The Outside Lands

by Hannah Kohler

“Your father can’t be looking at your mother’s things everywhere he turns,” she insisted, ignoring Jeannie’s protests; and Jeannie felt a balloon swell inside her. She waited until her aunt was outside fussing at the trunk of Uncle Paulie’s car, then grabbed the nearest carton—marked Nightstand—and shoved it into Kip’s room. When her aunt had left, Jeannie slipped into Kip’s room and opened the carton, digging through the haul —the tissue-pocketed housecoat, the hairbrush spindled with hair, the coral vanity case—before carrying it to her bedroom and pushing it inside her closet.

  Christmas came and went—maple ham and long silences at Aunt Ruth and Uncle Paulie’s place—and a new year. Jeannie cut class at secretarial school until, come February, Mrs. Harris suggested she take a break from the program. She quit volunteering at St. Mary’s, and lived out the rest of the winter perching at the soda fountain with Nancy, or lying for long dull hours on the living room floor, browsing through her mom’s back issues of McCall’s. She spent her days waiting: waiting for the hands on the clock to move and for her dad and Kip to come home, when they would heat three dinners and watch TV until The Tonight Show started and their dad switched off the set.

  “Your father doesn’t mind you lazing around all day long?” asked Nancy one day on Ocean Beach. It was Washington’s Birthday, and sunny out; mothers had come to run their children on the beach. Nancy knelt behind Jeannie, tying a scarf around her head.

  “Hasn’t said a lot about it,” said Jeannie, pushing her bare feet into the sand.

  Nancy touched the top of Jeannie’s head—Head up. “My daddy would kick me out if I wasted my days that way,” she said.

  “Your mom would beat him to it.”

  Nancy made the noise of a smile. “There.” She patted Jeannie’s shoulders.

  Jeannie turned; Nancy’s face glared in the sun, like a coin catching the light. Jeannie shuffled to sit next to her.

  “What were you going to tell me?” she asked.

  “I don’t know if I should,” said Nancy, unpicking a carton of her mother’s Newports and pulling out a cigarette.

  Jeannie nudged her friend. “Tell me.”

  Nancy placed the cigarette between her lips, lit it with her father’s Zippo, and slid her brown legs to her chest. She blew smoke. “He told me not to.” She squinted at the sailboats swinging on the ocean and took another pull.

  “Who?” said Jeannie. “Tommy?”

  Nancy leaned in to whisper, the wind flicking her hair into Jeannie’s face. “Mickey Riley,” she said, her breath warm on Jeannie’s ear.

  “Mickey Riley?” Mickey had graduated high school as their homecoming king and was now working as a meat wrapper off Twentieth Avenue. He was also married, having knocked up the homecoming queen, Sandra Simmons, (so the rumor went) on prom night.

  “Hush,” said Nancy, checking for listeners. Just a heavy-diapered toddler, squashing sand into a tin can.

  “What happened?” said Jeannie.

  “We did it.” Nancy smiled, her canine teeth showing over her bottom lip.

  “What? When?”

  “Last night. Over there, by the rocks.”

  When Kip was six, he was climbing those rocks when he slipped and fell into the water and—had it not been for a nearby man plunging in to help him—was almost swept away. When they got home and told their mom, she slapped Jeannie so hard her cheek was still red the next morning.

  “I got sand everywhere,” said Nancy, voice rising. The toddler’s mother gave Nancy a sharp look. “All the way up—”

  “Keep it down,” hissed Jeannie. “Jesus, Nancy.”

  “You’re such a prude.” Nancy smiled.

  “You weren’t afraid somebody would see you?”

  “I think we might have shocked a couple of seals.” Nancy laughed and buried her cigarette butt in the sand.

  Jeannie shook her head. “You got to be careful you don’t get in trouble.”

  “I’ll be fine.” Nancy caught her pale hair in the crook of her arm and swept it behind her shoulders. “You got to watch you don’t miss out on trouble altogether.”

  They stayed on the beach all afternoon, until the sunset dragged the warmth from the sand and it was cold and dark under their feet. At home, the sound of men filled the living room; it was her dad’s turn to host his Corps friends for poker night. Jeannie felt their presence like static, all noise and heat and roughness, stuffing the house, pushing itself into every space; and the absence of her mom ambushed her with such violence her breath caught. She stopped in the hallway, waiting until her breath eased. The sound of yelling and whistling boiled over from the living room—an unexpected hand revealed, a foolish bet placed. Jeannie pushed her hair from her face and stepped into the kitchen. Her dad was scrubbing the countertop, muscles taut like rubber in his thin brown arms; and something in the smallness of his labor, in the brightness of the room and the smell of Ajax, returned the house to itself, and her mom’s shadow folded itself away in the corner of the room.

  “Daddy, it’s clean,” said Jeannie. “Go be with your friends.”

  Her dad grabbed a tuft of steel wool and worked it over an imperceptible stain. “What did you do today?” he asked. Bernie Garubbo walked in, his belly pressing against his shirt, his eyes scanning the kitchen for snacks.

  “I went to the beach with Nancy.”

  “Who’s Nancy?” said Bernie, shaking a pack of peanuts into a bowl.

  “A girlfriend,” said Jeannie.

  “You spend too much time with that girl,” said her dad.

  “That’s what she said too.”

  Her dad straightened to look at her. “What about Mrs. Harris? Want me to give her a call?”

  Bernie leaned against the counter, cracking nuts with his fingers. Jeannie wished him away.

  “She won’t have me, Daddy. She didn’t mean for me to come back.”

  “So, someplace else.”

  “I don’t know if I want to be a secretary anymore.”

  Her dad and Bernie swapped a look.

  “You got to do something,” said her dad. “All this lying around’ll make you soft.”

  “I got Aunt Ruth fretting I’m too skinny and you saying I’m getting heavy.” Her dad didn’t smile.

  “Your father’s right, Jeannie.” Bernie splashed shells onto the floor.

  “Jesus, Bernie, we’re not in a goddamn bar,” said her dad, scooping up the mess with his hands.

  “You’re a nineteen-year-old woman,” Bernie continued, spitting nut fragments. “You got better things to do than jaw with your girlfriends all day long.”

  “It’s not like that—”

  “I talked to your father.” Bernie brushed his hands together. “There’s a spot for you at my place.”

  Jeannie slid a pleading look to her dad; he frowned down at his dish towel.

  Kip slunk in. “Jeannie’s going to flip burgers?”

  “A waitress job,” said Bernie.

  “Thanks, Mr. Garubbo, but I’ll pass.”

  “Not so fast,” said her dad, opening a Pabst and handing it to Bernie. “You got another way to pay rent around here?”

  “Kip doesn’t pay rent.”

  “Kip isn’t grown,” said Bernie. He sucked greedily on his beer.

  Kip made a face; Jeannie glared back.

  “It’s a nice gig, Jeannie.” Bernie wiped his lips on his knuckles. “A buck and a half an hour; you keep the tips.”

  “Honestly, Mr. Garubbo—”

  “It’s no problem. Come tomorrow at eleven. I’ll show you the ropes.” Jeannie’s dad nodded; Kip grinned.

  “Jackson, your hand isn’t going to play itself!” came a yell.

  “Let’s go.” Bernie put his hand on her dad’s shoulder and steered him back to the game.

  “Sucker,” said Kip.

  “What the hell am I supposed to do?”

  Kip cracked a shell and caught a peanut in his mouth. His eyes shone. “You’re going to boot camp, sis. Bernie’s gonna bust you
r ass.”

  “Screw you,” said Jeannie. She went to her bedroom and shut the door.

  Bernie’s Hamburgers was a dive with oily windows and sticky leather booths. But the hamburgers were generous and the French fries had just the right salt and bite, and in any case, it was the only place to eat within a block of UCSF. Everybody who came in seemed to be waiting: for a relative to get better, or worse; for a shift to start; for the next procedure. One thing they didn’t want was to hang around for their food.

  “The patient ones are in the hospital,” joked Anita, Bernie’s longest-serving—and favorite—waitress. She was forty going on twenty-five, with a spare inch of makeup and, as Bernie put it, two spare handfuls of patootie. Jeannie wondered if she’d heard about the accident, because from her first shift Anita had maneuvered Jeannie around the diner with the quiet care of a school crossing guard. The rest of them, for the most part, ignored her: Esteban and Gaël, the chefs, who talked only to each other, in Spanish; Patty and Linda, who saved their smiles for the doctors; and Bernie himself, whose attention was rare but unwelcome. The work was enough to trick her out of her grief, sometimes for hours at a time. At the end of each shift, Jeannie returned home with tender feet, stinking of fried meat. “Hey, Jean-Burger!” Kip would call, and Jeannie would give him the finger before collapsing into bed, too stuffed with the smell of food to think of eating.

  Whole months worked themselves away that way. Jeannie found the rhythm of her labor and rolled through the days. As summer came and gave way to fall, the temperature outside rose, making the windows sweat and leaving moisture on her upper lip. Every night she counted her dollar bills and tucked them inside her mom’s vanity case, which she kept hidden beneath her bed. At the end of each month she pushed twenty-five bucks under her dad’s bedroom door for rent, and the next day she found the bills returned in a neat pile on her dresser. When Linda quit to marry her high school sweetheart and move to South San Francisco (she never did hook a doctor, sniped Anita), Jeannie picked up the extra shifts. Now that Nancy was spending all her spare time with Mickey, there wasn’t much else to do. Fall deepened to winter. Jeannie got to feeling like there was never a time when she wasn’t pacing over the days, sliding plates on and off tables before sliding into bed. She could go long spells without thinking about her mom’s death, but three, maybe four times a day it would skewer her like a knife. It was like riding the Limbo at Playland—long stretches of dark riding, and then, when you least expected it, a horror lunging from the shadows.

  On Halloween, Nancy came over, her plaid skirt rolled high, her hair ratted into a lump on the top of her head.

  “It’s me,” she said in a flat voice as she pushed into the house. Her eyes were thickly and unevenly lined. Kip was at the kitchen table studying a Sgt. Fury comic; he started out of his chair.

  “Kip, honey, how are you doing?” Nancy folded Kip against her chest. He angled himself away, snatched up his comic, and left the room.

  “What’s he in now, seventh grade?”

  “Ninth.”

  “Cute little guy!”

  Jeannie heard Kip’s door click shut. “You okay?”

  “You got anything to drink?”

  “I think we have seltzer.”

  “I mean something to drink.”

  Her dad was out bowling. Jeannie hesitated, then pulled a bottle of Old Crow from the cabinet.

  Nancy’s nose wrinkled. “Your mom didn’t keep any vodka?” Something catty touched Nancy’s face, then vanished; Jeannie saw an apologetic heat spread at the root of her friend’s neck, and decided to ignore it. She cleared her throat.

  “This is it,” she said. “Take it or leave it.”

  Nancy shrugged and sat at the table.

  Jeannie took two coffee cups from the kitchen closet and poured. “Something happened at Bernie’s today,” she said. Jeannie turned and saw Nancy picking up a letter addressed to Jeannie’s dad; Nancy let it go and it drifted to the floor. Her face was pale and spiteful. “What’s the matter?” asked Jeannie, sliding over a cup holding an inch of bourbon. Nancy looked at her head-on for the first time since she’d arrived; she had a tightness about her eyes, as though she’d been crying.

  “I’m late.”

  It took a moment for Jeannie to understand what Nancy was talking about. “How late?”

  “A week.” Nancy took a gulp from her cup and gave Jeannie a strange smirk.

  “A week’s not so long,” said Jeannie.

  Nancy sent her a dead look. “I’m never late.”

  It was true: Nancy prided herself on being regular.

  “You were careful?”

  “Mickey doesn’t like to be careful.”

  You’d think Mickey would have learned. “You been to the doctor?”

  Nancy shook her head.

  “Does Mickey know?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Shit, Nancy.”

  Nancy scratched at the table with a pink frosted nail. The sound of the Beach Boys bled through Kip’s door.

  “What are you going to do?” asked Jeannie.

  “I’m not going to end up like that stupid bitch, that’s for sure.” Jeannie thought of Sandy Riley, with her thin face and her furious baby. It would be worse for Nancy—not even Mr. Cooper could shotgun an already hitched guy to the church.

  Nancy must have seen something in Jeannie’s face, because all of a sudden she looked scared. “I don’t have a choice,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Nancy stood and went to the cabinet. She tipped three glugs of bourbon into her cup.

  “CeeCee’s cousin knows somebody who can take care of it,” she said. Jeannie heard the shade of challenge in Nancy’s voice.

  “You told CeeCee?” Jeannie checked herself. Nancy sat, her face smoothed with something like satisfaction.

  “She knows about stuff like this,” said Nancy. CeeCee Adams had lived in a Manhattan skyscraper until she was eleven, and she still acted like she’d learned everything about the world staring down at the dirty streets and the little yellow cabs.

  “She wants you to think she knows,” said Jeannie, a rash prickling her chest.

  “Don’t be jealous,” said Nancy, a smile pulling at the corners of her mouth.

  Jeannie adjusted her voice. “I’m not jealous,” she said. “But you can’t just go get rid—”

  “You’re getting religious on me? The Virgin fucking Jeannie?”

  The rash had crawled up Jeannie’s neck and over her face. “You could get hurt.”

  “I knew I shouldn’t have told you.”

  “Come on, Nancy.”

  “You know what Mickey and his friends called you in high school? Icebox. Because you’re so damn frigid.” Nancy was standing, hard-voiced, with that odd smile still touching her mouth. Suddenly she looked how she might look in ten years, like the former pageant girls in the grocery store whose beauty didn’t last—plump faces that dragged to fat and cute-nipped features that sharpened with age. You’ll be just like them, Jeannie thought; and the cruelty of the thought had a kind of power, stopping her tears.

  “Maybe it’s okay. Maybe you’re not gone,” she offered.

  “Maybe you’re fucking clueless,” said Nancy.

  The scratch of a key at the front door. Jeannie and Nancy downed their bourbon, Nancy gagging on the last swallow.

  “Hello, girls,” said Jeannie’s dad, setting down his bowling bag and removing his shoes. His shirt collar was loose, and the skin around his neck looked plucked and raw, like a turkey’s.

  “Mr. Jackson,” said Nancy, coughing to recover herself. “I was just going.”

  “Don’t leave on my account.”

  “My mother’s expecting me.” Nancy brushed out her skirt and nodded. “Goodnight, Mr. Jackson.”

  “Goodnight, Nancy.” Jeannie’s dad turned on the kitchen faucet and squeezed Lux into the sink.

  “Nice girl,” he said when Nancy had closed the door behind her.
>
  That night, Jeannie couldn’t sleep; she kept replaying Nancy’s words—jealous, frigid, clueless—and letting them hurt her all over again. She sat up in bed, looking out the window at the browned-out front yard, headlights blaring over her every few minutes, then every hour. A scratch against the wall behind her head—Kip was awake too. The sound of the back door sliding open. A long sag of time, the chink of glass bottles on the doorstep; then, nothing.

  The next day, Jeannie was hiding behind the counter at the diner, sweeping up broken glass. Bernie had reamed her out in front of everybody after she fumbled a tray and sent a half-dozen new water tumblers crashing to the floor.

  “Guess who showed up!” Anita’s face appeared, pressed powder breaking into excited cracks across her forehead.

  Jeannie gazed up at her. “Who?” She wondered if it was Nancy, who never stayed mad for long.

  “The doctor who’s always making eyes at you—the one with the specs and those red cheeks.”

  Jeannie sat back on her heels and pushed her wrists to her eyes.

  “Honey!” Anita threw her a paper napkin. “You’ll spoil your face.”

  “Table Five,” barked Bernie.

  “You go, honey.”

  “I’ve got to finish up—”

  “Here.” Anita rounded the counter and took the dustpan and broom. “He’s yours.”

  He was bowed over a newspaper, his glasses pushed into his hair. He was becoming a regular. The previous day, he’d been in with a couple of bigmouthed doctor friends, and she’d felt their amused eyes on her from across the diner, heard their loud-voiced banter, caught his look of hope and horror as she approached to take their order. Jeannie wanted to creep back under the counter; but Anita popped up and mouthed, Go.

  Jeannie’s approach jerked him from the Chronicle; his knuckles caught the saltshaker and spilled a mouthful of salt onto the table.

  “What can I get you?”

  He swept the crystals with his palm; they scuttled across the newsprint.

  “Sorry.” He set his glasses on his nose. “I was in here yesterday.” A bashful smile. “I’m here a lot.” He half stood and nodded his head. “I’m Billy.”

  “Hello, Billy.”

  A pause; he lowered himself to his seat. His eyes darted to the button fastened at her chest. “You’re Jeannie,” he said. His cheeks purpled.