by Rachel Cohn
It’s like Jamal forgets right away that I’m even there. Jamal takes Bex by the hand and leads her into a den where music videos blare from an overhead TV and gyrating, E-tripped, boy-boy, girl-girl bodies are soul-dancing up close and personal. Now add in Jamal and Bex, boy-girl, and a matched set completes the room.
I stand in the hallway, mute. Alone.
I realize: I must develop the ability to go the distance rather than just envy it. I must try harder—franchise franchise franchise. Learn to jog five miles a day along the Potomac, even at sun-death high noon during 90 percent humidity. Learn to keep those two fingers down my throat instead of gagging and pulling them out too soon. Learn to live on Diet Cokes and licorice, maybe the occasional bowl of kimchee if I’m feeling frisky, and Korean.
If I could train myself to starve (or purge—beggars can’t be choosy), I could be thin like Bex, dancing up against Jamal.
I need to escape this hallway with the view toward Jamal and Bex, but my legs feel locked in place while theirs move to the rhythm. He’s got his hands on Bex’s bony hips, fully exposed by her low-slung jeans that ride about a centimeter above her crotch. Very subtle. Bex’s hands wrap around Jamal’s neck as her hips make a futile white-girl two-step effort to sway in time to the music’s beat. He’s leaning down to her, smiling, inviting; it’s almost like he’s going to kiss her. Except she’s a vanilla girl who’s not supposed to be on his color palette of girl hues. He whispers in her ear. She laughs. I hate her even more.
Jamal kisses a lot of girls but never me. He doesn’t see me as a girl. To him I’m just a Miles, the sidekick. He doesn’t judge me, he accepts me warts and all—“warts” being the operative word.
Bex’s pants ride so low, they look like they could fall down. She’s even skinnier now than when I saw her at the funeral.
I’m not even high yet, but still I hear Laura whispering in my ear: She’s too thin, even for Bex. Something’s not right.
Only something has to be right with it. Jamal can’t take his eyes off Bex’s body.
Bex is so lucky. Her grief metabolism must swing on the appetite loss side of the pendulum. Mine swings toward bingeing.
That does it. I should make the commitment. I’m going back on the starvation diet: one lean frozen entrée per day, and unlimited Red Bulls and Marlboros. It takes a lot of willpower, but the results are fantastic. I can get down two sizes in a matter of weeks. Too bad about how I’ll gain four back when I go back to the regular binge cycle.
Floyd notices me as he steps down the stairs into the hallway. Strands of long, greasy, strawberry-blond hair fall over his chin covered in stubble. I suspect he shaves about as often as he shampoos. He wears a long and tattered granny cardigan sweater. With a tie belt. Disconcertingly, he appears to perk up at the sight of me—or to perk up as much as a guy whose eyelids are perpetually half closed can. “Hey, Miles.” He tucks a strand of greasy hair behind his ear. “I’ve been hoping to see you. I wanted to tell you I’m really sorry about your sister—”
“She was my cousin.”
“She was so pretty like you, I figured she had to be your sister.”
I’d be more flattered if Jamal had heard Floyd’s comment. Does he notice me here with Floyd? Would he care that somebody, maybe, is attracted to me?
It could happen. Not every man sees only size. Some sense depth.
“What’s cooking tonight?” I ask Floyd.
“What’s your pleasure?” My feet finally cooperate, called to action by the goodies that will be found by following Floyd to the kitchen. There, we sit down on stools and Floyd takes some plastic baggies from the worn-out pockets of his granny sweater and spreads them across the long, marble countertop.
“Nope,” I say to the dope.
I shake my head at the coke. Gross.
The third bag, the pill bag, is the charm. “That’ll do me.”
How soon can I get there? How soon?
“Miles!” Jamal approaches my side, sweat glistening on his brow from the dancing, but no Bex in tow. “Could you go check on Bex? She took off suddenly for the bathroom. I’m worried something’s wrong.”
Floyd tells Jamal, “The house’s rest room areas are not marked as being for either Girls or Boys. It’s a unisex free-for-all stall situation here. It’s okay to check on your girl yourself. Can’t you see I’m sharing a moment with your lady?”
“But what if it’s a girl thing?” Jamal asks him, and suddenly he and Floyd are united on this front.
“Yeah, you’d better check on her,” Floyd tells me.
I roll my eyes. “Whatever.” I never say no to Jamal.
What a princess. I find her upstairs in the best bathroom in the house, in Floyd’s parents’ unused bedroom, the one room untouched by the evening’s denizens. It’s the bathroom with the bidet and the Jacuzzi and the sunroof and the enormous glass shower stall that seems bigger than my bedroom. I expect to find Bex with a proud finger down her throat at the gilded toilet, but instead she’s sitting on it, her pants still on, leaning her head against the tile wall at her side.
Crying.
Bex wipes away her tears, tries to compose herself. She acts like nothing’s wrong, like of course I would find her in the Buckingham Palace bathroom so we could have a proper chat. She says, “I saw that Floyd guy checking you out. I think he likes you. Do you like him?”
“He’s just being friendly.” Like I can’t see through her act, trying to be nice to me to get to Jamal. “Why are you crying?”
Hungry?
“You really want to know?”
Not really, but why don’t you tell me anyway.
I nod, move a couple inches closer to her. She could touch my hand or something if she needed comfort. I’m doing my part.
“It doesn’t feel right,” Bex says. “Being here tonight, without her.” Now here’s a strange and unfamiliar feeling not caused by a mind-altering substance: I agree with Bex.
But I say nothing.
She takes a deep breath, almost as if to calm herself, but her next words are anything but refined. “I HATE HER! HOW COULD SHE DO THIS TO US?”
I do want to speak now, to tell Bex that I understand, that I am shocked we could share any kind of mutual emotion, but she storms out of the bathroom before I open my mouth.
I hate Laura too. The hatred surges sudden and raw. Unexpected. Even when Laura and I went through stages when we weren’t close, I never didn’t love her, never didn’t feel part of her.
She didn’t fight hard enough. She deserted us.
Accu-Miles Storm Center Report, live on the scene: This intrepid reporter did not fail to come upstairs armed and ready. I can hold down the fort from this bathroom. Ride it out here while Bex returns to the eye of the storm downstairs. I take out the plastic pill baggie from my pocket and instinctively reach for two pills from the bag. Then I remember. I return Laura’s to the bag, then remove the outer coating from the one for me. I can save Laura’s for another day. A rainy-day promise for the future.
Ah, here it is. Finally. Yes.
It’s sinking in as I sink down the wall. This is the rest of our lives, without her.
Burnout
AM I STILL HIGH?
Or did Floyd, who’s given me a lift home after I passed out in his parents’ bathroom at Crash Landing, really hold open his car door for me and then mumble something about whether I wanted to go see a movie with him sometime, or whatever? I have to be hallucinating, because no way did some guy not named Jamal ask me somewhere, or whatever.
If only I was hallucinating. But the smell of leaking transmission fluid from the trailer-slash-meal-truck parked on the street alerts me to the morning’s reality: It’s not Jim I need to dodge as I stumble back home. It’s the biological entity known as my father.
Is it just me, or do other daughters have a dad who lives out of a creaky, smelly, dirty mobile home that doubles as what he lovingly refers to as a “roach coach,” from which he sells sandwiches at constructio
n sites to eke out a living?
Television perpetuates the lie that dads are reliable, loving creatures who earn stable livings and can be counted on to tackle home improvement projects—with disastrous and hilarious results, along with some doting advice snuck in to the kids. Who gets that dad? I certainly didn’t. Mine can legitimately repair a roof, fix a dishwasher, or install drywall, but ask him what day is my birthday, when did I first walk, my first word, the name of any school I’ve attended, and he’ll draw a blank. Don’t ask him to kick in for child support. He’s broke and proud of it. He wants for nothing beyond his mobile home and the hope that some skinny, perky blonde will turn letters on Wheel of Fortune until she literally keels over, dead but smiling.
Maybe I’m too hard on Buddy. He himself makes no pretense of having fatherly ambitions, so why should I hold him accountable as a daughter? This is a guy I’ve called “Buddy” my whole life, and not because it’s his name, but because when I was a small child and he didn’t understand the concept of how to address a “daughter,” he would call me “Buddy” instead of my name; I just gave the nickname back to him, not understanding then the concept of a man who would answer to “Daddy.” For Laura, such a man could exist, but even then I knew: not for me.
The neighbors typically complain every summer about the monstrous vision of Buddy’s mobile home sullying their historic thoroughfare of historic homes. There’s plenty of room for Buddy’s trailer in the parking area inside the gates of Jim’s compound, where Jim’s collection of vehicles are kept: his Volvo, two BMWs from paramours no longer amour, Laura’s untouched hybrid graduation present, an ancient Rolls Royce that belonged to Jim’s mother that he’s never been able to part with. But the neighbors atypically can’t turn to Jim for support on the roach coach issue; his civility does not extend to his civic duty where that trailer is concerned. Jim requests Buddy not to park there because the trailer leaks fluid not just on the parking area pavement, but also, more importantly, across the ancient cobblestones leading from the iron gate at the street to the parking lot behind the big house. Big Architectural Digest no-no.
I could care less about the opinions of the Georgetown community, but I’m with Jim on this one. I prefer that the dilapidated trailer be parked on the main street. I’d rather have my father out there than in here. Buddy loves that mobile home and won’t stay in the carriage house except to use the kitchen or the shower when he parks here for summer visits. Works fine by me. It would work better for me if he didn’t come at all, but I haven’t negotiated that freedom yet.
I turn eighteen this August. I will no longer be obligated to tolerate Buddy’s summer sabbaticals as my temporary chaperone-from-a-trailer-parked-on-the-street. So, happy ending: I will ultimately have something to give back to the community.
Buddy sits outside the carriage house in the beat-up, plastic foldout chair he reserves for “guests” in his mobile home as I approach my charity home. “You look like hell, kid.” His gravel, country voice doesn’t sound concerned so much as amused. I quickly take mental inventory of the appliances in the carriage house—what needs fixing? Better to put Buddy right on the case before he jumps ship. “Is there a boyfriend in the picture these days that I have to talk to about returning you home before ten in the morning?”
Now it’s my turn to laugh. A boyfriend returning me home after a wild night out? Right. That’s not a problem heavy girls generally need to worry about. Heart disease and diabetes—maybe. Getting some—not really.
I turn to face Buddy. I don’t know how I sprung from his DNA. We look nothing alike. He’s tall and wiry where I am short and chubby. My hair may be black and curly like his, but that’s hair dye on my part, and humidity on D.C.’s part. And I would never cover my head with a red bandanna or allow my death-pallor skin to acquire trucker tan on my arms and neck.
Buddy looks me up and down, taking inventory of me. I’m another year older, and fuller—he must notice that. But his observation is: “You’re burnt out, kid.”
Takes one to know one. At least he’s not so phoney as to fake concern. He has no problem looking irritated, however. Chaperoning a daughter who’s a burnout—just one more thing he’ll have to deal with in his hardship life responsible to no one but himself, living out of a trailer and selling cheese sandwiches to connoisseurs too desperate to find sustenance farther than where Buddy has shown up for the day—right in their face.
I kick aside the doormat and point to the key on the ground. He could have let himself in. He forgets about that key every year. All those years of my childhood he lost to drugs and alcoholism cost him key brain memory cells. That substance scenario won’t happen to me. My DNA code was shared with Laura. We’re all or nothing.
I step inside the house. I want my bed and for Buddy not to be here. “Nice to see you too, Miles,” he calls out from behind me.
The sarcasm. Got that from him.
He follows me inside. “I left you a message telling you I was arriving this morning.”
“Oh.” I pop open a Coke from the fridge.
“Do you even listen to your messages?”
“No.”
I go into the hall closet and find some clean towels, hand them to him, and proceed to my bedroom. I am about to close the bedroom door, but he’s standing right there, holding his hand out to prevent the door closing.
“Laura,” he says.
I say nothing. Can’t even offer “I’m fine.”
He offers: “It’s, like, totally weird to be here now and know she’s not going to come through the door at any moment looking for you. Do you, like, want to talk about it?”
The question sounds, like, rehearsed.
He gets plenty of emoting at his AA meetings. Doesn’t need it from me.
“No.” Please, let me shut this door in your face. And tell your sponsor not to advise you to pretend to console me just to make YOU feel better.
Yet I leave the door open, opening him up to continue, “Mel didn’t tell me until after the funeral was already over. I’m sorry. I would have been there.”
Even in death Laura overshadows me. Buddy’s missed all the important events in my life so far—yet he would have wanted to come to Laura’s funeral.
If I wasn’t burnt-out right now, I would lose it. The aftermellow allows me simply to remain silent.
“Help me out here, kid? Don’t you have anything to say to your old man?”
Last summer he gave me twenty bucks to go to an Al-Anon meeting while he went to one of his AA meetings. I repeat back to him an AA adage from a poster I saw on the wall there: “Don’t speak unless you can improve on silence.”
I close my bedroom door.
Escape Hatch
THE INFORMATION CONSPIRACY WILL BE TELEVISED. LOCATE your escape hatch.
Round-the-clock “news” feeds (D.C.-area commuter traffic update immediately followed by Middle East bombing followed by celebrity divorce update then back to hellfire terror images) flash from television monitors everywhere—at the grocery store checkout line, the post office, train stations, cafés. No innocent bystander shall be left wanting for information.
I prefer to be uninformed. Perhaps I can’t escape the fact of the “news” force-feed, but I can, simply, close my eyes. If I visualize a chocolate cupcake and settling into a hydro and a book at bedtime, I can block out the backup on the inner loop of the Beltway, or the international faces of anguish that the “news” blurbheads, selling Hondas in between the images of hopelessness and horror, must want to numb me to in their relentless quest to inform inform inform me.
Please. Be quiet.
Despite the bombardment of information coming from all sides, whether you want the information or not, there’s still so much that can effectively be blocked out. Sunblock to protect the skin. Antihistamine to block the itchies. A computer keystroke to block an online pervert. Unfortunately I went to bed in too much of a haze to turn on the white noise machine I keep in my nightstand specifically for summertime—t
o block out cicada noise, and the grating sound of Buddy’s voice and his strangely high-pitched, girly laugh.
I hear him through my bedroom window. He’s out in the garden with Jim, probably sitting in my seat. He’d better not be smoking my cigarettes. I’m on a budget.
The setting sun beams through the window shades as I wake to the conversation of the Odd Couple in the garden. They’re talking about sandwiches.
Jim: “This is surprisingly tasty for a cheese sandwich.”
Buddy: “It’s brie, man. Gotta go with brie. And fresh bread. Always. Fresh basil, too, if you can score it. Hehheh.” He cackles. I shudder.
Is there a pill to keep me asleep through the rest of the summer?
Alas, hunger prevails. It always does with me.
“Good evening, Miles,” Jim says when I find my way out to them at the garden patio table. He’s so formal, with a proper linen napkin on his lap, waiting to address me until he’s completely swallowed that tasty brie.
“Seven o’clock in the evening always your wake time, Miles?” From Mr. Suave, napkinless, mouth still full. The gourmand added ketchup to his sandwich.
“She’s a night crawler, like me,” Jim tells Buddy.
“I set out a sandwich for you,” Buddy says. The sandwich is wrapped in wax paper, cut down the middle, and awaiting me on a dinner plate.
“I’m lactose intolerant.” I pour the Coke I’ve brought out to the garden into a glass of ice and reach for Buddy’s bag of potato chips.
“Since when?” Buddy asks. He stares too intently into my eyes. It’s weird. “Mel shoulda told me. That’s important.”
Am I supposed to care that my father, who went three years when I was a child without a single phone call, letter, or visit to me, on account of being too wasted to remember the fact of his seedage left behind in Georgetown, has all of a sudden decided to care? Because caring—it’s really not an emotion I can conjure that easily. Either I block it or I don’t.
“Miles isn’t lactose intolerant,” Jim tells Buddy. I detect a slight twinkle in his eye as he glances in my direction. “She’s teasing you.”