Driving in Cars with Homeless Men

by Kate Wisel

  Christian came home late but first. He wrote me a check. Forty dollars was missing. I pictured him at the mall, cornering some mother on the cusp outside Sears, luring her into signing paperwork for a vacation down on the Cape. There would be an indoor pool with a hot tub, a porch with a grill, a view of the waves crashing. No cash up front. Time-shares were like buying cake batter on the dollar rack at the grocery store. A good deal but it was going to fuck up your life.

  I didn’t confront him about the check, not because he was scary in the way I used to feel my father was scary, the way he would reach out to swipe a full glass of milk off the table if you said something he didn’t like, then walk away. I was scared of Christian because he wasn’t scary, not overtly. He was the kind of criminal who would use turn signals in a high-speed chase; you couldn’t tell if he was stupid or nice. Each morning he’d ask, the way a computerized secretary greets a patient, how my day was, though it was 7 a.m. Mariah once joked to me that he was a psychopath.

  In September, Mariah called to say she wouldn’t need me on Tuesday but would I go spray-tanning with her? Mariah bounced the wheels of the stroller down the steps and we walked through Southie, leaves slashing under the stroller’s tires. We talked about Sadie’s recent bout of hiccups, how Christian worked six days a week, how they hadn’t been out once together since Sadie was born.

  “It’s on me,” she said, bouncing Sadie on her knee. The girl behind the counter waved. “They know us here,” Mariah said.

  In the spray-tan room, which was less of a room and exactly a closet, I got undressed like I was told and slipped on the black disposable G-string. I stood in front of an aluminum room divider for twenty minutes, waiting for the spray-tan girl to come in and judge the wisps of hair on my nipples, the razor-burn between my thighs. When she did, she kicked up the machine and told me to turn around. She hosed me with my arms up crucifixion-style, the mist as cold as being stuck in the walk-in freezer at McDonald’s.

  “You look incredible!” Mariah said when I came out.

  I looked like a red pepper and a carrot got in a fistfight. The tan stained my white shirt in patches. At the park, I thought of the way I was turned back to front and doused, how no was a word that had been deleted from my genetic code. Mariah and I watched Sadie splash around in the fountain. I wanted to sprint through as the tan ran down my neck and arms, dyeing the kiddie pool a pissy orange.

  “Christian and I are splitting up,” Mariah said, her mouth tightening.

  “That’s enough,” some mother shouted from the edge, prying her dripping-wet son out by the armpits.

  “Oh,” I said. I had known Christian was sleeping on the couch. He left his pillow there and never kissed Sadie goodbye. He’d leave and there’d be nothing but the TV in her eyes. I thought of my dad, the smell of basil etched into his fingers.

  “Sadie and I need you more than ever,” Mariah said. “I want to give you a raise.”

  “It’s a terrible time to talk about money,” I said.

  “I don’t want to make you feel uncomfortable,” she said. “I just wanted to be honest with you. You and me, we need each other.”

  I looked back at her, thinking, What is this bitch talking about? She had her sunglasses down to block her expression, so I said, “Totally.”

  The next week, Mariah asked if I would go to brunch with her.

  “This isn’t part of your job,” Jimmy said, holding his phone to his chest. “Say no.”

  This was the difference between us, me believing the things I could directly affect were my responsibility, him thinking they were not. He was responsible for a lot. A whole company. He ran PR for festivals and events all over Boston. On weekends, I wore laminated necklaces and drank unlimited vodka while hanging backstage with bands like the Pixies. He owned his place in Fenway above the stadium and I enjoyed the walk-in shower. It wasn’t why I was with him. I wanted to say it constantly, like a tic. I insisted on paying him two hundred dollars a month for rent.

  “You maintaining your independence?” he’d tease.

  At brunch, the stroller got jammed in the doorway. The wait was twenty minutes. I felt Mariah’s mood prick. She pushed the stroller back and forth beside the door as a cluster of leggy girls in rompers leaned against the wall with their phones under their noses.

  “Shhhh,” Mariah hissed as I bent to give Sadie her water. She hurled the heavy plastic bottle between a passing waiter’s legs. She screamed like a bird of prey, like she was falling from the sky, like her fingers were being severed one by one.

  We were seated an hour later. It was the first time I’d ever really looked at Mariah head-on. She was wearing loads of makeup, winged eyeliner sketched over crow’s-feet. Foundation pulled into the corners of the worry lines on her forehead and down under her nose in slash marks.

  “It’s been a bad week,” she said. “I don’t mean to bring you into it all.”

  “You’re not,” I lied. “I’m here for you and Sadie.”

  “You have no idea what Christian has put me through,” she said. “Your boyfriend is a good guy. I can tell from pictures. How old is he?”

  “We kind of met in a weird way,” I said.

  “He’s not a cheater like Christian,” she said. “You know that Malcolm Butler jersey, signed and fucking framed on the wall?” I didn’t.

  “I bought him that. I like to buy gifts that people really appreciate. I just want somebody who will do the same for me.”

  “You’ll find that,” I said, regifting sayings. “It takes time.”

  I thought of Jimmy, his hat pulled down on the rooftop at the Rattlesnake. As if we weren’t high enough, I asked him, testing his strength, to lift me up. He held my hips like an ice-skater as my arms helicoptered above the crowd.

  “Thank god for you,” Mariah said.

  The waiter hurried to our table, and I paused as Mariah asked for a mimosa pitcher. The waiter filled our glasses to the top. Sadie struggled to reach over her stroller, then smacked mine to the floor.

  “Like mother, like daughter,” Mariah said, then kept Sadie’s stroller faced to the wall as she wailed. The food came and Mariah looked bleary-eyed when her side of home fries was missing.

  “Have some of mine,” I said, pushing over my plate.

  “I just want to be honest with you. Christian hasn’t been home in weeks,” she said, knifing ketchup out of the neck. “If he doesn’t come home soon, I’m throwing all his shit in the yard.”

  That night I met Jimmy at Boston Calling. I spotted him threading in and out of the crowd with his headset. When he found me, he brought me a cheeseburger with a basket of french fries.

  “Eat the burger first,” he said as he took off his Rangers hat.

  The Roots were playing “You Got Me” as they crouched and crossed one another on the smoky stage. My phone set off in my pocket and there was no mystery as to who it was. If you could slur through text, Mariah would have been the pioneer. She had seen Christian at a bar with some chick. The security camera caught Mariah punching the girl to the ground. Mariah told me she was arrested, then released.

  “That her?” Jimmy said. He held on to the brim of his hat. His assistant, skinny from Adderall, pushed her way towards us with her clipboard, her manic black fly-aways like that of a woman in labor.

  “We have to rotate,” his assistant said, ignoring me. “Let’s go.”

  “It’s like you get off on their shit,” Jimmy said, ignoring her, swiping back the hair he had left, then correcting his hat.

  “You have no idea what I get off on,” I said.

  There were times I thought to quit, like the day Mariah ordered a Date My Mom onesie. When the wine bottles appeared like knocked-over bowling pins on the kitchen tile. Or even at Starbucks, that first day, when Christian turned around and the baby was strapped to his front, her head bobbing with those ninety-ninth percentile cheeks. Her fat thighs kicking the air. The love I felt for her pulsed with pressure, an overcaffeinated type of love.


  After the interview, I dipped behind the gang-signed alley and typed “eighty dollars times three days a week divided by eleven hours a day” into my phone and realized that flat rates were some kind of bullshit. I could make more tonging Munchkins at Dunkin’. I had a friend who used to babysit a kid, and she was paid twenty bucks an hour in undergrad.

  I googled: “Swedish word for doing something against instinct?”

  I’d quit a lot of things, by that point. I’d left college, then taken night classes, skipped graduation. I’d worked at an after-school program where only the autistic kids handed in papers that made any sense. I worked for Delta, flung myself through cities and terminals, quit. I’d left Niko, the guy who smiled in astonishment, tears filling his eyes after he colored my face with bright bruises. I’d quit my first real job teaching first graders to write three-word sentences: I have it. This is big. See her go. Sometimes the simple repetition and those synapses linking was so mysterious that I was left sobbing in the girls’ room by the miniature toilets.

  I was terrified of bosses. I was set on existing as my own boss. I was terrified of myself.

  The next Monday, I took Sadie for an extra-long walk. We stopped in the grocery store and I let her taste a strawberry. Through aisles, she poked her head out of the stroller as if through the window on a road trip, her lips stained a healthy red. I took her to Trident and lifted her on my shoulders so she could trace her finger across the bright spines of autobiographies. At home, she was an overtired brat. She plucked the elastic off the cabinet handle, turned to me with the depraved look of bad-girl hesitancy, then slammed a pot against the wall. She opened DVDs and scratched at the discs as I tugged them back from her. She cried like a maniac in my arms. She slapped at my face.

  Later that night, as Jimmy and I sat out on the deck, Mariah texted me photo after photo of Sadie when she was born. Tiny Sadie was unrecognizable, tightly wrapped in cloth with a pimpled, ancient face. Mariah told me she wanted to talk someday about how hard it was to bring a child into the world. Not just the physical pain. It was harder than anything you could imagine, she said. To hold a family together, to be that skin-close to another person. Jimmy and I were splitting a cigarette. We were drinking but we weren’t laughing. Below us in the stadium, a bat cracked hard and I felt the home run before I saw its reflection from the flat-screen on the mirror of the glass door.

  “Are we losing now?” I asked as he passed back the light.

  “Stop talking to her,” he said, widening his eyes. “She’s crossing the line.”

  “Why don’t you just punch me already?” And I meant it. And Jimmy knew that.

  “I won’t tell you again,” Jimmy said, pulling to the edge of his seat, genuinely hurt. “You’re not going to get that here.”

  When I got to the apartment the next day, Sadie’s stroller was flipped over on the stairs, the back wheel turned in on itself like an umbrella whipped up by the wind. At first, I thought Christian had come home, turned his theatrically calm demeanor inside out, but Mariah was in a tank top in the kitchen, her massive boobs spilling out of the lacy cups. Bottles of wine were lined up by height like rows of candles at a night mass. She grabbed one and chugged from the neck. She shut her eyes and wiped her mouth with the back of her palm. A red cut above her lip gleamed with Neosporin.

  “I cut myself,” she said in a plain voice.

  “Looks bad,” I whispered, though the look of her in pain excited me. I fingered my ponytail from behind, needing something to touch.

  “I’m useless,” she said, pouring wine into a water glass.

  “You haven’t been yourself,” I said, though that’s exactly who she’d been. “Sadie needs you.”

  She loaded the dishwasher, scummy knife blades erect, then kicked it shut and leaned against the counter. “Sadie needs both of us, a mom and a dad.”

  “My dad left,” I said. “You call me an angel, right?”

  She began to cry, fully, an eyelash coming loose.

  “I was fired from the hospital,” she said. The other eyelash traversed down her cheek like a centipede. “And by the way, you’re twenty-two,” she hissed, raising her hand at me. “You don’t know anything about what it takes to hold a family together.”

  “I’m twenty,” I corrected. “I’m sorry.” I was sorry for a lot of things. Sadie was sleeping—I could hear the whir of the fan from her monitor. “Let’s go and see Sadie. We can wake her up.”

  “I need to lie down.” Mariah tripped on her way to the couch. I pulled her up. “I lit a towel on fire last night,” she said with a snort, her curvy body sprawled across the couch.

  I faked a laugh. “Why?”

  “We were fighting in the bathroom.”

  “About what?” I said, my palms back against the carpet, the way they were when we were watching Sadie run through the fountain.

  “He’ll never change,” she said. I nodded gravely. “We were on this fantasy football team, you know? With all his friends. I texted the entire group saying I’d have to withdraw on account of Christian fucking another chick. Not one of them responded,” she said. “How psychotic of them?”

  “Totally,” I said.

  “I had a boyfriend once who hit me. Christian never hit me, but it was worse. He didn’t love me.”

  I stared at my thighs.

  “Have you ever wanted to go to Cabo?” she said, seized by the idea, her wet eyes filled with focus.

  I picked apart the carpet, mustered, “Not really.”

  “Good times,” she sighed, then rolled off the couch. “Hold on, I want to show you something.” She crawled towards me, her cheek close to mine.

  “There’s this guy,” Mariah said. I snuck a glance at her face as she swiped through her phone, something hard rammed under the bags of her eyes. “His name is Robbie,” she said with her nail between her teeth. “We were best friends in high school. Missed timing or something.”

  He was Mariah’s type, whatever that meant. She showed me another photo of Robbie in front of a sun-faded baseball field with a small boy on his back.

  “That’s his son. He’s five. Sadie’s future older brother?” She cackled, the way nervous people crack during funerals. “He invited me to visit in Rhode Island.”

  I sat on the edge of her bed as she packed her overnight bag: Victoria’s Secret perfume, silky thongs, eyelash glue. She brought me in to wake up Sadie from her nap, but it didn’t feel like a job for two. Sadie’s head swung back, her hair a dandelion of pink light from the window. A hundred frozen particles. The white bars dividing the room. Light swallowing the carpet.

  Sadie didn’t have receipts she couldn’t find, debt from credit card bills. She hadn’t done anything wrong. But when Mariah and I crept in that day, her room was overly warm, sour with the smell of spent diapers and sweat-clung sheets. Mariah lifted her into the air, then palmed her wet head to her chest. Sadie looked at me drowsily. Rhode Island was only a two-hour drive. Mariah said she’d be back the next day.

  “You’re our angel,” she said, and I wasn’t sure who she meant as she lifted Sadie higher than the ceiling fan.

  I sat with Sadie on the stoop. Her stroller was broken and the refrigerator was empty. I could carry her to the grocery store, or let her down to walk beside me if she didn’t run too far ahead. I made a mental list: eggs, bananas, cheddar cheese to melt into Sadie’s pasta, passive-aggressive flowers for Mariah.

  I watched Sadie descend the stoop backwards. She paused, seeing if I would stop her. Her leggings were bunched around her thighs and I tugged them down. She squatted on the bottom stair, tracing her finger over the gritty bumps on the concrete. My rage was so concentrated that it fused with the sunlight on the dumpster. It made me want to cry, not because Sadie wasn’t mine, but because she was Christian’s, and where the fuck was he? Sadie said, “Ot”—she meant hot, her new favorite word—and I carried her to the store.

  I quit. I moved back in with Raffa and got a new job teaching ESL to women who
wore high heels with tracksuits. I told Mariah I would find someone else, and even met her at Starbucks for an interview. Some nice girl in school for early childhood education. She had nothing-special hair, a brown suede purse that buckled on the side. She was the one. I listened to Jimmy for once, then I left him. It was too obvious, like a flu passed between us: I was with him because he wouldn’t hit me. I left him because he wouldn’t hit me.

  I went to dirty dives, places like Mary Ann’s and Biddy Early’s, where I drank from plastic cups and aimed darts at a fuzzy wall. I was back to the hollow buzz of dark jaws trilling broken English into my ear and to milk sugared by cereal in the morning and to the strange comfort of mysterious bruises, my legs shaved and lonely. One night I saw Mariah. It was before close at some waterfront bar when the dancing died and I looked out to the dark lap of the harbor, craving a cigarette, and there she was, sitting on a barstool, wearing a Red Sox hat and tons of lipstick. It was no coincidence, I’d told her to come.

  There was a guy behind her, his arm caged around her stool. I tapped his shoulder and he gave me the once-over, then bounced the other way, pretending to check the score on the Sox game. Mariah pulled me close, her hair smelling like an ashtray outside a mall. We talked about Sadie, her new preschool with the Playskool house out back, her new heart-shaped handbag. Mariah said she could speak in sentences and I asked her to tell me which ones. Whatever Sadie had said, I’d taught her to say it.

  “I don’t know,” Mariah shouted against the techno. “I can’t remember.”

  She laughed recklessly without making a sound. Then she went dead-eyed, killed her drink, and that was it. There was no conversation left to strain. Still, I wanted her close. There was something I badly needed to check. I pulled her neck to mine like we were conspiring, or Siamese, then stuck my mouth to her ear.

  “I’m your angel?”