almost eighteen years ago.”
Dad coughed. It went on for almost a minute. “I hate to say what I’m gonna say. I really do,” he said when he was finished coughing. I waited for him to say he had cancer. Or a heart condition. Instead he said, “It doesn’t look like I can come up for your graduation.”
I laughed. “It’s just a dumb ceremony,” I said. “I don’t even know if I’m going.”
“Your mother told me the date. I’m just heartbroken about it. Try as I might, I just can’t make it happen, workwise. What with the sick day today, and my vacation time gone—you�
�d think they’d do it on a weekend.”
“Seriously. It’s not important,” I said. I wondered what he had done for a vacation. “We’ll see each other after that.”
“It is important! I wanted to watch my little girl walk across that stage!”
“Well, there’s always my college graduation. I’m not making any promises after that, though.”
“I’ll come up over the summer. Take you out big. Someplace fit for a young lady with a high school diploma under her belt.”
I forced a smile. “Deal.”
Mom showed up around five, and we were on the road by six. In the parking lot Dad squeezed my shoulders and told me to stay out of trouble, and I felt the tears rise in my throat again. Mom and Dad shook hands and then hugged. The diamond studs William had given her for her birthday glittered in Mom’s ears. She was wearing jeans and sneakers, and the earrings didn’t fit in with the rest of her outfit. I turned away, pressed my tears back down to my belly.
I slept most of the way home. I expected Mom to yell at me as soon as we were alone in the car, but she didn’t. She didn’t say anything at all. It was late when we got home, and William was already in bed. There was a sheet of yellow notebook paper on the kitchen counter. Call Joey was written in William’s small, loopy handwriting. I picked up the message and threw it in the trash can under the sink.
Everybody knew I’d run away. Mom had called Carrie and Theresa almost as soon as I left. Since I had my spiral notebook with me Mom hadn’t been able to find Joey’s number with its 202 area code. And somehow Carrie had convinced Mom that it would be better if one of my friends called him. They’d all been sure that Joey was hiding me, until Dad called.
Carrie and Theresa followed me around at school, offering me cigarettes and asking if I needed to talk. Joey pleaded with me to forgive him for not letting me come over, and promised he’d make it up to me when he saw me next. I told him I wouldn’t be seeing him anytime soon, since I was grounded. Lyle told me that I was always welcome to come over to his house, day or night. He reminded me that I could have tapped on his basement door, slept on the scratchy couch next to the band equipment without his mother finding out. Adam called me Huck Finn and asked me if any pimps had come up to me in the bus station. I told them all the same thing. I’d gone to visit my dad and that was all. I felt Mike Franklin’s eyes on me at the lunch table, but I pretended not to notice.
The rest of the week I came straight home after school and spent my evenings locked in my room. I stayed off the telephone and avoided the TV. I did my homework. William and Mom ate their dinner in front of the TV and I ate my dinner in my room. Friday night came and went. Nobody mentioned the Bad Brains show, even though everybody was going.
Saturday Mom woke me up early. There was a final winter clearance sale at Hecht’s. Normally I slept in, but I was glad to get out of the house. We got there just as it was opening, and Hecht’s was nearly empty. We started in outerwear, and then moved on to sweaters.
Mom held a pink wool cardigan under my chin to see how it looked with my complexion. She was a Color Me Beautiful addict. Mom was a winter, and I was a summer.
“Did your father seem all right when you saw him?” Mom asked, moving her eyes from the sweater to my face and back to the sweater.
“I guess so,” I said. “Why? Did he seem weird to you?” I pushed the sweater away. Pink was supposed to be my color, but I hated it.
“There was a time when—well, he’s usually okay during the day.”
We wandered over to Shoes. The sale shoes were crammed together in tight rows. I was starting to wish I’d stayed in bed.
“Dad was fine,” I said. “He wasn’t drunk, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Mom picked up a maroon loafer and turned it over.
“At least he was nice to me,” I said. “At least he didn’t tell me he didn’t want me living with him. Or refer to my friends as hooligans.”
Mom put the loafer down. “Do you want William and me to get a divorce?”
I felt my breath go out of me. I didn’t have an answer. I turned and walked over to a stack of jeans by the dressing rooms. Mom followed me.
“I could get a second job to pay for your college and go back to living in a crummy apartment. Would that make you happy?”
I thumbed through the jeans to find my size. I was still waiting to breathe.
“You know, life isn’t always how you want it to be. We don’t always have control over things. That’s something you’re going to have to learn.”
I exhaled. “Believe me, I know,” I said.
We walked in silence toward the mall entrance, through the makeup counters with their heavy perfumes struggling to stand out against one another. Mom walked slightly ahead of me. Her shoulder slumped under the weight of her oversized brown zippered purse.
We made our way around an overweight, middle-aged couple in matching sweat suits to the glossy floor of the mall’s main thoroughfare. It was our habit to stroll the mall after a Hecht’s sale and have lunch in the food court. But today it felt forced. Mom’s mouth was tight and small. I could tell she didn’t want to be here any more than I did.
We paused in front of Linens ’n Things to let a woman with five or six little boys in birthday hats get by us. “You don’t know how lucky you’ve got it,” Mom said.
“No, I guess I don’t.” The boys raced off in the direction of the multiplex, all shouting at once.
“William does a lot of things for you. You should be more grateful,” Mom said when we started walking again.
“Just because Dad was a jerk doesn’t mean that William is some perfect father figure,” I said.
“William is not an alcoholic. William cares for you in ways your father is not capable of.”
I didn’t answer her. We came up on the main fountain. The fountain was rectangular and spanned the length of four stores. The rushing water drowned out the piped-in Muzak. At the far end of the fountain were a couple of benches and next to them, an assortment of giant, fake potted plants. An old man sat next to the plants, tapping the ash from his cigarette into fake plant dirt. I sucked in his leftover smoke as we passed.
Mom wasn’t finished with me. “I wish you’d try to be a little more respectful of the rules,” she said. “I spend more time than I’d like defending you to William.”
“I’m seventeen,” I said. “I hate to tell you, but you guys are basically through raising me.”
“Can’t you just try to get along with him?”
“What if I don’t want to?”
“I want you to. Doesn’t that mean anything?”
I fell silent again. I hated this. In front of us a group of skinny, heavily made-up middle-school girls breezed into the Photomat. Three short skater boys hovered next door at the entrance to the record store, staring after them. Mom and I were people watchers. Sometimes we’d sit down on one of the benches at the mall just to look. She liked me to name all the different kinds of teenagers.
“What’s that one?”
“A bop.”
“How about that one?”
“In the leather jacket with the denim vest over it? That’s a metalhead.”
“And is that one a metalhead?”
“That’s a grit. See the beard? Definitely a grit.”
“What about her?”
“She’s a deadhead. You can tell by her skirt and her bracelets. And over there, those girls are new wavers. You can tell they’re vegetarians because they’re all wearing those cloth Chinese shoes.”
Mom laughed at the names, praised the cleverness as though it were mine.
“What are you?” Mom asked me once. I told her I didn’t know.
We stepped onto the down escalator. Sweet, greasy food-court smells floated up to us. We looked down at the brown plastic tables with yellow umbrellas.
“You’re not the only one who can run away,” Mom said in a small voice. “I could run away tomorrow:”
I gripped the side
s of the escalator.
“I have a car and money. I could run away, and neither one of you’d ever see me again,” she said.
I shut my eyes and waited for the escalator to run out.
When we got home there was a message from Theresa. There was an afternoon party going on. Bands were playing in someone’s garage, and supposedly the neighbors weren’t calling the police. Everything had been arranged ahead of time, and Theresa was calling on the off chance I could go.
“You can go this afternoon, but you’re still grounded,” Mom said. I guessed she felt bad about the things she’d said at the mall.
Carrie picked me up. Theresa was in the car with her.
“Hey, how was it?” I almost hated to ask. “I’m still so pissed I couldn’t go,” I said.
Carrie put the car into gear and pulled away from the curb. “We have to tell her,” Theresa said.
“Tell me what?” I felt a dull dread begin to wash through me. Maybe someone else had died. Or maybe Mike was going out with someone.
Theresa turned around in her seat. “We were gonna call you last night but we decided to wait until we saw you in person.” She tossed her box of Camel Lights onto my lap. “We saw Joey kissing a girl.”
“Are you sure it was him?” I said. “Maybe it wasn’t him.” We turned out of my street and onto the main road.
“God, Polly, he was like, totally making out with this chick in front of everybody,” Carrie said. “We walked right by him and totally fucking stared at him and everything, and he didn’t even act like he knew us or anything.”
I dug my nails into my palms and waited for the shock I was feeling to fade.
“Totally ignored us, the fucking snake,” Theresa said. “He’s probably been skeezing all over D.C. this whole time like some gross, cheesy asshole.”
“I told Lyle I had a bad feeling about him,” Carrie said. “I mean, after he told me he liked my miniskirt that one time in that tone of his, I said to Lyle, I was like, ‘I don’t know if Polly should trust that fucking guy, because—’”