by Jen Beagin
He picked up another guitar and said, “I probably never told you this, but I used to play guitar before I lost my arm. I wrote songs and was in a band and everything.” She watched his eyes fill up with tears. It gave her a panicky feeling and she tried to think of something to prevent any further spillage. He never talked about what he was like before the accident.
“You had more hair back then, too,” she said, and smiled.
He put the guitar down and looked at her appreciatively, as if she’d just said something profound. “Did you know me and your mom saw the Doors on our first date? They were at the Whiskey.”
“What’s the Whiskey?” she asked.
“The best nightclub around,” he said. “Your mother got completely hammered and puked all over my Mustang. I still liked her, though. She was wearing white patent leather go-go boots that night. Man, oh man.”
In his stories about her mother—to Mona or to anyone else—her mother was always the drunk and out-of-control one. But also the beautiful one.
Before leaving, he bought himself an old Nikon, and then told her to pick out ruby rings for both of them. “Rubies are lucky,” he said. She thought pointing out favorites would be the extent of it, but then they actually tried them on and everything. She chose a small ruby surrounded by diamond chips, her father a pinkie ring with a thick gold band. “We’ll take ’em,” he told the owner, to her astonishment.
“Semper fi,” the owner said as they were leaving.
Her father merely nodded. He liked men to think he’d been in Vietnam.
At the hotel hair salon she managed to talk him into getting her a perm, something her mother would never allow. Her father wanted one as well, which made the hairdressers laugh. Bald on top, his red hair was long on the sides and back, so they said they could do it, if that’s what he really wanted. “Curly hair is in,” he said, flicking his hair back with his hand. He flirted with the hairdressers the entire time, but Mona didn’t mind because they were laughing as if he were the funniest man they’d ever met. When they put the solution in, he screamed, “It burns!” and did his imitation of the possessed girl in The Exorcist.
They emerged three hours later looking like Little Orphan Annie and Bozo the Clown. He bought her an ice cream cone and they headed for the movies. Mona was relieved to see no children’s movies playing; she had an aversion to Disney films. She had a choice between Ordinary People and Raging Bull.
“I heard Ordinary People is a total downer,” he said.
They bought tickets for Raging Bull and sat near the front, like she wanted. She watched the kissing scenes carefully, trying to figure out the transition between regular kissing and tongue kissing. She glanced at her father from time to time and noticed that he cried during most of the boxing scenes. When the movie ended, he declared, “That’s the best movie I’ve ever seen.”
The rest of the weekend she spent mostly alone, lounging by the pool and drinking virgin daiquiris while her father played blackjack. On their last night she ordered room service and lounged in the Jacuzzi tub. The towels were bigger and thicker than the ones at home and she made sure to use all of them, drying off with one, wrapping one around her body and another around her head. When she came out her father was back from the casino and sitting at the desk with a drink, trying to load film into his camera.
“Give me a hand with this,” he said.
She helped him feed the film into the spool. He took the first picture while she was brushing her teeth. She spat out toothpaste and told him to cut it out. He ignored her and snapped a few more, and she gave him the finger.
“Wait.” He smiled. “Do that again.”
She crooked her middle finger and smiled widely for the camera.
“You look like a model with your tan,” he said. “Come sit on the bed.” She gave him a dirty look and took the towel off her head. “No, leave the towel on. You look like Natalie Wood.” She didn’t know who that was, but assumed she was someone glamorous. “Come on, Mona. You know you love having your picture taken.”
True—if she saw a stranger taking a photograph on the street, she tried like hell to get into the frame somehow.
“We’ve had such a good time,” he said, still trying to convince her. “I just want something to remember this trip by.”
“You have the camera,” she said. “And your ruby. And you won’t forget that perm.” She laughed.
“I think the rest of my hair’s falling out,” he said, looking worried.
“All right,” she relented, wrapping the towel back around her head. “I’ll pose for your stupid pictures.”
Delighted, he refreshed his drink and directed her to sit on the edge of the bed and cross her legs like a lady. “Put one hand on your hip and the other on the back of your head.”
“Take it from above,” she said.
He stood on a chair.
“Make sure you get my profile,” she said, turning.
“Don’t worry, you look wonderful,” he said with a fake accent.
She can’t remember how he enticed her to remove the towels, but it seemed natural at the time. She liked the pictures, despite the drastic tan lines. They were back home by then and the school year had just started. When he showed her, he said, “See what a beauty you are? You look just like your mother.” She was thrilled by this prospect.
A few months later she caught him showing them to his fat friend, Fat Jim, in the living room. She watched Fat Jim run a finger over her black-and-white figure and heard him comment on her flat chest and lack of hair down there. Her father said nothing, just nodded in agreement. She felt dizzy and quietly backed out of the room, thankful she hadn’t been seen, and then spent an hour in the bathroom, watching herself cry in the mirror.
Later, in high school, her therapist anticipated—and seemed to crave—a different ending, but her father never laid a finger on her. He moved away to Sacramento when she was thirteen. Still, she doubted he would have tried anything. He seemed a little frightened of her by the end.
* * *
HENRY DIDN’T STRIKE HER AS being a perv. On the other hand, maybe her perv radar was on the blink and a little reconnaissance was in order. She walked into his office and eyed his desk drawers, then stopped herself. Nothing going on here, she told herself. She looked at her watch—already 3:00. She swept the floors quickly and then mopped her way out of the house.
On the way home she stopped at the Agave, a dive bar and taco stand on the edge of town, and treated herself to a taco plate and a glass of crappy chardonnay. The bar was empty except for the bartender and another loner like herself, a bone-thin Native American woman with open sores on her face, sitting at the end of the bar. The only Native Americans she ever saw were at the gas station, filling their tanks, or at 7-Eleven, buying six-packs and cigarettes. The woman at the bar was drinking something with cranberry juice. If Mickey were here, he’d whisper, “Looks like she chased a fart through a keg of nails,” his favorite expression for homely women. Then he’d try to get into the woman’s pants. She imagined the various ways he’d go about doing that—he’d buy her a few drinks, offer her a bump of coke, openly gape at her chest. When that didn’t work, he’d make up stories about how he’d lost his arm—sniper fire, a land mine, a prison camp in Laos—or tell her about the time he’d met Christopher Walken, who’d bought him a drink and told him he should go into acting.
Stop thinking about him, she chided herself. She’d thought about Mickey more in the past two days than she had in years. Maybe it was a sign—maybe he was utterly alone and dying of cancer, and he desperately wanted to make amends but was too—
“Why are you staring at me?” the woman at the end of the bar called out.
Mona looked over her shoulder—no one there.
“I’m talking to you,” the woman said. “You keep staring at me.”
“Sorry,” Mona mumbled.
“Maybe she likes your face,” the bartender said to the woman. “Maybe you remind her of he
r sister.” The woman rolled her eyes and they smiled at each other. The bartender turned to Mona and asked, “Another?”
“No,” Mona said. “I’m finished.”
* * *
AT HENRY’S THE FOLLOWING WEEK she focused on the living room, dusting the vigas with a damp mop, and reconstructing what he and Zoe might have done the past weekend. There were Dylan CDs in the stereo, a stack of movies on the coffee table—The Crow, Groundhog Day, The Nightmare Before Christmas—an empty pizza box, six empty beer bottles, and two cans of Coke on the kitchen counter. In Zoe’s room an empty pint of Chunky Monkey on the nightstand next to a dog-eared copy of Interview with the Vampire.
When she stripped Zoe’s bed she found a bloodstain the size and color of a plum on the mattress. It reminded her of a birthmark, and something about it brought tears to her eyes. She scratched the stain with her fingernail and felt the urge to gouge it out of the mattress with a pair of scissors. Instead, she sat on the bed and stared at Zoe’s nightstand drawer, willing herself not to open it.
Protect your karma, she ordered herself. It’s forever.
Inside the drawer, a set of colored pens, a handful of rubber bands, a necklace with a butterfly pendant, and a small red journal. A master snoop, she took a mental picture of the drawer before removing the journal, noting its exact position.
Unfortunately, there was only a single, undated entry:
Dear Diary,
Yesterday was San Geronimo Day and me and Dad went to the Pueblo. A big crowd was standing around the village square. It was very hot and the wind kept blowing the dust around. Indian clowns ran through the crowd, shouting and acting crazy. They were naked except for homemade hula skirts and their bodies were painted with black and white stripes. A few of them were fat. They snatched little kids from their parents and carried them on their shoulders to the river. The river is sacred. The clowns dunked the kids in the river. I wished I was one of them. It’s supposed to be a blessing.
She appreciated Zoe’s style. She replaced the journal carefully—facedown, its spine flush with the back of the drawer—then wandered into Henry’s room. On his nightstand, two Sue Grafton novels, J Is for Judgment and K Is for Killer. He was certainly better read than her father; the only book she’d ever seen Mickey read was E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, a novel based on the film rather than the other way around, and he never even finished it.
She opened Henry’s nightstand drawer. No journal, just maximum reserve tip condoms, a bag of shake, a one hitter, and, hidden at the back of the drawer, a large prescription bottle. She looked at the label—Dilaudid. The stuff they salivated over in Drugstore Cowboy. Well, this was a first. She’d seen plenty of habit-forming narcotics in people’s houses—Xanax, Valium, Demerol, Percocet—but Dilaudid? She counted the pills—only nine left—and wondered if she could get away with stealing a couple. Or just one. They were 10-milligram pills—one was plenty. She asked herself if she really wanted one. The answer was yes. She could go home and wash it down with a beer and then spend the evening contemplating the calluses on her feet. But maybe she should wait and see—he might be the pill-counting type.
She opened the other nightstand drawer. A case of Rolaids, a bottle of Pepto-Bismol, a pair of scissors. She slid her hand between his mattress and box spring. Her fingers brushed paper. Lifting the mattress slightly, she saw four little chapbooks with plain covers. She pulled one out and leafed through it: no pictures, just old typewriter text on newsprint. Poetry?
She zeroed in on the words: “The horse came in buckets all over her back. She was covered in cum. She moaned and continued fingering herself.” Whoa! Bestiality! Another first. She turned the pages—the woman in the story went on to fuck all of the barn animals, including pigs. She just couldn’t get enough of corkscrew cocks. At one point a farmer spied on her. After the woman finished with a pig, Mr. Green Jeans took her from behind. The End.
She shuffled through the remaining three. Each one was dedicated to a specific fetish: golden showers, foot fucking . . . and then this: “We took turns spying on our teenage kids through the keyhole. After Becky sucked Robbie’s cock, he fucked her tits. I noticed my husband had a hard-on. ‘We know you’re watching, Mom and Dad,’ Becky called out. ‘You should join us.’ ”
A family orgy ensued, mother with son, father with daughter. Incest erotica, she thought. Fucking gross. She was unable to stop reading, however, and gradually became aware of two rumble fish swimming around inside of her. One fish was Repulsion, the other Arousal. They swam in circles for several minutes, sizing each other up. Then the fighting began. She continued reading and the fighting intensified. She climbed onto the bed, the book in her left hand, her right hand down her pants. It didn’t take long, only a minute or two. Afterward, she replaced the books. You are a slimy little creature. Wretched, vile, despicable. You should seriously consider seeking—wait, is that a hidden camera? There was a hole in the wall she’d never noticed before. It was the size of a quarter and too high to peer into, so she inserted a finger into it. No camera. She opened the armoire. No camera there, either. It was just her and her filthiness.
In an effort to cleanse herself, she spent an hour on hands and knees, vigorously scrubbing the floors with vinegar and water. She cleaned all the baseboards, too. Incest pornography = child molester? Probably not. If all three booklets were devoted to incest, then maybe. He clearly just had a taste for the taboo. So did she, apparently. And so what if he thought of his daughter when he jerked off? It was none of her business. She was a fucking cleaning lady, not the Incest Police.
By the time she left, her knees were red and swollen and her back was killing her. On her way home she stopped at the grocery store, bought some leafy greens and a bottle of salad dressing for dinner. After the stunt she pulled at Henry’s, she felt undeserving of a proper meal.
At home, she broke another of her rules by dragging out a box of old journals from the closet. She’d been saving the journals for her future biographer, but never allowed herself to look at them—too depressing. Most of them were from high school, but she had one from around the time her parents split up, the year she’d been Zoe’s age. She rifled through the box, searching for it. She remembered it being purple and having a lock.
It was at the very bottom of the box, of course, and the key was missing. She brought it to the kitchen, popped the lock with a sturdy butter knife, and then sat at the table. When she opened the journal a photograph fell out. A picture of her childhood home in Torrance. The house was even smaller than she remembered. She grew up on Newton Avenue—a street of modest one-story homes built close together and in the Mission style, with smooth stucco siding and red-tiled roofs. In the seventies, shortly after Mickey and her mother bought the house, Newton Avenue became popular among Asian families who’d been buying up a lot of the businesses in the area. Korean families had lived on either side of Mona’s house, and a family of Samoans lived across the street. The neighborhood was nestled up against the hills of Palos Verdes, where wealthy people continued to buy property even though their houses kept falling into the ocean. These same wealthy people used Newton as a shortcut home, and their BMWs and Benzes often careened at high speeds past the house. Her father was fond of throwing things—small rocks, garbage, dirty looks—at speeders while he watered the lawn.
On the very first page of the journal was a drawing of Tom, her father’s best friend and former business partner. She’d been secretly in love with Tom for two years. She remembered having done the math at one point: by the time she was eighteen, Tom would only be thirty-nine, which meant they could still get married. She was twenty-four now, which made Tom—wherever he was—forty-five. Around Henry’s age.
She was impressed by the level of detail in the drawing. He was smiling, and she’d captured the gap between his two front teeth, a gap that had made her want to writhe around on the carpet. His resemblance to Mr. Disgusting was startling, embarrassing. It made her feel like a robot, and not a smart one
. A robot from the fifties, perhaps. Was she really so transparent?
Dear Diary,
Tom’s been sleeping on the couch. He sleeps naked. When I come into the living room he doesn’t put clothes on. His body is very long with lots of little muscles. He has a hairy behind. His thingee is regular-looking with black hairs around it. His balls are shiny. Mom says Tom is a scumbag.
Dear Diary,
Tom’s mouth is shaped like a piece of toast when he yawns. He has a tattoo on his arm that says “Rat Patrol.” He said he used to run with a gang. I told him I didn’t know he liked to run! He thought that was funny. Then Dad came in and he stopped talking. I wish we could be alone.
Dear Diary,
Dad’s friends are here. Tom, Fat Jim, Ed the Electrician, and another guy. They’re watching the fight on TV. Dad made me take his boots off in front of everyone. Except he tricked me this time and they all laughed. But not Tom. I think it’s because he’s in love with me. I’m in my room now. I hope he comes to see me.
The boot trick. He’d asked her to remove his cowboy boots, which wasn’t in itself out of the ordinary. She’d approached his outstretched leg and straddled his calf as usual, while his friends looked on, bemused. She faced away from him, the boot between her legs like a horse’s head. Grabbing the heel, she gave it a good pull, but he flexed his toes so the boot wouldn’t come off. She had a vague notion of the subtext, but continued the performance like a good sport. Everyone (except her and Tom) seemed really entertained by the whole thing.
Dear Diary,
Tom gave me a ride on his motorcycle tonight. He told me to hold on tight and we went really fast up and down the street. I didn’t want it to be over. My hands were cold so I put them under his shirt. Dad was really mad when we got back. He was making hamburgers and he threw mine against the wall. It left a red mark. I wasn’t hungry anyways. He always makes mine bloody in the middle.
Dear Diary,
Dad had his friends over to watch the fight on TV. Then Tom and Dad got in a fight and we had to go to the hospital. Tom held my hand in the waiting room and told me he was adopted.