Outside, a fountain spits into the sky. The sun is beating down, and I’m sweating in my chair. I peel off my sweater. Pills of cashmere stick to my forearms like fly tape.
I hear her before I see her—Merry Christmas, baby—behind me. I stand up and turn around as she opens her arms. We hold each other so close her hair is in my mouth. I crumple into her. I miss you, I say. It’s all I can seem to say. The tears come down my face, and, for once, I let it happen.
My mother speaks to me slowly, measured. I can tell she’s medicated so she won’t fever again. We talk about other things: the weather, the news, other patients inside the center. Good, good people. You’d like them. Some of them are around your age. I tell her about Grandma Sitchie’s house, the liver, the Sour Patch Kids. Before I get to ask any more questions, our time is up.
Take care of yourself, baby, she says. She picks up a glass of water from a lawn table and sips it. She holds my hand a moment longer. You doing okay? She is earnest in her question.
Of course, I say. I sit up straighter. I smile.
Make your numbers tomorrow, she says. One of the biggest shopping days of the year.
That trout. I wrestled with the hook to free it; I was in a hurry. Easy, like this, said my mother, and she did it in one motion, a popping sound. The hook had pierced my finger, and I sucked the blood so hard my fingertip went white. I tossed the fish back into the mud of the pond, and the two of us watched it shoot off like a single strand of tinsel in the sun before it disappeared.
What I mean to say is, it lived.
PEOPLE LIKE THEM
I have a famous uncle in prison in northern Florida, a second uncle locked up in the middle of Texas, and a third who will join this club in a year or two. It doesn’t matter why.
Today, I’m visiting the Texas uncle, Uncle Kai, the one with the habits, the one without God, and my Auntie T says, Careful now, you won’t be let in with an underwire bra.
Why not? I ask.
Because a bra could be used as a weapon.
It’s all I have in my suitcase—this bra with the wire in it. I am thirteen and my padded, white, diaper of a bra has a wire running all the way through it. I’m too embarrassed to tell my family this, to show it to them, so I decide to visit prison for the first time braless.
I walk through security with my arms crossed over my chest. I walk like this all the way through a building that smells like microwavable burritos and bleach, until we’re directed outside, to an enormous barren yard, where my uncle sits, smoking a Newport, at a picnic table.
I don’t want him to hug me, because of my chest.
I say, Hello.
He tells me about the latest visitors. How a group of wives shat balloons full of black tar heroin into the toilets. How he was going to get his very own guitar string tattoos, or learn how to give them. How lately, people have been smuggling juices from the kitchen in order to make alcohol.
That sounds nice, I say. Complicated.
This is the last memory I have with my Uncle Kai. Here, he is still mellow, himself. Soon, he’ll be released, take up new chemical drugs, ride a stone horse monument in the middle of Parkland, and beat my mother up on the side of the road. Soon, he will threaten to take out his whole family with explosives and black magic. Us, I mean.
It’s not so bad here, he says.
The blank Texas sky reminds me of a green screen, like I could cut out his body and move him anywhere else, drop him into any other world.
We share a hamburger from a security-monitored vending machine. I break mine into little pieces. The meat is a grayish purple with pockmarks, and he chews like an animal given a treat. We look alike, my uncle and I. Gummy smiles, deep eyes, the ragged edge around our nails where neither one of us can ever stop picking.
At twenty-two years old, I begin teaching inmates in a county jail.
I prepare notebooks with no staples, no paper clips. Rubber golf pencils. I walk through the metal detectors with ease, wired bra and all, drop my belongings into little plastic crates and clear baggies and wait for an officer’s eyes to magnify behind them.
One night, as I’m leaving, a correctional officer corners me in the elevator. He is standing too close to me. His breath on my neck. I hold the papers to my chest.
Why do you teach these losers, he says, when they are so fucking stupid?
They’re not, I tell him. They write brilliant.
I go through their mail sometimes, he says, and laugh at their stupidity.
They’re brilliant, I say.
And anyway, he says, What’s someone like you doing with people like them?
BROTHERS
There are two boys in my life. The older boy, Shawn, is very serious, his eyebrows thick and expressive like a tract of cables running straight to his heart. The younger boy, Blake, likes to perch on top of cushions, or steps, or countertops, with his knees to his chest. He’s always kicking something, needing something, digging at something. Scabbed and ready. I don’t know who these two boys are, not yet, only that we pose in pictures together from time to time, and that, somehow, in some places, I love them.
There are two boys in my apartment. That’s what my mother tells me, anyway, when we have to pack up for the weekends and stay with my Auntie T. When we leave, my father locks up the room with my Breyer horses spread across the carpet, my mother’s lipstick-smacked tissues piled up in a garbage can—a door locked in front of any lingering silhouette of a woman or child. My father plays catch with the boys on the weekends, buffed leather to ball, a square of sun behind the building. I wonder, still, how he explained our locked room. If it supposedly served any purpose.
There are three children on a beach. The two boys, now teens, and me. I’m chubby-legged, wearing a flopping sunhat, shoveling my feet into the sand. My mother is reclined in a chair, darkening beneath the sun like a soft, worn saddle. My father is speaking to the boys, the boys in their neon swimsuits, white smears of lotion circling their shoulders, their backs. They all look at me, sitting on my stupid towel. Their faces are exquisitely serious. Waves crash over in fangs. The two boys remember this day, this moment, more than I do. They remember every second of it.
A boiler room. An extra closet. A secret Narnia. A reclusive roommate. A door to nowhere. Just a door, long stuck. Another liquor cabinet. Storage for cleaning supplies. A grown-up room. A room of hidden pets.
My father was an excellent liar. His lies were like laminated sheets of paper—the facts were the facts—shining, reflective, unable to be torn even when a corner peeled.
I don’t actually remember their neon swimsuits. Of course I don’t. What I remember is a photograph taken on the beach that day. Two boys squinting into a camera, me in the middle—look at them, together!—none of our faces are ready. The two boys, now teens, looking at me on the edge of my towel. Round, Asian child, a face nothing like theirs, kneading hopelessly into colder sand.
You see her? said my father. That girl?
Yes, say the boys.
She’s not just that woman’s daughter, he says. She’s your sister.
There are two boys in need of a home. Hurricane Andrew chewed up their land, spat it out in splinters. My mother, father, and I drive down to Coconut Grove, where we bring the two boys canned foods and bags of chips. A woman pearled with sweat opens the door to an apartment. It’s dark inside, damp; there’s no power for miles. The woman looks at me more carefully than anyone has ever looked at me—his other child—Hello, she says. The two boys at her side, guarding her like soldiers.
Are you old? I ask her. My words have no malice, no motive. I am just a kid, carrying cans in my arms as if they are baby dolls.
One of the boys says Mom, and I can barely breathe.
This mother is nothing like my mother. This mother is not my father’s. How many mothers can exist in the same world? And do they all live in locked, dark rooms?
There are two teenage boys visiting from South Africa, where they now live. My mother, father
, and I now live in the big white house with the indoor pool. My brothers stay in the guesthouse with black-and-white Berber carpet, a lofted bedroom area, a drum set. The older boy keeps to himself, folded inside the pages of Hawthorne, Faulkner. The younger one has just dyed his hair electric blue, and he body slams me into the mattress each time I try to sneak into their house. I love it when he does this—when he raises my body above his head and throws me down into the springs. I try and try again to bother them, to get the slams, these stunning moments of rage. Somehow, even then, I already know we all need this.
If you asked me, I would have told you I was an only child. If you asked again, I would have said I have two brothers, somewhere. Where somewhere? Africa. Why? To be away from me. And their mother? I hate their mother.
My older brother doesn’t speak, I tell my friends at school. He’s a real asshole. At the time, I think my brother hoards all his thoughts and words and opinions for later, for the people he thinks deserve them more than I do. I never remember seeing him smile. Everything about him was in his eyebrows. One day, while visiting, he finds a box in our garage full of his high school photographs, love notes, yearbooks. He reads the scraps aloud on our living room floor, laughing, grafting together different pieces of paper, different memories. It’s the first time it occurs to me that my brother has a life outside the few days a year in which I see him. He has jokes. He’s been in love. I don’t even know him. I feel at once both enamored and deceived.
I never hated their mother with any purpose—I never even knew her. I hated her because there were two mothers and only one father.
If you asked the two boys, they might tell you they had a sister, somewhere. Where somewhere? Boca Raton. Why? Because she got a life better than ours. And her mother? Well, they hated her, too.
Imagine that locked room in the weekend apartment, imagine a father around less and less, a man moved from one home to another—my mother’s lipstick on his collars, her scent everywhere—my father’s new habits, a new ring, his new life. Would you blame them?
After she dies, I will wonder about the two boys’ mother. I will study the African seed pods she collected, floating in a glass shadow frame on my older brother’s wall. I will consider the dimensions of her urn on the mantelpiece, next to my father’s urn. I will touch the art she collected over the years, each paint stroke, the frames, and wonder at the value she placed on each one, the ways in which they may have moved her. She was an artist. She made two beautiful men. Once, she loved my father. Sometimes it feels like too big a wonder.
I keep things from my brothers. I don’t tell them about the baseball bats or the women and men who’ve appeared in our house in puffs of smoke; I don’t tell them about the pantry incident; I don’t tell them about the burning stink or the stuff or the way our father turns off in the middle of speaking sometimes, his face bloodshot, his eyes gone. Instead, I ask the younger brother to teach me how to play the drums. In the guesthouse, he lets John Coltrane spool around a cassette until the button clicks, and then we play him again, again, as he shows me how to wrap my fingers around drumsticks, how to keep time, snap the hi-hat, stuff the bass drum with a snail-rolled towel. We beat the snare until it silvers, until we can’t hear anything outside the sound that it makes, until it needs a new skin.
If there are real men, I haven’t met them yet. Not when my father moves to New York, not when my mother falls. So when my brothers and father come home for Christmas, when my brother hands me those Sour Patch candies, you must understand why I said nothing. I’m still trying to explain.
I’m visiting New York—a teenager—and there’s a concert in Brooklyn. Blake is playing in the show, and Shawn wants us to come out and watch. Shawn takes me down into the subway for the first time, and I scream when I see a rat on the tracks. He laughs at me, covers my eyes with his hands. Perhaps, I think, this is the first thing he’s learning about me as a person removed from a mother or father. I am a girl who is afraid of rats.
We make it to a dark Bushwick living room where my brother plugs at the bass. He’s wearing a silver tie, and everyone in the room is screaming, cheering him on. Shawn nods his head to the music. He is mostly quiet, listening, sipping on a beer. Blake shreds the strings. He hooks his arm around my neck when he sees me. This is my sister, he says to his friends.
We all have our own languages.
As adults, in a hotel room, I tell the younger brother the truth about the pantry incident. The way my mother’s skin tore like a piece of overripe fruit. The purple of it.
That’s why we left town, I say. We didn’t mean to leave you two with the mess.
Blake looks at me, blinks hard.
I didn’t know, he says, any of that.
Sometimes it feels like we are only this: moments of knowing and unknowing one another. A sound that is foreign until it’s familiar. A drill that’s a scream until it’s a drill. Sometimes it’s nothing more than piecing together the ways in which our hearts have all broken over the same moments, but in different places. But that’s romantic. Sometimes it’s realer than that.
My older brother speculates that my father knew he would die before we did. Just days before, my father wanted a shave. He’d been in a coma for two weeks, and a beard scrabbled out of his face—unnatural, patchy—the color of his old cigarette ash. My father was obsessed with the shave, the right razor, a smooth finish.
The best sign! I said. He cares about the way he looks—he must be coming back.
But my brothers had seen this before—their mother wanted lipstick, a compact, the day before she died. A dazzling exit. My older brother’s face became a gray wedge in his hands as Blake and I shaved my father’s cheeks. Nobody said a word as we moved the blade above and below every last tube, humming a song. Children being dutiful children. All that brutal love.
We were so careful not to cut.
When I file that restraining order against Chad, Shawn takes me to Whidbey Island, to a residency, where I will feel safer. My brother rides the Mukilteo ferry with me, buys me swirled cones of ice cream, takes me out on the deck to look at the sea. I’m proud of you, he says. After the court hearing, I arrive back to his house in Seattle, where he blends smoothies for me, makes my bed, picks up my favorite kind of crab for dinner. Remember how Dad made them? I ask. We don’t, but we make up a new recipe of our own.
There are three of us in a photograph. One of us, me, does not look like the others. I am always in the middle of these two men, who are tall, handsome, protective in their postures. We do not fit, but I can tell you that we have the same fat toes, the same predisposition to canker sores, the same ability to mimic accents; we land impersonations. We drink when we are lonely, sometimes when we’re together, but mostly alone in our separate cities. We chew the same. We laugh with our eyes closed. There are thousands of ways to love men, Lidia Yuknavitch once wrote, and when I watch my brothers button their shirts, or body slam my niece, or dance with their lips puckered, I think I know all of them.
There are two men in my life. Their names are Shawn and Blake. The older, more serious one, pushes his daughter on her bicycle as she lifts her feet from the pedals. The younger one has three different colors of hair—dark on top, graying at the hairline, red in the sideburns. Every word from him sounds like jazz. They are beautiful, good men.
The three of us take a walk through a park in Seattle. It’s spring; we are all still grieving the same father; I am twenty-nine. The leaves of a tree glow bright and then darken as the clouds pass, as if the tree has a pulse. When will we see you again? my brothers want to know, and I believe them. I believe that they miss me for every year we didn’t have, the way I miss them, too. Sometimes I miss them most when we’re all together, when we’re already looking back at the moment, wondering how it will ossify with time, how much more we will know and unknow about each other.
That little girl on the beach. I was yours.
BIG HAIR, BIG HEARTS
Daphne Beauregard can smoke an e
ntire pack of Parliaments and drink a liter of vodka in one night, just watch. She does lines of cocaine like they’re pixie sticks, huffs keyboard cleaner spray into her nose, gulps pills, sucks the bong, and still, she is beautiful, regal even, a Dixie queen from Kansas with the best rack you ever saw. Daphne Beauregard lives with me. At least until my mother comes back.
Daphne doesn’t have parents, either. Not really. Her father’s back in Kansas and her mother’s usually traveling for work, reviewing hotels across America. She’s got no siblings, and calls me her sister—The bumpkin and the Chink, she says. Perfect match for this place. Her drawl is thicker when she drinks. I ask her to read receipts aloud to me sometimes, pages from my books, magazines, alien romances from the National Enquirer. Talk, just talk, I say, in bed at night. When I close my eyes, I pretend we live in the country, just the two of us, back in Kansas where a lightning storm has just cracked the sky open.
Daphne has a grandma in the Florida panhandle, and one weekend we decide to drive up and visit. We drink vodka sodas and puff on joints the whole way, bare feet out the window. Her grandma isn’t home when we arrive, but we’re thrilled to find a tanning bed in the middle of her living room. We strip naked; I climb inside the glass bed and pull the hood down. I light a cigarette and let the buzz drill through me. I ask Daphne to take my picture like this on her disposable camera, the filter slanted out of my mouth, ribbons of smoke glowing under the light, my nipples purpled in UV. I tell her this portrait will be my masterpiece, the photo I want blown up and framed when I die. I will call it Human Cancer on Cancer on Cancer.
Daphne is too mature for boys. They don’t make ’em like they do back home, she says. To hell with these polo and sweater vest chumps. She wants a real cowboy and she tells me so. A man who will spit dip into a plastic bottle. A man who can two-step. I come from big hair and big hearts, she says, not this rah-rah money crap. One night, during a party at my house, I smoke weed laced with angel dust. I hallucinate beetles are digging into my skin; I need to be held down to keep from scratching. A boy named Stratton from math class puts my head in his lap and smooths back my hair. You’re too good for this, he says. Stratton believes in God and I don’t. You’re too smart for this; you could go to college, get straight. Daphne does not approve of this boy, though he’ll be the one to save my life, the first boy to ever love me.
Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls Page 15