by Erin McGraw
—We both need more wine. Or don’t.
—Definitely do. We haven’t even gotten to Frank. Great cocaine, awful breath. How could you stand to kiss him?
—My nose was so wrecked from his coke that I mostly didn’t smell his breath. I didn’t let myself think about his teeth.
—How was he in bed?
—Active. Does your husband know that you’re asking about other men’s sexual prowess?
—No. Active-good or active-bad?
—Active-coked-up. Are things okay?
—I am plying my friend with wine to get her to tell me details about her old boyfriends. What do you think?
—There doesn’t have to be anything wrong with that.
—Thus speaks Unmarried.
—Men know wife material when they see it.
—And that’s what I am?
—Don’t sound miffed. You’re someone’s one and only.
—I can be miffed if I want. Women friends are supposed to support each other.
—Thus speaks Married. What would you do if you weren’t?
—I’d get my married friends to tell me about their sex lives, because I couldn’t imagine night after night after night after night with the same man. And some afternoons.
—As bad as that?
—At some point since the bouquet and the cake, a door closed. I didn’t even hear it. Now I’m a wife.
—My door slides. I can see through it, but it’s still closed.
—And there you stand, with your nose up to the glass? Don’t ask me to pity you. You can open your door.
—Golly. Why didn’t I think of that? Maybe I was just distracted, wishing I was married, like you. How wonderful it must be.
—Plenty of distraction to go around. Last night, while I was lying awake, I thought about you. You might have been watching TV. You might have had somebody’s cock in your mouth. You might have been trimming your bangs.
—You better believe it. Three o’clock in the morning, with the cuticle scissors in front of the mirror and the taste of come in my mouth.
—Hélène Cixous made it sound better than that. I was lying in bed while my husband gently farted beside me.
—Do you think he dreams of other women?
—If he did, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
—People can surprise you.
—Not husbands.
—There was a party a long time ago. You two were barely married.
—What are you about to tell me?
—I was in the kitchen and he pinned me at the sink. He told me that he’s not the kind of guy who has affairs, but if he were, he’d have one with me.
Say something.
—What were you wearing?
—Don’t say that.
—He got me a blue top once that laced up the collar. He never notices clothes, but he told me he thought it would look pretty on me.
—I was probably wearing a T-shirt. I never had a top that laced.
—Maybe there was another party, and another woman in the kitchen.
—I’m not special?
—What did you tell him?
—You were my friend.
—Lucky me. I guess.
—Tell me what is the right reaction when your friend’s husband assumes you’re available, except for his high morals. What would Jens’s wife have wanted you to say?
—Good-bye.
—Is that what you’re saying?
—Is there more wine?
—Always.
—Then not yet.
Hallelujah Day
I’ve been back at the compound for five days and have already picked a fight with my mother. New land-speed record. I suggested that she take some local women to the village well to teach them how to avoid diarrhea in their babies. She got sidetracked into talking about baptism, and the next thing you know I had to shoulder her out of the way because she’d gotten into immersion versus sprinkling and was heading ninety to nothing toward baptismal regeneration. Three women had already drifted away, and we only started with seven.
Now I need to apologize to her. The diarrhea lesson was my idea, not hers. She’s happier talking about heaven, which she’s sure will have the golden sidewalks and the harps, and when I remind her that we still have to attend to our earthly lives, annoyance clouds her features. She is fervent, Lord love her. And the Lord probably does love her, which makes me both exasperated and grateful, since somebody’s got to do it.
Along with a handful of other missionaries, Mom and I are spending a year volunteering for Christian Outreach, situated on a tiny island off of a tiny island off of a smallish island in the central Philippines. Not at all my kind of thing, but Mom caught me at a weak moment, when I’d broken up with my boyfriend and a holiday in the tropics sounded good. Mom came raring to talk faith, but the folks here don’t want to talk about their everlasting souls. They want to talk about electricity and the possibility of another well on the island. Every Sunday we lustily lead prayer and song in the shanty church built by the group before us, and the locals sing gamely along, shooting me annoyed looks meant to remind me of Panasonic refrigerators that defrost themselves.
We aren’t the only missionary group on Bacoyan Island, small enough to circumnavigate by foot in a day. On the east side, catching the good morning light, is Glory and Hosanna, a much noisier crowd who sing praise songs while they pull weeds. Our group’s music minister, who got here six months before I did, calls them the Glory Hole, which explains why I like him and Mom doesn’t. All of us are supported by contributions from churches back in the States, churches that like evidence of the good we’re doing in the world. That’s why I was home last week in Chicago, showing pictures of ninety-pound women lugging home gallon jugs of water from the well. I said, “We in America take so much for granted. Another well would revolutionize these people’s lives.”
Later a parishioner said to me, “They look so happy in their simplicity. I would hate to take that from them.” Catching my look, she said, “I don’t mean that we shouldn’t help. I just worry about unintended consequences.”
“Wise. But we need to think about the intended ones, too,” I said. Next time I come I will bring a picture of Luz, my best friend in Bacoyan. Luz loves anything as long as it’s electric. I managed to find her a Reddy Kilowatt T-shirt, and now it’s her favorite garment. That would be a good picture to show people.
By the time the trip was done, I brought back pledges for $1,800, what Christian Outreach calls a good harvest. Also, I saw my old boyfriend. He grinned and asked if I had come back so I didn’t have to eat goat every night. Mom always thought he was a jerk. I told him I was God’s hands in the world, firm in my faith and gentle in my way. That got him to leave me alone, a story I would tell Mom if I hadn’t already managed to pick a fight with her.
Goat, by the way, is good.
Coming halfway around the world hasn’t changed me at all. Mom’s industrial-strength faith was convinced that once I came to this village—barangay, to use the local word—I would finally see her God. I would see shining souls lined up and waiting for the hallelujah day. What I see are children with scabies that would clear up tomorrow if we could just get them clean, and young people frantic to get to Morlano, two islands away, where there is a jukebox and a fiesta every Saturday night.
“You’re missing the point,” Mom says crabbily. She doesn’t need to tell me that she’s regretting bringing me instead of my cousin Maria, a young woman already so devout that when two little hoodlums from her South Side neighborhood stole her cat, meaning to extract a ransom, she found them to say she forgave them.
“Don’t you want your cat?” said one of the kids, outraged.
The road into Bacoyan is lined with palm trees that look like they’re wearing skirts made of torn, tossed-out plastic bags, and goats shit everywhere, but it’s eighty degrees here in the winter, the dizzying sampaguita blooms at night and floods the air with scent, and Luz bakes me pastri
es that crumble when I pick them up and taste like margarine and sugar and the rough local flour. I’m lucky beyond words. “Blessed,” Mom would correct me. She’s not wrong, but neither am I.
She’s still sulking next to the well when I go back to find her. “Sorry.”
“I’m going to have a bruise where you shoved me.”
“Like I said.”
“Do you think about the kind of example you’re setting?”
This is low. I’m twenty-five, not eight. “I’m trying to keep their babies alive. That’s a pretty good example.”
She’s staring out past me, at the path that leads to the church. Out of character. Usually she’s all about eye contact, and plenty of moist hand touching, too. “I wish you . . . You’re not . . . kind.”
Why does this make me cry? It’s hardly news. “I try.”
“I know you do. That’s why I wanted you to come here. I thought this would be the good soil that would allow you to flourish and set seed. But something in you refuses. Something there is hard, and will not be touched.” She’s never spoken like this to me before. Her eyes stuck to the horizon, she keeps talking, her voice oddly soft, as if we’re having a conversation. Probably she’s remembering the day Dad got killed, the event that drove her into Jesus’s arms. I was fifteen when Mom went to the funeral home to see what was left of him after the boiler blew. She came home with clenched hands and new talk about divine messages. I swore I would be good to her, a vow I’ve broken every single day.
She says, “You won’t allow yourself to be raised up. You’re determined to look at the dirt, not the sky. Even here, in a place like paradise.”
I lift my streaming eyes and see a smear of white shacks, a white dirt road, two nearby whitish goats. Above them the depthless blue sky, and behind them the placid, endless ocean. Of course it’s beautiful. It will be beautiful until the end of the world, which Luz hopes to see from a well-lit balcony in Manila.
It’s my turn to talk, but I don’t have anything to say. Because the horizon is too bright to keep looking at, I drop my eyes again, then laugh. Nestled at my feet as if I’d put it there is a dainty sampaguita, delicate as a snowflake, still open though normally the flowers close at sunrise. Nearby are a crumpled chocolate wrapper and a plastic straw. Now I’m really laughing. It’s like Jesus’s own irony. “Mom, look. Turn around.”
She glances down and says, “Oh, for pity’s sake.” She sweeps up all of it, tucks the sampaguita behind my ear, and carries the trash away.
Haircut
Two days ago my daughter cut her hair off. She is four. She loosed a cowlick that now curls like plumage from the crown of her head, adorable. Everything the child touches turns to gold.
It seems impossible that she could be the sum of Larry and me. His crabs, my clap. His bad breath, my teeth. Our habit, which brought us together long enough to make Stella, and then wonderfully drove us apart. Stella doesn’t know about him. Sometimes when Larry comes through town he and I see each other for old time’s sake, when Stella is safe with my sister.
My girl is not like me. She reads already, and dances. I told Larry about Stella’s pealing laughter when she, age one, encountered a soap bubble, and he said, “Cheap date.” I haven’t told him anything about her since.
He thinks I’m raising Stella wrong, and he isn’t the only one. Janice, my friend at work, asked me just what I’m waiting for. “Kids her age go to preschool. They have playdates. You don’t need to keep her in Fort Knox.”
“I give her tests. She’s scoring off the top of every one of them.”
“What’s going to happen when she starts school and finds out that she’s not the center of the universe?”
I haven’t told Janice yet about the homeschooling. I’ll need to get my GED, which I started years ago and put aside when I didn’t see the point. Now I hit the books after Stella goes to bed, pulling out sample tests on math and social studies that I hide in a high cabinet during the day. No point in raising questions if Larry comes over. But I’ve got to be nimble. Stella will catch up with me before I know it.
She stampedes into day care, racing to see her friends and kiss the stuffed moose that is her favorite. She was three when Laura who runs the place pulled me aside and said, “I think she’s reading.” Her long face looked worried, as if I was going to be mad that she let my brilliant little girl read when I wasn’t looking. “I didn’t teach her.”
“I know,” I assured her. Laura doesn’t run the kind of day care where three-year-olds learn to read, but the kids are clean and she teaches them to share.
Stella can write her name and mine, and she draws the puppy she wants me to get for her. She resets the oven clock when we switch from daylight savings time, and she knows what daylight savings time is. She knows the names of our mailman and our neighbors, and though she doesn’t run up to them—I’m careful about what I let her do—she waves and says hello. She charmed Adele Burgess one snowy day when Adele came stumping up the street behind her walker, scowling at the slushy pavement.
“The snowflakes are dancing!” Stella said, not her usual kind of talk. I thought maybe she was afraid of Adele, and so let herself sound babyish.
Adele was afflicted with everything—bad feet and swollen knees and skin that caught and tore like paper, and she met everyone she saw with a long list of joints that pained her, but this day she smiled at Stella. I didn’t know the old bitch could. “You have quite an imagination!” Adele said.
After she was out of earshot, Stella leaned toward me. “The snowflakes are really just falling, but I thought she might like to hear about dancing.”
GED sample question: What is an opinion rather than a fact?
“It’s time for you to meet someone,” Janice tells me.
“I’ve got a kid at home. Guys would rather start fresh.”
“You have a pretty smile and long hair. Plenty of guys would give you a chance.”
“Did I say I was interested?”
“That girl of yours is going to want a daddy. Or a brother or sister. Maybe you could get a car with air-conditioning out of the deal.”
“Got my whole life worked out, don’t you?” I smile, she smiles back. I have a better life than hers, so she’s allowed to be bossy. It was Janice of all people who made me quit smoking before Stella was born. I’ve seen that woman go through three packs in a night, but she kept taking cigarettes out of my fingers when we were on breaks. “You don’t want a dumb one,” she said. Her kids are with their dad’s mother.
Now she reaches out to touch my hair. “You can borrow my flat iron.” For a treacherous second I remember how it used to be, with music and beer bottles and hot hands against my waist.
Stella is used to hearing about Janice the same way I’m used to hearing about Louis at her day care who won’t drink chocolate milk unless graham crackers are crumbled into it. I don’t expect her to think much when I tell her that Janice and I might go out some night, and Stella would be able to stay with her aunt and watch whatever TV my sister thinks is right for a girl aged four going on nineteen.
“Is it a date?” Stella asks.
“Silly. Janice is my friend. We don’t go out on dates.”
“But you might, if you meet someone.” Her eyes are startlingly clear, the blue of swimming pools. “Louis’s mom goes out every Friday. He gets to eat Pop-Tarts.”
“If a date ever comes up, you can negotiate Pop-Tarts with Aunt Doreen.”
Stella grins. She loves me to use big words with her, and I haven’t stumped her yet, though as she twirls away chanting “negotiate,” I feel as if I’ve swallowed a cannonball. I can already hear the scorn in Janice’s voice when I explain there will be no night out.
GED sample question: If a savings account pays 5% simple interest, how much interest in dollars will $4,000 earn in two years? I have never seen $4,000 at one time in my life. I make up my own question. If a pack of cigarettes costs $5.30, how much is each cigarette in a pack?
&nbs
p; Stella storms back into the room, her new cowlick bobbing on top of her head like a decoration. She’s holding a book she brought home from day care, and her finger is stabbing at a word. “What is this?” she demands.
“Sound it out,” I say automatically.
She can get as far as b-a-l-l-, but the rest stumps her, even though the drawing on the page is crowded with balloons and for God’s sake, it isn’t that hard. “Ballow,” she keeps saying. Tears are coming to her eyes. She hates being wrong.
“Come on.” I put her coat on, and we go outside, Stella not even asking where we were going. Janice is on shift, and she’ll give us a balloon for nothing. Sure enough, her face breaks into a grin when she sees us.
“What happened to that kid’s hair?”
“Ten minutes when Mom wasn’t looking,” I say.
“You want to get some scissors to even it out?”
“Nope,” I say. “A balloon.”
“Balloon!” Stella whoops, finally getting it.
Janice looks at her oddly, but inflates a green balloon for her at the helium tank and ties it off with a long ribbon. She’s ready to tie the end to Stella’s cowlick, but I’m not having it. My girl and I walk home, her pretty face flooded with joy at the new word she owns, and all I can think of is pins, knives, scissors.
Rock and Roll
For the sixth time tonight, Jimmy yells “Rock and roll!” and jumps from the riser. He packs a good 240 now, and the stage throbs when he comes down. We’re at a speedway outside of Versailles, Indiana, and I hold my breath, though maybe I should thank him. Dead because my idiot bandmate thinks he’s Mick Jagger? Could be worse.
We crash to an ending and the crowd stops talking and balances their hot dogs and Cokes on their knees to applaud. Beyond the fifth row, people tilt their faces to watch us on the world’s smallest Jumbotron. A Dinkytron. The seats are maybe half full, even though Run Dog Run opened for us, and they had a hit in the ’80s. Maybe the Run Dog Run fans are saving their money for the next time the Stones come around. Maybe they can’t make it from the parking lot on their walkers. Maybe, if I go out there to hang myself, they’ll offer me a bite of hot dog first.