I saw he was angry. I smiled. I sipped water. I looked around the room. I looked at my watch. I said, “That’s an excellent question. I’ve been thinking about that all day, and just as I was reading . . .”
There was a long pause. Everyone was waiting for me either to take offense or to say something intelligent about autobiography, fiction, narrative distance, the ethics of writing about family members. I was waiting for the man to sit down. I didn’t know what to say. Finally, I said something I had heard Rick Moody say about the movie of his book The Ice Storm. The movie, he’d said, was like the evil twin of the book. Autobiographical, I said, was more like autopilot. When we wrote fiction, some kind of automatic story generated itself, based on what we knew about what we saw. I gabbled on and on about how the deeper truths emerge, how truth is embedded in intention, not fact. When I noticed that two women in the front row were taking notes, I shut up.
After the talk, I sped down the twisting brick side streets of Winter Park, passed the golf course, turned around, lost, passed the golf course again. I was looking for a busy road—any busy road. I plunged back into traffic, honking, honking, sorry. I pulled into a restaurant on 17, a Chinese place that had been elegant to me from afar when I was a child. I was always begging my mother to take us there. The restaurant was closed. It had a pay phone outside, by the red-leather-upholstered front doors. I’d loved those doors, like vertical couches. As a kid, I’d always thought bad people would bounce off and good people would slip inside. Once my mother drove me around back and said, “See? See? Filthy. No way will you get me in there. Not if you paid me would I eat in a place like this.”
On the phone now, I told my mom the boys were safely on their way home, and she said how nice it was to meet them.
I swallowed hard. Did she not remember kicking us out, me and Dave and the boys? To prevent myself from saying anything unkind, I said, “I can’t hear you!”
A siren passed, leaving my ears ringing. I reminded my mother I had my reunion and then I’d be home; it might be late.
“You won’t be here for dinner?” Her voice was metallic.
“I’ll be at the reunion. I signed up for the food.”
“Where?” she said. “What food?”
“The old gym.”
“That was torn down years ago!” she said. “Gotcha.”
I hung up. I banged my head on the red cushion door of the dream restaurant of my childhood, a door that was tattered, slashed, and grimy. And much harder than it looked from the road.
Five
When I was fourteen I wanted a living bra in the color “nude.” Lisa Colpac had a nude living bra, she’d had one since she was eleven and a half. She brought the box to school. She was the nicest, coolest girl in my class. Through junior high, she allowed me to copy her math, though I wasn’t allowed to approach her or talk to her out loud or pass her notes anymore. She told me I scared boys away, particularly Trey. She loved Trey. I just wanted a bra. I did not have breasts. But I had pain.
I wanted anything—anything: panties, pants, a hairbrush, a couch, the bra—in the color called nude. L’eggs panty hose in nude, in their silver plastic egg, would have made me happy for the rest of my life. I wanted things in the new “wet” look too. I was fourteen years old, I whispered to my mother. I needed to shave my legs, wear white Levi’s cords, wear Can-die’s, keep a comb and lip gloss in my pockets and use both every few minutes. I was the lowest person at my latest school, Cherokee Junior High. There was one other person who was like me, not talking, head down, eating lunch alone, weirdly dressed, no comb: a boy named Ricky Spees. People said he was my boyfriend. He was not at all my boyfriend. We never spoke to each other or to anyone else. He was a frightened, terrible boy in high-waisted pants and clodhoppers. Like me, he was a nervous wreck, an idiot, a ghost. I steered clear of that boy. I thought of him as a suicide risk and also contagious.
My father had moved out of the Holley Apartments and was living somewhere in Winter Park or north Orlando. I knew from eavesdropping on a call he made to my mother that he had been to Germany, and he was back. He was working and he had two girlfriends. “Livestock,” he’d called the girlfriends. My mother had wept into the phone.
At the house on Buckwood Drive, my mother was cemented in her bedroom for days at a time. I mostly wanted to go away to anywhere else. When I mentioned to my mother that I would love to go to prep school, she said under no circumstances. With what money? And with my record?
I wasn’t sure exactly what she meant. I didn’t have a record. Until last trimester, when Lisa Colpac moved to sit next to drippy Trey, I’d made straight A’s. But I didn’t argue. Record, okay, I have a record. Can I buy a bra? With my own money?
Never, she said.
My mother had to stay in the dark. She called it a headache. It seemed more like cancer to me. Something large. A head death. She was half asleep, almost frozen. I could poke her with a pencil or tap a book on her forehead, and I did, and she would not move; her eyes were open. She wasn’t dead but she was. It was strange, boring, and smelly; an aroma of old peaches and fur. She couldn’t have any light on her, or any moving air. I looked for words in the school library’s psychiatry books to locate my mother. I found catatonia, but I was sure she was just faking being frozen. My father had left her because she wasn’t any fun, and she was trying to get him back. She could, for example, get up whenever she wanted to. She just didn’t want to, most of the time. Meanwhile, I was supposed to be doing laundry, studying, ironing, being quiet, not leaving the house, not turning on the radio, not answering the phone, never letting anyone in the house. I could go to school but nowhere else.
Every afternoon after school, while my mother fake-slept, I went into the bathroom, sat on the low counter, and slowly took off all my clothes. I looked at every inch of my body. I inspected the parts between parts. I pretended I was my lover. I looked at everything—everything—I tried to see inside. It was nerve-wracking and delicious. I was making myself into myself. Why not go for gorgeous?
Once in a while my mother banged on the door, rattled the knob. “What are you doing in there? Come out. Right now. You know I don’t like locked doors.”
I smelled my armpits. I needed deodorant. I went to her bed, clothed again, and pleaded my case. She said no, no, no. “I’m not ready to get into that sort of thing,” she whispered. “Smell me,” I said. “I stink.” She said she didn’t think it was that bad yet.
She owned two bras. They were the creepiest things. I couldn’t even try them on. I didn’t want what was on her body to touch my body. When she wasn’t so sick, she hand-washed them. She slept in one or the other, under her flannel nightgown, under her robe—even in late spring, even now that it was roasting outside. The off-duty bra always hung on the bar over the toilet, nooselike.
I wasn’t going to survive if I stayed with her. I was turning primitive. I was starting to eat paper again, like Ricky Spees. I had to have paper in my mouth all the time. I was beginning to crave rocks under my tongue. I had looked up this affliction, too, and discovered it had a name, a history: pica, the craving for unnatural substances. It was rampant among the retarded. It was a sign I was under great duress. I was eating my Ticonderoga pencils. I was eating the metal. I knew I had to get away from her. I felt like I was carrying on, just trying to get attention with my paper- and pencil-eating and stone-sucking. But I couldn’t stop, either. I just pretended I was pretending.
I knew my father would buy me what I wanted: a bra, something in the color called nude. People in bras didn’t suck rocks or eat paper. I decided to insist on moving in with him.
My father was not convinced this was a good idea. He believed I was troubled. Emotionally disturbed—those were his words, and he’d gotten them from my mother. I had heard them use this phrase on the telephone when I was eavesdropping, which I did as frequently as possible. My mother would not agree to even a trial period. She told him I was in serious trouble. I had to be closely monitored. I’
d caused untold problems. She didn’t believe my father’s lifestyle could safely incorporate a child. “I am not a child!” I wanted to yell into the phone. I held my breath. I was no trouble. I was nothing. I was turning into a bizarre person because of my mother—I was sure of this—and if I could just get away from her, in a nice way, not to be mean, I would turn into the super-fun person I was meant to be.
“Hang up, Heather. Now,” my mother said every few minutes during these conversations, like a pre-recorded message.
Finally, though, my father said he’d take me. He was doing it to make my mother mad, not to make me happy, but I didn’t care. I just wanted out of her house. He liked to have fun, I liked to have fun. My mom did not like fun.
The man who came to pick me up, several days late, was a stranger, an interesting stranger, who, if he had not sounded like my father, would have caused me to call the sheriff. I knew he was my father when he whacked me on the butt and said, “Let’s hit it. Burning daylight, why is it you ain’t ready?” This sounded exactly like my father.
He’d permed and dyed his hair into a frizzy golden Afro. He was grinning nervously, fiddling with a bolo tie studded with a turquoise the size of a baby’s palm. He was wearing cowboy-style jeans, tight, and ostrich-skin cowboy boots. He was jumpy, tapping one foot then the other. I stood there, gaping. I looked at his belt, expecting to see a holster, handguns. Fred was written there, in tooled white letters, Fred Fred Fred. The belt was cool. I would love a belt like that with my name. Anyone’s name.
I wanted to get in his car and be gone, before my mother came home and everyone changed their minds about everything. But it was so much harder to go with him than I had thought it would be. Without me, I worried, my mother would kill herself. She’d threatened this so many times that I suspected it had become an idle threat. But what if she actually did it? Would it ruin my whole life?
“I’m ready,” I whispered. “Let me get my stuff.”
In his gigantic brown Oldsmobile Delta 88, he lit a cigarette even though one was fuming in the ashtray. He said we could eat at any restaurant I wanted. It was four in the afternoon. This was the opposite of anything my mother could even conceive of, and it was exactly what I wanted. “Steak ’n Shake!” I said. I’d been to so few restaurants, I knew each one by heart.
“Gary’s Duck Inn,” he said. He banged the steering wheel.
“Where is this place?” I turned off the blaring radio.
He turned it right back on. “I don’t need a lot of static. That’s going to be rule number one. Don’t give the Grand Poobah any static.”
When I buckled up, he said, “Don’t do that.”
I unbuckled.
“You want to be able to get free. You want to get the hell out.” We rared out of the driveway like the car was on fire.
I looked at the Grand Poobah. All I could think of was static.
He took a glass off the dashboard and slugged it back as we careened across Orlando. This could go anywhere, it seemed, and that seemed like the best thing that could happen to me. My dad was back.
He reached down under the seat—we were over the center line now—and from a white plastic flask refilled the glass between his legs.
“Isn’t that Gary’s Duck Inn?” I said, pointing to a sign in the shape of a giant faded brown duck.
We veered down a side street and through a trailer park. We passed a woman in a see-through top with two little kids wearing only diapers. She looked beautiful and exhausted. She looked exactly how I felt. I watched her out the back window. I was going to get my dad to buy me a bra, and new clothes to go over it, nude shoes, a cute wet-look purse, and makeup.
I took a piece of ice from the drink between his legs. It tasted bitter, like a broken branch, and my stomach tightened and rolled over, and over again. I opened my window and spat it out.
“That’s not water,” I said. “Gross.”
“I’m not thirsty,” he said. “For water.”
At the Duck Inn, he wept openly, blowing his nose and wiping his face repeatedly with his white cloth napkin. He said he should never have left a child with our mother. She was an emotional wreck, a person hell-bent on unhappiness for mysterious, unknowable reasons; maybe I could shed some insight. She’d ruined me. He wondered how I would ever make it in the world, having been exposed to so much lunacy.
I thought I should know the answers to his questions. I pretended I did know and wasn’t allowed to say. This habit of mind—pretend to know, pretend it’s not allowed—was how I was sorting my life.
It was too late, he said. I was completely ruined. The woman had single-handedly turned me into a head case.
“I’ll have fish in the bag,” I said. I ordered fish in the bag because he thought that was the funniest-sounding dish. It frustrated him, but I ate the bag, too, the blackened and browned parchment paper melting in my mouth. This was the life I wanted and deserved: fancy dinners, freedom, new clothes, normal things. I put my feet up on my father’s side of the booth, sat back, and finished my water, ate my ice. I was a clever and companionable person, wise beyond my years, and fun.
After the Duck Inn, we went to the Rexall, where my father believed I needed to purchase unmentionable female items, and where I spent as much of his twenty bucks as fast as I could: giant silvery dark plastic sunglasses, hot-pink nail polish, Bonne Bell Lip Smackers, a puka-shell necklace, Maybelline mascara, green flip-flops, and Hawaiian Tropic suntan lotion. These were the things I wanted, the things I’d wanted for years. I sat in the backseat in order to apply the oil properly.
He pulled into the parking lot of Oak Ridge High School. It was nearly six, but the lot was full of cars. The schools were in double sessions in those days because Florida was booming. But I refused to go into the office and enroll for fall. I crossed my arms. I closed my eyes, zipped my mouth, crossed my legs, put on my seat belt, hugged myself. I could not change schools again. My mother had enrolled us in a different school every single year of our lives, some years making us switch in the middle of the year, always sending my brother and me to different schools. I knew no one at Oak Ridge. It was a poor-kid dangerous school with terrible teachers. I had to go to Boone. I knew people—Lisa Colpac, Keith Landreu, Duane Bacon, Ricky Spees—who would be going there. At Boone, I’d have a chance. With my father and this whole new life, I had a chance.
He hollered at me while I held tight to myself and kept my eyes shut. He said, “Ah, goddammit,” and I looked at the cloud of hair shining in the sun like frizzled aluminum foil and thought, I can’t really be related to this man.
In the trailer on McLeod Road, my father pulled a giant jug of gin off the counter and filled a glass that was sitting in the sink. Then he added an ice cube.
One bedroom was all filled up with his bed. You crawled across it to get to the closet. The other bedroom was filled with a lathe, a table saw, boxes of tools, piles of wood. In the jalousie window porch attached to the front of the trailer, a white dog slept on a brown La-Z-Boy. My father said, “Sleep here with Dolly, girl child.” He laughed.
“Is there a pillow?” I asked after a little while.
He pointed to the love seat. “Cushions. Many cushions,” he said. He patted the back of the love seat. “Good furniture.”
I missed my mother, but I knew that would pass; I just had to get used to him. I wasn’t going to cry over stupid pillows. Dolly didn’t get up from the recliner. I wondered if she bit.
My father had a couple of drinks while listening to the radio. He went to the bathroom with a fresh drink and a fresh cigarette: he lit one off the other. Then he left. I followed him to his car. He would not say where he was going.
The Olds idled under the giant jacaranda tree. It was good to be outside. The sky was purple. I never wanted to live anywhere else but Florida, it was so beautiful all day and then night was dressed up, with jewelry, so you didn’t have to be. I leaned on the hood. “Don’t go!” I said. “Let’s play a little cards. Take me with you.”
I peeked at him through the windshield. He was in a cloud of smoke.
He snorted and laughed, then slung ice out the window and backed out as I slapped along in my new flip-flops, holding on to the door frame. “Well, at least tell me when you’ll be back.” I was like the new dog.
“Classified!” he hollered. He banged my hands with the heel of his hand. Then he lunged down, mouth open. He was going to bite; he meant it. I drew my hands back. I watched him, in a cloud of orange McLeod Road dust, as he turned into the night.
He slept during the day. For dinner, he brought us Chinese food, or we went to Jin Sha, sometimes to Gary’s. And then he went out. I huddled with Dolly in the recliner, night after night, and turned on the porch television so that the noises wouldn’t startle me as much. All over the trailer there were giant flying cockroaches. You could see their eggs along the inner edge of the television screen. There were lizards on the ceiling, roly-polies everywhere, living and dead. There was Raid in the kitchen, but I hated to fill my own room up with that white dusty spray; it made me nervous for Dolly and nervous for the geckos, which I hoped ate the roaches and not the other way around. I focused hard on the television, although nothing really made sense. My mother had never let us watch television. Now it was like I didn’t know how. I couldn’t figure out the plots. Maybe she really had ruined me.
Toward the end of the summer, enrollment paperwork came from Oak Ridge High School; I threw it in the trash. One day in August, after my father had been gone for two days and counting, I drank part of a beer. Then I called up Boone High School. My daughter, I told them, would be enrolling. I told them she was interested in band and acting, and asked if there were any clubs. Spanish? Debate? Chess? I gave my mother’s address.
You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know Page 5
