I put my feet on the seat to avoid the cold air coming in. Suzy’s floor was rusted-out lace. Mom’s pale pink bedroom slippers transformed my real feet into mouse-looking feet. I tucked them under my butt and shivered.
“What if she doesn’t start,” Mom said. She closed her eyes. She held the steering wheel in her hands as though gently shaking Suzy by the neck.
“It starts, it starts,” I said. “I started her up earlier.”
“She’s not starting, Heather. She’s not starting.”
“You aren’t engaging the clutch. You have to press down.”
“Oh my gosh in heaven,” she said, peering down at the pedals accusingly.
If I made my mother think I was in on her plan, I could sometimes redirect her. I’d help her look for the threatening trucks, then casually suggest a troll through Holley Apartments’ dirt parking lot. I wanted my father back. We weren’t making it without him. For months I’d been calling his work number after school, letting it ring for hours. He never picked up his phone. I wanted to know: Could you make a phone ring for an eternity? Or at some point, does the operator step in and put a stop to it? You’re done trying! No one is home! I could try him only after school when my mother was out job-hunting. She did not want the phone used for any reason except an emergency.
Secretly, I was thinking about maybe moving in with my father. What had happened to him? Where was he? Did he really have a new family, as the neighbor girl, Chantelle, had suggested over a year ago, flipping her gross new bra straps with her witchy index fingers? Reaching inside her own shirt and snapping. I hated that Chantelle. She lied about little things; she seemed obsessed with sex talk. She said, “Heather, you’re such a dip.” She couldn’t believe I didn’t know what a rubber was. Of course I said I did know. You really don’t, she said. I can tell. If you know, then why won’t you say?
I don’t want to say.
After he first left, I’d received a postcard from my father, postmarked, thrillingly, Bonn, West Germany. In it he said to tell my mother not to worry so much and he was hoping to get a goat when he returned to Florida—they were incredibly destructive animals. Would I like a goat? He said he’d forgotten to pack socks and underwear. I thought if only he had me, if only he’d taken me with him, I would have provided underwear, I would have brought socks. He’d signed the card with his giant trademark cursive F. In the upper left-hand corner of my homework that fall, I’d started putting a big H. It could also be used for personal tic-tac-toe. I only played myself. I pretended not to know what I had just done. That was easier than it sounded, but it was still a kind of trick.
Now, Mom and I were lurching down Summerlin at a speed so slow I was sure it was illegal. Suddenly Suzy started choking and rumbling. We lurched forward.
“Oh my gosh.”
“What,” I said, looking around for the convoy, or for a tire to have flown off the ancient truck.
“The front door. I am suddenly not at all sure I locked the front door.”
So we went back, as we always did. My mother loped out of the truck and up to the house. When she came back, she got in, lurched us halfway down the driveway, then said, “Can you run quick, check the door, honey, would you? I’m just not certain. Would you double-check?”
I lunged out of the truck and hurtled up the driveway in the dark, but there were pink edges around the sky now. It was freezing.
I twisted the knob.
The door was locked.
But it wasn’t completely shut and I was worried about my outfit. It was what my mom would call a “getup.” We weren’t going to be able to walk around in these clothes. What were we thinking? She was in plaid pants from the 1940s, a plaid shirt over another plaid shirt. Her hair was in curlers. She was always in curlers; even her driver’s license photo was in curlers. They wouldn’t let her change it. I’d called the secretary of state and pretended to be her. My accent came out British, vaguely like a queen. No new photos.
“Heavens to Murgatroyd!” I’d said, enjoying my voice. Whoever this person was, I liked her.
I pulled the door closed, quiet but hard. This was good strategy. She’d think, My thorough, safe, conscientious, beautiful daughter. I’d get points.
I was hardly back in the truck when, boom, she was out to check again. She took her purse. My mother didn’t trust me with her purse. Each night she hid it somewhere or slept with it. She would not leave me alone with her purse. This was because I ransacked her things regularly and read all the mail that came to the house. Every afternoon, I got off the school bus and went straight to the mailbox, collected the mail, and read every word of every piece—everything. I even tried to read the long-paper lawyer mail, thick packets of gobbledygook, worse than my textbooks. It always spelled doom: foreclosure, divorce, escrow, custody. My father was suing her and she was throwing away the paperwork. The lawyer letters were getting longer, the envelopes thicker; she was ordered to show up for court dates, and I had a very strong feeling she was not showing up. She kept saying to me, over and over, “It’s the children who are victimized in these situations. The children! They are the ones who suffer.” She wanted me to get my own lawyer and pay for it myself. If I didn’t have representation, the court system would run over me.
Sometimes there was an envelope with a check from Fred Sellers. No return address. No note. The address on the check was 701 Buckwood Drive: our address. We were eating way-more-than-day-old from the Merita outlet store, and twenty-for-a-dollar lime and lemon-lime yogurts that were past their prime. I begged, “Cash one check! Please! It’s our own money!” But my mother argued that if she took the money, she’d be construed as condoning the divorce, and she couldn’t condone divorce. She’d been raised Catholic, she had married for life.
“But you won’t even take me to church,” I pointed out.
“Honey, you’re haranguing me again. Please. I can’t take your pressuring me all the time. I’m on the very brink.”
It was getting light out. My mom hunched over the steering wheel, squinting as though we were pressing, blindly, into stiff wind, dense fog. She was driving about four miles per hour. I watched the speedometer closely.
“You can go faster, Mom,” I said. “This is hard on your clutch. This is what is wearing out the clutches so fast, the guy said. Remember? You are riding the clutch.”
“Thank you, honey,” she said. “I’ll try to do better. Now, eyes peeled. This is where I lost them last night. I think right in here. Can you see anything?”
We mounted the on-ramp for I-4. On the highway, a steady stream of vehicles passed us, honking. She rolled down her window and waved them on, grimacing. After a while, she honked back. “Mr. Big Hurry!” “Mr. So Important!” “Mr. Better Than Everyone Else! Here’s a toot for ya! Back at ya!” She shook her tiny, papery fist. I scrunched down in the passenger seat.
“Let’s go home,” I said. “I’m already going to miss the bus.”
“I have a hunch,” she said, glittering. “Let’s just try the parking lot at the oil company. I think that’s where they might gather to stage.”
“No,” I said. But I didn’t care. First period was band. Kyle Roberts, Duane Bacon, and Keith Landreu. Keith was a lanky, pimpled, rail-skinny boy with thick, frizzy, curly hair, the kind that moved independently of him, giving his head a fragmented, lopsided, ridiculous effect. I couldn’t help liking him for that. But Kyle and Duane were horrible boys who called the teacher gay and said nasty blow-job-type things to us winds. You like flowers, right, Heather? So why don’t you put your tulips on my organ? More than once, Duane Bacon had put a note in my flute case. I knew it was him. He wanted to make me talk. He wanted to lick my feet.
Being late meant I would miss band. But being late for the bus meant my mother would drive me, and she’d insist on walking me to the doors, carrying that crazy box.
“You need your headlights on,” I said.
“My headlights are off for a reason, Heather honey. Oh my gosh—look. See thos
e vehicles up ahead?” Her voice shifted into a football-stands yell. “Good girl, Suzy! Well, they aren’t getting away with it! I’m going to get to the bottom of this.”
The caravan of trucks ahead of us didn’t have license plates, and they did look creepy. There were a couple of military bases around Orlando . . . but still. It was weird. We followed them down the off-ramp at Colonial. We turned, after them, to the right. This was the way to the base and to the beach.
“No!” I cried. “Mom. No. I have school!”
“Aha!” she said, and she tapped the steering wheel. “We’re on ’em!”
Ahead of us, the trucks were ghostly-looking in the foggy dawn. They were flatbeds, with giant hoops covered in taut camo canvas, like a military Little House on the Prairie. Soon, their taillights were way ahead of us. We were doing nearly forty mph, warp speed for Suzy, but five mph below the posted minimum.
I rolled down my window. I took the apple from the box.
“Honey,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “It’s nippy. So? Sue me.”
I palmed the apple and then winged it ahead as the icy air took bites from my face. I knew I wouldn’t hit the trucks, but I wanted to try. I wanted to say, “We’re back here!” I wanted to say Hello and Help. I wanted to say Get Me out of Here. I wanted to ruin my mother’s plan, be part of it, both at once. The world absorbed the apple without a sound. It was as if it had never existed. Wind flashed into the cab and whipped my hair into my mouth, my eyes. I rolled up the window and watched the road sliding under the broken-out bits of floorboard, hoping to see the apple or at least some applesauce.
We drove in silence for a long time. I thought of my homework, in my satchel, undone. And how hard it was to know which was worse. This or band.
We didn’t look for my father that day, but we did on other days. We’d saddle up Suzy, check the door countless times, and set out at the crack of dawn.
Chantelle Jenkins, the neighbor girl who enjoyed telling me about where her father put his pee-pee in her mother, was the one who told me my father lived at the Holley Apartments; she’d been swimming there, with her father and my father’s new family. I told her my father was in Germany and I told her she was obstreperous and mendacious. She knew penis this and gonads that, but I knew some words too. Chantelle said I was a freak. I told Chantelle she was so normal, she was devoid of interest. She was like a fake person. Plastic. “You’re like a toy,” I said.
We discovered the Holley Apartments were not named for the plant. There was no landscaping whatsoever. As we chugged around the dirt circle that was the driveway, I looked around for someone like my father. The apartments were cement block, painted pink. As far as I could see, there was no pool.
“It was worth a shot,” my mother said. She looked happy and calm, tooling around the circle.
I convinced her to go around again. I wanted him to see us, to understand that we knew all about his other family and his horrible new life. I believed that if he knew we knew, he’d feel so terrible, so ashamed, he’d come back and be happy with us. His real family.
“Let’s ask at the office,” I said. “For their manifest.” I loved the word manifest. It sounded nasty, but it wasn’t nasty, it was powerful and intimidating.
She said we couldn’t go in like this. “They’ll think we escaped from the asylum!” she laughed. “Look at us.”
“This is how we look, Mom,” I said, bored and flat and as dully as possible.
I pressed my face against the cold glass of the window and looked hard at the metal doors, the dark cars, as we were driving away. I wondered whether, even if I caught sight of him or his car, I would say so to my mother. It would feel like I was ratting him out. I didn’t want to sic her on him. I just wanted him to remember me, to see me. Maybe I could dash out and talk with him alone, without her. I looked hard for a sign of him. His golf clubs. A pile of junk.
“This is a bust,” she said, and we headed for home. I had a nervous school stomach. What if one of those men in front of the apartments was my father? What did he look like now? What if we’d driven right past him? I looked back. Maybe a good man in a suit with a briefcase and shiny shoes was chasing us down the road, waving, Wait up! Wait up!
Along Orange Blossom Trail, there were men with beards, barefoot, shuffling along, drinking out of paper bags. Out in front of GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS! girls sat on stools and waved. I waved. A shirtless man waved back.
My mom said she didn’t think it was a very good idea to encourage that sort of behavior. And in that moment, I thought, I will dedicate my life to encouraging that sort of behavior.
“Mom,” I said, “here’s the turn. Go, go, go. Don’t stop on green, don’t stop on green.” Behind us, a truck was flashing its headlights, the driver snarling.
“I can’t get over at the last minute!”
“You can get over!”
“I can’t!”
We missed, again, the turn toward home.
Three
The night before we left Michigan for Orlando, Dave and the boys waited in the parking lot while I ran to Walgreens. I’d ordered triple sets of a dozen photos: the boys at the beach, the dogs and boys in the park, the boys in the fall leaf piles, the boys playing Nintendo, the boys and Silly String, holding the dogs in my backyard—all of us, including the dogs, grinning like lunatics. I wanted to give sets to my mother and my father so they could put us in frames, display us as family.
There was a line for photos, and I thumbed through People as I waited. I tried to stay up on the stars’ pregnancies and melt-downs so as not to be a complete cliché as an English professor. It was hard to just keep a hand in, though. I recognized the names—Jennifer Aniston, Angelina Jolie, Britney, Jessica—but not the faces. It was like high school. All the popular girls made sure they looked exactly alike. It would be a life’s work to really know who was who. I was trying to sort out the women when a young man came up and stood right next to me, way too close. I pulled back, my heart beating wildly. I was just about to shout for help. I held tight to my purse. He had a backpack pressed to his chest—was he shoplifting?—and a ball cap on. He tried to hug me.
“What are you doing?” I said very loudly, and people in line turned to me. The man laughed and tried again to hug me.
“No!” I said. I walked toward the doors, where there was usually a cop.
“I want this,” he said. “Heather.” He shook my shoulder. We were standing in front of a display of bagged snacks.
It was Junior. He dropped the backpack to the floor and used both hands to shake me.
“What are you doing?” I said. “What are you doing?” It seemed like a mean trick he was playing.
When I got back in the car, Junior was already telling his dad and Jacob what had happened. I’d squealed like a girl, he said, the whole store freaked out.
“I thought he was a shoplifter,” I said. I laughed.
Junior said, “You thought I was a homeless person. A criminal! The look on your face!”
In the car, Dave had put his arm around me. I leaned on his shoulder. He asked me if I was okay. “Are you sure about all this, sweetheart? Have you taken on too much with us three guys and this big trip, this trip home?”
I admitted, quietly, I was just a little nervous about flying. I turned to the backseat and told Junior I was really sorry. I was just tired. I felt crazy, wrong, stressed-out. It was Orlando: I was tense because we were going home.
He said there wasn’t anything to be sorry about. “No worries,” he said. “I thought it was funny.”
This kind of confusion had happened before. Sometimes I didn’t seem to recognize the boys. I was afraid I did not love them. Or I was mentally ill. Or both.
After knocking and knocking on my father’s door, we walked in and there we stood, watching a man asleep on the small curved gold crushed-velvet sofa. His snoring was so loud, with such chest heaving and such dramatic pauses between breaths, it was like watching a zoo animal. The
timing was somehow off, the snore not in sync with the breathing. The boys couldn’t stop giggling. They were falling on each other.
The house was cluttered, but furniture was missing. The end tables and side chairs were gone. The photos were gone from the mantel, except the one of me in my pink prom dress, standing next to my father. Piles of mail, magazines, newspapers, covered the dining room table, save for a little carved-out space at the end where my father’s office chair sat. At his place, on a weathered yellow place mat, three ashtrays smoked, filled with dead and dying cigarettes. The boys looked cold and scared and small. I put my arms around Dave and held on.
“I think Louise has moved out again,” I said. The televisions and radio blared. The sleeping man had to be Donny. He had the Donny shape: doughy, mountainous, scars on the fronts of his shins and knees, a Frankenstein.
“No woman lives here,” Dave said loudly, “that’s for sure.” I was surprised at his tone, how hard it was. I’d expected things to be so different here, just because we were coming down.
Why would I have thought that? Meanwhile, Junior had spied the organ and was running his hands up and down the keyboard, which had never worked. Jacob was picking at both eyebrows, thumb and forefinger riffling through the crop of hairs, plucking.
“So, where’s Fred?” Dave said. He stroked my back and I pulled away.
I walked down the hallway in the dark. Behind the closed door of my old bedroom, I heard a man coughing—not my father’s coughing—and strange sounds, sex whimpering and elevator music oversimplified, a porn soundtrack. Whenever Fred’s current wife, Louise, took off, my father took in drifters, non-vets he met down at the Legion, men who promised to barter maintenance work for rent. They stole his money; he wrote them large checks and told me they were his friends, leave him alone, mind my own business. His sister had quit speaking to him because of it. All his tools were long gone, along with my grandmother’s silver, crystal, and china, his newer computer, a bed. They were good men, he said. He knew them.
You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know Page 2
