When we got to my building, I turned to face him. “Well, Carl . . .”
He leaned over and kissed my mouth with his warm, dry lips. I put my hand on his neck, and he shivered. His helmet bumped against my head.
After a minute, Carl pulled away and buried his face in my hair and seemed to be breathing me. I was so glad I didn’t smell like smoke anymore. He let out a huge sigh and kissed me again. He lifted the front wheel of his bike, turned around, and shot off into the darkness.
The next day was Saturday. Anita came over with Evelyn in the afternoon. We waited in my room for Carl. Anita lay across the end of the bed with her head touching the floor on one side and her feet in a box of clothes on the other. She watched Evelyn pull the books off my cardboard bookshelf. “Evelyn, put those books back.. You’re wrecking them. Leah, what’s going on with —”
Evelyn opened up Green Eggs and Ham. She turned a page and ripped it.
I said, “That’s a special book, Evelyn. Hand it over.” I held out my hand for the book and coughed. Ever since I quit smoking, I’d had a runny nose. Overnight, I’d developed a sore throat, and it hurt to talk. I hoped I hadn’t given anything to Carl.
Evelyn stood up and threw the book at me. Her shirt didn’t come down over her stomach.
Anita banged her head against the carpet. “Ugh, where’s Carl? His stupid mother.”
There was a rap on the door. Cindy, in her robe and a towel turban, opened the door and gave me a nauseating smile. “Leah, you have another guest.” She swung the door open and squashed Evelyn behind it.
Carl slunk in and raised his hand in greeting. “Hey.” Cindy stood in the doorway with glazed eyes, smiling.
“Bye, Mom.” I climbed over Anita and shut the door. Carl sat on the floor against the door.
Evelyn leaned on his leg. “Carl,” she said. She gazed up at him, put her little hand on his knee, and pretended to play piano. She had a few flakes of sparkly orange polish on her fingernails.
Anita pulled herself up and sat cross-legged on the bed. She rubbed her eyes and smeared her makeup. “Finally, Carl.”
He pulled up his knees; he was wearing combat boots that made his feet look enormous. “I stood my ground. I said I’m sixteen and it’s Saturday and I’m going to see my friends. I want my phone back. And I’m going out tonight, too. May I please use the van? I work my ass off and I deserve to have a little fun.”
“My God, Carl. You actually used the word ‘ass’? What did she say?”
“Her mouth got really tight and she said, ‘Fine.’ Then she went into the backyard and smoked a cigarette.”
“Really? Patty smokes?” Anita propped her chin on her fist.
“I owe you, Carl.” I coughed and quickly wiped my nose on my sleeve.
“No rush. I get paid to play a wedding next week. Are you sick?” He shyly stared at my ugly carpet. His hands hung over his knees, and his right hand tightly held his left wrist. Carl Lancaster was sitting in my pathetic bedroom, and I didn’t seem to care. I was fine with it.
“Looks like we can go out tonight.” Anita looked at Carl and then at me. “What should we do? Want to go down to Torrance Park for kicks?”
“What’s happening with your big Kristy Baker problem? Have you gotten it all straightened out?” Carl bunched up his eyebrows. He methodically cracked the knuckles of both hands.
Anita stacked her fists under her chin. “Yeah! What’s going on? Did you —?”
“I’m working on it.”
The phone in the living room rang. Cindy came to the door again. She smiled down at Carl and winked. She handed me the landline. “My goodness, Leah, you are certainly the social butterfly today.”
I took the phone from her. “Hey, Kristy.” Carl and Anita both stiffened.
Kristy said, “Why was your phone off? We’re going to the park tonight, remember? We’ll pick you up at six. Dave and Rob told me they saw you yesterday with Anita Sotelo and Carl Lancaster. What the hell were you doing with them?”
I kept my gaze on the wall and thought it was probably how the earth looked from the window of a plane. The crack was a river.
“I’ll call you back.” I pushed the button and ended the call.
A minute before, I’d been sitting in my room with Anita and Carl, but now when I looked at them, just for a flash, I saw Anita Sotelo and Carl Lancaster. Carl’s face was so thin and serious and freckled, his lips were chapped, and he had a little acne on his high cheekbones, and those long white freckly fingers. And Anita’s face was kind of gray from getting up at four thirty, and also because she was probably anemic from being vegan and not getting enough iron. Her thick eyeliner was smeared, and she wore cheap, flimsy scarves and leggings and knockoff Keds.
Carl picked at the bottom of his combat boot. Anita stared cockeyed at the wall and chewed her thumbnail.
“Hey,” I said. “You guys.” They looked up at me, and I saw my friends again.
“I’ve got to go down to the park with Yertle and Corinne. We already planned it, and I can’t get out of it. Just for a little while. Then I’ll meet up with you guys.”
And then I had to meet someone at eleven. Just for a minute.
Carl blew air through his teeth. “I can only use the van if I’m home by ten thirty. I can’t be tired for the goddamn recital.”
Anita had her head tipped back and watched Carl’s face. Carl was looking at me. His gaze stopped at my mouth, then traveled up to my eyes. I looked at the carpet, my heart whumping.
“But theoretically, I’m OK with it,” he said. “Who is Yertle?”
Anita pulled her legs up to her chest and pressed her chin against her kneecap. Her eyes looked darker, the lines of her face sharper than usual. “Fine. I might have to bring Evelyn.”
“Excuse me, girls. I need to use the restroom.” Carl got up and went out the door; we could hear him talking to Cindy.
Cindy said, “I understand you are a musician, Carl!”
Anita rolled over and looked at the ceiling. She tilted her head as her gaze followed the outline of a stain. “You guys are a couple?” She sat up, crossed her legs, and straightened her spine in a yogi pose. She took some deep breaths and blew them out. “Cool.”
Evelyn was sitting on my paperbacks. She paged through Hop on Pop and sang a song that we used to sing at the YWCA camp I went to on scholarship when I was eight:
“I’ll sing you one, Ho.
Green grow the rushes, Ho.
One is one and all alone
And evermore shall be so.
I’ll sing you two, Ho.
Green grow the rushes, Ho . . .”
Carl opened my door and stood in the doorway. Cindy was still talking behind him. He stared at my window. “Holy crap, no fire egress.”
One is one and all alone and evermore shall be so. An atom. I always thought that was me.
At five o’clock, Corinne called. “We’ll pick you up at six.”
“You’re going?”
I heard her blow out smoke. “Yeah. I’m sick of Kristy and her shit, but I don’t have anything better to do. Hey, what the hell, I heard you’ve been hanging around Anita Sotelo and Carl Lancaster again.”
I opened the door to my room just as Cindy rushed from her room into the bathroom. The brother of a dental hygienist had invited her to the Hilton Days barbecue, then to a line dance at the Stoplight Lounge. It was the weekend of Hilton Days, the town’s yearly festival. There were pancake breakfasts, bingo games, and country bands playing all over town. There’d been a parade down Torrance Avenue at two o’clock that afternoon. Kelsey Parker’s big sister was going to be crowned Hilton Days Queen at a rodeo on Sunday.
I stood in the bathroom doorway. Cindy leaned close to the mirror and blended her eye shadow with her pinkie. She pulled back, bunched up her lips, then leaned in again and checked her teeth. She took a brush from her makeup bag and dusted bronzer on her cheeks, shoulders, and boobs. She pulled open her shirt and blew into it.
; “Hey, Mom.”
She spun around and posed against the sink. She was wearing tight white capris that were now dusted with bronzer, a neon-blue tank top, and new red sandals that laced up her ankle. She lifted her foot. “They hurt like hell, but I love ’em! Leah, how do I look? I stopped at the tanning salon. Do I look burnt? I finally colored my hair last night. Is it too much red? What do you think? Am I presentable?”
Her pupils were huge. Her breath smelled like Chardonnay. The corner of her mouth quivered a little.
“You look pretty.”
Her face relaxed. “Really? You’re not just flattering me? Because you feel sorry for me? Because I’ll be forty in a couple of years.”
“You’re younger than all my friends’ mothers. You look beautiful.”
“Beautiful? Oh, Leah, you can’t be serious.”
“God. Yes! Now leave me alone.”
“Oh, sweetie. Sorry, I’m a little nervous. A very handsome gentleman is taking me out tonight.” She took my face between her hands, being careful of her nails; I could smell the polish. She pulled my head down for a tiny kiss on my forehead. “What are your plans, honey?”
She blinked like a little girl and gave me her cute, wobbly smile. She was pretending to forget that I was grounded. I’d rather she’d just say outright that it was too much hassle to be a mother. It took a lot of energy to enforce rules and curfews and groundings. It was boring and tedious to plan and cook nutritious family dinners, especially when that family didn’t include a guy and consisted of a fat girl and a tired woman who just wanted to drink wine and space out in front of the TV. She got furious when I got in trouble because then she’d have to do something. “It’s as much a punishment for me as it is for you!”
“I’m going over to Kristy’s.”
“You girls have a wonderful time. Be safe. Give Connie a kiss from me.”
There was a honk in front of the building.
“Oh my God, he’s here. He said he’d honk.” Cindy grabbed her jean jacket, rushed across the room, and pulled a red cowboy hat out of a shopping bag. She carefully put the hat on her head without squashing her curls.
“Does this hat look stupid? It does, doesn’t it? Oh, well! It’s cute.” She slung her red leather purse over her shoulder, took a big breath, and strolled out of the apartment.
She rattled her keys and tried to lock the door. “Screw it. Have a lovely evening, sweetie!” she called from the hallway.
Her voice floated down from the street. “Well, howdy, partner.” Then the clonk of a car door. The engine faded away. I was alone.
I sat down on the edge of the sofa and ran my foot over the faded green carpet. The apartment felt unpleasantly still, like a heart that wasn’t beating. I thought about how lucky I was that Cindy was never able to maintain a punishment of any kind for more than six hours. Corinne’s and Kristy’s parents were very strict — if they said you were grounded, you were grounded. Of course, Corinne’s mom allowed her to smoke. Cindy technically did not allow me to smoke, though she had never commented on the fact that I always stank like cigarettes. When she found smoke in the bathroom and a butt swirling in the toilet, she yelled, “No smoking in the goddamn apartment, or we’ll get a huge cleaning fee when they kick us out!” “I choose my battles,” I’d heard her tell her sister Linda over the phone. Now I’d quit smoking and she’d never even told me to stop.
I was unable to find an expression to put on my face. It felt like my face might slide right off onto the carpet.
My knee ached. All of my bones ached. It was an ache that started in my leg and radiated toward my stomach. Maybe I had bone cancer. I’d seen on TV once that bone cancer could be triggered by a sharp blow. I rolled up the leg of my jeans and looked at the blue bruises and the scab from when I’d tripped on Corinne’s walkway. I stood up and went into Cindy’s room.
I sat on the edge of her bed and ran my finger over the velveteen bedspread. I lay back and looked up at the leaves and flowers burnt into the maple headboard. When I was a little girl, I’d lie on the bed and stare at the headboard while Cindy got ready for work. I pretended that the headboard was a door to another world, and that was the world where my dad lived. It was full of flowers and leaves, but they only turned from orange to all the colors once you stepped inside.
The bed frame was the first piece of furniture that Cindy and Paul bought together. The story Cindy always told was that they were on a country drive and saw a sign for handmade furniture. They drove down a gravel road past a field full of sunflowers to a pole barn where a rancher was selling chairs, rocking horses, magazine racks, and bed frames.
We’d dragged the bed from apartment to apartment. On moving day, Cindy would get one of her coworkers’ boyfriends to help us move with his truck. She’d make brownies, buy a case of beer, put on eyeliner, and tell the sad story of Paul, and how he’d died two years to the day, almost, from when they bought the bed. Besides our pathetic little Christmases, the moving-day ritual was our only family tradition. The guys always listened to Cindy’s story with blank faces while they drank all the beer.
It suddenly occurred to me that the burnt flowers and the shellacked orange wood were hideous. I could have drawn better flowers when I was six. The bed was the ugliest piece of furniture I had ever seen. Paul and Cindy had chosen an extremely ugly bed. That made me so sad I almost started crying. I rolled off the bed onto the carpet.
I lay there for a while thinking about how strange and giant things look when you lie on the floor, then got up and went to the dresser where Cindy kept her makeup, creams, and hair appliances laid out like surgical supplies on a lacy blue cloth. I pulled out the wand of her mascara, twisted out her lipsticks, sprayed perfume on my wrists and behind my ears. I rubbed seaweed moisturizer that smelled bad onto my arm. I opened her jewelry box with the little gold key and lifted the lid just enough for the theme song from The Princess Bride movie to leak out.
I pushed in the plastic folding door of Cindy’s walk-in closet. Her shirts, sweaters, and dresses hung on blue hangers spaced two inches apart. Hanging against the wall was the peacoat with big plastic buttons that Cindy had worn for ten years. It was dingy and faded and covered with fabric pills. One of the buttons hung by a thread. “I’ll never get rid of that coat. It reminds me of what I’ve been through. I worked three part-time jobs for an entire decade to give you new shoes and school supplies,” she’d say. Then she’d stare at me and take a big swig of wine.
Her shoes were lined up beneath the coat and dresses and work uniforms. Besides her white work shoes, she had a pair of black pumps and a pair of high-heeled sandals, both ready for a big day, though the strappy sandals were sagging to the side as if they were tired of waiting. Hideous brown leather slip-ons with tassels “just for casual.” The white walking shoes for the power walks she and a friend took for two weeks before they quit. There were fur-lined snow boots with blue laces that she’d owned my entire life but never worn once. And now a pair of bright-red sandals could join Cindy’s collection of shoes.
On the shelf above the closet pole was the faded blue-and-white shoe box that held my baby pictures. I dropped onto the floor of the closet with the box.
My baby pictures slid around the bottom of the dusty old shoe box. The photos of me stopped at age two, when Paul died. Other than pictures taken by my friends, the only pictures taken of me since had been school pictures. We had bought the cheapest package twice, so I knew how chubby I’d been in third and fifth grade. The pictures my friends took of me with their phones always got deleted.
I was a fat but beautiful — no exaggeration — baby with fuzzy dark hair and huge saggy cheeks. Whenever I looked at the pictures, I fell into a trance. We looked so happy. I was the happiest-looking baby I’d ever seen.
I looked happier than Jimmy ever was, maybe because I was an only child, though Paul and Cindy had wanted another one. I turned the picture over — Cindy had written in her tight neat handwriting: One year, three months, and five
days old. I was asleep on Paul’s chest.
Paul had curly hair so short that it was just a ruffle on top of his head. His ears were so flat against his skull, he looked earless. He had huge dark eyes like mine. His brushy eyebrows grew together over his nose. I was glad I hadn’t inherited his unibrow, though I could have waxed it. He had long cheeks and a small mouth with full lips. That was my mouth. It was weird to see a picture of someone who looked like me. No one else in the whole wide world did, as far as I knew. He didn’t seem embarrassed to have a baby asleep on his chest. I was sleeping with my mouth open, with a little drop of drool on my lip, my head tipped back and tucked under his chin. He looked like a hands-on dad, though Cindy had said many times that he’d changed my diaper “exactly once.”
In the next picture, Cindy and Paul stood together with me squeezed between them. Their hair blew in a long-ago wind, and fat clouds puffed across a long-ago blue sky. Cindy and Paul looked young and proud, as if they believed they were the lucky ones. I’d always wondered who took their picture. Probably a stranger who forgot about them five minutes later.
When I looked at his picture, I tried out the names. Dad. Daddy. Pop. None of them worked. Only Paul. He was antimatter dad, the black hole that had sucked love and money and happiness out of our lives. Maybe I’d end up drunk on a couch and never be a doctor because Paul was my father.
The few times I’d asked about him, Cindy said, “Your father was a sweet guy, but a drinker. That’s all I have to say.” I first heard the story by accident when I was eight. Cindy and her friend were drinking wine in the kitchen at the apartment in Tallahassee. I was pretending to be asleep, with my eyes squeezed shut and my hand between my cheek and the scratchy couch.
He was supposed to be at work, but instead he went to a bar and drank a lot of beer and tequila. On the way home, he drove his truck into a telephone pole. Cindy started crying and said, “The poor, dumb bastard!” I’d thought she said “custard.”
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