by Monica Drake
Who defined the limits of “day labor”?
They could help her; she’d help them. She had money. It was cheap labor, no paperwork. It was only the cost of copulation, that human risk.
Survival of the species is about creative adaptation.
Where did thriving sperm cluster? The day laborers were rugged men with hard lives, troubles that showed in their skin and teeth. But there, in with the broken and worn, was one man with a Burt Reynolds mustache. He wasn’t handsome, but he had confidence. Then she spotted a dark James Dean. His hair held a shine like the water of the river, that churning, toxic ribbon of the Willamette that cut the city in half only a block away.
Behind the day laborers a building had been imploded. There was an empty lot full of rubble wrapped in cyclone fencing. Sarah had driven that street for years, but couldn’t remember what building stood there.
That’d be her own life story: here for a while, then gone, and who’d remember Sarah? But to see these men selling their bodies, their skills, on the side of the road, gave her a new sense of possibility. One man held a guitar. He handed it to another guy when a car slowed. She pulled to the curb, still a ways back. She watched him lean in to talk through the passenger-side window of a stranger’s car.
She could do that: pull over, talk to them. They’d come to her.
She circled the block, hoping for a red light, a chance to scan the crew without swerving. She drove slowly, ignoring the honking horns—those mechanical howls of domesticated primates—and passing the line of waiting men a third time. Then the man with the guitar stretched. His guitar leaned against his leg like a devoted pet. He looked good, solid and relaxed.
Relaxed was a trick that didn’t exist in her family gene pool so far.
Sarah was high. Those nibbles on pills added up. Who kept track? She was high and desperate. The man with the guitar leaned against the chain-link fence, his shoulders big and rounded.
She pulled over to the side of the road and powered down her passenger-side window. The pills whispered, “It’s okay.” More than okay, it was brilliant. It was survival. “Hola!” She waved a hand.
How awkward: Spanish or English? Her Spanish was lame. She put a smile on her face and pointed, picking out her man. It was that easy.
He left his guitar on the curb and walked to her car window.
“Quiere trabajar?” Sarah opted for the formal verb. She admired any language that offered a built-in distance.
He nodded. “Sí, sí. Yes. You have work?”
Oh yes, she had work.
“How many men you want?” he asked. His eyes were deep brown, with long lashes. They weren’t Ben’s eyes, not at all. She pressed on.
“Solo uno,” she said. “Solo usted.” It wasn’t clear if Spanish was even his language.
He gestured with a hand toward the open city. “I have tools.” Somewhere, out there.
He had the tool she needed. “No worries. Let’s go. Vámonos.” He got in the car. He sat, then lifted himself from the car seat and ran a hand underneath himself, coming up with a Klonopin vial.
“Sorry.” She took the vial from him. Their fingers brushed. His hands were rough, his fingers short and thick.
She watched the road. What came next? The man was big in her car. His shoulders blocked the side window as he twisted to look at her. It was like bringing a Christmas tree home! He was bigger than he looked on the lot. Traffic urged her forward, in a stream of busy people driving with conviction.
The man rested his hands uneasily on the wide expanse of his thighs. He could strangle her. What had she done?
His thighs pressed tight against his clothes from inside, ropy with muscle. Sarah felt her cell phone in her coat pocket. That phone, with a loaded speed dial, was an umbilical cord to everyone she cared about.
What now—take him home? This was adaptation through experimentation. She saw a car wash on the side of the road and pulled in, buying time to gather her medicated thoughts.
TOUCHLESS, the sign said. A touchless car wash.
She pulled up to the booth and handed the car wash attendant a prepaid card. He punched the card and handed it back, keeping his cap low as he leaned back into his booth and disappeared.
The man looked out the window, as though a parking lot full of self-serve auto vacs was scenic. The sky was the mottled gray threat of an Oregon winter rain.
If Ben were in the car, he’d say, “Why wash the car when it’s getting ready to rain?”
Sarah would answer, “Why eat, when you’ll be hungry later?” It always rained in Portland in the winter.
Ben pretty much was there in the car with them, the way she heard this conversation in her head. The man she’d picked up looked at the sky, and Sarah could tell he’d agree with Ben.
She shoved her punch card in the ashtray, alongside Klonopin crumbs. One whole pill lay there round and white, as promising as an uncut cake. Sarah asked, “What’s your name?”
“Frank.” There was the flash of a gold tooth halfway back. His feet were in worn Adidas. The white leather was like raku, it was so covered in cracks. If things worked out, she’d buy him shoes.
Frank?
It was possible she’d picked up the only Germanic day laborer in town.
She followed yellow arrows on the ground, around a semicircle, toward the maw of the wash.
She steered the car onto the short track. A teenage employee came through a narrow doorway, waving a hand for her to move forward. She pulled in slowly.
“Pull up, pull up, pull up,” his hand beckoned. When he flashed the flat of his open palm, she took her foot off the brake and put the car in neutral. She moved as though it were all according to this kid’s plan—fated on the lines of his creased palm—not hers.
Jets of water started as a trickle then grew stronger. The jets themselves lifted as though by the force of the water, and turned toward the car on mechanical arms. The car lurched. Sarah kept her hands on the steering wheel, even as she leaned against the door and turned to appraise Frank.
Inside the car grew dark. Frank, cast into the dusk inside the wash, tapped his fingers against his thigh. The sound of his breath disappeared, subsumed into the louder voice of machinery, mechanical arms, and water pressure.
This was a fine first date, the short version of a drive-in movie, just long enough to smell each other in the compressed space of the car. It was an exercise in intimacy.
It was a trespass, against Ben.
Sarah asked, “You have family around here?”
Water beat against the roof and the sides of the car like a storm. The car was a private cabin on a rainy night, a weekend getaway. It was Noah’s ark in a car wash flood and they were two in a pair. There was a pressure in the dark; even the air felt limited and tense.
Hot foam covered the car windows.
“Yes, family.” He pointed in a circle around his head. Family around. His breath was the warm smell of a jar of pennies.
Family didn’t mean a wife. Not necessarily. They were in the heart of the wash. In the dark, in the gears, with the windows covered, and equipment up close, all sounds blocked by the hum of machinery, the world was gone.
“Kids?”
“No, no kids.” He smiled as he said it. She almost believed him.
“You?”
If her car were to slide off the track they’d be jammed in the machinery, trapped at the mercy of slow-witted teenagers. She’d marry her day laborer—a marriage of convenience, married by gears, crushed together.
Then he opened her glove box and looked inside. He shuffled through her papers. What the hell was he doing? This was too forward. There was nothing in there except Burgerville napkins, tampons, and car records. She reached to close it.
His hand was in the way.
He gave her a smile, showing his gold teeth. Who had she invited into her car?
This risk was the new cost of copulation in her survival strategy. The Klonopin made her head thick and had started
to give her a headache. Either that or the Vicodin was wearing off. She ran her hand over the console between the seats until she found a pink crumb to slide between her teeth.
He closed the glove box, in his own time. She refused to flinch.
A car wash compresses time and space; it takes forever and then is over in minutes. The dark inside the car lifted. The windshield cleared. The black gaping mouths of wide hoses nodded up and down like snake heads, blasting the hiss of hot air over the car. Six hands reached for them; three attendants, palms draped in soft cloths. A girl with a long ponytail pressed herself against the side of the car. A boy patted the fender.
The world was bright and painted with rainbows in the prisms of chemically tinted water, a spray of polish illuminating the windshield. The track ended; the car dropped to the pavement. Sarah shifted into gear.
She was still the driver, and the driver is in charge. She pulled into traffic and moved down Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard. The day laborers would be there again the next day and the day after that.
This didn’t have to be the end of anything.
For now, she reached the patch of sidewalk where they clustered, pulled over, gave Frank twenty dollars, unlocked the doors, and let him go.
After work crew Arena took AKA to the Temple Everlasting. His long grasshopper legs barely fit behind the seat in front of them on the city bus, and he sprawled into the aisle. Arena asked, “Do your parents wait for you to come home, or whatever?”
“Parents?” He blinked, like she’d woken up a sleeping corner of his brain.
At the temple, Arena pushed open the front door and called hello to cluttered rooms. The battered TV was midsentence, in its guppy routine: “… able to live upstream from the threat of violence …”
AKA said, “Upstream from violence?” He slapped a hand on the Sony. When he turned the old-style knob to switch channels, the guppy track screwed up, making a crash of static.
AKA was violence; the guppies were fried.
Arena said, “Don’t touch it. We don’t know how that works.”
“It’s a TV. I grew up with one.” He flipped the channels, then turned the whole thing around to mess with switches on the back.
She looked for a remote, and while she did, Mack emerged from a back room. He said, “Arena! What’re you doing here?”
“Meet my friend.”
“Dude, I busted your set.”
Arena offered a nervous giggle. “It’s not broken. Can we use the camera? Let’s see AK’s energy field.” Arena pushed AKA forward and held his arm like they’d come in for prom photos.
Mack only nodded a tight nod, like he had checked something off a bitter list.
AKA said, “Nah, I don’t know if I’m into that.” He seemed more gangly than ever in the cluttered store. “Maybe I’m, like, a vampire, right? What’s vampire energy?”
Arena assured him, “Your energy is great.”
Mack unplugged the guppy TV, hoisted it off the stand, and carried it to his back room. “Arena, I’m not a photo booth at the county fair. This is science. You don’t play with testing energy fields. Besides, the Kirlian machine’s broken.”
Mack came back out with a broom and swept the floor like he was beating it into submission. He swept where they stood and then again where they moved to. He swept until AKA moved away from Arena, and then he swept AKA’s feet.
AKA asked, “What’s that smell?”
Arena sniffed. The place smelled like leaking pipes and molding floorboards.
Mack said, “Weird. It just started when you got here.” He dabbed at the floor with his broom, pushing dirt into the air and in a pile.
Arena said, “That dust in the air? That’s matter transferred, like energy.”
Mack kept up his work. “You’re a doubter.”
Arena said, “No! I mean it. I see it everywhere now.”
“Right.” He swept closer to AKA’s feet and AKA stepped back, again and again, until he’d backed them all the way to the door.
AKA opened the door and went outside, and Arena followed. She waved a good-bye that Mack ignored. Like, when did his job get so busy? But it was beautiful out, they were free of the musty temple, there was a Cajun bistro down the block with an oil drum–style barbecue out front making a smoky cloud across the sidewalk, and the city smelled like grilled shrimp.
AKA said, “Wow. Talk about a negative energy field. That dude is gone.”
They passed a corner bar where hipsters played pool inside. The door was open. They heard the crack of balls and smelled beer. There was a 1914 church, then a second hipster bar, then a gangster church with a PT Cruiser complete with flames outside. It was that kind of neighborhood: young drunks and people looking to be saved. She asked, “What do you do? When you’re not picking up trash.”
He said, “I’m in a band.”
Of course! Who wasn’t? Phone poles were wrapped in rusted staples and band flyers, a show every night.
“Eco-emo. Angry songs about the trashed environment.”
Arena said, “Really? My mom’d love it.”
“She should come to a show,” he said. “Maybe you’d come with her. We’ve got this one tune, ‘Whose the Nero Now?’ I totally wrote it. It’ll make you cry. Feel. Break up with your boyfriend.”
She said, “I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“Wow. That was easy,” he said.
“Ha.” Arena ducked into a junk store and AKA followed. It was all random resale: buttons and Barbie dolls and picture frames sold as art supplies. A woman with a thick waist, a heavy sweater, and a head of hair like tumbleweed sat on the floor sorting through a bucket of rocks. In a dusty back corner, a bolt of white mesh fabric rested against the wall, caught what little light there was, and glowed in its plastic white aura like a synthetic ghost. To Arena’s eyes it was white as heaven, even with a waffle-shoe footprint on one spot, keeping it tied to the earth. It was perfect. “How much for that?”
The woman put her hands beside her on the floor, pushed off, heaved herself into an upright position, then lumbered over to the mesh.
She dug in her apron pocket until she found a stack of Post-it Notes and a ballpoint pen. She wrote “$5.00” on one page and stuck it to the mesh. “Sound good?”
Arena hoisted the bolt of fabric to her shoulder.
When the woman moved behind the cash register, she checked the price on her own Post-it as if she hadn’t just written the note. Arena dug in her backpack, found a five, and handed it over.
They walked down Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard. Arena balanced the bolt of netting on her shoulder. A stray strip trailed her like a veil. “I’ve been looking for exactly this.”
This mesh was Arena’s mosquito net made visible. It was Anchee Min’s mosquito net, from Red Azalea. Arena said, “AKA, if I tell you what it is, will you help me with it?”
Arena wanted a partner. She didn’t know how to ask.
He said, “Tell me.”
“It’ll be an installation. Synthetic Heaven, I call it.” She couldn’t look at him. Then she did look his way, looked him straight and steady in his dark eyes, though it made her own eyes water. It was a muscle-building exercise, to hold his gaze. It was an exercise in personal energy. She collected her words in her head before saying them out loud. Finally, fast and soft, she said, “All you have to do is be naked.”
The day of Lit Expedition, Georgie woke up before Humble and the baby—woke up like a kid on Christmas, ready for her first day back at the work she was born to do.
By the time Humble got up, when Bella started to cry, Georgie was already out of the shower and drinking coffee. So many days lately her head had been cloudy. From morning until noon could pass in a blurry haze, one diaper change after another. Nursing hormones make a woman’s brain less engaged in aspirations. Georgie had read that. And she was prone to barometric migraines. Under a constantly cloudy Oregon winter sky, she could feel the atmospheric pressure shift inside her head. Today her
head was clear, with a chance of thinking. Beautiful.
“Big plans?” Hum asked. He scratched his stomach and reached for the coffeepot. He’d forgotten.
That was okay.
Georgie didn’t need Humble’s validation; her plans were important to her. It was a certain kind of peevish wife’s role to begrudge him his own forgetfulness, and she thought of Mrs. Joe Gargery, that belittling drudge, that cautionary tale of an unwilling wife and surrogate mother in the gendered society of Great Expectations. I may truly say I’ve never had this apron of mine off since born you were.
“Lit Expedition,” Georgie said, calmly. She had Bella in one arm and was patting the girl’s back. “Arena’s coming to babysit.” She touched her iPod in its docking station. It was already cued to her sound track, and blasted Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture through the house.
“Jesus, that’s loud.” Humble was puffy-eyed. He moved like an older man, totally hungover.
“It’s good for Bella and good for us.”
Then she remembered: Nurse Ratched, in Cuckoo’s Nest, blasted music through the psych ward. Agh! But this wasn’t a ward. It was her house. Humble wasn’t a patient. He could go out if he wanted to.
Anyway, maybe it was time somebody rewrote that book from Nurse Ratched’s point of view.
Upstairs, with the overture still playing, she put Bella in a rocking swing, then squeezed into her best pre-pregnancy skirt. She let her shirt hang out to camouflage the snug waist. It was a gorgeous and generous indigo blue, spun hemp and silk. A lucky, luxury shirt.
Today would be Bella’s first experience with an actual sitter.
It would be Georgie’s day out on her own.
The rocking swing ticked like a metronome, counting down the seconds.
The thought of leaving her baby in anybody else’s care made Georgie half-sick. Really, it did. But she’d see it through. People did this all the time.
The doorbell rang. Humble was in the bathroom, his morning office, and Georgie gave Bella a second look—the girl was buckled in, half-asleep, safe—then ran to get the door. Arena was on time, thank God. She was wearing a tiny T-shirt that said I ♥ OLD PEOPLE. Her jeans were striped jeggings. The girl was tall and thin and made being human in a human body look easy; everything fit and hung and tucked and moved in all the right places.
