Pizza Girl

by Jean Kyoung Frazier

  I’d hopped into the Festiva and sped down the 5 North. There was a high that came with being on the open road, alone, seeing Los Angeles fade behind me, the twinkling city lights burning out slowly. I’d never been outside of the city limits. Dad and Mom had always talked about a vacation for the three of us, but it never happened, always an excuse available—money, time, they could never agree on where they wanted to go, Dad liked cities and Mom liked nature. When I passed Glendale, I’d officially been farther from my home than I’d ever been in my life. All I could really think about on the way to Bakersfield was how good it felt to have the wind hit my face—I didn’t think at all about what I would say to Jenny when I finally reached her.

  I wrapped my hand around the doorknob. You don’t have to say anything, I told myself. You just have to open the door and she will feel your shadow cross over her body and she will sit up straight in bed, having been awake for hours waiting for something without even realizing it was you, and she will know, even in the dark, even if she can’t fully see the expression on your face, why you’re here, that she doesn’t have to say anything either, just has to get up and take your hand—I took another drink and pushed open the door.

  The room was too quiet and I pulled the gun from my pocket. It didn’t feel heavy, but sticky. Whether it was from my sweat or the gun’s, the longer I held it, the more it seemed to melt into me. I saw an outline of the bed, but not much else. I took one step closer, two. No sounds or movement from the bed. My grip on the gun tightened and I worried that Jenny wasn’t there, that she’d had an idea similar to mine and had hopped in her car, taken off down the highway before this new house became familiar and she found herself becoming as much a part of it as the plaster on the walls. I heard a cough and my heartbeat quickened.

  I walked closer to the bed, and as I did, my eyes adjusted to the dark and I was able to make out a large shape hidden under blankets. I walked even closer and realized the large shape was not just one body, but two.

  Jenny and Jim wrapped closely together. His arms around her midsection, his chin digging into her shoulder. Her head turned away from him and toward the window, a sliver of moonlight cutting her face in half. She looked pained to have him touching her like that, her body as far on the edge as she could go without falling off. Sleeping on the edge of the bed was no way to live. She should’ve been in the center of it with her arms and legs splayed out, the end of each limb touching a different corner and marking them sacred like pennies in a fountain, lipstick on a bare napkin, flags on mountains and moons and other places worth claiming, the spit of little kids on random sections of the sidewalk and street, a physical marker of joy so great it brimmed out of them in all forms and fluids.

  Jim made a gurgling sound in his throat. I stared at him, not just a still, no-teeth smiling image, but a real and solid and fleshy presence. I raised the gun and pointed it at him.

  My grip on the gun changed from stickiness to slipperiness. My hand started to shake and I had to bring my other hand to steady it. I kept the gun aimed directly at his forehead and I wondered how loud the shot would be, how it would echo throughout the house, how scared Adam would be, and what Jenny’s face would look like when she woke up. His pillow was a light purple or blue and I tried to picture how blood and brains would look like against it. My finger was lightly squeezing the trigger when Jenny turned over and snuggled into the crook of Jim’s neck.

  * * *

  —

  I WATCHED THEM LYING TOGETHER, their bodies pressed close, drawn together even in their sleep. Her leg hooked around his waist, her arm draped over his shoulder; he pulled her tighter, and when they both sighed, deeply, I could see they were in love. Her breath must have felt so warm against his neck.

  Jim suddenly looked handsome to me and, more than that, I could imagine the comfort of his large body. She didn’t move to Bakersfield because of him—she moved for him. She moved because when he left for work she immediately felt like the whole house got smaller. She paced room to room, touching each section of the wall, each grain of the carpet, trying to remember what he said the last time he stood there and there and there. Her heart must have bloomed to life every time she heard the door click open. She must have glowed when he kissed her cheek even when she was dying for his lips. During our kiss, I had no doubt that, with each passing second, she was comparing mine to his, how wrong mine must’ve felt—Jenny, I swear I didn’t know, Jenny, why didn’t you tell me? The strip of moonlight widened, and I noticed then that the shirt Jim was wearing was the one I plucked from her laundry basket the night I watched Adam, the one with tiny tooth holes in the collar, the one I put in my mouth and sucked on—his, not hers—she loved him and he loved her and I was a lonely, drunk pregnant girl in a home I didn’t belong in.

  I lowered the gun, drained the rest of the Coke can, and walked away. Before I closed the door behind me, I took one last look at them. They hadn’t moved.

  * * *

  —

  JENNY AND JIM didn’t have whiskey, but downstairs they had bubble-wrapped bottles of wine in a box on the kitchen table.

  I unwrapped one that had a label with French words and a black horse. The horse’s mane was beautiful and long and flowing in a wind I couldn’t see. The mane reminded me of Jenny’s old ponytail and I pulled open each drawer, searching for a corkscrew, couldn’t find one. I broke the neck of the bottle against the counter, poured some into the Coke can, didn’t bother cleaning up the glass this time.

  On the couch, I drank their wine and let my head fall back. I looked up at the ceiling and I couldn’t project my future against it. I pictured so many things, but this was impossible. I stared hard, actually tried to see myself in a year, a month, a week, a day from where I was sitting. All I could see was pizza, booze, Los Angeles, and the inside of the Festiva.

  I had a random memory of a day from a year or so back when I was alone at home. I had ditched school and was hoping that there was still some roast beef Mom had made the night before in the Tupperware in the fridge. I told the school nurse that I had a headache, a really bad headache, and I could barely see her face or the mustard stain on her cardigan. It was around 11:00 a.m. when I got back to the house, and I knew this because I had faked a headache to ditch third-period pre-calc to avoid a test—unit circles made no sense, and my graphing calculator was big and had buttons with squiggles on them that actually made my head hurt.

  When I opened the door, I saw Mom sitting on the couch, Tupperware in her lap, roast beef in her hands, grease on her chin. Dad opened the door and walked in less than a minute after me, and then we all stood staring at each other. We all had places we should’ve been—Mom opened at Kmart on Tuesdays, Dad had just started a new job cleaning the bathrooms and mopping floors at a law firm downtown, Mrs. Keery was probably glaring at my empty desk. We knew this and we didn’t say anything, just started laughing. We laughed past the appropriate amount of time, only stopped when our sides and lungs threatened to burst. We sat on the couch, not saying anything to each other, passing the roast beef back and forth, and watching a TV show that I don’t remember a single part of. I sat in between them, their shoulders both touching mine.

  I put my hands to my eyes and realized I was still holding the gun. The gun in my hand no longer felt sticky, or slippery, or much like anything at all. I pointed it at myself, looked down the barrel of it, and I couldn’t see my future there either. I pointed the gun to the ceiling and, just to see, just to hear what it would sound like, I pulled the trigger.

  Nothing happened.

  I looked at the gun, opened the cylinder, and saw that there were no bullets in it.

  I laughed and laughed and I don’t remember much after that. I’m pretty sure I dropped the bottle of wine, which I only know from later, from looking at my hoodie and seeing little burgundy splotches against the gray fabric. The last thing I remember is distantly feeling hands grabbing
my shoulders, my whole body being shaken. Through a tiny slit of light, I saw Jenny’s face close to mine, could see she was yelling, but couldn’t hear what she was saying. She really was beautiful, even with short hair.

  EPILOGUE

  I WAS FIRED FROM EDDIE’S.

  I wasn’t fired because of the incident at Jenny’s. I didn’t even think Peter, or Darryl, or Willie, or anyone at work found out about that. I just failed to show up for my shift and didn’t call anyone back. Apparently, Peter and Darryl both called me several times. I tried to explain to Peter that the cell phone he’d been trying to call me on no longer worked, had broken a couple weeks back, that even if it had been working, I was in a Bakersfield hospital that day, wouldn’t have been able to answer. He didn’t care, told me that he could find plenty of people that didn’t disappear and wind up in weird hospitals, people who had working cell phones.

  I woke up the morning after that night at Jenny’s without realizing how long I had been asleep or that I had even woken up. It just felt like I had closed my eyes, taken a very long blink, and when I opened them, I was staring out a window that faced a brick wall. I heard a whimper and I looked to my other side and saw an IV in my arm, Billy and Mom rising from chairs.

  Billy told me in a monotone, looking not at me, but out the window at that brick wall, how he was woken in the night by a phone call and was half asleep when he realized what a strange woman was yelling into his ear. He and Mom were soon driving without even changing out of their pajamas.

  “That woman almost called the police, you know. Her husband really wanted to, was horrified that a drunk, pregnant girl he’d never seen before had brought a gun into his home—his home, where his son slept—that this girl was clearly dangerous.” Billy choked on the word “dangerous”; I looked over his shoulder to see Mom crying silently into her hands. “You’re lucky the gun wasn’t loaded and the woman insisted that you weren’t dangerous, that you were just a girl who was in a bad situation, that you were having a hard time. But who is this woman and how the fuck does she know about your situation or the time you’re having?”

  Billy finally looked at me, no tears in his eyes. “Who is this woman?”

  The doctor came in soon after and told me, in front of Billy and Mom, that I’d had a blood-alcohol content of .17 and that, given my state—he gestured awkwardly to my belly—this was highly dangerous. “You are pregnant,” he said. “Heavy drinking while pregnant can result in miscarriage or stillbirth, and there are a range of lifelong physical, behavioral, and intellectual disabilities your daughter could be born with.”

  “My what?” I asked.

  “What?” The doctor frowned. He was young, his hair blond and long, and his name tag didn’t read anything funny, just said “Dr. Carroll.” If this man was named Dr. Oldman, it wouldn’t have been funny. I wanted to ask him if he was a surfer.

  “You said my”—I tried to swallow and it hurt, the inside of my mouth tasted awful and stale—“daughter. You said ‘daughter.’ ”

  “Yes,” the doctor said. “You are going to be having a baby girl.”

  I sobbed into my hands until maybe Mom, maybe Billy, maybe Dr. Carroll or a random nurse pulled my face from my hands and pushed me into their chest to stifle my sounds.

  A week later, I got a new job, bagging groceries at the local supermarket.

  Every hour I thought about quitting, but I was eighteen, didn’t know how to do much of anything, twenty-one weeks pregnant.

  It really wasn’t that bad. The work was easy. Even a chimpanzee that had been hit over the head multiple times with a rock by his chimpanzee friends could’ve figured out a way to grab what was given to him, put it in a brown, recyclable bag, smile, and say, “Have a nice day.”

  The only bad moments were if people purchased a jar of pickles. When the jars were passed my way to be bagged, I just looked up at the fluorescent lights and hummed quietly. It must not have been that quietly, though, because on my third day Marina, the cashier I was paired with, leaned over to the cashier on twelve, jerked her head at me, and said, “Did Donnie give me one of those Special Ed high schoolers again?”

  One day, Rita came into my lane. She didn’t seem to be hurt in any way, but she never had seemed that way even when she was being hurt. We made eye contact when I passed her three bags and she said, “Thank you,” and I said, “Have a nice day.”

  Another day, Darryl and a short guy with a mustache and a thick, neck-swallowing chin showed up in my line. I figured the guy was Carl after I watched the way he put his hand on Darryl’s shoulder and told him to put the magazine back, there was no need to waste money on things like that. When I handed them their bags, Carl said, “Thank you,” and I ignored him, looked at Darryl. He gave me a “Hey,” nothing more. I gave him a “Hey” back. “Do you guys know each other?” Carl asked. I wanted to turn to him and say, “Yes, we do. And I know you too. I hope you realize how fucking lucky you are,” but I just said, “We used to work together.” Darryl took a bag of cantaloupes and cucumbers from me and said, “Thank you.” I watched them walk out of the automatic doors, hand in hand, and said, “Have a nice day.” Marina leaned over to twelve again and whispered loudly, “Donnie needs to stop hiring retards.”

  After my shifts, I didn’t drive anywhere except home. Jenny’s old street would’ve been on my way, but I took a different route. It added an extra five minutes.

  At home, if Mom was there, I would sit next to her on the couch and watch whatever was on. We watched a lot of game shows, Wheel of Fortune mostly. As the pinwheel spun around, I would try to work up the courage to ask her all the things I wanted to know—was she able to look at me without thinking of Dad, did she like Billy more than she liked me, was she still excited about the baby, her granddaughter, did she know I didn’t hate her and never hated her, I worried she hated me?

  One night, we were watching Full House instead of Wheel of Fortune, and I heard myself saying, “I just worry that I’m a lot like Dad.”

  Without turning from the screen, she said, “You are.”

  Before I could really process this, let it take me to a dark space, she continued, “You’re smart and have an eye for detail. Your dad was always pointing out things he noticed, things I never would’ve seen myself. Your sense of humor is similar too, not a loud ha-ha, in-your-face kind of funny, but quiet, a little dark, honest funny, is what I always thought. It’s why people liked him so much. Did you know that everyone in the neighborhood loved him? He had a way with people, connected to them in just one interaction, and it’s because he never pretended to be anyone but himself. You loved tangerines growing up, could eat them all day. Your dad made sure to become friends with Steve, the guy who sells fruit by the freeway, so he could get them at a discount and you’d never have to ask if we had any left.” The credits of Full House started to roll. Neither of us made any move to change the channel. “You have his eyes. On first glance, brown, but if you looked close, you could see how complex they were—light brown rimmed by a dark green, makes me think of moss growing on tree bark.”

  “I meant the bad stuff.”

  That kept her quiet for a moment. The credits finished rolling and a commercial about tampons began, women of all ethnicities running through a pure-green field. “He had his problems,” she said, “there’s no denying that. But none of that is your fault and nothing is decided. It’s up to you to be more than him.”

  “I hated how he treated you, how he stole so much of your life.”

  A show I didn’t know came on. It seemed to be about a group of dogs that were tired of their humans controlling their life. We watched the intro and then she said, “This is not where I saw myself when I first immigrated to America.”

  “What, like, Los Angeles? This house? This couch? Did you want one of those couches that massage you?”

  She didn’t laugh. “I don’t even remember anym
ore what I imagined on that plane ride from Seoul to Chicago, but I didn’t imagine this.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She turned away from the TV then, looked at me, didn’t say anything until I looked at her. “Don’t be,” she said. “I have more than I ever thought I would have.”

  * * *

  —

  BILLY HADN’T SAID A WORD to me since we left the hospital. The only time we’d really talked since Bakersfield was the first night back in our room. He’d asked me if I even wanted the baby, if I even loved him, and I’d asked him to stop yelling at me, I couldn’t think when he was yelling at me.

  I never asked what happened with the gun. I imagined Jenny holding it, being as fascinated as I was by its stickiness, holding it for a moment and wanting to fire it before tossing it in the trash.

  Billy never brought up the gun either, but he came home one day with a large backpack full of textbooks and dropped it on the kitchen table, made Mom and me look up away from the TV. He spoke only to Mom and told her that he had just enrolled in night classes at the local community college and was hoping that, after a year, he could transfer to USC or a college like it, a college that could help him get a good job, a job that actually paid well and would allow him to provide for her and the baby. “I can’t keep doing what I’m doing and stay sane.” He didn’t mention my name.

  We were back to avoiding each other in the mornings. I finally got a new phone and sometimes he would call me or text me things he wanted me to grab from the grocery store—peanut butter, black beans, pizza bagels, whatever he needed to make dinner—but mostly my phone didn’t ring throughout the day. I imagined him mowing lawns and digging holes, stabbing his shovel sharply into the ground and picturing my face where the point of the shovel hit.