by Monica Drake
The thought of putting her art up in the school gym for people to see made her queasy and have to pee, but it was better than picking up used condoms on the side of the highway. Dulcet showed her work. Arena aimed to be brave, like Dulcet.
She noticed a grainy photo in the Metro section of the Oregonian, the paper under her clay. It was a close-up of her mom’s face looking older and anxious. Her mom’s hair was wispy. She needed to put whatever people put in their hair to make it lie flat, product, something her mom would call toxic chemicals.
This was different from the earlier stories she’d seen about her mom and the attempted robbery.
There was a picture of AKA. There he was! Arena’s heart picked up. Her only friend! It looked like him, but more sulky. Wait—was that him? She started to doubt it. She’d already seen him a few times in strangers on the street—the slouch of his back, his shaggy hair—the way it happens when you’re looking for somebody, the way it happened when she thought about her dad. She’d see men on the street who could’ve been her dad, if he were alive.
She looked closer. This was her mother’s attacker, the man who’d left her mom limping like an old lady. The guy who wouldn’t leave the store. Alvin Kelvin Aldrich.
Aldrich, an emancipated minor, is on probation for property theft and menacing …
Arena couldn’t breathe. The air was thick with the dust of tempera paint and dry clay. She folded up the paper. Her stomach was a knot. In the back of the room, Barry Gibb helped a student into a smock.
She took the paper and slipped out into the empty hall.
Her mom had beaten up AKA. Her mom beat up her boyfriend, the only eyes she could look back into and not squint and skitter.
An alarm went off, blaring loud, like a fire drill, only this time it wasn’t a drill. It beat against the inside of her skull. She couldn’t hear anything else. It was in her head, in her brain, in her heart.
She couldn’t breathe until she got out the front door. In the school parking lot, she took out her phone and called, clay dusting the phone’s tiny buttons.
There was his voice—“Not here! Ha!”—and it was all a big joke except he really wasn’t there and he could even be dead because that voice had been his message for as long as she’d known him and now for all she knew he was nothing but energy in the cosmos and his voice was sound trapped in time and all of physics couldn’t explain why her heart hurt and her gut hurt and outside she wanted to see the city bus round the hill.
She wanted that bus like it was her breath.
She crushed the newspaper in her hand, then smoothed it out. She looked at AKA’s face, glowering and worried, and he was lost, and she was empty and he was hers, and her mother had done this, and no way was it AKA’s fault, and Arena was in love.
The partnering side of mating is a bodyguard arrangement, about sticking around to protect new babies and the mother while she’s vulnerable. Was that still so relevant, in the modern world? Sarah, on the couch, was a snow leopard on a rock ledge, patient and edgy. She wore an invitingly short T-shirt dress with a pair of high-heeled mules and called it good.
She ran a hand over Shadow’s knobby back, and watched the clock. She had strong coffee ready to make those spermy sperm race. Go, little soldiers! All she needed was Ben.
A footstep landed on the front porch. Sarah got up and Shadow got up fast, too, underfoot. Together they scrambled for the door. Sarah lost a shoe, and then she wasn’t a snow leopard at all but a stray and starved dog—not the plan! She stopped and tugged at her dress. She told Shadow to sit. She slid her foot back into her shoe and did her best to walk calmly.
She heard Ben make his way to the door. She poured the coffee. He’d have his hands full, his big satchel, and his crumpled, oft-reused paper lunch bag.
She flung the door open and threw out an eager thigh: Hello, Sugar!
A rusted wheelbarrow sat in the front yard, tipped to one side like a drunk trying to remember the way home. A man came from across the street carrying a shovel and hoe. He had dark curls and big shoulders. Ah! She’d forgotten: her latest date with lawn care, a day laborer.
Shadow made his way to the door slowly and started to bark an aging dog’s bark, deep and weak and slow.
Bags of mulch were stacked against the side of the house. They’d booked ahead—this guy was in demand. His teeth were white; his arms were strong. He was, he said himself, the day she met him in a parking lot, “good and fast and clean.”
He was kind of a young Orson Welles, if Orson Welles had worked out. He was beautiful genetic material.
“Coffee?” she offered, and held out the cup.
“Hey! Looks good!” Ben’s voice was sudden and booming as he came up the walk from the other way.
Oof! He’d seen her, offering coffee.
Sarah turned fast. Her hands shook, the coffee spilled, and the cup fell to the front steps and smashed. “You’re home.”
His medium beige foundation was broken by a five o’clock shadow. That was why men didn’t wear makeup: Their facial hair ruined it. The shadow was manly! He was half in drag. His nose looked better, really, or maybe she’d just grown used to it.
He bent and picked up a piece of the cup.
Sarah took his hand. “I’ll get that later.”
The day laborer started laying mulch, getting their flower beds ready for winter. Privately Ben had already asked Sarah more than once why they were hiring laborers for work they could do themselves. It was charity, she said. Giving men work.
She pulled Ben into the hallway, shut the door, and closed young Orson Welles and the rest of the world out.
Ben said, “Well, got through my stack of loans. I was working on a VA loan at the end of the day that looked like it’d never come together, but I think we’ve—”
She put her arms around him and kissed him. She didn’t care about loans. She unbuttoned his work shirt. He dropped his bag on the hallway floor.
He said, “Your doctor said wait two months.”
Sarah said, “We can’t wait.”
He said, “We might lose another one.”
Her body felt ready. Who could say when her last good egg would move from her ovaries to her fallopian tubes? “Anything can happen. I’ll take my chances.” She moved behind him and pushed him toward the stairs, upstairs to their bedroom.
Ben let her take his shirt off. He had on a ribbed tank, sweaty with the day’s work. He smelled like a man. A little like powder and makeup, too, but mostly a man. He smelled familiar. He smelled like hers.
The curtains were pulled. Outside, it’d grown dark, and the inside room was a cave against the winter. Sarah kissed his face. She could tell he was nervous. She said, “It’s fine.”
He said, “You’re sure you want to do this?”
“It’s what I live for.” When she pushed him onto the bed it was a loving shove and he was compliant.
“Our lives are good,” he whispered.
“We’ll make a good life for a child.”
“I worry about you—”
She said, “Shhh. It’s not about me.” She put a finger to her lips, then her lips on his, and she stopped him from talking.
He pulled away. He said, “Ow, Jeesuz!”
She’d hit his nose with her own.
He winced. “I’m okay.”
Sarah tugged at Ben’s boxers. She pulled her dress over her own head and kicked out of her underwear.
A child’s heart, that first functional embryonic organ, built in the mother’s own body, is no secret to a mother. Nyla’s unborn baby would show itself soon, through evolving morning sickness and later kicking. All she had to do was pay attention. For now, though, any embryonic struggle was overshadowed by the nuisance of a throbbing pain in Nyla’s side.
She’d pulled a muscle, probably when she executed the roundhouse.
Maybe when she broke the kid’s ribs.
God, she hated to think about all that! She could still feel the way her foot had made co
ntact, the bone cracking. She had a bruise on her instep. What was a bruised foot and an aching side compared to broken ribs? She could’ve punctured that boy’s lungs. They were lucky he was alive.
She beat up a child! Sheesh. Yes, he was a grown kid, almost eighteen, menacing and with a record, but still.
It was worse to her mind that he was brown skinned, maybe Native American, or African American, part Latino or from India, or all of those ancestries. He was a disenfranchised, disadvantaged youth. She’d made his future a little more screwed. From what she’d read in the papers, he didn’t seem to be a gang member. He wasn’t a murderer.
Her store was poised on the edge of a neighborhood forever in transition. She was only blocks from Unthank Park. The name of that park always sounded so ungrateful, but really it was named for Doctor DeNorval Unthank, one of Portland’s early African American doctors and a civil rights activist, maybe by necessity. He’d been chased out of Westmoreland, a white neighborhood, by hardcore racism. Now Nyla had become the very last thing she ever wanted to be.
She was gentrification. Even on her slim budget.
She was whitey! A scared white lady.
Dulcet treated the whole thing like an unexpected victory, a reason to slap a high five, pour another vodka ’tini—shaken, stirred, dirty, dry, laced with barbiturates. Georgie looked baffled, but that was sleep deprivation. Sarah only chirped, “Your training paid off!” Like Nyla had been doing yoga and kickboxing all these years to kick teenage butt.
She was ready to forgive that almost-grown boy for entering LifeCycles. He was misguided. He didn’t need money. He needed love! If he should perhaps want a foster mom, a friend, a big sister, a mentor, she’d be there for him.
What kind of mentor could she be, though? Jeez. The shame of liberal guilt climbed through her bones: a foster mom, really. Because why? Because she was white and old. Those were her credentials. That was nothing.
And she’d raised a couple of kids, true. She had experience there.
But she lived on her husband’s life insurance policy and had a narrow storefront like a toy store in a crummy part of town.
Nyla reached up to a high shelf for a bag of organic flour. As she reached, the muscle in her side gave a twinge that made her sweat. She breathed through the pain, visualizing letting it go like leaves drifting down a river.
This was her health care plan: visualizations.
She was seven weeks pregnant. The baby was still too small to feel except in nausea. Somewhere in the world was a man with a deep voice and black hair on the backs of his hands, who had left his DNA for the child that he would have with Nyla.
She could e-mail him. But she could never muster the level of naive optimism she’d had before the car wreck, the optimism that it took to build, again, a two-parent family.
On the same high shelf she found a metal tin with sugar inside. She slid the tin onto the counter next to the flour, then got out a quart of milk. She pressed one hand near her hip bone, over the ache. She was expanding her Amish friendship bread dough starter to give to friends. Baking was Nyla’s way of giving back. This round, it was a formal request to the world for forgiveness for her failings.
Norman Cousins, the writer, said, “Life is an adventure in forgiveness.” Nyla exercised her own forgiveness muscles daily, with the same rigor she brought to Pilates. She forgave the shortsighted, greedy politicians and the local land developers who filled in wetlands, killed off ecosystems, and flattened her childhood sledding hill to build a strip mall nobody needed then sprayed the place with neurotoxins in the name of pest control.
They’d killed the last beaver in Beaverton, a suburb of Portland.
This boy had only pulled her hair. It could’ve been worse. She limped across the kitchen, held her side, and found a wooden spoon in a crock of utensils.
Nyla had covered her fridge with inspirational notes, mostly in her own hand. One read, “A dirty coffee cup isn’t clean, but it’s never very dirty either.” That was hers. Another read, “The further off from England, the nearer is to France,” from the “Lobster Quadrille” by Lewis Carroll.
Nyla felt herself in the sea, and swam toward that further shore, seeking a way out. She lifted the ceramic bowl. The Amish friendship bread starter was a life form doing its job: yeast rising. She tended that starter like a child, every day.
She tended it the way she cared for Arena.
Who were the parents of her attacker, her victim? What kind of parents didn’t know when their child was heading toward trouble? That would be a mother who didn’t know her own child’s heart. Arena was safely in school.
Actually Arena was downtown, in the street, standing in the way of a barreling TriMet bus. She yelled at AKA’s apartment building, calling his name. The bus driver hit the horn without slowing down. Arena gave the bus a glare as though her fury could stop it. TriMet barreled forward. She dove for the curb at the last possible minute, tripped on the sidewalk, rolled in the passing crowd, and flipped the bus off.
A raspy and low voice said, “Get yourself run over, that way.”
She turned toward the voice. It was a man in a long army coat and a floppy, oiled-leather hat. He had a paper grocery bag under one arm and a short cigar between his teeth. It was the hippie she’d seen in AKA’s place, the guy who wasn’t AKA’s father.
She stood up fast and brushed herself off. “We met, remember?”
He looked her up and down, took the cigar out of his mouth, and raised his eyebrows. “I’d like to remember.” His voice pawed her like a hand.
“I was with AKA.”
The hippie put his wet cigar back between his lips. His teeth were dark and crooked. He worked a key into the lock and muscled the door open. “He owes us rent.” The cigar danced against the man’s lip. The gray sky had started to spit, and the man’s bag was dotted with rain. “He needs to pick up his crap.”
“Did he move out?” Arena was cold. She was shaking. Her heart was a pigeon, her lungs were all city bus exhaust.
“Disappeared,” the hippie said.
She’d already been down to the Juvenile Justice Center and asked about AKA. The suits behind their counters wouldn’t tell her anything. Confidential. At the hospital, she had to have a secret PIN number to show she was legally granted access to his information, to know if he was even there. It was all confidential. She had no clues. She’d scanned the phone poles for flyers, looking for a sign of AKA’s band. Maybe he’d play somewhere and she could show up.
She followed the hippie’s hunched shoulders into the shadows of the apartment’s stairwell. He let her. They went down skinny and unlit halls. He said, “Take anything of his you want. The rest is headed for a Dumpster.”
When she reached AKA’s room, she knocked, then pushed the door open. The windows were already open. A nylon curtain blew in the wind. Rain kicked up the tar smell of the roof outside. Blankets lay in a tangle on the mattress on the floor. There were clothes on the floor, too, like AKA had just stepped out of them.
She read the clothes the way she’d read a book. This place was her mosquito net, the source of her longing. She dropped down on the bed.
The hippie knocked around in the next room over. Footsteps came down the hall. She held her breath. The steps went on by.
Beside the bed there was an ashtray full of cigarette butts, a half-full plastic liter of warm Coke, and a photograph. It was the picture of AKA and his country house. There, for a moment stuck in time, he was a long-haired, shirtless, happy kid with a dog and a tire swing. Arena turned the photo over. Somebody had written a date and an address on the back in the curling, careful letters of a woman’s hand. Below the date, it said, “The Boring House.”
Of course: AKA would go home. He was in trouble. He was hurt. Arena’s own new-age, environmental, nonviolent mom had pounded him! He’d want the safety of his parents.
Her mom was nuts with saving the rain forest, conserving toilet paper—Canadian old-growth forests!—and barely dr
iving the car. But his mom might be the kind to buy Cap’n Crunch and watch TV with him.
She slid the picture into her pocket and left the room.
The hippie loitered in the living room, now stripped down to his post-working-day or whatever tighty-whities and a Hanes T-shirt. His hat was off. His long gray and black hair had the ring of hat head. Without the hat, he didn’t look so much like a hippie, more like just an old man who needed a haircut. He said, “You party?” He took a toke on a joint so small it was almost invisible between his thick fingers.
Party?
He held the tiny joint out.
She sucked in her stomach to slide past him. He exhaled and said, “Stay, Princess!” He followed her into the narrow hallway. He reached out. His fingers wrapped around her wrist and he pulled her toward him, smashing his face against hers. It wasn’t a kiss so much as their teeth hitting together. She pushed against his body and yanked her arm away. He threw the roach on the floor, then pushed her head down. She fought back. His underwear was tented as he pushed into her, and showed a damp spot. His hand pushed against her head, urging her down, toward that damp spot on his briefs. She brought her knee up and he twisted her wrist. It was all in seconds. He was strong, but wasted and unsteady. She screamed. The hippie was bigger than she was, but he lost his footing when she ducked sideways fast, and she shoved until he hit the ground.
She ran. He fumbled to get up behind her.
La la la …! Nyla hummed and stirred her Amish bread. Life was good, getting better all the time, if she could only shake the guilt and the ache in her side and the limp of her sore foot.
She’d called the courts and said she wouldn’t press charges—the attack was a misunderstanding, water under the bridge, right?—but the boy had a record. He was on probation. His future was in the hands of the state.
She added a cup of flour, a cup of milk, and a cup of sugar, everything in equal proportions. The starter was the “mother bread,” meant to be divided.
