Dolls Behaving Badly

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Dolls Behaving Badly Page 12

by Cinthia Ritchie


  Sunday, Dec. 11

  Sandee and I walked along the frozen beach out by Point Woronzof, Jay-Jay’s BB gun swinging against my chest. The wind blew damp and cold, and large blocks of ice littered the beach. We moved slowly, due to snow pockets that plunged us down past our knees.

  “Did we have to come this far?” Sandee stumbled and caught herself on a jagged iceberg shaped like a huge breast. “Couldn’t we have shot cans in the yard?”

  “It’s illegal to shoot in the city.”

  “It’s a BB gun, Carla. We’re not using real bullets.”

  “I didn’t want anyone to see us,” I admitted. “It felt, I don’t know. Private.”

  Sandee nodded and kicked snow off a log, clearing it off so that we’d have a place to sit. “Should we shoot into the water or the bluffs?” We were on a narrow strip of beach that curved around the Earthquake Park, the inlet on one side and bluffs rising above our heads on the other. No one else was around; it was silent except for the wind and the water bobbing against the ice. I took the cans out of my backpack and arranged them facing the water. Sandee and I had decorated them earlier, hers covered with photographs of Randall and mine with blond-haired models that reminded me of Francisco. We stacked the cans three high and then moved back toward the bluffs. “You first,” Sandee said.

  I pumped the gun, which was modeled to look like a rifle though it was much lighter, held it up to my shoulder, took aim with one squinty eye, and pulled the trigger. The shot cracked and two cans flew through the air.

  “Wow, I didn’t think you’d actually hit anything,” Sandee said.

  “Thanks.”

  “No, I meant it as a compliment.” She raised the gun, shimmied her hips, shot and missed. “Fuck,” she whispered, and tried again and again. “Help me out here, okay? I refuse to embarrass myself in front of Randall’s photos, the bastard.”

  I showed her how to position the gun, how to sight her target, how to hold her breath the moment she pulled the trigger. “Don’t aim directly at what you want to hit.” I tried to remember what Barry had told me when he first took me hunting years ago, back when he still harbored illusions of turning me into a rugged Alaska outdoorswoman. “Aim very, very slightly to your dominant side. See, watch me. See how I lean into my right a few seconds before I shoot? So I aim a little past my target to the left, to compensate.” I couldn’t remember if this was what he had actually said or if I was making it up, but it didn’t matter.

  Sandee hunched over the BB gun, pulled the trigger, and missed again. “Fucking bitch,” she yelled. “I won’t let you do this to me, Randall.” She moved closer to the targets, missed again, moved closer and finally hit the edge of a can with Randall’s picture. It slowly toppled over. “Wow!” she smiled over at me. “That’s super intense, isn’t it? It’s almost sexual.” She pumped the rifle, raised it, and blew two cans away. “Did you see that!” She danced around the snow in her heavy winter clothes, looking carefree and ridiculous.

  After we obliterated the cans, we gathered the pieces in a plastic shopping bag and headed up the bluff path to the car. “I feel like I’m on a high.” Sandee shoved the can remnants inside a bear-proof garbage can with a complicated lid. “Like I’m invincible. No wonder men are so arrogant. I would be too if I grew up shooting.”

  “Well, there’s probably more to it than that.” I started the car and headed toward the grocery store. “I think it has to do with testosterone levels.”

  “Probably,” she said. “I’m starving, what about you? I feel like a banana split. I haven’t had one in years.”

  “Yeah, me too.” My teeth were ready to rip into raw meat, into a live animal, though we ended up buying twenty dollars of sugary carbohydrates. We made banana splits for everyone, and after we finished I lured Sandee over to the answering machine to help analyze Francisco’s message.

  “What do you think he meant?” I sat on the floor, the carton of Safeway chocolate ice cream between my legs. “You think he’s telling the truth? You think he’s worth seeing again?” I sprayed whipped cream on my fingers and ate it.

  “You can’t believe him.” Sandee spooned ice cream from her bowl. Her lips glistened with chocolate sauce. “Maybe everything he said was true, and probably it wasn’t, but let’s just say it was. It doesn’t matter, you know why?”

  I swallowed and waited.

  “Because he didn’t call you first. How many messages did you leave, three? Four? It was his duty to call and leave a message first, since he was the one in the wrong. And yes, I realize that he was in a hurry, but a phone call takes less than a minute. But that’s not the point, either.”

  “So what is the point?” I was getting cranky from too much sugar.

  “He didn’t take time for you. It sounds like a small thing, but it’s not. If I had been smarter, I would have noticed the same thing about Randall and saved myself a lot of anguish.” She squirted more whipped cream over her sundae. “Maybe I should have shot him. Has anyone mentioned that? Tell me the truth, okay? Do people think I killed my very own husband and buried his body out in Vegas? Is that what they said when he didn’t come back?”

  “No one thinks that,” I reassured her, though of course people had wondered exactly that. “They just thought you were, you know, a woman who couldn’t keep a man.”

  “I’ve been called worse things.” She dipped her fingers in the ice cream and scooped out a handful. “But it would have felt good to shoot him.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “It probably would have.”

  What’s on my kitchen table

  Electric bill: DUE

  MasterCard bill: DUE

  Gap credit card: DUE

  A tattered copy of Loving the Right Men for the Wrong Reasons

  Six Barbie hands, cut off at the wrists

  Chapter 11

  Monday, Dec. 12

  “I’M STAYING HERE.”

  “Wh-what?” I opened my eyes early this morning to Laurel standing above me eating crackers, the crumbs falling across my arms. “How’d you get in?”

  “You gave me a key, remember?” The side of the bed shifted as she sat down. “You shouldn’t keep the house so cold. It’s bad for the digestion.” She stuffed another cracker into her mouth. She slid into bed next to me, her feet cold when they brushed my bare leg.

  “Junior came back from Portland yesterday, but he won’t notice I’m gone. I made apple crisp for breakfast, with whole wheat crust. As long as he gets his fiber he’ll be okay.” She turned over, fluffed her pillow, and was asleep within minutes. It was odd having someone in bed with me. Barry occasionally fell asleep after our sad little bouts of sex, but I couldn’t remember the last time I lay awake beside someone in the dark without feeling burdened or heavy. It must have been when Jay-Jay was smaller and crawled in beside me, his back tucked up against my hip, his lips sucking as if even in his dreams he was aware of me as mother, supplier of milk.

  “Carly?” Laurel was suddenly awake, or maybe she had never been asleep. “We’re out of crackers, but don’t get the Keebler brand, promise? I keep imagining my baby morphing into one of those elfy creatures from the commercials.” She shivered and yanked the quilt over toward her side. “What would I do if I had a something like that?”

  “I thought you were having an abortion.”

  “I am, Carly. Just get another kind of cracker, okay?”

  Tuesday, Dec. 13

  I didn’t expect Laurel to get up for breakfast but there she was, sitting at the table in front of a pile of unpaid bills when I came in from walking Killer.

  “What took you so long?” she said crossly. “I’m starving.”

  I fixed scrambled eggs and toast while Jay-Jay complained about the powerlessness of childhood.

  “It’s not so great,” he said. “You don’t get to choose what to eat or when to go to bed.”

  “If someone had told me when to go to bed I wouldn’t be in this trouble,” Laurel muttered. Jay-Jay ignored her.


  “It’s a monarchy,” he said in that smug tone he’s been using a little too often lately. “Kids are serfs and the parents are feudal landowners. That would make Killer, let me see, a…”

  “Where did you learn about monarchies?” I interrupted.

  “Mr. Short. He says true monarchies seldom exist. Most are imitation, like processed cheese slices.”

  He took a gulp of orange juice and burped. Laurel didn’t say a word. He burped again, louder this time, and she sat quietly and played with her eggs.

  “What’s her problem?” he asked.

  “I’m going back to bed.” Laurel said. “I feel a little woozy.” She rushed across the room and threw up in the sink. Jay-Jay was horrified.

  “Mom,” he whispered. “Do something, okay?”

  I followed Laurel to my bedroom and helped her off with her blouse. Her bra was yellow with tiny orange flowers printed across each breast. This made me incredibly sad.

  “Tuck me in?” she said in a small voice.

  I smoothed the comforter and tucked it around her shoulders.

  “Now say ‘Good night, sleep tight.’”

  “It’s morning,” I stalled.

  “I know. It’s just something to say.”

  “Goodnightsleeptight,” I said quickly, hoping to get to the door before she started crying.

  “Carly.” She clutched my wrist. “Will it hurt?”

  I didn’t know how to answer. My abortion hurt for a few hours but I knew she wasn’t talking about physical pain. Emotionally, it hurt for a long, long time. Pain still flares up unexpectedly.

  “They don’t use machines any longer,” I stalled. “They have a shot now, it’s more like a miscarriage, you don’t even have to—”

  “Mom! I’m going to be late,” Jay-Jay yelled.

  “Call in to work for me, okay?” Laurel burrowed deeper beneath the covers. “I feel so heavy. My lips are too tired to talk.”

  “Laurel is staying with us for a while,” I told Jay-Jay as I drove him to school; we had missed the bus again. “She isn’t feeling well.”

  He played with the carabiner clips hanging from his backpack. “We might have to keep it quieter too, especially Thursday. She has to go in the hospital and well, it’s nothing to worry about really, just day surgery, not even day, more like an hour or two.” I laughed nervously. “I’ll take the afternoon off, stay with her, be back by the time you get home from—”

  “Did you remember lunch money?” Jay-Jay interrupted. “You forgot yesterday and I had to eat Josephine’s sandwich and, Mom, it was organic. I almost puked.”

  “Oh shit.” I had forgotten. “Listen, I’ll swing by the cash machine. It’ll only take a minute.”

  “You can leave it at the office.”

  “No, honey, I’ll bring it to your classroom to make sure you—”

  “Mom!” Jay-Jay hissed. “You have on shorts.”

  “So?” I looked down at my legs, pale and chapped and partially covered by my long winter coat.

  “Forget it.” He reached for the door handle. “I’d rather starve.”

  “Fine!” I snapped.

  The door slammed and Jay-Jay ran up the school steps, his ridiculous green knapsack bumping against his shoulders so that he resembled an oversized praying mantis. I wished I could follow him. I didn’t want to return home and hear Laurel snoring from my bedroom. I felt guilty about her pregnancy and slightly ashamed. If I had paid more attention, listened more carefully, not necessarily to what she said but what she hadn’t, I might have picked up on her state of mind, realized she needed help, an ear to listen, a shoulder to lean on. But I had been too involved with my own life, my own problems. Now I wanted to lay my hand on her shoulder and say, “Bless me, sister, for I have sinned,” the way we used to say to the priest before confession, before we bowed our heads and waited for penance, all those tedious Hail Marys and Our Fathers, which we cheated by praying only half of. After church, Gramma took us to eat at the Swedish smorgasbord out by the highway. She didn’t particularly like the Swedes, since she considered them sissies for not involving themselves more in the war, but she did appreciate their attitude toward food. She was sure that all-you-can-eat buffets originated in Sweden. I don’t know how she came up with this, but she believed it to the point that she taped a map of Sweden to her refrigerator. It made her happy, she said, to think of all those people eating as much as they wanted, beverage included, for one small price.

  Message on my cell phone at 2:32 a.m.

  “Hello, Carla? It’s me, Francisco. I’m still up in Barrow but I’ll…” He paused and cleared his throat. “I’ll be home by this weekend. I guess you’re, uh, still mad about the restaurant.” He cleared his throat again. “I should have called. I just, well, I just…this is all so damned hard, isn’t it? I just think that maybe we should, I don’t know, maybe just… Damn it, I’ll call when I get back.” He cleared his throat but didn’t hang up. He stayed on the line breathing until the machine finally clicked him off.

  Wednesday, Dec. 14

  It’s three a.m. and everyone is finally asleep. It’s been a long night, all of us frayed and stressed except Jay-Jay. Laurel wanted Spam for supper, an unusual request since she rarely eats meat, though Spam probably couldn’t be classified as real meat. She demanded I fry her up some as soon as I got home from work. I mixed it with potatoes, added onions and peppers, Gramma’s old hash recipe, and as I fried up that stinky meat product, Jay-Jay quizzed us on Spam facts.

  “Guess what state eats the most Spam? Oklahoma, Washington, Alaska, or Hawaii?”

  “Alaska.” I was sure I was right. Where else could you find enough people willing to eat what was basically dog food?

  “Nope. Hawaii. Okay, next question: if you took all the Spam ever eaten, how many times would it circle the globe?”

  “Oh-oh-oh, I know,” Stephanie yelled from the living room; it seemed she was staying with us again. “It’s totally eight.”

  “Nope, ten! Okay, last one. Think hard, you guys, you’re batting zero. Name one state where Spam is made. There are two, but you only gotta answer one.”

  “Texas?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Virginia,” Stephanie said.

  “Nope.”

  “Wait,” Laurel yelled. “It’s Ohio, isn’t it? Cleveland?”

  “Think harder, okay? It starts with an N.”

  “North Carolina,” Stephanie called out happily.

  “N. E. B.”

  “Nebraska,” Laurel shouted. “What’s the other one?”

  “Minnesota.”

  “No way. You sure?”

  “Yep.” Jay-Jay was already bored with this game.

  After our crappy supper, Stephanie left to meet Hammie and I hunkered down at the kitchen table to catch up on my bills, which for once were only overdue and not delinquent; I took this as a sign of progress. I was deliberating on whether to save the Gap credit card bill for next month or send in a bad check when Laurel called out from the living room.

  “Did you remember my blouse?”

  “Can’t you wear one of mine?” I signed my name to the Gap check and tidily licked the envelope.

  “I can’t believe you didn’t remember. My lucky blouse? The one I’ve kept all these years? I wore it when I took my SATs, and the night Junior proposed.”

  “So?” I was on a bill-paying roll. My endorphins were flowing, as if I had been jogging. I was almost high.

  “You promised to get it for me, remember?”

  I pounded stamps over the bills and spread them out in front of me: Visa, Paid! MasterCard, Paid! Electric, Paid! Gas, Paid! Gap, kinda/sorta Paid! I wiped my sweating hands over the dish towel. “What am I supposed to say to Junior?”

  “You don’t have to say anything. Pick up the blouse and get out.”

  I couldn’t do that, though. My loyalties lay with Laurel, but Junior has been in the family for over a decade. Last year he bought Jay-Jay an acre of land on the moon for
a birthday present, something Jay-Jay still talks about. I grabbed a handful of pretzels, called for Killer, and headed out to the car. Gramma always said that chewing got her brain working and I was hoping for the same as I drove south to the Hillside section of town, the roads becoming slipperier and less crowded the farther I got from town. I parked in the driveway and shut off the engine. Without the intrusion of streetlights, the sky was clear, the stars spreading out, the moon a round ball that reminded me of a pregnant woman’s belly. Junior answered on the first knock. He looked terrible. His pants were wrinkled and there was a stain on his shirt.

  “So,” he said as he closed the door behind me. The smell of take-out pizza filled the air. “How’s Laurel?”

  I kicked off my boots.

  “Look, I’m not stupid, I know she’s there. I see her car in the driveway. I drive by every night before bed, just to make sure she’s still there.”

  “Oh.” I didn’t know what to say. I hoped he wouldn’t start crying.

  “You want some pizza? It has anchovies but you could pick them off.”

  “No thanks, I can’t—”

  “I know she was seeing another man. I’m not dumb. I almost stayed in Portland last month. Then I stopped at a light downtown and a family walked by with two little girls. You could tell they didn’t have much money but they held hands and laughed; they looked so happy. That’s when I understood what’s been missing between us: a child.”

  “Wh-wh-what?”

  Junior kept right on talking. “She’s probably told you I can’t have kids. I’m not proud of the fact. But we can adopt, and if she wants to do the whole pregnancy experience I’m willing to go the artificial insemination route. We can pick an educated donor, someone with strong genes.”

  I could feel laughter in my throat, that hysterical, inappropriate laughter that descends during funerals or long church services. I coughed instead, and Junior looked at me dully.

 

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