by Kate Wisel
Just in time, “What’s your father’s first and last name?”
Nat lets out a choked laugh. “I don’t have one.”
The wind swirls the salt on the sidewalk. By the brick of the liquor store, Victor is gone.
Blue salt in the Best Buy parking lot. The smell of heat and exhaust each oncoming dark, when the yellow and blue lights kick off. Nat failed school last fall. Four F’s stamped down the page, a broken-looking C in English, one useless A in photography. The report card was waiting on the table between the salt and pepper shakers. Before Mona kicked her out. The only things she remembers from the fall were the pictures she printed: Mona chopping lettuce bitterly as kitty threaded between her ankles. Serena smiling secretively in the back seat. The bats and moon blue of the sky in Dedham when she drove down the highway, the feeling of fleeing. A barstool.
On Saturday, Nat wakes in the back seat of the Intrepid, her breath sour yogurt. There is crust in the corners of her mouth, half-moon shadows under her eyes. In the wet stalls at Best Buy, she pees for fifteen seconds straight, then uses a mini toothpaste to squeak her teeth with a finger.
She drives back to the Dot, across the highway where the skyline obstructs the fluff of clouds. She drives and the buildings get taller. Dorchester a maze of addicts crowding the shoulder lane with red roses in their hands, the look of static TVs flashing in their eyes like marbled, broken channels.
On Dot Ave, she sits freezing in nothing but jeans and a hoodie, afraid to waste gas. She nibbles at a waxy stick of licorice. Her nipples feel raw, pinched. Sore as her broken rib. For a second Nat is Boston, ancient and tense.
She looks at the bike rack, but there are no bikes, nobody.
By noon she’s picking at a cyst on her forearm. The gunk beneath the bump strains against a thin piece of skin. She tears it with her nail, white pus shooting onto the steering wheel. The divot on her arm fills with oily black blood. Mona would have slapped at her wrist, told her to quit picking. And if Nat picked anyway, Mona would take her to the clinic on Centre Street to see some short Indian doctor, who would gauze her. The bill would sit on the kitchen table between the salt and pepper shakers for weeks, like “Look what you’ve cost me.”
Nat presses her shredded sweatshirt sleeve against the wound, then looks to the sidewalk. She recognizes the beanie first. Victor walks out of the Laundromat with a magazine tucked under his arm. She thinks to turn on the ignition, follow him down the street. But Victor just stands outside, blocking the wind with a cupped hand to spark his light.
He looks much older than the last time they were together. When Nat was fifteen and he was twenty. White smoke escapes from his mouth, and when it clears she notices his cheek, gruff and pocked. His ugliness like a diamond, clear and cut. He walks, stops, sniffs the air.
Nat turns the key and Mona’s scratched CD plays on full blast. “Barcelona”—she’s been listening to Freddie Mercury for days. “I had this perfect dream. . . . The dream was me and you.”
Victor looks at the car. Nat kills the volume, then leans to crank the window. The cold makes her cough. When Victor leans his forearms on the door, she swings her eye to the rearview. Cold eye, monster green. She hears Victor tapping the hollow metal of the door.
“Got your own car, all grown up now,” Victor says. “I saw you here last week.”
“Yeah,” Nat says, feeling a foot away from herself. “We got busted.”
“Saw it.” He smiles, his teeth opalescent as sea glass. The cold sun everywhere. Her tongue stuck like bread caked to the roof of her mouth.
“Let me in?” Victor says.
The car fills with his scent, something oily like vanilla. He leans back into the window. He’s not afraid with his eyes, trying for the full view of her. His lips bright and open as a wound.
He fishes a pack from his pocket, then slips a cigarette into Nat’s fingers. She smiles with her mouth closed, not knowing where to go but driving anyway. He holds the cigarette with his thumb and forefinger. He doesn’t blink as the smoke spills from his nostrils, his eyes on her cheek.
The next day is different but the same. Route 9. They drive and smoke and stay in their heads. Nat imagines Raffa and Serena walking through English High’s halls side by side, buying Doritos and red Gatorades from the vending machine in the caf. What if they were talking about her behind her back? And Nat would never know. She’d never want to.
Victor shields his arm in front of her at the gas station like he’s saving her from a crash. It’s odd because she’s parked. She watches him at the pump. Sunlight warms the wheel. Nat wraps her hands extra tight as she pulls out.
“I should be hungry,” Nat admits. Hunger has her stomach split like a knife wound that opens and hollows, then closes in on itself.
At the diner, the stiff-haired waitress pours them two thick milkshakes for the price of one. Victor forks home fries onto her toast. Nat goes crazy with the ketchup. The pileup of food in her stomach breaks apart her nerves.
“Did you graduate MIT?” she asks.
“Nah,” Victor says, his palms out flat on the table. “Some things came up I had to take care of.”
“I’m supposed to be in school today.” Nat waits for something, for his palm to meet her cheek, but he just stares.
“You should go back, flunky,” Victor says.
She sips and the cold shake numbs Nat’s tongue, melts, then turns sweet.
The ignition goes choppy as they wait outside English High like fugitives. Dirt under her fingernails, nerves skipping like a scratched track. Nat unbraids her hair, then rebraids it. Snowflakes pick up outside. They’re slow to fall and pretty. She kills them off the windshield. Raffa clicks the front door open, and Victor gives a wave. She shoots Nat a look, then slams the door, climbs into the back.
“Hey,” she says, blinking at Nat in the mirror. Nat pops the DC, hands it to Raffa, who lights a 100. She smokes moodily as Serena climbs in the back.
“This is Omar,” Nat lies. “He can buy.”
“Hey,” they both say as they gaze out the window.
The Intrepid hums hungrily as Nat drives slow down McBride Street. They cackle at the sophomore girls who wear North Face jackets and Tiffany bracelets. Nat imagines their bank accounts brimming with bat mitzvah money, their after-school snacks on a white granite kitchen island. The staleness of the smoke mixes with the crisp air from the cracks in the window. In the rearview, before Nat tears off, she notices the way the light assaults the silver on their careless wrists.
Outside the packie where they first learned to Hey Mister, Nat hands Victor thirty quarters for three forties and a five-dollar bill for a six-pack for him. She watches him carry the bottles to the counter.
“Who the fuck is this busboy?” Raffa says, hugging the headrest. Serena snorts, catches Nat’s eyes in the rearview, then sighs and chews a nail.
“Shut up,” Nat says, letting a small smile grow.
Victor slams the door shut, then leans back to dispense cigarettes like gum. Nat turns up the mix: “You a industry bitch, I’m a in-the-streets bitch.”
At a red light, Nat cracks a paper-bag PBR and hears the hiss in her heart. Her ex-boyfriend Erik drove a Range Rover and taught her to drive. He slouched back in the seat with one arm hanging over the wheel, the other over her. Nat drives back to JP in the same fashion, freezing PBRs in the cup holders, her one free arm around Victor’s seat.
The thing about being ghetto is that toughness is a kind of love. By now, they’ve driven everywhere but home. She makes a turn onto Tremont, the snow brightening the road. She passes the Planned Parenthood that sits back off the street, its womanly purple walls. She passes her old apartment where she and Mona lived in government housing, before Northeastern bought their old brownstone for student dorms. Nat slows. She was fifteen in the old place.
Nesting doll on her windowsill, painted wooden cheeks getting smaller and smaller until the blush was just a dot. Blood slipping down her legs in the shower. And the fire
escape where green leaves flitted soundlessly against the window like fish tails. Victor from next door went to MIT and smoked blunts on the railing, her bedroom window cracked in spring against the radiator’s hiss. After Victor handed her the blunt, she coughed for five minutes straight. High, the traffic noises below sounded like video games, and the dirty-white flowers reeked of semen.
Victor twitched his nose, the silence loaded as he savored the rest of the blunt. Mona worked long hours at Macy’s, so Nat climbed through the window behind him. His room was identical but opposite to hers. The door on the other side, the windows switched. She was the one who slid off the condom, wanting nothing between them. Not even a song on the boom box. Just the sound of the fan lashing the air. Her own grunts and sighs like some haunted girl begging in another language. Her jaw hung open to mirror Victor’s, not from awe but from the promise of awe.
Once, in Victor’s bathroom, she watched a drop of blood expand in toilet water, thinning, then blooming. Once, she wore his unwashed T-shirts and they went downstairs to Anna’s, where Victor paid for two super steak burritos, then pulled up chairs in the very back. Nat listened to him talk about his biochemical engineering classes as she folded her tinfoil into smaller and smaller shapes. Every minute or two Victor glanced around. She knew he was nervous about being seen with a girl as young as her, her face so pale it blued, though she had promised she was sixteen.
Once, she moved her bed against the wall where Victor slept adjacent. More than once she held her hand up and left it there. It reminded her of her father in Ukraine, if you can be reminded of someone you’d never met. The way Mona told her the blacklist kept them separate.
Every street reminds her of something. Tremont will always be blood so bright it shocked her. Her hand on the wall where one night she heard a girl’s voice murmur in sighs on the other side. Or the day they got caught, when they were messing around in Nat’s kitchen, Victor pouring pineapple juice in his boxers. Nat took his free hand and slid it up her shirt. She braced her back against him as he fingered her spine. The keys popped the front door’s lock. Mona stepped into the doorway of the kitchen before Victor could dart past her. She held his shoulders and yelled so violently in Russian that Nat imagined her screaming at some other man. Victor moved without a word, his name on the mailbox taped over. The absence felt seasonless, a hollow pain so widespread it kept her fingers numb through summer.
Nat drives the length of JP twice. Victor keeps his hand hooked to the garment handle. Train tracks divide the cracked road. Frozen T windows refract the blur of colored bar lights. Golden arches, a shopping cart hitched on the curb, the church’s brick wall a spray-painted scene of a gospel choir midbelting. Seventies thrift shops with black ribbon necklaces. Thin, fragrant blouses screeching on the racks. Dead flowers under loose glass that Nat nailed to her bedroom wall where her hand had been.
These are their streets. Rainbow jimmies in a wax cup for eighty extra cents. The ice-cream truck’s nauseous ballad. Mozart Park, swings, three in a row. Hot rubber on her ass where her shorts skimmed her butt cheeks. Winding, tight streets. Nat’s street, where old ladies wear scowls, fur coats, and stark-white tights. Where Berezka’s sells olives and zefir and there’s a McDonald’s next door.
Nat passes her apartment and thinks of Mona in the kitchen. Picky with the grocery list and making borscht on holidays. Nat’s aunt furious with her stiff napkins. Her apartment is across the street. In Ukraine, she was a scientist at a university. Here, she’s on Medicaid. Her hall of clutter is unbearable and the windows only let in soft gashes of winter light.
In Chernovsty, they lived with Nat’s father. Eighty-six square meters and books in the bathtub. Mona worked at a toy store, then a watch store, then a veteran’s deli. She only tells one story. May Day, before Nat was born. How she walked to the parade. The shock of stepping in puddles with neon streaks.
Nat winds through the rotary by Arbour Hospital where the road turns off wider. Lawns stretch from houses like long, taunting tongues. The reservoir has a weird shine, a trick of black fur on a bird’s wing. The hills climb higher, arts and crafts Victorians stilted behind white fences. A Whole Foods on the corner. Cottage cheese for six bucks, the kind Mona likes with the pineapples. English High on the other side of the Arborway. She circles the loop around the school for the fun of it, her tires sloshing puddles and spinning out on residential streets. She jerks the wheel to make a turn in the road where there are no turns, the street warped with dirty snow. Victor is smiling, half his face slit like the moon.
Outside school, triple-decker houses at their back, they can see into the gym, whose lights stay on through the night. The rims of the basketball hoops ready, open jaws. She doesn’t want to think about last year or next year, how college moved towards her, then broke apart like an iceberg.
She lets Victor pick a reggae station, then takes his arm and slips up his sleeve to study his forearm. It’s smooth. She takes his other arm but doesn’t find what she’s looking for, track marks. How he’s ended up doesn’t make sense. She used to watch him sketching a double helix, strands that wound around each other like wind spinners. He once quoted Rumi, took her to a used bookstore in Cambridge.
“Why’d you drop out of college?” she says, wanting to unlock his mind. See if it’s as cluttered as her aunt’s apartment.
“I got someone pregnant,” he says, then shrugs.
Nat’s sleeve covers her fist. She takes a long gulp of beer, not feeling the freeze of the spill until it sops into the puffy layers of her jacket. She has feelings, but the carbonation pulps them together. The pit of her stomach fizzles like milk flooding a bowl of Rice Krispies.
There is distance between the rows of empty seats in the stadium of the gym and where she’s sitting now, in the driver’s seat. She stumbles out and finds her footing in the mounting snow around the tires, pissing in the glare of the headlights.
Victor wants to show her Waltham, where he grew up. Ice cracks off the windshield on the highway. He signals the exit, pointing a two-fingered gun to make a right, dirt sealed in his fingerprint. His thumb split like a gash made of wax. She swerves.
“Pull over,” he says. “I want to drive.”
“Can’t,” Nat says, risking a glance. “This is my dad’s car.”
“You don’t have a dad,” he says.
“You weren’t in the army.”
“You’re drunk.”
She sees them fighting in a room with no furniture. He touches her face beneath an underpass. Pushes her in an empty shopping cart, swings her around at the brink. She’s thinking of next week, the food stamps they could split and the days with no hours.
Earlier, in the Shaw’s on Tremont, she and Victor put together two fives and strode inside, shaking packets of M&M’S like maracas. Sampling a gummy California roll from the deli counter. Before they bailed, a girl with a crooked headband blocked the end of the aisle. When they came close, the girl looked up from just under Victor’s waist. She twisted her legs.
“Hi,” Nat said, crouching at eye level with the girl.
“I can’t find my mom.” It was only when the girl looked up at Victor that she began to pee, her pale pink leggings darkening in streaks towards her ankles. Victor held his hands in front of his chest as if he were pushing off a weight.
“We can’t help,” he said, taking Nat’s wrist, steering her past the girl.
Nat pulls into the parking lot of Victor’s old apartment complex. The lot is straight and lined like a bowling alley. Void as someplace like Phoenix, beige as Ohio. Different from the harsh lights of the Best Buy parking lot. Victor in the passenger side with the seat cranked back, his head to her feet on the couch of the back seat. She wakes in rushes of cold to the rails on the T rumbling like giant marbles sliding through a wooden room, then climbs into the driver’s seat, where everywhere is bright, obstinate morning light, clean and cold. She waits for Victor to wake up, even though there’s never anywhere to go. Nowhere in Boston. Now
here in her mind.
She listens to “Barcelona” on the lowest volume. Decides that the best love is something that can ruin you like permanent eye damage, spots of darkness in everything you see. And if love is a person, she’d gun them down in the street. She pictures herself in the paper that maybe Mona would be forced to read.
In his parking lot, Victor palms the hair back from her forehead on the couch of the back seat, the streetlight orange film. He looks at her, glides his hips over her hips. She looks away, the way she did after she dropped him a dollar and he lifted his beanie.
It’s impossible. To look someone in the eye in this way. She gets it from Mona. She has one photo of her father and Mona together. Soviet Russia, 1989. It must be perestroika because her father, the history teacher, is not working, the school burned to the ground. He’s sitting unrelaxed at a dinner table in a Puma T-shirt. His face is scarred down the right side, a white line like a tear. His arm stretched over the back of Mona’s seat, where she sits with her hand under her chin, her eyes looking through the wall as if she sees something beyond it.
If they look in love, they don’t look at each other.
Victor turns back her chin, firm, like he’s been teaching her how to look at him her entire life. She looks at him thumbing her bra, his teeth pinched around her nipple. She feels the pressure of his thumb on her jaw, the place under her ear that aches, that is locked. She puts her palm against his chest and presses. She lifts his hand to mirror hers.
“See,” she says. “We’re making a pact.”
“Looks more like a prayer,” Victor says.
“It was a wall,” she says, feeling the slap she’d been anticipating. She draws her hand back. In front of his face, it glows futuristic orange. The power seems to come not from the light, but from the tips of her fingers, her identity. Nat stretches her hand out, and more power builds. She studies it, the seams stitched by light. Like if she kept holding it, pledge-like, it could be scanned by some machine that transports you. She thinks to wave it, goodbye, then wonders where she would go.