I liked watching Starr work. She was a hairdresser, but she worked from home. In the living room, there were two sinks and two professional dryers, and all of her supplies were set up on the bookcase. There were two chairs, with foot pedals to make them go up and down, and a floor-to-ceiling mirror in front of them. The rest of the living room was normal—a couch and a TV and a coffee table.
The loud whir of the dryers was comforting, and I liked listening to the conversations Starr had with her clients. All of the women who came to get their hair done ended up looking vaguely the same—frosty blond, if they weren’t already. Farrah Fawcett feathering, which I was learning looked good on some people and not really on others. Starr said she just gave people what they wanted. “I know what’s best for them,” she told me, after a woman who’d beamed at her reflection one last time in the mirror had left, “but they’re happier when they get what they want.” She smiled absently, and recounted the money the woman had handed her.
Starr even did my hair once, though my mom wouldn’t let her dye it. I’d never had my hair cut at a real professional place. I couldn’t believe people paid other people to wash their hair, but after Starr ran the water until it was just hot enough, and massaged my head with creamy coconut-smelling shampoo, I understood why. Her hands worked through the knots in my hair like they were nothing. “You can keep your eyes closed, honey,” she said. “I’ll tell you when to open.” She wrapped my wet hair in a towel and wiped off my face. While she was sweeping up the clippings around my feet, I stared at the girl in the mirror. Me, but sharper.
Starr went to bed before I did almost every night we were there, most of the time before Russ even got home. She always said she was tired. When she wasn’t working, she was ambling around the house in her slippers and silk robe, drinking white wine and Sprite—she told me those were called spritzers. She made me one once, and it was mostly Sprite but I could taste the sour fruitiness of the wine underneath when I swallowed. Normally I didn’t like the taste of alcohol, because I only tasted it when my mom was so drunk she tried to give it to me, and it was too scary to see her like that, something I didn’t want to turn into. But Starr’s drinks felt safe. It was daytime; nobody was out of control.
I pretended not to like it as much as I did. People wanted to give you something when you weren’t excited about it. Sometimes you had to pretend you didn’t want something to get it. So I drank the first one slowly, said it was just okay, acted like I didn’t want another. After that, she made me one almost every afternoon with hers. Drinking with Starr made her house less boring. Everything was funny. I felt sleepy, but in a good way. I talked more. And it was like a game whenever my mom came home, to brush my teeth quickly, act normal. I had a secret with someone now.
Starr was like Bambi, sort of unsteady on her feet, trying to make eye contact when you talked to her but looking somewhere slightly above your eyes, or off to the side. But she was nice, and she liked having me there. Maybe it was just that she liked having someone there, and it didn’t matter who it was. But in the mornings, she’d sit at the kitchen table with me, tracing the silvers and greys on the mottled Formica with her index finger, and ask me about my friends, and my old school, and how I was feeling. None of these were questions it made sense to answer anymore—it didn’t feel like we were ever going back. But it felt good that somebody cared enough to ask them.
07
We weren’t supposed to stay long. Just a couple of days there. But days turned into a week, and we were still there. Once my mom woke up late, Russ made bacon, Starr made pancakes, we all crowded around the breakfast table. It felt like a family, almost like we were back with Daryl and Marcus again. But most days she left early, came back late.
I woke up whenever I wanted to. I stopped wearing most of the clothes I’d brought with me—if I didn’t leave the house there didn’t seem to be a point in wearing outside clothes. I said that to Starr one morning and she knew exactly what I meant. “Why do you think I have so many of these?” she said, tugging on her silk robe. “I like to feel dressed up even if I’m not going anywhere. When you work from home, you know…” She padded off to her room and came back with a navy silk robe covered in a pale floral pattern. On her, it was knee-length, but on me it hung lower. “Take off your pajamas,” she said. “You’ll feel much better in this.”
I hesitated for a second, then pulled Daryl’s old shirt over my head, standing in the kitchen in just my underwear. Starr held the robe out and I slipped my arms into the sleeves. She tied the strap into a tight bow, then pulled me into the living room to look in the mirror. “Doesn’t that feel nicer?” she said. It dipped low, showing my greying white training bra, and it was cold and slippery against my skin, a different kind of comfortable than the frayed softness of my t-shirt. “It does,” I said, not knowing whether or not I meant it yet.
When Starr was working, I usually stayed in the living room to watch. Sometimes I’d sweep up the clippings after a client left. I liked to be helpful. When I got bored, I flipped through her books. She didn’t have many, just a couple shelves of romance novels with a man and a woman on the cover. They were all the same story over and over, just in a different time or place. There was always one reason they couldn’t be together, but they had sex with each other anyway and said they were in love. They acted like they would die if they couldn’t be together. I’d never been in love so I didn’t know if that was true but I doubted it. Love wasn’t like that in real life. But still they made me feel a longing for something I didn’t even know I wanted, something I couldn’t even name.
Since my mom and Russ both came home late most nights, sometimes Starr would microwave something for dinner, or cook for the two of us. If she was going to bed early she’d hand me a twenty. “Get whatever you want,” she’d say.
Sometimes my mom and Russ were so late that I’d gone to bed too, bored by everything on television and sick of flipping through the old magazines Starr kept for her customers. I’d lie in the dark on my back and wonder what we were going to do next. Wasn’t Starr going to get tired of us being there? Where would we go?
My mom had said we weren’t living in the car, but when we’d slept in there for a week straight, bathed in gas station bathrooms with scratchy paper towels and foamy soap, ate our meals sitting in the backseat, parked in the fast-food restaurant lot, it sure felt a lot like living in the car. It felt like not having a plan. It felt like not knowing.
Those nights at Starr’s I stayed up late, and pretended I was asleep when my mom came home and checked on me. I didn’t want to talk to her. I didn’t think she’d tell me anything I wanted to hear. I let her fuss with the duvet cover and kept my eyes shut and my breathing as slow as I could until she’d walked out of the bedroom again. As soon as I heard her voice in the living room, I climbed out of bed carefully and scooted close to the door, flattening my body against the wall.
“She’s out cold,” my mom said to Russ. “Poor thing. I know she must be going crazy here. I just don’t know where to go next.”
“Well, you know you’re welcome here,” Russ said. “We’ve got room. We’re happy to put you up for a while. I know she likes seeing you. It’s good to catch up with old friends.”
“I don’t know,” my mom said. “I know it doesn’t feel like a burden now, but it’s going to, soon. I don’t know what I was thinking. I left all our stuff in the apartment. All we have is what’s in your spare room. Shit, the rent’s due in a week and I’m all the way across the country with about nothing in my bank account.”
“You haven’t been back to Eugene in a hell of a long time, according to Starr,” Russ said. “How’d you end up all the way down in Florida, anyway?” I couldn’t tell if he was trying to change the subject to something a little less uncomfortable or if he was flirting with her. I slid closer to the doorframe, but I was too chicken to peek.
“You really wanna know?” she said. “It ain’t pretty.”
“Lay it on me,” Russ said
.
“Modeling.” I held my breath. “My mom and I were at the Valley River Center and some man, dressed real nice, suit and everything, came up to us. Said he owned a modeling agency based out of Miami, wanted me to move down there and become a swimsuit model. I was sixteen. He had business cards, classy-looking headshots of other girls my age. Shit, what sixteen-year-old girl in Eugene wouldn’t have wanted to live in Miami and be a model? I just left,” she said. I didn’t know this story. “Wasn’t anything else for me here.” I thought about Starr. Starr had been here.
“Not what I was expecting,” he said. “So you just took off, like that?”
“He paid for the plane ticket—business class to Miami—and I guess that was all it took for me to believe him,” she said. “Promised he’d set me up in a luxury apartment on South Beach with other girls my age, that I’d be making so much money I wouldn’t know what to do with it. ‘Trust me, I know when someone’s got it.’ I still remember the way he said it.”
“So it didn’t work out quite the way you thought it would, I’m guessing,” Russ said. “Goddamn it. Taking advantage of sixteen-year-olds. What a shithead.”
“I was just so fucking bored here—no offense,” she said quickly. “I’d never even flown on a plane before. I got in a cab, figuring I could afford it now, told the driver the address. ‘You sure that’s right?’ he said. ‘Not the nicest part of town.’”
She fell silent for a minute. I was jealous of Russ, of the way he made her feel like she could tell him anything. She’d known him for a week and already she was telling him something I’d never known.
“God, that house was filthy. Ten girls, four bedrooms, two couches. The roaches. You know in Florida they have these roaches called palmetto bugs? They’re fucking huge, first of all, but they can fly too. They were all over that house. We’d smack them out of the air with flip-flops. But we were too high to care that much—we partied—” she stopped here. “I’m drunk, I shouldn’t be telling you this. You must think I’m awful.”
“No, not at all,” Russ said. Then softer, again, “Not at all.”
She laughed. “In that case, I won’t spare you. My god, we wore the trashiest lingerie for those photo shoots. Garter belts, see-through shit, mesh, fishnets. We just did whatever they told us to. Bent over the white leather sofa, ass to the camera. Crawled on top of the bedsheets, twirling our hair. We spent all our money on coke. Some pure shit down in Miami back then. We were barely breaking even.”
“Goddamn,” Russ said. I wondered if he was raising his eyebrows, shaking his head.
She kept talking. “I ignored my mom’s calls—never answered the phone, always got one of the girls to tell her I was out. When I left, I had enough money for a Greyhound ticket and a couple nights in a cheap motel. I called my mom from a payphone outside the bus station, crying like a fucking baby. My nose was bleeding so hard it was dripping onto my dress, this old denim one, the only one I had that didn’t make me look like a stripper. I wanted to come back, start over. But she didn’t want me back by then. I don’t blame her. I was a fool. So I figured things out for myself. Never left. Until now.” She laughed again, the kind of laugh where nothing is funny but silence is worse.
“I think you’re being a little hard on yourself,” Russ said. “That man was a criminal. Ever think maybe instead of feeling like a fool, you must have been real smart, to have gotten yourself out?”
“That’s sweet of you,” she said, “but I don’t deserve it. I was a fool. Still am, always have been. I never get myself out in time.”
They were silent for a minute. I just sat there absorbing everything, my back against the wall, then panicked, thinking maybe she was getting up to come back to bed. I jumped up, dove back under the comforter, waiting for her. But they kept talking, only I couldn’t make out their words anymore.
One day I held Starr’s kitchen phone in my hand, willing myself to remember Shauna’s number, frightened that I could forget something that used to be so vital. I didn’t even know what time it was in Florida. Our old apartment, my old school, my friends, everything—it all seemed less and less real, as if when my mom had shaken me awake I’d been in the middle of a dream, and I would never be able to close my eyes and go back to it again.
Another night, another late-night conversation. She hadn’t even come in to check on me when she’d come back. I climbed out of bed soundlessly, thankful for the thick carpet, cracked the door, and slid down the wall until I was slumped by the door.
“If you don’t mind me asking,” Russ said, “why’d you end up coming here?”
She sighed.
“It’s okay,” he said. “You don’t have to.”
“No, that’s not it,” she said. “I’ll tell you. I just—god, I feel so fucking stupid. I had a boyfriend in Tampa. Daryl. We were off and on, always breaking up and getting back together. We just couldn’t stay away from each other, but the fights got worse. I tried to keep Callie away from it, but I know there were times she noticed something. But I never thought he’d get violent.”
I knew they fought. There was that night we left Daryl’s Fourth of July party early, when I’d had to steer the car all the way home. But she’d slapped him that night. Daryl was never violent. I didn’t think. The scratchy carpeting began to tickle my thighs.
“The first black eye wasn’t that bad. I covered it with makeup for work, told Cal I’d walked into the doorframe, coming home late. Can you believe that? I would have rather told my daughter I was blind drunk than admit I’d let Daryl hit me. I thought it’d be the last time. You always think it’s going to be the last time.”
She’d never told me that. That was because she’d never come home with a black eye. She was lying to Russ. A big lie. I wondered what else she’d told me that wasn’t true. What else she hadn’t told me. I wanted to see her face so badly right then.
“I see this kind of shit all the time,” said Russ. “It’s not your fault. It’s never the woman’s fault. Makes me sick.” She didn’t respond. “Mind if I smoke?” he said. “You’re welcome to have one.”
“I don’t mind at all,” she said. “And I’d love one.” My mom never smoked inside. But I was learning how quickly she could shift, how many masks she had. “Anyway, to make a long story short, we had a big fight the night we left. The worst one we’ve ever had. And I did something really fucking stupid. That’s why—” she stopped. “I’m just—I’m afraid to go back.”
I held my breath. I still wasn’t exactly sure why we’d left. I knew we’d been running from something but I wasn’t sure what. I moved closer to the living room doorway, as quietly as possible. I could see them now, my mom’s knees drawn to her chest, Russ slouched low, legs stretched out in front of the couch.
“What did you do?” Russ said. “I’m sure he deserved it.”
“It’s against the law,” she said, and laughed, flicking his badge. He was still in uniform.
“I’m not going to turn you in, don’t worry,” he said, laughing too.
“I rammed his car,” she said, sounding almost proud. “I rammed the shit out of his fucking car. I slammed into the back of it with mine before I left. That’s why my headlight’s fucked. And that’s why I’m afraid to go back. I’m afraid he went to the cops.”
Pulling my drawers open, lights on in the middle of the night. Pot of coffee at IHOP. The broken headlight, the crooked bumper. It’s nothing. Try to sleep in the car. Waking to the sun rising over the interstate. Neck sore, cheek pressed against the window. Closing my eyes, opening them. Not a dream. Pretending not to hear my questions, gripping the steering wheel like she’d fall into a million pieces if she let go.
I was so angry, in a way that scared me. I had the answers to my questions and I was furious.
Sometimes, in the old apartment, I’d get up when I heard the key in the lock, no matter what time it was, and head to the kitchen in my pajamas. I’d have two slices of bread in the toaster before she came in the door. She’d
collapse on the couch, with her hand over her forehead. “You’re an angel,” she’d say. We’d sit together and eat toast with lots of butter, and I’d bring her a cup of water and watch her drink it before we went to bed. One time she’d started crying. “I don’t deserve you,” she’d said. “What do you mean?” I’d asked. She hadn’t answered, just repeated herself, “I don’t deserve you.” Over and over.
I wanted to take it all back, sleep through every late night, let her be alone with herself. I’d tried to take care of her. But she’d gone and done something stupid again and it was so big that I couldn’t fix it. I hadn’t even known about it. It wasn’t supposed to work that way.
“I doubt he said anything,” Russ said. “Sounds like he’d have a lot to answer for as well. You know I can check that, though. See if you’ve got a warrant out.”
“Will you get in trouble?” she asked.
“Nah,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. I got you.”
“You’re a good guy, Russ,” she said. “Starr’s a lucky woman. But I should get to bed. And you too. Thank you again.”
“Don’t mention it,” he said.
I scrambled back into bed just moments before she came in. She crawled into bed very carefully, trying not to wake me. I was trying my hardest to swallow quietly; the anger had formed a lump in my throat that was making it hard to breathe. She was out in minutes, snoring softly. The smell of cigarette smoke clung to her clothes. She made me sick.
08
It was early when I woke up—I’d forgotten to close the blinds and sunlight was drilling beneath my eyelids—and for a minute I didn’t remember what I’d overheard. Then that lump in my throat came back and I felt it again, that anger so strong I didn’t know what to do with it. I put on the navy robe Starr had given me and wandered into the kitchen. As I was pouring milk on top of a heap of Corn Pops, Starr walked in. She wrapped one arm around my side like it was something people just did, and it felt good. “Eat quickly,” she said. “We’re getting out of the house today. You and me. It’s my day off and I want to take you somewhere.” I couldn’t eat fast enough.
The Blurry Years Page 5