14 Degrees Below Zero

by Quinton Skinner

Jay suddenly realized that her daughter was staring at her breasts. Or—it was amazing how early children developed these attitudes—she was staring because Stephen was in the room, with a sort of opprobrium over her mother’s nudity.

  Jesus—did Ramona feel some sense of ownership over these breasts, more than two years after they ceased to be a source of nourishment for her? Stephen was certainly obsessed enough with them, always touching her nipples, always wrapping his lips around them in bed and grazing them with his teeth as though about to bite her.

  Not for the first time, Jay had a sense of her body as existing largely as a vessel for the pleasure of others. Wasn’t that a hint of ownership gleaming in Ramona’s eyes as she stared at her mother’s nakedness?

  A look of ageless wisdom passed over Ramona. She glanced at Stephen with a tired resignation. Once mine, now his, she seemed to be thinking, with her long legs planted in the doorway. Every now and then Jay got glimpses into Ramona’s inner life, all the minor triumphs and major heartbreaks.

  Jay pulled her blanket up to cover herself. “Time to get ready, pumpkin,” she said. “Want me to make you some toast?”

  “What are you doing here?” Ramona asked Stephen, her singsong delivery blunting the edge of her interrogation.

  Stephen laughed. “Right now I’m getting ready for work,” he said. “What are you doing?”

  “This is my house,” Ramona told him. “I don’t have to say.”

  Stephen smiled bigger, flashing teeth. “Can you make a picture for me today at day care?” he asked her. “Something nice, like those boats on the lake we saw the other day?”

  Ramona stared at Stephen, but Jay saw her daughter warm a few degrees. “Maybe,” she said.

  “Fair enough.” Stephen bent at the waist to bring his face closer to hers. “That’s good—don’t make any promises. You’re a terrific artist. Don’t force your creativity. It’ll come on its own.”

  “Sweetie, why don’t you wait for me in the kitchen?” Jay said.

  “You have to put clothes on,” Ramona observed.

  “That’s right, I do,” Jay replied.

  Ramona padded off, elbows swaying, and Jay got up. She paused in front of the mirror and saw Stephen looking at her with a pleasingly intent expression. He came over and put his hands on her hips. Last night they’d had very gentle sex, careful not to wake Ramona. Jay wondered what it might do to a little girl’s mind, hearing her mother fucking away in the next room. People had always fucked, after all, it wasn’t as though Jay had invented it—and people might have been fucked up by fucking, and all that it entailed, but people weren’t walking around in psychotic fugues because they once heard some thumps and groans through a wall. Still, she imagined all sorts of Freudian scenarios playing out, writ large in the form of Ramona’s hopelessly neurotic adulthood. She didn’t want to say anything to Stephen about it, because he would come up with all sorts of theories—he taught Freud, after all, and Lacan, and Adorno, and a whole pack of crazy Germans and Italians Jay had never gotten to because she’d dropped out of college. Never mind that she’d tested off the charts in elementary school, forget the inordinate pride Lewis had taken when the authorities informed him that his daughter was a “genius.” Now she waited tables. That was reality in its most unadulterated form. She was ill equipped to talk psychoanalytic theory with Stephen—and unwilling to subject her daughter to his thinking, for the objects of his observations tended to be painted in stark and unflattering light.

  “I have to stop at my place to get some notes.” His hand slipped down to cup Jay’s ass. He was a whole head taller than her, and possessed of a ropy musculature. Despite herself, knowing that Ramona was as likely as not spying from the hall, she pressed her bare stomach against the blue cotton of his shirt.

  “You look nice,” she said.

  “Thank you,” he said in a husky voice.

  “You’re teaching a class this morning?” she asked, realizing she had to defuse the sexuality that was springing up between them.

  “Two, actually.” He smiled. “Are you ever going to get my schedule straight?”

  “Why bother? It’ll just change next semester.” She pulled away and slipped on panties, a pair of jeans, and a Pavement T-shirt she’d owned since she was a senior at Minneapolis South. She looked in the mirror and saw that she looked the same as she had then, with the addition of dark circles under her eyes and the removal of a few pounds of baby fat. “And what about my work schedule? Have you memorized that?”

  “Well, actually, I have,” Stephen said, grinning. “You’re working dinner shifts Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays. Thursday and Saturday you work lunch—and every other Monday. Otherwise you have Mondays and Tuesdays off.”

  “You suck,” she said.

  Stephen put his arms around her and kissed her forehead. God, he could be such a prick. He was a tenure-track professor at thirty-two, a Young Gun in the Cultural Studies department and the author of an upcoming book. Jay had met him at a dinner party a year-and-a-half before, when she was still part of a circle of high-school and college friends. Then, as now, Jay was sorting things out, but she sensed that Stephen was only going to tolerate her stasis for so long. He treated Jay with undiluted respect, and he seemed to view Ramona as a real person rather than as a frightening hindrance, as other men did. Yet she sensed him growing impatient with her, more and more as time passed. She sniffed his hair, which smelled like her shampoo, and thought that often he regarded her more highly than she did herself.

  It was impossible to imagine life without Ramona, without her incessant moods, her tornado of disorder, and the quasi-spiritual miracle of her very being. Jay was capable of contemplating in the abstract other courses her life could have taken. Each one was like a mini-life she hadn’t lived, but could faintly remember, like an echo from a dream.

  Finishing college wouldn’t have hurt. At one time she had planned to pursue a Ph.D. and teach. Now she could get no traction on her life. She already felt too old and lived-in to sit in a classroom full of callow, self-absorbed adolescents—they’d be just a few years younger than her, yet separated by a gulf of experience.

  Anna had “loved” Stephen—her words, a direct quote. She had also, in so many words, warned Jay not to surrender too much of her emotional sovereignty to him, not while she was so young.

  “In ten years you’ll likely be someone else,” Anna had said. “He won’t. He’ll be the same person.”

  “You were just thinking about your mother,” Stephen said, running a finger along her cheek.

  She couldn’t speak.

  “Do you want me to talk to Lewis?” he asked.

  “And what would you say to him?”

  Ramona called out from the kitchen, her voice so squeaky that Jay wondered: what, are the girl’s vocal cords a millimeter long? How could such a high-pitched sound come from a human? Ramona called for her again, louder now, in the tone of royalty demanding the attention of a servant.

  “I’m coming, Ramona!” Jay yelled, and was startled to hear her mother’s voice coming from her mouth.

  “First I’d tell him he needs to back away and lay off you a little bit,” Stephen said calmly, ignoring Jay’s exasperation. “I’d tell him he should stop calling you four or five times a day and bumming you out. He’s overbearing, negative, and profoundly depressed. I’m not sure if he knows all that, but I would bring it to his attention and suggest that he see a shrink or a therapist.”

  “Stephen—”

  “His mood is like a contagion—”

  “Mama!”

  “He swoops in on you, and by the time he’s finished he’s sucked all the joy right out of you.”

  “Mama!”

  “I’m coming! Stephen—”

  “Let me finish. Every time he calls you, you go from well-adjusted to neurotically anxious in the span of about two minutes. God knows what Anna endured being married to him, but now that she’s gone Lewis is turning all his energy on you.”
r />   “Stephen, that went too far.”

  “I apologize,” said Stephen. “But it doesn’t mean I’m wrong. And part of the reason you haven’t been taking any positive action in your life lately—”

  “Is because my mother died, Stephen. She died of cancer, and it took a while for her to die, and it was horrible, and it completely fucked me up—”

  “Mama!”

  “Ramona, stop it!” Jay screamed. Stephen flinched.

  “I know, Jay,” he said quietly.

  “And also because I’m a mother, and because I’ve been alone, and because it takes all my energy just to present myself as a functioning human being in front of my daughter.”

  “Please, she shouldn’t hear this,” Stephen said, putting a hand on her shoulder.

  “I know it!” Jay snapped. “But I can’t help fucking up all the time.”

  “That’s not true. You don’t fuck up all the time. You’re one of the least fucked-up people I know,” Stephen said in a level voice. “That’s just the way your father makes you feel. You have a great mind. You’re very young. But Lewis will drag you down with him if you allow it.”

  “That’s too much,” Jay said. She found a box of tissues on the dresser and blew her nose.

  Her thoughts fell into a familiar downward cascade. Ramona, Stephen, her job, her father, her life—all of it blurred into a single insurmountable problem that made her fingers tingle and left her wanting to levitate and never come down again. Her room looked shabby and small, with its beat-up postcollege furniture and vomitous green color scheme. She smelled stale sex rising from the sheets. All of it, all of it, became a spongy fear that expanded inside her, which would grow and magnify throughout the day until Ramona’s bedtime, when she would be so tired from all the worry and uncertainty that her eyes and back would burn. How to argue with the dread when the dread might be right? Maybe things were going to keep slipping away from her. Maybe Stephen really just liked to fuck her, and would eventually get tired of it. Maybe she would still be wearing a Pavement T-shirt in ten years.

  She was a single mother who waited tables.

  “Mama?” said Ramona from the doorway, looking up sheepishly. “Can I have breakfast now?”

  “Of course, sweetie,” Jay said. “Mama’s really sorry she yelled at you.”

  Ramona turned on her heels and ran down the hallway with heavy steps. She never acknowledged Jay’s profuse apologies. Jay couldn’t tell whether it was because the offense was already forgiven and forgotten, or whether something deeper and dark was going on.

  Jay ran her hands through her hair and shrugged at Stephen. It was so early in the day.

  “Look, I’ll talk to him,” Stephen said. “I’ll be tactful. I know how to dance around with people like Lewis.”

  “No. No, let me do it.”

  “That won’t work,” he replied. “You go into these conversations with your father full of resolve. Then he batters you with his sarcasm, and all that loving manipulation he throws your way, and then you’re right back in it. You’re a little girl again.”

  “Maybe,” Jay said, heading out into the hall.

  “Maybe nothing,” Stephen called out from her room, though not without kindness.

  Jay made for the kitchen and put on a Lifter Puller CD. There was toast to be made and milk to be dispensed. Ramona was going to be late for day care once again. There were so many things that needed to be done.

  INTERLUDE. IN THE CAR, THERE WAS NO WIND.

  Ramona had a lot of secrets. Some of the secrets were good, and others were bad. There were some secrets that she wasn’t sure were which, but in order to find out she’d have to reveal them to a grown-up, and then they wouldn’t be secrets anymore.

  You could talk about some things to grown-ups. Other things you had to keep to yourself. Ramona’s mama was beautiful and smelled good and was really smart. She also got mad really fast. There were a lot of things that Ramona knew Mama wouldn’t understand.

  Like the car seat. Ramona kind of liked it. It allowed her to sit up high, so she could see the trees going by. She liked to count the dogs on the way to day care.

  “Three,” she said. It was a black dog on a leash. She held up her bear so that it could see, too.

  “What, honey?” Mama asked, looking in the mirror.

  “Nothing,” Ramona replied.

  The thing about the car seat, actually, was that Ramona hated being strapped inside it. It reminded her of the electricity chair she saw one time on TV when she was watching a movie she wasn’t supposed to be watching. Someone had pushed a button, and the man inside it had died. Ramona sort of wondered whether her mama had a button like that someplace.

  “Four,” Ramona whispered. That one looked like a nice doggy. She made sure that Bear could see it. Grampa Lewis had a very nice doggy named Carew. Bear loved Carew as much as Ramona did.

  One time one of the fish in the tank in Ramona’s room died, and Ramona cried for a long time. She was still waiting for the fish to come back, but it hadn’t, not yet. Ramona wondered what was taking so long, but this was one of the secrets she didn’t want to talk about with Mama.

  Because when you died you went away. Ramona wasn’t sure what had to happen for you to come back, but she figured she’d find out soon.

  Mama was cussing at the car in front of her. Mama wasn’t supposed to cuss. No one was, but they did it anyway. One time Ramona said goddammit and Grampa Lewis got real mad and sort of yelled at Mama about it. Mama said that Ramona probably heard it from him. Ramona was supposed to never say that again.

  It looked windy outside. It was getting colder. In the car, there was no wind. That made Ramona feel kind of sad, because she liked the wind even though it messed up her hair.

  A lot of things made Ramona kind of sad. She didn’t know why. That was another secret. She wasn’t supposed to be sad, it bothered grown-ups. So she didn’t tell them when she felt that way.

  Like now.

  She liked Stephen but didn’t want him to know it. It wasn’t a big deal. She had been really surprised to see him in their house this morning. Ramona wondered what Stephen and Mama did when they closed the door. She suspected it had to do with butts, or Mama’s vagina. She wasn’t sure.

  Stephen kind of wanted to pretend he was Ramona’s daddy. She didn’t like that. Ramona had a daddy, though she didn’t like him. She sort of didn’t like men. Some of her friends’ daddies were all right, in a way, but she wouldn’t want any of them to be her father.

  She liked Grampa Lewis. A lot. He was tall, and handsome, and he gave Ramona candy and told her not to tell her Mama about it. He was really strong, and sometimes when she was with him she wished he would kick someone’s butt so she could see what it would look like. She knew he could kick pretty much anybody’s butt if he wanted to.

  The sky had a lot of clouds. It was going to get colder, maybe tomorrow. Ramona remembered winter. It felt like hurting inside.

  Grown-ups were hurting all the time. Their bones popped when they walked. Grampa Lewis cracked and popped all the time. It was funny.

  “I’m craziest about that dog,” Ramona told Bear. It was a special dog, all black with white spots on its face.

  “What did you say, honey?” Mama asked.

  “Nothing,” Ramona told her.

  You couldn’t tell grown-ups the whole truth. They wanted it, but you couldn’t give it to them. That was how it worked. Ramona didn’t make the rules. They were always asking questions, with their big faces and big eyes. You had to figure out what they wanted to hear. Otherwise they would get mad, and they might not give you treats and presents. Mama was hungry for Ramona all the time, hugging her, touching her, asking her how she felt. It was nice, but sometimes Ramona pretended not to hear Mama, and pretended not to notice her.

  Because she was the Perfect Princess. Sometimes she was both Ramona and the Perfect Princess, but that was hard to explain and she was still working it out. The Perfect Princess talked to Mama some
times, giving Ramona a place to hide and not deal with all the things that Mama wanted from her.

  And if Ramona answered all of Mama’s questions, there would be none left. And then Mama might die like Grandma.

  She wanted to ask Mama when Grandma was coming back. Grandma was Mama’s Mama. That was magic. The Perfect Princess thought dying was like going on a vacation. There were trees there, and water. Grandma was having a nice rest.

  Sometimes Ramona wondered if Grampa was kind of a bad man. He was nice to her, but he wasn’t always nice to other people. Sometimes he was, but it was also weird how he acted.

  Now they were at day care. It was time to visit with her royal subjects: the younger kids. She would pretend the older kids weren’t even there. Mama opened the car door and undid Ramona’s car seat. Ramona slid out.

  “What are you thinking about?” Mama asked. “You’ve been so quiet this morning.”

  “Nothing,” Ramona said.

  “Oh, come on,” Mama said with a laugh. “You have to be thinking something. Everybody is thinking of something.”

  “I love you, Mama,” said the Perfect Princess.

  “Oh, honey,” Mama said. Her eyes got watery and she kissed the Perfect Princess on the forehead.

  Ramona liked her mama. The Perfect Princess wasn’t sure. The Perfect Princess didn’t really like anybody.

  4. A SINGLE MOTHER COLLEGE DROPOUT WITH RAVEN BLACK HAIR.

  There were a number of things on Stephen Grant’s mind as he made his way to his late-model Volkswagen. There was a thin stratum of logistical fretting—the stop by his house, the things he needed to pick up there—then a layer of mental preparation for his classes that morning, which was not dissimilar in nature from the sort of all-around readiness evinced by an actor who was starring in a play later that day. Stephen liked thinking on this level, letting half-formed memories percolate in a stew of ephemera. It was probably why he had become a teacher—for, unlike many of his colleagues, he viewed himself as a teacher first, an educator even, and a theorist second.

  He wished these were the only thoughts that preoccupied his consciousness as he started up the car and glanced back at the brick apartment building where Jay and Ramona lived. Stephen, it turned out—and it pained and embarrassed him on some level to admit it—was an actual human being who required companionship and suffered a deep primordial longing for the daily dramas his fellow Homo sapiens sapiens were so adept at creating. On a purely intellectual level, he wanted to be emotionally self-sufficient. He would even forgo his penis, that tyrant and benefactor, if the reward were to be total freedom from the weaknesses and caprice of other people.