by Chris Dennis
She ran home. The grasshoppers popped around her ankles like a hundred booby traps. She could still hear Cher rattling from the headphones as she opened the front door. The whole family was there, drooling nearly, over Tia, whose arms were flailing in what appeared to be the dramatic telling of a story. She was on the arm of the sofa again, smiling like a stripper with those bangs like hands clawing at something just above her head. Richard was sitting at the end of the sofa too, with Tia’s tiny bare feet resting neatly on his thigh. Tia rushed to Pam. “There you are,” she said, “finally!” She embraced Pam so freely, Pam thought she’d never been held like this by anyone. It was the affection of someone who valued her. “Look what I made you!” Tia said, pulling from the pocket of her pleated shorts a pair of earrings. Within the huge hoops were two black-and-white photos of Cher, held in place by red string woven in crisscrosses, suspending Cher’s face and body in skimpy crimson webs. “I worked on them all night because I just couldn’t stop thinking of what you’d said, about Cher being trapped between the old traditions of her ancestors and the whitewashed world of pop culture.” Had Pam said this? She wanted to have said this. She could feel the teardrops ruining her expensive mascara.
“Oh, honey,” she said, “I love them.”
“I just worry about you!” Tia said, holding the earrings up to Pam’s face. “In one of Daddy’s best talks, he says the Europeans were terrified of the Natives. Isn’t that crazy? I hope you’re not scared of me! He says it wasn’t because they thought we’d eat their eyeballs or build tipis from their bones. But because they thought we were smarter than them. They couldn’t understand why we weren’t obsessed with wealth. We could run, we could climb trees, we watched the sky for symbols of things to come, and we didn’t need to go out and conquer anything. Being civilized, to the white man, meant working until you owned everything you could see. Being civilized, to the Indian, meant not beating your horse to death when it got too old to be useful. They were terrified we had it right and they’d traveled all this way for the wrong reasons. So we had to be extinguished. I hope you don’t mind me saying that.”
Pam realized Tia was holding her hand, gripping it tightly. The family sat on the sofa, fidgety and stunned. From across the room, Richard’s crotch appeared swollen and alive. Tia stopped speaking but the sound of her voice hung in the air like the last echoes of a bell that had been ringing for an incredibly long time. Pam hoped Richard and the kids weren’t too jealous of the attention she was getting.
Pam spent a long time viewing herself in the mirror. The jewelry transformed her, lying neatly in the ratted nest of her hair, cradling her face like a small, pale egg.
The earrings brought back a memory of her mother screaming into the telephone. Her mother had torn the phone from the wall but was drunk and failed to realize how knotted she was in the cord. Her eyes were wasted cuts in her bloated face. The cord twisted inside an earring, tearing it from the lobe, flicking bloody droplets onto the wall and Pam, in her footed pajamas. After the blood dried, it gave the impression of little brown polka dots. How could she have forgotten the look Mother gave her, like Pam had caused the whole thing? “Go and wash it off, for God sakes! You look like you just killed something!”
Mother’s booze-ravaged face was so often contorted into a generator of enduring shame.
Everywhere she looked she could see the finest pricks of light like aspirated paint drifting across the horizon—the slow burn of another allergy headache, or maybe just the world quietly disassembling.
Janice and Tia were affixed to each other. They were mining each other’s depths. It wasn’t hard to do—they were still young and shallow enough to hit bottom. The world was made for teenage girls. Those tiny bodies. Those tiny tits. Early in the morning, at the end of the drive, doing jumping jacks in their leggings and scrunch socks, Janice and Tia were packed into their bodies. They were still in their unripe stages, on the cusp of revealing to the world their hidden meanings. Everywhere, Pam thought, men were waiting to explore them like unreachable caves, while she was left feeling like a condemned flophouse a cop might suspiciously shine a spotlight on in the dark.
“Janice is so strong, isn’t she, Pamela?” Tia said, annihilating a slice of the cherry pie she’d baked and brought to the family that afternoon.
“Shouldn’t we have baked for you?” Janice said.
“Since when do you bake anything?” Pam asked.
“I would, for Tia!” Janice whined. “Tia is the only one who gets me,” she said, shoveling in the pie, turning her nose up at Pam.
“Oh, Janice,” Tia said, extending the hand that wasn’t destroying the dessert. The girls locked arms and kissed each other primly on the cheek.
“How do I look in these jeans?” Pam asked. “They’re Guess! Do they flatter me?”
“Your ass looks like a sack of russet potatoes,” Janice said, her mouth half-full.
“Janice, sweetheart!” Tia said, tenderly chiding her. “Elegance, please.”
“Sorry,” Janice said to Tia. “Forgive me, Mommy,” she said to Pam.
“Tia, may I ask what brand of hair spray you use?” Pam asked.
Janice frowned.
Brock rolled his eyes from across the room. “Whores,” he said.
“Scum!” Pam said.
“I’m leaving,” Brock said.
“Listen, everyone, please. Close your eyes. All of you,” Tia said, affectionately stroking the black assembly of leather cords around her tenuous throat. “Listen to the wind. Can’t you hear it?”
They listened, or Pam did, at least—as if it weren’t there before and suddenly it was. She knew this was only because she hadn’t been paying attention. It rustled the trees, clattered a distant chime, pushed small dry things across the concrete patio.
“Let’s all have a family night!” Tia said, clasping her hands together.
Pam was only ever good at making plans and then pretending to be upset when she broke them. This was how she knew she was a decent mother—the attempts.
“I’m going to the community center,” Brock said. “It’s my night.”
Brock and his friends had turntables. The sounds they made were shocking. It filled Pam up, briefly.
“Let’s crimp each other’s hair in my bedroom,” Janice said to Tia.
“I’ll come too!” Pam said.
“I seriously doubt it, Mother,” Janice said.
“Are you doing any new remixes?” Pam asked Brock.
“Fuck off, Mother,” Brock said.
“Brock is working on his own original tracks,” Tia said. “Aren’t you, Brock?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Nothing’s for sure.”
“Go then! I give both of my children over to the world. I set you free!” Pam said.
“Oh, family,” Tia said, “I want to heal you.”
Pam waited for the children to execute their typical disgust, but they only sat there in silence, relishing the pie, waiting, it seemed, for Tia to follow through. Pam thought she should be furious, but instead she continued studying the dark wreath of necklaces, wondering where Tia had acquired them.
Pam spent the rest of the day eating gummy bears, listening again for the voice of the wind, hoping to hear something crucial. It was hard to hear anything though, over her relentless chewing and the girls’ melodious laughter and Brock’s record player, which seemed to be going in reverse as he ominously accompanied on an old keyboard he brought down from the attic after deciding to stay in. There was Richard too, counting irately and breathlessly as he jumped rope like a maniac on the front lawn.
“We need to go out shopping,” Pam said to Richard, sliding her fingers into the mesh gloves. “There are many new things I’m longing for. I’m desperate for a new look, something fresh.”
“You spend too much time alone,” Richard said.
“I stay occupie
d,” she said, thinking fondly of the trees and the kind box.
“Tia’s been telling the children you need help.”
“Help with what? The dishes? Isn’t that sweet of her. She seems very engaged with what’s going on around her.”
“No, Pam. Like, mental help. This might prove her point. The children and I don’t necessarily disagree. You could talk to someone again. What about Charlie? You loved Charlie. He really seemed to help after Daddy passed.”
“Charlie was a dirty old man! I couldn’t stand him. It was Linda I loved.”
“I thought he helped you. You seemed better after those talks.”
“He helped me out of my clothes once while he had me under deep hypnosis! That’s about it.”
“That never happened, Pam. Please don’t.”
“What is this? A witch hunt? What happened to Tia, the Mexican prostitute? Suddenly she’s a mental health professional and a spiritual guru?”
“What about that listening-to-the-wind stuff? You said that was nice.”
“You should put this on,” she said, tossing him a baseball cap.
Richard looked confused. Suddenly he was claiming he only wanted to be himself in the bedroom. She didn’t buy it. He wasn’t himself even out of the bedroom. Who was he anyway? And why wouldn’t he be Marky Mark for an evening, and she Debbie Gibson? Last time she’d allowed him to choose! That was ages ago. She was Alyssa Milano and he was the R & B sensation Luther Vandross. When Richard was Luther, he said things like “Rock my world, lover girl,” and “Do it to me, teen queen. Yes, yes, ivory princess!” It hadn’t worked. Richard’s Luther was a joke. And he would never pick a specific member of New Kids on the Block. When asked to take turns being all of them, in the manner of a classic gang bang, Richard had gone limp in her hands. Possibly her desires were too interior for him to fathom.
“New Kids on the Block would be so jealous, Marky Mark!” she said, pleading. “They could only dream of conquering this electric, youthful body!” She went on like this until he conceded. He put on his Calvin Klein underwear and the baseball cap. Pam situated the wig on her head—a ratty, blond shag from the Halloween trunk. “Can you hear all those fans chanting outside the walls of our mansion?” Pam asked. “They’re cheering for us!”
Richard was posing aggressively at the foot of the bed. “Yeah,” he said. “Now see if you can’t drown out their screams with the sound of your sucking.”
“All those young girls out there,” Pam whispered, stretching out the neck of her nightshirt to expose a shoulder. “They only wish they were me!” She was crawling toward him on all fours across the mattress. “They wanna wear my skin like a bodysuit.”
“Is that so?” Richard said, staring down at her, erect and dismal.
Afterward, swapping out their sweaty pillowcases, Pam said, “Love’s wings are broken too soon, Richard.” This was a Cher song. It made Pam feel good, to pull these flaming symbols from the air and expound them, daringly, like Cher. “You think you’ll knock me off my feet until I’m flat on the floor? Until my heart is crying Indian and I’m begging for more? Come on, baby! Show me what that loaded gun is for! I’m gonna shoot you down, Jesse James.”
“Whatever you want, Pammy,” Richard said, turning to face the wall.
She lay her head down next to his, feeling dizzy. It was sexy, and exalting, being someone else. She only wished he thought so too. She pressed her palms against her temples, making the fingertips touch over her eyes like a pliant steeple.
The angry fire had blasted above the asymmetry of the mysterious configurations of the steel mill, where she’d grown up. In that forgotten part of town one wasn’t inclined to walk the streets after dark. Every week while her father played his music in the basement, her mother toppled down the steps and slept like a homeless person on the lawn. How luxurious, Pam thought, to indulge in one’s bad ideas until you disintegrated back into molecules, drifted again through the lucent atmosphere like an isolated shower of black blood, heading nowhere.
The things Pam had the longest were the things she loved the most. Her yellow oven mitts. Her stainless steel ice bucket. Her 45 of “Half-Breed.” The garbage disposal, for some reason. She loved how it whirred like a little helicopter taking in a bowl of old food, mutilating leftovers into the plumbing. Where did they go? What happened to them after they got there? When the children were smaller they would run from the bus and into the woods behind the house. They’d run until they fell down in the leaf piles. This was how she’d discovered the box. It was just sitting there. Waiting for her. The children would dig toadstools from the undergrowth and hide them in their pockets. She’d find the flattened mushrooms days later while sorting the laundry. She would allow the kids to burn the piles of leaves in the yard, sending out smoke signals over the neighborhood. What other mother allowed her children to play with fire? With the cracked half of an old kiddie pool, they’d fan the smoke. “Don’t get too close!” she’d call from behind a magazine. Back then, she only had to say it once.
It wasn’t too many years later, they had taken the children to Garden of the Gods Wilderness and Wildlife Refuge. The massive, rust-colored bluffs jutted over a forest just beginning to bud. The children hurried past the sights, both of them listless and overdressed. She and Richard were on a narrow path, wedged between the million-year-old rock formations, when he turned to her. “Are we Menudo or New Kids on the Block?” he’d asked.
“NKOTB, all the way,” she’d said.
They kissed hard, and stretched all around, for miles, the tree limbs were bare and pocked with tiny green sprouts. To be young, she had thought, and in love. And now, to be neither.
“You’ve got to dry up, Mother!” her father always said. Her mother hated this. “I’m already dry as a bone, Bill. Take me out of the fire. I’m done!” Pam understood even then that it was meant to be ironic, when they found Mother’s bloated body in the bathtub, the beer cans precisely lined along the ledge. The steel mill had been shut down, not long after, and Mother was being lobbed like a rocket toward the deepest quadrants of eternity. Pam wondered how long it took to get there—centuries, perhaps, spent burning off the fuel of one’s dumbest dreams until you reached the center of forever.
On the day Mother was removed from the house, Daddy had rolled cigarettes on the porch. “You hungry?” he’d said. He worked the tobacco into a tube. Pam studied his thumbs, the way they deftly spun the fragile paper.
“No, I’m not,” she’d lied.
“I did it for you,” he’d said. “It was basically your idea.” Had he meant pressuring Mommy to dry up, or drowning her? She hadn’t asked. Did it matter? Mother would have boozed herself to death all on her own. But perhaps it was a kindness, on both their parts? Either way, they were in it together now. Behind them on the porch, dozens of Japanese beetles swarmed the windows, the sound of their hard bodies hitting the screen like the ticking of a sad clock.
She walked down the drive to get the mail before heading through the harvested field to commune with the box. In the center of the open trap the tiny flame was back, spraying down like an inverted fountain. She would burn that outrageously, she thought, someday. She would conquer, like this assertive fire. Or she would stand at the end of the driveway wearing all of her turquoise bracelets at once, holding her utility bills, watching the crazed squirrels scatter across the lip of the gutters. Her past had come to meet her. She had been leashed like a dog to her parents’ worst deeds, smelted from their blackest shit. Without even meaning to, she’d taken up the torch of all their pointless traditions.
The windows on the neighbor’s front door were like little blue lockets she wanted to crack open. Inside, the neighbors were probably smoking their peace pipes. She’d never seen the parents, but surely they were in there doing Native American things. The dream catcher still swung in the window. And the rest—what she couldn’t see—she could feel: Arrowh
eads being sharpened. The spirits of wild animals worshipped. Immense blankets woven from the hair of their ancestors. They were in there singing about the buffalo, the quail, the bald eagle. They were breathing one another’s sweet, wise breaths back and forth between them. Pam stood, trapped in the heat of every possibility, and then a movement, a shadow inside the locket, and the giant castle door opening up.
Tia stepped out—sashayed, really—wearing a massive feather headdress nearly twice the size of her head. It had two raccoon tails that hung down either side of her tan face. Pam caught a glimpse inside the huge house before Tia slammed the door. It was nearly empty, the walls blank, only the extravagant leather sofa sat in the center of the otherwise vacant room. Tia’s crown of white and red feathers stabbed out like shiny spears. She went over and mounted the stump, raised her hands above her head, ran her fingers back and forth through the air as if gathering it up. She cupped her hands and brought them to her mouth, taking in a huge breath, then blowing it back out slowly in every direction, as if putting out some invisible fire all around her.
Finally she acknowledged Pam standing alone in the field. Tia bowed gracefully, holding on to the headdress to keep it from toppling. She dismounted the stump and walked over. “This was my father’s headdress,” she called from across the road. “It’s vintage! Basically a sacred artifact.”
Up close it looked cheap and ragged, like an old gas station tchotchke. Pam reached out to pet one of the tails. The two women stood watching each other calmly. A hard breeze surfaced, disturbing the feathers, beating the raccoon tails against Tia’s cheeks, flipping Pam’s huge hair too, like a stiff weed.
“I’d like to show you something,” Pam said, immediately surprised she’d said it.
“I thought you’d never ask,” Tia said, flinging the shabby feathers off her forehead.
They were almost to the edge of the woods when Tia stopped. “Life happens to be the sum of many small, barely conscious decisions,” she said. “You should keep that in mind, moving forward.”