Chloe Doe

by Suzanne Phillips

  “In my underpants. He put his hand in my underpants.” And then he said to her, Jesus Christ, Camille, you have something growing there. And laughed.

  Our mother takes hold of Camille’s bunched fists and squeezes them gently. There’s a softness about our mother’s face that smoothes out the lines around her mouth. That makes her pretty. Camille says this is her payday look. When she’s able to make the rent and the electric bill. But it’s also how she looks when she’s in love.

  “Come on, now, Camille. It was an accident. We know it was an accident.” She drops Camille’s hands and goes back to the stove. “Well, these are burnt.” She grabs the pot and carries it to the sink. “Go back outside now,” she tells us.

  We decide we should run away. We pack our clothes, Camille’s box of lipsticks, and my book on wild horses into plastic bags we got from the grocery store. We get as far as the corner when Camille has to go back for her radio, which can run on batteries. She sits on the edge of her bed, trying to find a station. She lets her bag slip to the floor. She looks like she might stay awhile, so I remind her of what we were doing.

  “We have nowhere to go,” she says. And no money. We couldn’t even get on the train.

  Evening Rose

  Walt takes us to Denny’s for ice cream. He smells like Fritos and wears a blue shirt with his name on the pocket. He has a key ring on his belt loop and a tattoo of a woman in a red dress on his arm. When he flexes his muscles the woman dances. He got it in Mexico.

  At Denny’s we’re allowed to order whatever we want, so long as we can finish it. Camille orders a banana split with extra strawberries. I order a mint chocolate sundae. Walt drinks coffee with two sugars and watches us eat.

  Outside, the heat ripples off the pavement. It’s August and Camille and I go to the Y while our mother works during the day. Sometimes Walt comes for us and takes us away from there, where we really don’t want to be, where there are only little kids and poor kids whose parents can’t pay for a real vacation or a babysitter. We go to the beach and sometimes ride the roller coaster. Other times, we go to Denny’s.

  “You have a chocolate syrup mustache,” Walt tells Camille.

  He asks the waitress for more napkins and puts them down in front of us.

  Camille wipes her lip with her spoon and ignores him.

  Camille is good at pretending not to notice people. She doesn’t say hello to Walt when he comes in from work.

  In the evening he and our mother sit in front of the TV and laugh. Walt does the commercials, “Pine-fresh scent with Lysol,” in a woman’s high-pitched voice.

  “How do you like that, Camille?” he’ll say, and Camille will carry on like she didn’t hear anything.

  I get up and leave the room, go outside with a book and let our cat, Simon, curl up in my lap, or make up a hopscotch board and play by myself.

  He works for the Miller beer company again. He drives a cold truck and delivers beer to liquor stores and 7-Elevens. Sometimes he brings us penny candy: Bazooka bubble gum and Tootsie Rolls.

  He makes good money.

  “How much?” I ask.

  “Enough,” he says, then laughs with his head back and his mouth open and black.

  “More than the president?”

  “Almost.”

  He lives like a king.

  We’re not allowed to drink coffee, but Walt gives us sips of his, and sips off his beer. Our mother says, “Walt, stop that.” But she laughs when she says it.

  Camille has a collection of lipsticks. She’s not allowed to wear them out of the house, not even to the grocery store when our mother is with us. She can’t wear them into the front yard. Our mother doesn’t want our neighbors to think Camille is loose.

  Some of the lipsticks, half-used and broken, our mother gave Camille when she grew tired of their color. Most of them she got from restrooms in restaurants and gas stations. These are close to brand-new.

  She has seven: Desert Mirage, Wine and Roses, Persuasion, Copper Penny, Hot Cocoa, Really Rose, and Pink-A-Boo.

  She’s not allowed to wear the Hot Cocoa; our mother says it’s for black women. And she can’t wear the Persuasion because it’s too red and she’s too young. Most times Camille wears Wine and Roses because it reminds her of the women in the movies who have a lot of cute boyfriends. Before every kiss someone yells “cut” and the actresses touch up their lipstick so they won’t be forgotten. Camille says she plans to leave her mark, too. Even if she doesn’t become a world-famous actress, like she wants to.

  She’s always looking for more, so when we finish our ice cream we tell Walt we’re going to the ladies’ room.

  Camille picks through the garbage first. They always fall to the bottom. She pulls out the wet paper towels and hands them to me to hold and put back in the trash when she’s through looking. I don’t get anything for my efforts, not even a chance to try on whatever we find, but if I don’t help, she kicks my ankles or punches my arm until I yell uncle and have to do it anyway.

  “Jackpot!” Camille pulls out her arm. She has two lipsticks. “Evening Rose,” she says. She looks at the other one and tries to push back the little sticker on the bottom. Half the fun are the names. “Damn. It’s rubbed off.”

  When she opens it there’s nothing left, not even a little stub.

  “Looks like it was some kind of pink,” she says. “Maybe Dreamy Pink or Peony.”

  We stand in front of the lipstick displays when our mother takes us to the drugstore. Camille memorizes the names. One day she’ll model them in magazines.

  “What’s the other one look like?”

  She uncaps it and rolls it all the way up. The tip is smashed but there’s enough left that this is a good find. It’s the kind of red — too dark — that our mother won’t let Camille wear. Which is OK. Camille saves her lipsticks in a shoe box. When she’s sixteen and moves away like she plans, she can wear them.

  Walt is waiting outside the restroom when we come out. Camille tries to pocket our find.

  “What do you have there?” he asks us.

  “I found them,” Camille says.

  “I didn’t say you didn’t. What are they?” He bends closer to us, his hot breath in our faces.

  “Lipstick.” Camille keeps her hand closed around them. “I’m not going to use them,” she says. “I just like looking at them.”

  “We’re not allowed to wear makeup,” I say. “Not out of the house. Not until we’re sixteen.”

  “Let’s see them.”

  “Why?” Camille has her hand with the lipsticks pushed into the front pocket of her shorts.

  “A man likes lipstick just as much as you women,” he says. “You know that’s why you wear it, to get our attention.”

  “We don’t wear it,” I say. “We’re not allowed.”

  “Come on.” He starts us toward the door. Outside, the heat makes us sweat and makes everything white. “You can show me in the car. There’s a mirror you can use to put it on.

  “You can wipe it off before we get home,” he says.

  Camille sits in the front seat, because Walt tells her to. He pulls down the visor and opens the mirror so the light pops on; and I can see Camille’s face, tight and as white as my rabbit’s foot.

  “Put on the lipstick, Camille,” he tells her.

  But she doesn’t want to. Her fingers are curled around the lipstick and her knuckles are white.

  “Did you hear me?” His voice is louder, and heavy. It fills up the whole car.

  Camille’s shoulders twitch. Her fingers open and the Evening Rose rolls onto her lap.

  “You want me to help you?” Walt asks.

  “No.”

  Camille scoots forward in her seat so she’s sitting on the edge. She looks into the mirror. I can see her lips are trembling, but she moves the tip of the Evening Rose over them anyway. Twice she has to stop and use a fingertip to wipe off the extra. Walt sits behind the steering wheel, with the engine running and the air conditioner on high
, while he waits for Camille to finish and show us.

  “Beautiful,” he says, when she’s done and turns to him. “Color’s perfect.

  “Come here, Camille.”

  “No.”

  “You want to know what a real woman wearing lipstick feels like?” he asks.

  “No.”

  “Yes, you do.” Walt’s hand snakes out and he grabs Camille by the back of her neck. He moves so he’s almost on top of her and kisses her on the mouth. A long kiss. His wormy tongue licks her lips and then he moves away.

  It leaves Camille’s lipstick smudged. She looks like our mother does after she and Walt sit for a long time on the sofa while Camille and I are sent outside to play and we come in unexpected.

  “You feel grown-up now?” he asks Camille. “You feel like a woman?”

  Camille won’t look in the mirror at the smudged lipstick. She wipes her hand over her mouth then uncaps the Evening Rose and runs it smoothly over her lips. She moves back to her side of the car and flips the visor up. She breathes like she’s crying, like she can’t get enough air.

  Walt puts his arm over the seat and looks in back.

  “What do you think, Chloe?” he asks me. “You ready for some lipstick?”

  I think he should keep his wormy mouth to himself.

  Camille is only thirteen. I tell him, “We’re not allowed to wear makeup.”

  “What did I tell you, Camille? Your little sister needs a little more growing up.”

  He looks at me in the rearview mirror. “Eh, Chloe? Maybe next year you’ll like lipstick?”

  When Walt turns onto our street he hands Camille a napkin and she wipes off the Evening Rose.

  Between

  I moved up the food chain. Today, I can decide between two entrees for lunch. Chicken breast or pepperoni pizza. I wait until I see them both and then make my decision. The chicken is sliced, was cooked on the grill, and is on top of a pile of lettuce. The pizza looks like it’s been sitting a long time. The oil has risen to the surface and is beginning to form like Jell-O.

  “What kind of dressing?”

  “What kind would her royal highness like today?”

  I look over the counter. I already know it’s Graciela because her English is too perfect and wrapped up in a thick Mexican accent, but her voice is so strong I don’t know if she’s smiling unless I see it.

  “Congratulations,” she says. “You’re doing something right.”

  I haven’t missed therapy once since my second month here, when I pretended to have the twenty-four-hour flu that lasted two weeks. I went down to zero in points and it took three weeks to get a bar of soap.

  I’ve been here, at Madeline Parker, four months now. I have a brush, shampoo and conditioner, and library privileges.

  “Thanks.” Graciela is motherly. Her smile falls on me like a blanket, wraps me up, and lasts long enough I’m feeling smothered. “Do you have Ranch today?”

  “For you, of course.” She puts the chicken and salad on my tray, a big squirt of dressing into a plastic cup beside it, and then drops a slice of watermelon in the empty space. I stare at it for a long time, my hands sweating.

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I haven’t had watermelon . . .” since I sat at the kitchen table with Camille and we argued over whose lips looked more like a slice of watermelon, pink and happy.

  We bought watermelon-flavored lip gloss at the drugstore that morning but had to share it. It was one of our mother’s good days; she bought eye shadow for herself and later took me and Camille to the outlet stores for one dress each. The school year started weeks before, but there was no money then for clothes.

  Graciela uses her plastic-covered hand to slip a second wedge of melon onto my tray.

  “Now go. You’re making me miss my crios.”

  I sit down at a table by myself, even though the Niña is waving at me. Girls sit in groups of two or three, leaning into the tables, talking and laughing too loud. I’m not like them. I keep to myself, but know the right words to fit in, and I use them when I need to. I am a long way from the Chloe I was meant to be, and that’s what Dr. Dearborn wants me to think about. Where was I headed before my world fell apart? Before I landed somewhere in between.

  There’s a bus stop on the street I worked, in front of a pizza shop and not too far from the mall. There’s a different kind of people on the street before dark. A lot of teenagers. They go to the mall after school and buy date dresses and eat pizza before heading home. Sometimes I think about what their homes look like.

  Their yards are watered and green and the light is always on in the living room, so they know they’re wanted. They have parents who call the police if they stay out too late, worried they got in a car accident. Family photos hang on the wall above the TV and cover tabletops. The kitchen smells like spaghetti, garlic, and tomatoes. I bet every girl I watched, waiting for a bus to take them back to their castleios, swinging plastic bags stuffed with “Kiss me” T-shirts and too-tight jeans, has her own bedroom. Posters of rock stars and pictures of the boys they love are pinned to the walls. They have a boom box and a collection of CDs they play so they can sink into another place, another time, where all their dreams come true.

  I used to think like that. Before, when I had Camille and a life ahead of me. I thought I’d have a boyfriend one day, who sat on my bed after school and looked through my music collection, who picked flowers for me and held my hand. The things my father did for my mother when it was still good between them.

  It feels so long ago, she seems too far away to be me. I try to hold on to that picture of her, to see what else I hoped for, what more is missing, but it grows blurry and I realize I’m about to cry. I cried a lot my first year on the street, after my stomach was full and I had a place to live. When I knew for sure there was no going back and nothing for me there anyway. And now all kinds of thoughts are swirling through my mind. What was I like? Did I want to be a doctor, an artist, a librarian? I liked school and reading. I remember that. Did I want to move to another state? Another country? Learn to speak another language? I think I might have a talent for it; I picked up the Spanish so easily.

  Would I have gotten married? Had a kid?

  Would I have saved my love for someone special?

  These are things I will never know.

  I have not held the hand of a boy.

  I have not held the hand of another human being since the day I came home from school and found Camille gone. And it was the hand of a lady police officer trying to keep me from drifting away, from looking for Camille.

  On Friday nights—date night—too-blond girls pushed through the doors of the pizza shop, their boys following behind them. They chewed gum, wore shirts that showed their bellies, and said nasty things that made them laugh, and they held hands.

  The girls smiled like the sun was shining.

  They were happy, knowing their boys wanted them.

  I don’t know how to smile like that. What it would cost me to learn.

  And I suppose that’s who I’d be, if things were different. A girl with a boyfriend and a smile I felt on the inside.

  Mexican Border

  In our mother’s old Nova, Camille and I take a pretend trip to the Mexican border. We want to buy bead necklaces and orange wrap skirts — cheap. We don’t have much money, only what we managed to save from our allowance. Just across the border we can buy for half price.

  We’ve been once, for real, when our mother and one of her boyfriends took us on a day trip. They bought statues: a wood-carved standing Jesus in prayer, and a brown mustang rearing on his hind legs. They bought the statues from the lines of vendors by the side of the freeway and wouldn’t let us get out of the car.

  This time we’re going to mingle with the natives, Camille says. We’re going to haggle for the best price.

  “They’re hungry for the American dollar,” Camille says. “We’ll talk them down to a good deal for us.”

  Camille is
sitting on the pillows from her bed so she can see over the steering wheel. She brought her black purse that was our mother’s until last year. Inside, she has her Maybelline Wine and Roses lipstick, an empty compact with a mirror she pulls out at traffic lights to check her pretend eye makeup, and a man’s white handkerchief she says belonged to our father. She has no proof. But she won’t use it. She keeps it pressed and folded and either in her purse or in the top drawer of her dresser, where no one, not even our mother, is allowed to go.

  She also brought her favorite sweater, a green fuzzy pullover with a pearl button in the back. She brought her first bra; she has only one. And her radio.

  I brought two apples from the fruit bowl on our way out of the house.

  This trip is sudden. Camille found me in the backyard, in our mother’s lounge chair, where I sometimes read. I have my rabbit’s foot in my pocket because I don’t go anywhere without it, and a dollar for the ice-cream man.

  I found Simon sitting in a sun spot by the car and put him on the seat between us. He’s walking on the back dash now. His claws get stuck in the stereo speakers and he has to shake them free. He makes sharp, yowling cries when this happens.

  “Can’t you shut that cat up?” Camille asks. “I’m trying to drive.”

  “His paws are stuck.”

  “Then unstick them,” she says, and heaves a breath that messes her bangs.

  By the time I reach into the backseat, Simon has taken care of it himself.

  Camille drives smoothly, turning the wheel with her fingertips. She learned from watching our mother.

  I’m sitting in the passenger seat. Reading the map is my responsibility, although Camille says it won’t take much brain to do it.

  “It’s a straight shot all the way. You just look out for police,” she says.

  We don’t want to spend all our money on a speeding ticket.

  Before we get to the border it starts to rain. A squall off the ocean, Camille says. She expected it. She heard the tide warnings on the radio. “If it gets much worse, we might have to pull over.”