He’s standing outside, about to take his first bite, when he sees the dark car, the windows tinted black, the purple sticker with the silhouette of the busty woman on the back. The men. He starts to walk away, thinking he can slide from their view, slip loose. He feels them behind him but refuses to turn around. He walks faster, feels footsteps slapping, sees their shadows on the ground, and then a hand claps him on the shoulder.
They circle him. The dark-haired one elbows Gold Tooth in the ribs, motions to Luis’s pizza, rubs his hands together. He tries to step around them, but Gold Tooth grabs his shirt, pulls him back. The paper plate wobbles in his grip. They make their eyes big, looking at the pizza, cartoonish and stupid and mocking, then the dark-haired man reaches for a slice, folds it, and takes a bite that makes a third of the slice disappear. Gold Tooth laughs and does the same, each of them returning the slices to Luis’s plate, nodding at him in pretend thanks. Just when he thinks he’s free, one of them trips him from behind. His chin scrapes the sidewalk and there is pizza smashed into the front of his shirt.
He knows he’s done nothing wrong and still, he feels the shame, hot and bright, in his cheeks. It’s the same as when he was a boy, at school. When the other kids beat on him, but he was the one left feeling as though he had done something bad. His shame expands when he feels the tears begin to well behind his eyes. The men look down at him, and their smiles get bigger. He wants to kick their shins, land punches to their guts, tear at them, rip those chains from their necks. Finally, Gold Tooth pats him on the arm—the greatest insult of all—as though they are friends, they’re all in on the joke. They part to let him through, and though he thinks of the way his grandmother showed him to take deep breaths, to count to ten on his fingers, and sometimes that still works, this time he leaves behind the mess of plate and half-eaten pizza and breaks into a run.
He doesn’t stop until his chest is heaving and he’s reached a barren part of town, where a single house stands in the shadow of the blue glass tower, the one built a few years ago that’s already empty and locked up. He keeps picturing that gold tooth winking, the cruel gleam in their eyes. His hunger has now been replaced with a desire for revenge. A desire to make them sorry, to make them—the men, the cops, the city, everyone—hurt worse than they hurt him.
JANE 4
YOU ARE HAPPY, UNTIL YOU’RE not. It happens as quickly as someone throwing a bucket of cold water over your head, the way the team did that spring sophomore year when you took first place in the 400 at States. One night you are out with your friends at the diner, Amanda dragging the last nubs of her french fries through ketchup, making little zigzag tracks, Francesca picking at her fingernails and cutting her eyes across the room at the table of guys from Freemont Prep. A woman comes in, and you can tell by her walk, her posture, that she’s high. As a girl, you learned to watch for the sway in your mother’s footsteps when she was using. You can’t see the woman’s face from underneath her matted tangle of dark hair, but you break out into a sweat. It’s her, you think. After all these years, she’s come to take you back.
You realize you’ve been waiting for it, that sometime along the way your fear alchemized into something much more dangerous, something closer to hope. You wanted the pain to begin so it could be over with sooner. So that you wouldn’t have to live looking over your shoulder at every cigarette-roughened laugh that tails off in a wheezing cough.
Deep down, you wanted to be reclaimed by the life you came from, the one where the electricity was always getting shut off and you could fit all of your belongings into a pillowcase when you inevitably got kicked out of wherever you were staying. A world where you heard the headboard banging against the wall all night, while you pretended to be asleep, but secretly you opened an eye and tried to understand what was happening, whether that slapping sound of flesh on flesh was injury or love or a little bit of both. And then there might be money on the nightstand, while she slept through the morning, and your stomach raged with hunger but you knew better than to take it, to even touch it. And forget about telling her you were hungry. You’re always complaining, she’d say. You’re no fun.
The woman in the diner who is not her, can’t be her, leans on the counter, brings her palm onto the bell. Please ring for service, again and again, even though the waitress is still bustling behind the pie case. Just a minute, the waitress says sharply. The woman hasn’t turned, and by now you know it’s not really her, but the bell reminds you of the time she took you to the mall to have your picture taken with Santa. She had been high then, too, pulling your arm too hard, dragging you toward the cottony mounds of fake snow while Christmas carols warbled, tinny and too loud, through the speakers. She grabbed the bell out of the hands of the Salvation Army worker clanging for loose change. Santa, santa, we’re here, she had yelled. She pushed through the line, and when you stood before the man in the suit, you looked up to see Santa frowning down at you. Julie’s here to see you, go ahead, tell ’im what you want. She gave you a shove, too hard, and you landed in a sprawl in front of Santa’s boots. A child behind you started to cry. Other children were always crying in response to you and your mom. You closed your eyes and waited for all of it to end. There was the crackle of the security guard’s radio, a voice over your head. Ma’am. Ma’am, there’s a line. You can’t just butt in. Ma’am, you have to go.
That phrase has worked its way back into your brain, into your bloodstream. Ma’am, you have to go, you have to go. Go go go.
Back in the diner, Amanda snapped her fingers in front of your face to get your attention. Earth to Julie. Helloooooo? You owe seven bucks for the bill?
Amanda’s mom picks you up. You are driven home in this clean car, this safe little capsule of steel and glass, and it strikes you as absurd. How protected you are, how completely sectioned off from the ugliness of the world. Is it even real, to live this way? To sleep through the night without hearing glass breaking, a car alarm going off, shouting in the streets? Has this all been one long dream?
At home, your bedroom is immaculate. You’ve never left so much as a sock on the floor. You know your aunt would never say this, but she wishes you would. Wishes you, for once, would put a cup down without using a coaster, would forget to take your dirty sneakers off at the door. But no matter how many nights you sleep in this bed, with its gingham coverlet that your aunt sewed by hand, or how many meals you eat that your uncle has cooked from his well-thumbed copy of the Joy of Cooking, or how many medals you earn and how many checks they write for your track uniforms and your Honors Society dues and your dresses for homecoming and prom, you will never believe that this life is yours, that there isn’t a shadow version of yourself out there, picking through dumpsters for scraps and checking the slots of pay phones for change, a shadow self that you are going to have to join one day, because a person can’t live split in two forever.
When you first came to live with them, your uncle wept when they said you had scabies, lice, a urinary tract infection, then looked at you with a face full of guilt. For crying in front of you? For not stepping in earlier? For waiting until you spent three nights in a home after your mom was arrested, simply waiting for someone to come? You were like a stray dog in from the street. This was a form of care, but why did it feel so much like punishment? The doctor studying you, examining you with his blood pressure cuff and his tongue depressor and the little light he shined in your nose and ears, asking questions that embarrassed you. The psychologist, who found different ways of asking you if anyone had ever touched you. Any of the strange men—dealers, one-night stands—who used to come by the apartment. She asked so insistently, reassured you, in so many different ways, that you could tell her anything, that you started to wonder if it was wrong that no one had. How were you supposed to tell her they were always too high to even know you were there?
You pick Atlantic City because the bus fare is cheap, and you remember a mug from your first apartment: red, with Resorts Atlantic City written on it in white letters. Th
ere was a single chip on the rim, but it was the thing from your childhood that was closest to whole. But you don’t choose Atlantic City because you think she will be there. She’s been dead for nearly a year by the time your bus from Baltimore pulls into the depot. In a way, you’d been waiting for her death your whole life, the question always in the back of your mind. Not if but when when when. A cellulitis infection took her. Your uncle and aunt hadn’t needed to explain that she got it from shooting up.
And yet, she’s here in Atlantic City. She’s at the bus shelter, smoking a Pall Mall. She’s waiting in line at Harrah’s for a pots and pans giveaway. She’s at the McDonald’s near the bus depot, stirring six packets of sugar into her coffee, licking the pastry crumbs and grease from a cardboard apple pie container. But it’s not your mother you’re looking for, it’s your shadow. With every potential fuckup, every misstep, you felt her step closer—the girl you’ve been fated to become all along. Now you’ve decided to just meet her, to reach out and shake her filthy hand. One night you are walking along the dark boardwalk and stop in front of a psychic’s shop. The lights are out and you stare at the gold evil eye symbol on the glass. You let yourself feel held in its gaze for a moment, wondering what it sees. A feral cat winds its way around your ankles, its whiskers holding the light from the moon. Something lost recognizing one of its own.
* * *
YOUR FIRST night on the streets, you think of how you used to pee the bed every night when you originally came to live with your aunt and uncle. You slept on the damp sheets the first few times, the wetness chafing your skin. You wonder if even your aunt and uncle are thinking it: that you’ve turned out just like her, that something in you just soured, and you’ve started hitting the pipe, too. But you haven’t—you’ve never even smoked pot. Never even had a drink. You know it looks like ingratitude, but to you it’s the opposite. Lightening their burden, removing yourself from all the things you never could believe you deserved. The scholarship offer from University of Maryland. You’d gone online and looked up the tuition. Even with in-state rates you couldn’t believe all the money it represented. You couldn’t believe that you had earned it—it felt too much like a gift, and gifts scare you. Gifts always feel like they can be lost, reclaimed. You would rather get the loss over with, or else it will hang over you indefinitely, the good, beautiful things in your life just a debt you’ll never be able to pay back.
CLARA
AFTER LINING UP TWO MORE dates for me, Des was already having trouble finding men. Apparently she’d thought it would be easier to attract the ones who weren’t looking for more than dinner or drinks. Men who just wanted to look and spend. The man who had come in while Lily was in the shop took me to a steak house, where he talked at me as he sawed into a rare piece of meat. Speckles of blood on the white tablecloth, a pool of it on the white plate. The fat finger choked by a gold wedding ring. Still, I smiled at him, like he was some kind of prize, and asked him about his childhood dog, who I glimpsed in a vision before the bread was served. The second was a narrow, chain-smoking lawyer who only wanted me to sit next to him at the blackjack tables—the pit boss frowned at my ID, but he slid her a hundred bucks and I watched him lose $500 more. The vision I had when I was with him was more complicated: a classroom, a teacher bringing a ruler down on top of his desk, inches from his hands. He was terrified of being embarrassed, of being belittled, so I made sure to slip my arm into his, to lean close, ask him questions about how the game worked. And each one gave me a little extra on top of what he gave Des, so I was up to $450 pressed into the back of my book. Even so, I was relieved there wouldn’t be any more dates. But I should have known that, like the cool wind from the ocean, relief was always short-lived.
When I went down to the shop on July 5, I found the eviction notice on the floor. My ears were still ringing from the sounds of the fireworks. I used to like watching them when I was younger, but now I wondered if all of that money turned into smoke and ash wasn’t just a waste. It was close to ten in the morning and Des was still asleep, her shades drawn against the light. She groaned when I raised them. Her pillowcase was a mess of blue glitter and red lipstick. I thought of the way my hands shook on the first date with Tom, when I lifted the wineglass to my mouth. I thought of the way the man after him had pinched me on the ass, hard enough to leave marks. We had ten days to leave, or else Bill was going to call the cops.
“What the hell, Des? Shouldn’t we be caught up on rent now? That’s why I was going on those dates!” I waved the notice in front of her face. She rubbed her eyes, and one of her false eyelashes clung to the back of her hand like an insect. “Bill is evicting us, Des. We have ten days to pay the rent we owe, plus this month, or else we get kicked out. Where will we live? Where can we go?”
“Darling, it’s not as bad as that.”
“Don’t darling me! I’m not one of those dupes from the club or a dumb tourist. I’m not just another person you can con.”
“Let me see this.” Des took the notice from my hands. The money I’d saved was enough to cover some of the back rent, but I didn’t know where we’d get the rest. By my math, we needed almost two thousand bucks.
“How much do you have saved? Des? Tell me.”
“Three hundred, maybe. Could be a little less than that.” I figured she had $100, tops.
“Where did it go, Des? I thought that was the whole reason I was going out with those guys. So we could pay our bills.”
Her voice rose to match mine. “So I bought some new clothes. So I went out a few nights. Poor little Clara had to eat fancy dinners with a few rich men, giggle a little bit. Boo-hoo. Such suffering. Well, you know what? I’m sick of living here, where everything feels like half of what I used to have, then half of that, then half of that. So sue me if I want to find a little joy in the tiny little bit of my life that I have left.”
Des had been unhappy for a long time, but she hadn’t always been like this, with the drinking, the pills. I remembered her smiling more when I was a kid, when she was still slinging cocktails at the Showboat. Some nights before her shift she would dress me up, too, and we’d dance in the living room, singing into our hairbrushes. Then her shifts started getting cut. Then business at the shop started to falter. Then we started plucking wallets and billfolds from people as they bent over the craps tables or fed money into the slots. I had that $450 and was tempted to just pick up and leave, but I knew I wouldn’t go. Not until things were a little steadier for Des. She was far from perfect, but she had never wanted a kid. She could have left me a long time ago. I felt the anger surge through me, an anger that I tried, most of the time, not to let myself feel. The way her need sucked up everything else. If I looked at that anger head-on, it would swallow me whole.
“You’ve found a lot of fucking joy in that money, by the looks of things. I hear that joy rattling around in your purse, you know. I’m not stupid, okay?”
If we hadn’t heard the knocking, I think she would have slapped me. She wasn’t used to me talking back, to me being outside her control. We looked at each other, then at the eviction notice, which I had dropped facedown onto the floor.
“It said ten days, didn’t it?” I asked.
“Leave it to that bastard Bill to give us ten minutes.” She pushed her hair away from her face and looked up at me. “You need to go answer it. He’ll have more pity on you. He can’t do anything to a minor. Tell him I’m out. Or better yet, try to butter him up a little.” She ran her fingers through my hair, pinched my cheeks to give them color. “You know the drill.”
I sighed and made my way down the stairs, into the shop. Des crept behind me so she could listen from the hall.
The beaded curtain at the front door divided the figure into strips, but right away I knew it wasn’t Bill. I could see a woman’s feet.
“False alarm,” I called to Des. “Someone for a reading, I think.” I hated that this surprised me, someone showing up at our door because they thought we had something to offer.
“Can I help you?”
“Hey. I’m here to see the psychic? Clara Voyant or whatever?”
“Hello, that’s me.” I was flustered. Where had she come from? Why did she need a reading so badly? “Please, have a seat. Sorry, we usually don’t open until eleven on Saturdays.” The crawling feeling started again, and I scratched my nails along my arms.
“Cool,” she said, watching me itch. I dropped my hands to my sides.
Her eyes roved over the counter, which was crowded with statues of saints Des had bought from the dollar store a few blocks down, plus a single jade Buddha she stole from the Eastern Delights Massage Parlor—payment, she explained, for them giving her a mediocre foot rub.
“Just give me a minute.” I pulled the curtains open, tied them back, and the shop flooded with sunlight so suddenly that the woman winced. I made my way over to the shelf, took the satin bag of tarot cards down, and wondered if I should choose a crystal. Sometimes I brought one over just for show, but she didn’t seem like the kind of person who would go for that kind of thing. She seemed a little embarrassed to be here at all, which didn’t make sense to me yet, given the way she had pounded on our door. I carried the tarot cards back to the table and started to shuffle. She kept her eyes on my hands.
“I usually start readings with a question. Is there something you came here to find out?”
Please See Us Page 12