by Camille Roy
She tells me her mama said You’re old enough to know to keep your pocketbook closed, and we laugh about that.
Monica walks into school
her fingers loosely rolled
a snap to her stride.
It’s September.
Still summer
there’s that other kind of light.
Weeds line the crack, there are gardens in vacant lots.
Between classes we’re kept in formation, think lines of skittish kids on opposite sides of the hall. Green iron bars cover the windows. Gang wars edge in over the grey pavement of the school yard. Monica is light on her feet, quick by necessity. I want to please—I don’t know why—I follow and give her books from the library. I’m sorry they’re stolen, I say. She says, Sorry didn’t do it, you did, and laughs. Like she does when she tells me about the death. Even I know that’s wrong, to laugh at her daddy, dragged out of a taxicab, dead of a heart attack at 44. It’s late in the day. We’re standing by the window in an empty classroom, the sky behind her shoulder is a dull blue. When I tell her to quit laughing, she wipes a smile on and runs out of the building.
She got poorer after that. She had to move out of the district.
X spreads gleaming
micas across her eyelids
& clips her hair. The
blond ends fall on a
glass-topped vanity table.
Her relatives cut their
hair off before they split
up
she’s heard that. She strokes her lips red. I’m the private glamour in a dead public, she thinks. After each orgasm she’s happy for hours, it makes her want to change course and slip
under what she wanted before. Pursing her lips for the mirror, I should hang cool sight lines next to the bed, a thin frame containing light footsteps across the water. If I were certain of finding what I want, she wonders, would I become smaller.
X and I are driving through a warehouse district after getting out of a movie. I’m morose; my mood is bruised. X stubs out her Camel filter and asks What’s the matter, babe. Too much wild, wild life?
I’m thinking about the moment when Freddy Krueger jumped out of thin air. Horror movies seem so familiar, I say. It’s like waiting grimly for some lunatic thing to pop out of a family’s member’s mouth; then it happens and you want to slide under the table. But I like to go to them; they’re so repetitious. It’s like my own private joke.
X says You feel vindicated when something horrible happens.
I’m thinking it’s true, it’s the only thing that makes the inexplicable burst like a bubble. I look out the window at the warehouses.
Nah, I say, finally. It’s just that something always pops out that reveals the essential nature. And you’re either waiting for it, or you’ve been set up, and which is better.
X laughs, sort of cautiously.
It’s that climate of expectation, I say. Like when I was a kid and it would get so fucking hot even the Lake
was hot but you had to go swimming
even though the Lake had pee in it.
I mean a lot of pee
and dead fish. It was that hot
I was with my sister
before she was a beatnik
she was wearing a yellow bathing suit
with a white belt and cat eye glasses.
She was sitting on the beach
eating a hot dog with pickle relish
and reading her theatrical magazines.
I ran in diving and splashing
coming up inside a bunch
of grinning kids whose teeth gleamed
like an ad for toothpaste.
The biggest pushed my head under
once, twice. I surfaced gasping
knees scraped.
The horizontals were dazzling
those stacked grins like ladder rungs
I couldn’t climb.
A glimpse of a withered grey pier
then a Black finger in my eye
and the shining water smacked my chin.
I was under again.
I started to kick.
I must’ve made some noise
because my sister ran into the water,
waving her hot dog.
My tormentors scattered at the sight
of her adult-size thighs, laughing.
That was it.
I’d thought skin color was decorative.
I found it was territorial.
And I stayed out of the water, walking up and down the
beach picking up pieces of worn glass bottles, mostly green
some red and blue. Blue was the rarest.
X says, You mark time backwards to the moment of damage.
She threatens but she won’t leave me. I’m already missing something. If there’s a window in the room I’m looking out of it, leaning against the wall, hands stuffed into my pockets. I frown a lot, my face has acne scars.
Now Christmas eve is on with strings of big colored bulbs in the living room, and Eartha Kitt is drawling Santa, baby… on the radio. I pick up the Sporting News while X finishes her dressing, fastening a brooch with red and green paste jewels to her wool crepe jacket, then pulling on little Xmas boots, spike white heels under red felt. I have a weird yearning to get fucked up. Lately my mind sort of plops from one to the other of all the drugs I’ve got in the house. I’ve got heroin in the basement, I think, while reading about baseball contracts.
X likes hallucinogens and I like opiates—one of our differences.
X’s chopped hair is cut like a cap.
She leans toward the mirror
gently pulls one lower eyelid down
then draws the short stub
under her lashes, making a thick black line.
When done with both eyes
she tosses the pencil into the trash.
Another girlfriend gone.
X gave me the word this morning, but
I can’t think about it
… those perfect pouty lips… It was really a bad sign when
she painted them red before 9:30 in the morning…
I stare at those lips. An impossible disruption. Breach, that’s
what this is. My mind foams, Am I on the other side?
It’s my way or the highway, babe, says X.
An elastic grin surfaces under my feet. If we could
just shut up when we get close to one another—
then I’d be action NO PLOT, while X marks
the beginning of the story. I eroticize dread.
It’s beginning again. Is our aggression a manner of speaking,
conversation taking shape?
More wishes:
A white car or a wide receiver.
Driving in the narrative of shadow.
X tells me I’m too much for her aching stomach.
I say, If I left you I could steal anything.
Afternoon sun flattens the beige shingles of the apartment building where I used to live. There’s something unexpectedly cool about the reflected yellow light. In one window a FOR RENT sign hangs. That apartment has two radiators in it, I happen to remember. My taste for accuracy is like gleaming chrome window knobs on an abandoned car. The apartment is roomy, there’s room for two. X worked as a bookkeeper and I was a thief. Once I stole a whole Xerox machine and stripped it for parts. It was there when Camille, a neighbor, bought a stereo and speakers from me for 75 bucks. X gave her attitude, eyeing her disdainfully while painting her toenails on the couch. I think Camille liked that. She’s the kind that likes a bruise. Anyhow she seemed pretty interested when she was casing our stuff. There’s not much of a market for hot copiers. I piled what I couldn’t sell in the middle of the living-room floor when we left town.
I knew those two. Frank, the building manager, told me they left an answering machine behind when they split, with a bunch of messages on it from your husband, Alfred. Frank ran into them when they were packing up their car, a white ’67 Plymouth Vali
ant with decorative turn signals on the hood and a dark red interior. They said they’d be going south down Interstate 5 to Bakersfield, then cutting east to Las Vegas. He was surprised that they were all paid up on their rent, but I wasn’t. It was the honest bookkeeper girlfriend, settling accounts. She had the soft round eyes of a calf and a smudged pout. When I bought a stereo from them she eyed me like I was one of her girlfriend’s vices. I figure the thief was the kind who ignored bills. She had long skinny thighs and a weird bob in her walk, like her joints were too loose. She was secretive but could flash a warm smile on and off, at least for me.
That got me razzed; I don’t know why. I want to peel that smile off and put it in my pocket.
1. Lydia & Pearl
My cousin Sam called me and asked if a spur of the moment visit was okay—sure, but why, I wondered, after so long? We hadn’t seen one another in such a long time that this was the first time I’d met Sam’s twelve year old son, Darryl. Mostly Darryl roamed around the house as Sam and I had ginger-lemon tea in the kitchen. Sam and Darryl were in the middle of an exhausting drive from Los Angeles to Eureka. He told me his mother (my aunt) had given him a copy of my first book. He didn’t elaborate but I understood what he was referring to—the passage about his speed addiction and rumors that he ran guns and drugs for the wrong side in small countries. My cousin is a helicopter pilot, a skill he learned in Vietnam. He shopped that skill around after he got back.
Then Sam told me what he’d been doing for the last decade. In retrospect it seems like he performed a polite, thorough, even quasi-official registration of a “change in character.” Helicopter rescue—that’s his job. It turns out my cousin is a leading innovator in this specialty, being the only pilot in the country who can do it without any assistants. This makes him very popular with strapped rural county fire, flood, and mountain rescue departments. He works wherever a disaster breaks out in Northern California. The work comes in keen adrenalin surges. Bobbing free lines over choppy water. Scooping chilled corpses from the ocean. Raising children up out of the flames.
I guess Sam didn’t like what I’d written about him. He said, “I tried writing, and I found I just couldn’t do that to other people.”
I objected but mildly. I sipped my tea. After he left, I found myself stewing, then I began a strenuous argument in my head. It boiled down to this—if I’m the only one with the appetite to tell a story, it must belong to me. I do the work. It comes down to my appetite, which in turn comes down to whatever grips my powers of recognition. That’s what makes my little engine purr. I take the facts and expand along lines of thrill, aiming for unreliability, its quivering heart.
Of course, here I am assuming my cousin was referring to my writing. But he’d just been talking about his mother, Lydia, telling me various sordid difficulties. He was trying out the thing one tries at one time or another: “naming the experience.” That followed by a dazzled look, as his features relaxed and fell away from one another. Why do those loaded difficult words feel empty? The ones used to label childhood traumas. Whatever. Maybe Sam gave up on writing because he couldn’t write about his mother, or around her. This I can understand. Our moms are sisters, daughters of the stalwart Mabel Margaret. My mother, Pearl, is the blond one, the milkmaid, but built for the fifties. All sleekly muscular curves. Lydia, Sam’s mother, was built the same way but tawny in coloring, brown irises surprisingly dark. She has a widow’s peak. Raymond, their dad, was a wayward gambler-prospector with a gift for abandonment. Dumping his family during the Depression, he ran off for high times with a couple of seriously odd women. More about that later.
My mother, Pearl, was born babbling in the nascent Los Angeles of the 1920s. Her accent was dubbed “American West” by an Italian linguist, who studied her in astonishment. I imagine she probably told him she was born in Winnemucca, Nevada—it sounds more appealingly Western than LA, the hard desert sun boiling everything down versus coastal haze. When I mentioned Pearl’s birth in Winnemucca to Lydia, her brown eyes glared at me in outrage—Pearl once again pulling a fast one. Lydia ran off for the birth certificates. They verified her story: Pearl was born in Los Angeles, and Lydia was born in Winnemucca.
They had different personal styles: Lydia took the truth hostage, guarding it jealously. Pearl abandoned it on a daily basis. What was at stake?
Family reunions were rare but intense. I recall one reunion where our moment of collision gave way to a rolling obscure fight which lasted three days, wet and smothering with too much booze: Lydia’s four boys versus Pearl’s three girls—a strange proliferation, all charged up. We didn’t argue, we fought. Lots of politics, especially relating to sex. Still I loved them fiercely, each strange male cousin. Once Sam snipped the butt off a firefly and put it on my finger. Bitterness inside a sexual fog—that was the surface. Underneath was the grudge we inherited, Pearl and Lydia’s inscrutable calculus of betrayal and loyalty.
Lydia didn’t remember Raymond, she was a baby when he left. Pearl was older—probably around seven—but didn’t remember anything before the age of sixteen. Pearl’s lack of memory was terrifically odd, itself a thing of great plasticity. It was as though out of pure will she’d substituted imagination for memory.
At fifteen, I was a rapt audience for Pearl’s nightly performances, my attention made out of hard particles of dread and identification. Families are nuclear, and nuclei are smashed together. Do you know the difference between the weak and the strong forces? The strong one is the massive force of the universe, binding quarks of opposite charge. It’s only exercised across tiny distances, such as families. Everything else is weakness. I loved the dazzle: Pearl’s career as a high diver at the Depression-era fairs (aborted by an exhibition high dive belly flop that left her sinking to the bottom of the pool in a coma), the swim to glory and medals, making the Olympic team the year the games were cancelled, Pearl’s socialist Jewish father, Raymond, and his movie star friends (who even had movie star animal pals), the opium dens of Winnemucca. History made of such sparkles. The father in this tale even had a violin. (Lydia would later insist it was only a guitar.) The stories disappeared into one poignant pang after another. I couldn’t notice how they didn’t add up. I was too pleased with being part Jewish, and striped with Olympic muscles. It helped me in the neighborhood.
Sam remembers Raymond. At least, he thinks he might remember him. Twenty five years after dumping Lydia, Pearl, and my Christian Science grandmother, Mabel Margaret, Raymond rang Lydia’s doorbell. Sam was three, banging a spoon in his highchair. Lydia had invited Raymond to come. It was oddly like dating: mutual friends had introduced father and daughter to one another. Life is strange on the frontier.
Raymond arrived wearing a big Stetson and black lizard skin cowboy boots. His shirt had that swirly piping on it, I imagine it as yellow piping on soft cream colored rayon, a cowboy shirt with iridescent snaps. Very fifties, Hank Williams Senior—love that dude, don’t you? Anyway, when Lydia told me about this she handed me a postcard. The Silver Dollar, Winnemucca, Nevada was written in thick toothpaste script on the photo of a cowboy bar interior—saddles on the wall, spurs. That’s Raymond behind the bar, she told me. He looked tall but old, gazing down at the beer he was pulling.
Lydia had been a baby when Raymond left. There wasn’t money to feed two children, so Mabel Margaret sent Pearl to relatives. Mean ones, of course, a chilly farming couple who were unhappy to have to share their bread and garden peas with a boisterous little girl whose nickname was Butch. Filled with high-spirited declarations, Pearl always insisted that she refused to see Raymond ever again. She was good at leaving, we all have that survival skill. So, of course, I believed her, in fact I adopted her attitude—Nasty Pops, you may be dead but I’m never going to speak to you. Actually, Lydia admitted to me that she had kept Raymond’s visit to herself. She hadn’t told Pearl that she knew where Raymond lived, or even that he was alive. Three months later he was dead.
Winnemucca, that’s where the family’s se
nse of itself is somehow concentrated. As a place, unbelievable. It doesn’t cohere. I think I’ve actually been there but I don’t remember it. After the highway signs—hasn’t everyone seen them?—347 miles to Winnemucca! 213 miles to Winnemucca! 24 miles to Winnemucca!—I got there, drove through, and nothing stuck. I want to go back, but it has to be the 1930s. I want to see the top half of Raymond’s face. Fleshy, grinning. Holding the squirming laughing baby that resembles my mother. This is the only photograph remaining of Raymond and it shows only his jaw. The rest were destroyed. But in the one remaining you can see his reddish skin, a fringe of white blond hair. He doesn’t look Jewish. My mother’s eyes are the color of aquamarine.
Hopscotching all over the west in his helicopter, Sam ended up spending time in Winnemucca, where he nosed out the old gamblers who had known Raymond. Oh yeah, Raymond, dirty bastard. Died owing me three thousand dollars.
Sam’s legs under the table tilt and amble with the autonomy of length. Sam is a long drink of water. His head droops languidly onto his upraised hand as he leans forward, his voice husky with a secret. Have you heard the one about Raymond and Aimee?
