Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 27

by Gavin J. Grant Kelly Link

  “What’s it like where you’re from?”

  “Oh,” Tanga’s rag does not stop, “It is…different…than here.”

  “What’s different?”

  “Many things. We eat no carrots in my country.”

  Jessie’s eyes bulge. There have always been carrots for Jessie.

  “But carrots have vitamins! They make you see!”

  “Your mother has told me this. In my country, we eat vitamins you do not know.”

  “Can you see in the dark?”

  “Jessie,” Mrs. Rogers enters the kitchen, “Leave Tanga alone. She has eyes just like you and me. We all see the same.”

  “But she doesn’t eat carrots.”

  “She doesn’t have to,” Gwen Rogers tries to shoot Tanga a conspiratorial sigh, to dismiss Jessie’s ignorance as the ignorance of children. But she is never sure Tanga understands unspoken cues.

  “Please, I will have a carrot,” says Tanga.

  “Oh, no, I didn’t mean…” Gwen nearly chokes with horror.

  “Is no problem,” Tanga takes a carrot, dips it dutifully in one tablespoon of fat-free ranch, and unhinges her jaw for a healthy chomp, “I am an American now.”

  There was nothing in the media about the disappearance of Alexis Leonard. Lexie watched the Channel Nine local news at five, six, and 11 every night for a week. She had hoped that they would broadcast the picture she’d left on the dresser. The one where she was smoking and wearing The Goth Dress her mother hated. She imagined that whenever they got around to the obligatory weeping parents interview her mother would say that she was 5’1”, that she had very dark brown hair, that she was going through a Goth Phase. Ironically, it was Channel Nine that had first introduced Mrs. Leonard to the term during a rash of suburban kitty-cides the previous Halloween.

  Lexie did not consider herself a Goth. The Goths at her school were too fat to be scary, and would’ve traded their eyebrow hardware for conventional popularity in a second, given the option. Only Lexie truly Didn’t Give A Fuck. Catcher in the Rye was the only worthwhile thing in high school, and you did that sophomore year. So she dated a guy from the shore until her parents said she couldn’t at which point she ran away to live in his duplex. A Real Life. Not that anyone had noticed, apparently.

  Lexie’s parents considered the neighborhoods on the shore seedy. They hadn’t taken her to a boardwalk since they became upwardly mobile enough for a Florida time-share. No more carousels and churros and dizzy vomit rides for the Leonards. Just the fakey backdrop of the Gulf, like the sand-filled ashtray in the Ritz-Carlton that never held a butt. Lexie had longed for the Jersey shore even after she outgrew bulky prize bears.

  Rick was better than any purple bear. Sure, he was a little chunky. He had a cartilage piercing. He worked in the most dilapidated ice cream stand on the boardwalk. But he was no high school cupcake Goth. He was a Drug Dealer.

  Joe Rogers never knows exactly how to act around Tanga. When he brings his emptied ice cream bowl into the kitchen and she is washing dishes, he becomes slightly pink and stands scratching the back of his neck. Eventually Tanga takes the dish with downcast eyes. He scratches his neck and says thanks, unsure whether he can be heard over the roar of the sink. Back in the room with the television he sits down heavily. He spends most days thanking people for faxes, files, coffees, temporary use of pens, the passing of napkins, the transcription of messages. He is not sure he likes thanking people in his home.

  For his wife the adjustment has been less difficult. Breezing around the house distributing purchases or taking inventory, Gwen Rogers will speak to Tanga about anything: capital gains tax, glass ceilings, red lowlights in blond hair. She does not know how much Tanga understands, but hopes the talking will be helpful. English by osmosis.

  While assembling a salad, she tells Tanga of a woman in her office whose blouse had a soup stain all afternoon. Always, this woman was wearing untucked shirts and running hose.

  “You just cannot overestimate the importance of looking professional,” Gwen smiles at Tanga, to show her the story is not pointed. They are just two women in the kitchen chopping carrots.

  “You must miss your home, Tanga,” says Gwen. She lets Tanga slice the cucumber. Tanga is better at that.

  “Oh yes,” says Tanga, “But one cannot be always at home.”

  “It is good to see the world,” says Gwen. She had spent a semester in Paris at twenty. She is embarrassed by the diary she kept; all those rhapsodies on pastry and architecture. It seems flighty and vaguely unpatriotic.

  “Yes. There is so much of the world,” Tanga has said very little of her journey to their home, outside of scattered references to dark and cold, confusion and cheating, all of it culminating the plush comfort of the New Jersey Transit. She tended to go on about the Jersey Transit, the brightly colored upholstery, the plentiful leg room. It made Gwen ashamed that whenever she rode such trains she kept a tight grip on her purse and packed antiseptic wipes.

  “You must have left much behind.”

  “The things here are not like the things in my home. Here you have machines for juice and bread and peeling. And such wonderful things for cleaning,” Tanga speaks of sponges and roach motels in more detail than the customs of her homeland. Gwen Rogers suspects that Malanesia is a land of many bugs.

  “I think she likes me,” Gwen says in the bed that night.

  “It’s her job to like you.”

  “She’s very helpful.”

  “It’s her job to be helpful.”

  “Joe, she’s more than helpful. She puts herself into the job. I think she cares.”

  “Wish I felt that way about my work,” snorts Joe.

  “Tanga’s from a different culture.”

  “So hard work makes her happy?” Joe touches his wife’s hair. It is not a fight. They are a couple who enjoy spirited discussion. They sometimes vote differently in presidential elections.

  “I hope she’s happy,” says Gwen, “Don’t you?”

  “I just hope she continues not to kill us in our sleep.”

  “Tanga is a very gentle person,” says Gwen, “You should try to get to know her.”

  “Sure.” Joe falls asleep easily; he’s almost there now.

  Gwen is wide awake. She’s thinking of a story Tanga told Jessie, trying to commit it to memory. It went like this: Once upon a time, a tiger came to the home of a family at the edge of the village. They were going to attack it with spears, but it pled with them, saying it was not a tiger but an enchanted princess, and meant them no harm. The family took the tiger in and promised to help her in her quest to break the enchantment. For years, no solution was found, but the tiger grew alongside their own daughters, giving them rides on her back and protecting them from thieves and wild dogs. Then one day the family heard of a powerful sorceress (Gwen pictured grand naked breasts festooned in necklaces). But the family had grown fond of their tiger and no longer wished to see her transformed. So, instead of the real sorceress, they bring an imposter to pronounce some mumbo-jumbo over the tiger. Somehow the hoax is revealed and the tiger winds up eating the family, daughters and all. The princess transforms but retains the power to become a tiger. They say she still stalks the forests of Malanesia in her various forms.

  Gwen thinks there might be a little of the tiger in her.

  “Tanga is very wise, in her own way. Promise you’ll make an effort to know her better.”

  “Promise.”

  Rick had it figured out.

  “The way I figure, I’m not gonna bust my ass nine to five all year when I can get it all done in one season. One fucking season pushing cheeba with the nutty buddies, every now and then pumping a legit fro-yo for some idiot from the city who doesn’t know the deal. I stay out from under the Man’s thumb all winter, free to be. And in the summer, plenty of discount cheeba and fro-yo.”

  Lexie looked up from the pipe to show she was listening. Rich collected pipes. This one looked like a dragon, bellowing out of a protuberant
lower lip.

  Rick’s U.N. listened and nodded, though some of them looked confused.

  “Rick’s U.N.” was the frequently invoked nickname for the entourage of foreigners he had met working at the shore. They were summer people, imported to serve America’s sugary snacks and mop America’s roller coaster vomit.

  “Jersey kids are getting too spoiled for summer jobs on the boardwalk, but you guys aren’t too good for it. You guys are what the so-called American dream is really about, right?”

  “Greatest summer of my life, ay?” slurred an Aussie, who was still wearing the blue nylon tie of a Ferris wheel attendant, “Are there any more of those Cheetos?”

  “Is great opportunity,” said a sleepy-eyed blonde from Ukraine. She was known to seek weekly prescriptions for the morning-after pill from the Wonder Land medic, “Not like home.”

  “I’m taking sacks of the Cheetos back at the end of the summer,” the freckly Irish boy had recently lost his virginity to a succession of tattooed American teens who Loved His Accent, “Cheetos are lovely.”

  “To new friends, new discoveries, and conquering the fucking world,” the Aussie raised his beer can.

  Rick nodded toward Lexie to make sure she was benefiting from the multicultural buffet of stoned youth. Rick and Lexie met six months before when he walked up to her at a concert and stared hard into her face, really studying her. “What are you?” he finally said. Lexie was flattered, both by the attention and by the way he’d noticed her hint of ethnicity. Since she moved in with Rick she’d started lining her eyes to bring emphasis their faint slant.

  “I’m not too spoiled to work on the boardwalk,” said Lexie, “I’m in hiding.”

  “Doesn’t seem like there’s much of a search party.” Rick popped another beer and offered a mispronounced Slovak toast he had learned from the other girl he was sleeping with.

  Jessie Rogers places Halloween at the top of the holiday pantheon. Christmas means a new batch of books and educational toys. Birthdays mean a gathering of her parents’ friends’ children and maybe a smelly pony on a tether. But Halloween is the one time of year her mother allows candy into the house and it is coming soon.

  Jessie runs around the house perforating a war whoop with the palm of her hand. In the kitchen, Tanga is seasoning a halpa-based stew. Gwen Rogers is wearing glasses and writing checks. She pinches the top of her nose as Jessie and her noise shoot through the kitchen. Jessie will be pretending to be a Native American for Halloween, Gwen explains.

  “Jessie is not,” Tanga’s voice grows hushed, “American?”

  Gwen laughs, though later she will wish she hadn’t. Later, over a glass of wine she will wonder aloud to Joe what Tanga makes of their careless laughter. She will wonder aloud why her laughter is so much more plentiful than her amusement. Joe will rub her shoulders and pour a little more Sancerre.

  For now, she can only explain what is meant by “Native American.” She tries to do this fairly, not leaving out the parts about bead trades and broken treaties and smallpox blankets.

  Tanga takes this in and ventures cautiously, “Americans must be very strong to defeat these natives. Your people are wily…like coyote.”

  Gwen frowns. She doubts that coyotes are native to Malanesia. Has Tanga been allowing Jessie to watch cartoons? She will speak to her about it later.

  Jessie joins the conversation to explain about the candy candy candy.

  Gwen tries to explain about costumes and the origins of Halloween.

  “So I guess it does have its origins in Satanic…or at least pagan…practices. Of course, it’s supposed to scare people a little, and there will be people wearing horns…” Gwen begins to wonder whether she ought not to have laughed at that Baptist family across the street who won’t let their children trick or treat.

  “We also have bad spirits in my country,” says Tanga, “We put out a bowl of milk to keep them happy.”

  “Like Santa?” says Jessie.

  “If they have milk for drinking, the spirits become fat and pleased. They do not hurt you then.”

  Gwen strokes her daughter’s warm hair in case she is frightened by talk of spirits. Jessie brushes away the manicured fingers and resumes her ambush of the first floor. Later she will ask for a bowl of milk to be placed by her bed. This new ritual is noted and appreciated by the cat, who comes in the dead of the night to empty the bowl.

  Lexie liked hiding out at Rick’s every day. In case the police were looking for a Goth, she tanned on Rick’s roof. She was surprisingly good at tanning. On cloudy days, she got high and watched soap operas, trying to predict the next line.

  “Get out of my house you manipulative bitch!” Almost verbatim.

  It was the stagnating dramas of the daytime heroines (Emmanuela still hadn’t told Luke the baby was his, Sabrina continued comatose) that inspired Lexie to run again. Rick was out teaching a Slovak and Irish contingent how to bowl.

  Lexie clipped the lock on the secret refrigerator, loaded all the plastic bags into Triscuit boxes, and caught the train to New York.

  She made her first sale to another runaway on the train. Annika, who’d transferred to the Manhattan-bound line from the suburban Philadelphia system. Annika said her step-dad wanted to rape her and that she was the one who got sent to counseling where all they did was dope you up.

  “Sucks,” said Lexie, as if she’d heard it all before.

  “You got a place to stay up there?” said Annika. She was continually clacking her tongue piercing across the white picket fence of her teeth.

  “Port Authority souvenir store, most likely,” Lexie hated the clacking. Still, Annika was the kind of girl people noticed, button nose and blond dreadlocks, sexy smoker’s voice.

  “You wanna stay with me at the W? I’ve got a credit card.”

  “Maybe,” Lexie shrugged.

  She eventually accepted. It was funny how Annika assumed Lexie had never stayed at the W before. She must look destitute. They drank a tray of martinis in a blue velvet booth and told pieces of their life stories, mostly funny stuff about being wasted.

  Lexie refused to say why she had left home. She kept to herself the fact that she had always been a straight-A student with a very clean room (sans maid—her allowance had been contingent upon housework). In fifth grade, she played an orphan in a local repertory’s production of Oliver! She’d belted out “Consider Yourself” and “I’d Do Anything” and her dad had bought her flowers and they went out for ice cream and she announced with certainty that she was going to grow up to be a famous actress. No one had contradicted her.

  Sometime in the vicinity of eighth grade she stopped thinking her father’s jokes were funny. She threw a loafer out a second story window. She realized that her parents had no black friends and that they were vaguely bothered by the situation but did nothing to change it.

  For a while, Lexie soothed her inner turmoil by sitting at the Asian kids’ lunch table. They talked about how much they hated when people assumed they were shy, smart, and good. One Monday they were full of stories about huffing keyboard cleaner in Grace’s basement and Lexie realized that she was the only one who hadn’t been invited. Plus, no one ever assumed she was smart or good. She had a gene or two in common, but she still didn’t belong.

  She spoke to the school counselor, who gave her a Diet Pepsi and some pamphlets. Then Lexie realized that she came from The Most Cliché Family Ever and worse, that hers was a Typical Adolescent Response.

  Things felt better now. Deliciously atypical. Lexie slept in a fortress of expensive pillows while in the next bed Annika fucked the bartender who hadn’t asked them for ID.

  The bed in the yellow room upstairs is the largest the Rogers have ever owned. It is the largest bed on the market and it has been specially designed to prevent one sleeper from detecting the presence of another. Gwen has had her side specially reinforced to improve her posture.

  On the softer side of the bed, Joe begins to have thoughts about Tanga. He suppose
s it has something to do with her genuine servility. At the office he is catered to by a cadre of secretaries, mail clerks, and interns, but their contempt for their duties is thinly concealed. They have condos and spouses and happy hours in which to deposit their million grievances. Tanga has only the room over the garage, with its narrow bed and electric kettle.

  Tanga makes dinner almost every night, even if Gwen orders Thai food (which Jessie refuses to eat). Tonight it was chicken thighs baked in halpa. He had not meant to drop his fork, but when he did Tanga bent at the waist to pick it up.

  After light’s out, Joe recalls Tanga’s small, round, effortless hindquarters. You never see Tanga pausing and contorting before reflective surfaces the way Gwen does. He pictures Gwen’s mirror face, the way she sucks in her cheeks just slightly. Daily half-hours on the treadmill are not part of Tanga’s value system. After all, Joe thinks, the life of a domestic worker is itself a treadmill. He needs a glass of water and wishes sleepily that Tanga would somehow bring him one.

  It didn’t take long for Lexie to begin to learn behaviors that would help her survive in New York. She had a system of couches in rotation. They were in apartments owned by girls who had fled to New York with their parents’ consent and financial assistance, girls who acted like they were in an amusing play with wonderful costumes. There seemed to be more of them than there were natives, artists, and immigrants combined. Girls like Leora and Jenn, who liked to watch Lexie eat.

  “We’ll order you a pizza,” said Leora, who lived off vodka sodas and a synthetic ice cream product widely available in the city.

  “You need the energy,” said Jenn, who did not trust the synthetic ice cream. She ate only dry salads, though when she was black-out drunk she bought canned ravioli from the bodega downstairs.

  Lexie kept them entertained with stories of her life on the streets. She claimed to have fled an arranged marriage in a Lebanese pocket of Queens. Even now, her bloodthirsty uncles were combing streets, hoping to carry out an honor killing. Jenn and Leora shivered with delight. They were from Michigan.