Polly

by Amy Bryant

  “I think I’ve pretty much wanted to have sex with you for, like, years,” I said when Todd was finished with me.

  “I would’ve had sex with you before,” he said. He was still hovering over me. He smiled, and his right eye squinted shut. Light from the hallway seeped in under the bedroom door, making his pale skin look stony and unreal. He leaned down to kiss me again and I got that cold feeling I liked.

  I ran into him at a Dag Nasty show two weeks later. We did it in the back of my Subaru after watching the band from opposite sides of the club. We’d been hanging out almost every night ever since, mostly at Todd’s apartment. I didn’t tell Mom and William I was at Todd’s, and they didn’t ask.

  Todd was roommates with Fred Paige. I hadn’t seen Fred since I’d broken up with Joey. Fred worked the night shift at the video store, so Todd and I usually had the apartment to ourselves.

  “That’s an interesting choice,” Theresa said when I told her about Todd and me. Theresa had a summer internship at an abortion rights organization and a part-time night job at a record store in D.C. I saw her only once every couple of weeks.

  “I mean, I can see doing it once obviously, but—” she said.

  “It’s just for the summer,” I said.

  “I can see why you like him,” Theresa said. “But be careful. He’s crazy.”

  It was the same with Carrie. “He’s hot and all, but Lyle says he’s a psycho,” she said. “I hope you don’t want to double-date or anything.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. The last thing I wanted was a bunch of public outings with Todd. Lyle was right about him. In high school he’d punched a kid on the bus for a dollar. I’d heard another story about a skinhead punching him straight in the mouth at a hardcore show, knocking him on his back. Blood pouring from his mouth, Todd got up and kicked the skinhead in the stomach before the bouncers got to them.

  And it wasn’t just the violent stories that made me think Todd was crazy. It was everything. His squinty blue eyes were creepy and vacant. He hadn’t finished high school. He was twenty-one, and already his driver’s license had been taken away. He was given to loud, drunken rants that didn’t make sense. He’d spent more nights than he could count in jail. I wanted everyone in Reston to know I was his girlfriend.

  At first, my primary role at The Disney Store was as a greeter. I stood at the store entrance for six hours at a stretch, startling customers as they entered.

  “Hi! Welcome to The Disney Store!”

  I greeted for a month straight before I got promoted to the cash register. I still had to greet two shifts a week, but I didn’t complain. I had aspirations of being full-time on the register, so I wanted Jeffrey to like me. Running the cash register was the best job in the store because time passed the fastest there.

  I wondered if Jeffrey had ever met anyone like Todd Wilson, or if Todd had ever known anyone like Jeffrey. I couldn’t imagine many places more immune to the magic of Disney than Todd’s apartment.

  The night Todd got fired from Circuit City he was even drunker and madder than usual. He hadn’t shown up for work in two days, and they’d fired him on his answering machine.

  “They said I should have called in,” Todd said. “What if I was too fucking sick to call in? Did anybody ever stop to think about that? Did anybody so much as ask me?”

  “I guess if you’re that sick you’re supposed to have someone call in for you,” I said.

  “Oh, so it’s my fault now,” Todd said. He stood up from his mattress and walked across the hall to the bathroom. After a minute I got up and followed him. He was peeing with the door open.

  “It’s not like you can’t find another job,” I said. “There’s a lot of jobs you can get.”

  Todd zipped up his pants, flushed the toilet.

  “I guess you can’t use anyone at Circuit City as a reference, though,” I said. “Maybe you could make something up. You could say that your boss got fired right after you quit, and you’re not sure where he is.”

  “Why don’t you just shut up?” Todd shouted.

  I set my can of beer on the towel rack. I wanted to ask Todd why he didn’t show up for work for two days, if he took his job so seriously.

  He wasn’t finished. “You don’t get it,” he shouted. “You can just go ask your fucking parents if you don’t have any fucking money.”

  “For your information, I happen to have a job,” I said.

  He pushed me so hard I fell over the side of the tub and hit my head against the tile.

  “Fuck you,” he said, and stalked out of the bathroom.

  I struggled to untangle myself from the dirty shower curtain, which was wrapped around my calves. My legs were half in the tub and half out, and the back of my shirt was wet.

  I pulled myself out of the tub, picked my beer off the towel rack, and walked to the doorway of Todd’s room. Todd was kneeling in front of his boom box, rewinding a tape. The back of my head throbbed, just above my neck.

  “I never want to see you again!” I screamed. I threw my beer, and it landed with a dull thud on the carpet beside him. Beer spilled out onto the rug.

  I turned and ran for the door. Fred was sitting on the couch in the living room with his feet up on the coffee table. It was his night off, and he was watching television. He didn’t take his eyes off the TV as I went past him. I thought I heard Todd’s footsteps behind me as I slammed the door shut, but I couldn’t be sure.

  Two weeks passed. Now that I didn’t have Todd to look forward to, The Disney Store became unbearable. There was the woman who paid for a stuffed Winnie the Pooh bear with sweaty dollar bills she pulled out of her bra. The kid who took a dump behind a closed register. The man who screamed at me because I thought he was purchasing something he wanted to return. I tried to think of it as inspirational. Maybe I’d make a sculpture of dismembered Disney characters.

  Lyle’s mother went to Ocean City with her boyfriend, so Lyle had a party. It wasn’t one of the small basement parties he had when his mother went to her boyfriend’s for the night. This was a real party that took up the whole house.

  Todd was already there when I arrived. He was hanging out in the kitchen, talking to Fred and a couple of other guys. I was careful not to look in his direction.

  Mike Franklin was getting stoned in Lyle’s room.

  “Hi, Polly,” he said when I walked by. I ignored him.

  After I’d walked by the kitchen door a few times, I settled on the couch in the living room with Carrie and Theresa. Theresa was wearing contacts again and had cut her hair really short. It made her look sophisticated, like a French girl.

  “I don’t know, I’m still getting used to it,” she said, touching her head.

  “I like it,” I said.

  “You don’t think it looks sort of masculine?”

  I looked at Theresa’s C-cup boobs in her V-neck shirt. “You could never look masculine,” I said.

  Carrie looked down at her beer. “I’m thinking about breaking up with Lyle.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I’m just gonna try it on for size,” Carrie said. “If it’s too weird we can always get back together.”

  I stood up, spilling some of my beer on the couch.

  “You can’t just break up with someone you love,” I said.

  In the bathroom, I decided I would talk to Todd. I couldn’t decide whether it was better to demand an apology for the shoving, or focus on how he was ignoring me. I brushed my hair. I needed a trim. Then I put on more lipstick. Most of it settled onto a crack on my lower lip, and I grabbed a wad of toilet paper and blotted.

  When I got to the kitchen, Todd and Fred were gone. “He took off,” Lyle said.

  I called Todd from Lyle’s mother’s room, which smelled of baby powder and the same Charlie perfume my own mother wore.

  “Don’t you even feel bad?” I said when he answered.

  “Last I heard you never wanted to see me again.”

  “You could at least
say you’re sorry,” I said.

  “What do you care? I saw you. You’re fine.”

  “I’m not fine,” I said.

  Todd was quiet. Somebody put the Clash on downstairs. It was my favorite Clash song, “Police on My Back.”

  “Come over,” he said.

  “No way.” I danced in place.

  “Come over. Me and Fred have beer.”

  “How come you didn’t try to talk to me tonight?”

  “I’m talking to you now,” Todd said. “Get over here.”

  I left without saying good-bye to Carrie and Theresa.

  Lyle came to visit me at The Disney Store. It was a weekday afternoon, not too busy.

  “There’s something going on with Carrie,” he said. “I thought you might know what it is.”

  I widened my eyes in what I hoped was an approximation of dumb surprise. “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “She’s strange lately. Distant. And mad at me all the time.”

  I rang up a customer while he waited.

  “Maybe it’s hormones,” I said. “Has it just been the last couple days?”

  Lyle forced a smile. “She hasn’t talked to you about anything?”

  “No. At least not anything strange, distant, or mad.”

  Lyle looked down at his shoes. “Is she cheating on me?”

  Now I really was surprised. “No! Do you think so?”

  He didn’t look up. “I guess not,” he said.

  A customer came up to us with a Little Mermaid video. I ran it over the scanner.

  “I’ll see you later,” Lyle said.

  I watched Lyle walk out of the store and down the mall corridor. He was tall, over six feet, but you couldn’t tell at first because he didn’t have good posture. He slumped when he walked.

  I was driving home after work when my right rear tire blew out. There was a high-pitched hiss that I could hear over the radio, and then I felt the car heave and tilt. I turned off the radio, put the car into neutral, and gripped the steering wheel with both hands. I forced myself not to slam on the brakes; I knew you weren’t supposed to do that when you hit ice, and I figured this might be similar. I coasted to the highway shoulder.

  Once I’d come to a complete stop I pulled up the emergency brake and dropped my head to the steering wheel. My forehead was slick with sweat, and the vinyl of the wheel stuck to it. I raised my head back up and reached for my cigarettes.

  I got out of the car. The tire was gone, and I stared at the silver skeleton in its place. Pieces of rubber trailed out behind the car and onto the highway. It was five thirty, and traffic was heavy. Cars whipped by without stopping. I was only about a mile away from the mall. I turned on the hazards, locked the car, and started walking.

  William picked me up in front of Hecht’s.

  “Did you see it?” I asked.

  William nodded. “You’re lucky you weren’t stranded.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “You might have considered putting out flares.”

  I patted my cigarettes that I’d hidden inside the waist band of my skirt. “Why do you do that?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Criticize me. Tell me how I could do everything better.”

  William pulled off the highway and stopped behind my car. “I just want you to be safe,” he said. “It’s what anyone who loves a child wants.”

  I tried not to cry. “I’m not a child anymore,” I said.

  “I know.”

  I wasn’t sure if I even had a spare, but there it was, under the floor of the hatchback. We pulled it out and I sat on it while William jacked up the car and loosened the lug nuts. They spun around but stayed tight.

  “I think you’re supposed to loosen them before you jack the car up,” I said.

  William took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose, and I noticed the deep creases at the corners of his eyes. “You’re right,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve done this.”

  Once the car was jacked up again, we each grabbed a side of the spare. I shifted my weight and William grunted beside me. There was the sound of the gravel underneath our feet and then William slipped, causing me to lose my grip on the tire. I turned my head in time to see William fall backward into the gravel.

  “William!”

  “Shit,” he said. He wasn’t getting up.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. There was grease on my pleated skirt and my pink oxford.

  Still flat on his back, he started to laugh. His T-shirt was riding up, and the skin on his stomach was lighter than the skin on his arms. “It’s not your fault,” he said. “I’m just a klutz.”

  I held out my hand. “Yes, but you’re a lifesaving klutz,” I said.

  Todd called me at work the next day.

  “Can you buy orange juice on your way over here?” he asked. “I have vodka.”

  It was eerie to hear his voice in The Disney Store.

  “I can’t,” I said. I was using my customer service voice. “My dad’s here. We’re having dinner.”

  My dad had called me the week before to tell me he was going to be in town. I’d only remembered at the last minute to bring a change of clothes to work that morning.

  I met Dad for dinner at a Mexican restaurant adjacent to the mall. He was waiting at the bar when I got there. The restaurant was bright and heavily decorated with Mexican streamers and sombreros and lights shaped like chili peppers, but the bar was dark and nondescript.

  “Sorry I’m late,” I said after we hugged. “I had to change out of my Disney costume.”

  He turned to the woman sitting next to him at the bar. “This is Gwen,” he said.

  “Hi,” I said. Gwen beamed at me like I was her own daughter.

  I assumed Dad had met Gwen at the bar, but I started to wonder when she followed us over to our table and squeezed in on his side. It wasn’t until I heard her accent that I realized he had brought Gwen with him from North Carolina.

  “Polly, I can’t tell you how nice it is to meet you,” she said as the waiter passed out our menus. “Bob’s told me so many wonderful things about you.”

  “I wish I could say the same thing,” I said. I couldn’t figure out how old Gwen was. She had short gray hair, but her face was unlined.

  “I wanted it to be a surprise,” Dad said.

  The waiter asked if we wanted anything to drink. Dad ordered a beer, and Gwen and I ordered Diet Cokes.

  “So how did you guys meet?” I asked when the waiter was gone.

  “Bob rear-ended me in a parking lot,” Gwen said.

  “She was so nice about it, I called her up and asked if I could take her out to dinner,” Dad said. Gwen looked at him and smiled.

  “Wow. That is nice,” I said. “When was this?”

  “Three months ago,” Dad said. “But it feels like longer.”

  “It really does,” Gwen said.

  The waiter came back with our drinks and asked what we wanted for dinner. After we’d ordered we sat in silence, eating the complimentary chips that the waiter had brought with our drinks. A Mexican love song played from a speaker above us.

  Dad asked me about school, and I told him I was looking forward to going back. I asked Gwen what she did for a living, and she told me about her job at a bank. She dealt in home owner loans, among other things. Dad mentioned that he and Gwen were going to visit the Vietnam Memorial before they drove back to North Carolina the next day. I said I was sorry but I had to work and couldn’t go with them. It wasn’t until we were almost finished with dinner that Dad said he and Gwen were getting married.

  I stopped chewing. “Congratulations,” I said. “When’s the big day?”

  “We’re not sure,” Gwen said. “Sometime this fall.”

  “We’d like you to come down,” Dad said.

  “Sure,” I said. “Now that I have a car I can drive down from school anytime.”

  �
�It’s not going to be anything fancy,” Dad said. “Just something small at the house.”

  “What house?” I asked.

  “Gwen’s,” Dad said.

  “Ours,” Gwen said.

  I thought about how I wouldn’t know anyone at the wedding, besides Dad and Gwen. Dad got up to go to the bathroom, and Gwen beamed at me again. I smiled back at her.

  “I feel so lucky to have met your father,” she said. She looked down at her plate. “I never had any children of my own or anything.”

  “Well, that’s good,” I said. “I mean that you met my dad.”

  The waiter came by and dropped off the check. When he was gone I said, “I’m glad Dad met you, too.”

  I didn’t realize until the words were out of my mouth how true it was. Gwen looked like she was going to cry. I excused myself to go to the bathroom.

  After dinner I took them out to the parking lot to see my car.

  “It’s pretty crappy, but I love it,” I said.

  Dad clamped an arm around my shoulder. “You really are all grown up,” he said.

  My cigarettes were on the dashboard, but neither of them said anything. After we said good-bye I watched them walk across the parking lot to Gwen’s Toyota. There was a dent in the trunk where Dad had hit her. Just as they reached the car Dad grabbed Gwen’s hand and squeezed it, and she looked over at him and smiled again. They were both wearing oversized T-shirts and baggie jeans. They looked like they’d been together for years.

  I bought orange juice on my way over to Todd’s. When he saw me at the door he picked me up and ran to his room, accidentally bumping me against the wall in the hallway. He threw me down on his mattress harder than I knew he meant to. I shut my eyes and waited for the rest.

  Afterward it dawned on me that this was the first time I had slept with Todd sober. I put my underwear and my T-shirt back on, and went to the kitchen for a beer. A bottle of vodka sat on the counter, half empty. When I got back Todd was moving around the bedroom with nervous energy, gathering beer cans, scooping up cigarette butts, and dumping them all in the trash can. He was still naked. I sat down on the mattress, lit a cigarette, and watched. He was energetic sometimes when he was drunk. It was hard to predict.