“You did it,” Beth squeaked happily, “you dud it.” She was holding onto my arm with her extremely inebriated head resting against my shoulder. “Dud it,” she squeaked again, leaning against me. “Dud ut, dud unt, dud dunt, did it, dunt dunt, dun dun.” It was the Pink Panther theme song she was singing. When she was done, she giggled meekly and rubbed her head against the arm of my jacket.
“Okay.” Tanya stood erect, amazingly unencumbered by being nearly naked in fifty degree weather. “You two’s turn. You gotta do your dare now.”
“We gotta do ur dare,” Beth slurred, smiling up at me from my side.
“Fine,” I said. I took her by the shoulders and turned her to face me.
“With tongue!” Tanya hollered.
She was watching us like we were the most intriguing film. Beth was having trouble standing on her own, still she persisted, smiling up at me with her heavy eyes and wobbling in place. “Kiss me, Gillian,” she said like it was a joke, and puckered her lips. I sighed heavily, and took her head in my hands. Neither of us had ever kissed anyone before, with tongue, boy or girl.
“Okay, I’m gonna do it,” I told her, and readied myself as if preparing for impact in a boxing match. I tilted my head and went in for the kiss. Beth opened and closed her mouth, making fake sexy moaning noises, but about two beats before our lips would have touched, she doubled over and hurled all over my shoes.
The vomiting was violent and went on for a while. When we thought it had stopped, it started again. I held her head as she vomited on the gravel road, then walked her over to the mausoleum, where she vomited again against the back wall. Tanya followed us around like a worried puppy, topless and yapping out advice. “Hold her head. She needs water. I don’t got no water. You need to get her home. Throw her in the shower. Hose her off.”
It took nearly an hour and a few failed attempts at keeping some Mountain Dew (sans vodka) down before Beth was in good enough shape to make the stumbling walk home, during which I half dragged, half carried her most of the way. Somehow, we made it. It was now well into the wee hours of the night. She hit her bed and went immediately to sleep. I woke her briefly to pour water down her throat and undressed her the best I could, then curled next to her, falling quickly into a heavy sleep myself.
Her parents never even suspected. The next day, in the late afternoon, we went back to the cemetery and collected the things we’d left: our bikes, my radio, and her mother’s mug. Tanya wasn’t there, but her things were still as they had been the night before. I rode back to my house in the mobile home lot where I lived with my father.
He was a kind, quiet man who worked at the rock quarry fulltime, and was doing his best to raise me alone, since my mother left us when I was seven. She’d always been a drunk, and when she lived with us, he did little more than cry and mumble, and they yelled at night. So when I came home from school one day and she was gone, it wasn’t the worst thing. I won’t say it wasn’t hard, but it wasn’t the worst thing. It was bad at first, not knowing where she was or if she was ever coming back, but eventually I got used to not caring, and by the time I was that age, I didn’t really think about it anymore.
Dad did his best. He didn’t always know quite what to say to me, but he was always good to me. When I came in that day, hungover at twelve years old in the late afternoon, he greeted me and motioned toward our dinner, which was laid out on the kitchen table. He had bought us Subway sandwiches and we ate them in the living room, watching the football game as we often did on Sunday nights, as if nothing extraordinary had happened. He had no idea. Of course, he had no reason to suspect anything was different. As far as he knew, I’d simply spent the night at my friend’s house and came home the next afternoon, as I had many times before. But somehow, I thought he would be able to see it on me, this change, whatever it was, brought on by the events of the previous night. It was so obvious to me, and it didn’t even register with him, I was ruined for the world. We both were, Beth and I, spoiled, in a weird way. Our safe, simple world where our basic needs were met would no longer be enough for us. We longed to taste the freedom of her lack.
It was hard for us to sleep that night. We lay awake in our separate beds, our minds racing with thoughts of her. In the space between waking and dreams, I saw her slinking in her baby blue panties and running shoes, topless up the night road, the stars guiding her on toward the truck stop where scurrilous men handed her bills to crawl up into their oily cabins and take them in her mouth. The smell of Listerine filled my nose and tickled the back of my tongue. We pondered what it was like to be her, free as her, and would she let us in again to that place where we could be free with her?
We went back as often as we could, which was quite often. After school and after our homework was complete, most days, we sat with her until sunset. She told us about things. She answered our child’s questions. She answered every question we asked and told us things we never would have thought to ask. She could talk for hours on end without tiring of the conversation. She could dance to country music on her old radio, and twirl for us, and gorge herself on candy, and comb her hair straight, and smoke infinite quantities of cigarettes. I took up smoking with her as a lark, and began turning pale from the horrible menthols. Beth didn’t smoke again, and didn’t drink with her, either. She was afraid of it after that night of violent vomiting, but I would help myself to a shot of whiskey here and there, which I sipped as we sat, enjoying the privacy of the mausoleum walls: insulated by the bodies of the rich dead.
Soon, we sat with her after school and after we’d only pretended to do our homework, and our grades began to fall, and I became paler, and neither of us took much interest in the school, or the playground antics of our peers, or the yammerings of our parents and teachers. We had more important things to think about. We ran errands for her. We made grocery lists and bought her close approximations of the food she’d asked for at the local supermarket: peanut butter and jelly, bread, Lunchables, and Go-Gurt pouches, cookies, and canned SpaghettiOs; nothing perishable, because she didn’t have a refrigerator. If not for us, she would have lived off of the chips and candy bars and liquor she purchased late at night at the truck stop. She paid us for our errands, three dollars here, five dollars even, sometimes, for a big haul. She seemed to have a nearly endless supply of small bills. I had a hunch I knew what most of the cash was from, but I didn’t ask. Although she was quick to divulge information about her personal life, and about the seedy goings-on of humankind, there were some things we did not ask, which I knew she would never be honest about.
It was in the paper for weeks. I noticed it one morning as I sat with my father, eating cereal, him drinking his coffee and reading the sports section, which is all he really ever read of the newspaper. The news part of the paper was lying on the table in front of me, and my eyes caught a headline: “Search Still in Progress for Woman Robber.” I read the story. A woman, wearing a ski mask, weighing approximately one hundred pounds, about five feet five inches tall, had robbed a gas station in a neighboring town. They weren’t sure if she’d even had a weapon. She’d held up the place with something that could have easily been anything, shoved into a paper bag and pointed at the cashier as if it was a gun. The cashier was a kid, a girl of only sixteen, so she gave the woman everything: all the money in the register as well as in the safe, which unfortunately had not been locked, so she got away with nearly two thousand dollars in small bills. We lived in a very rural area of neighboring small towns, and this sort of incident was quite uncommon. My father noticed what I was reading. “Goddamned meth heads are everywhere lately,” he grumbled, shaking his head and sipping his coffee.
There was a number to call if you had any information. Although I assumed the suspect was Tanya, I didn’t even think about calling the number. It would have been a betrayal. She was ours now, Beth’s and mine. She was like our pet. She was like a cat. We could leave her alone all day, sometimes even skipping days, and she would still be there, crooning and waiting
to be fed and paid attention to.
We loved her. We loved her in different ways. For Beth, she was like a cool older sister, or older girlfriend. Beth felt excited and like she was doing something very taboo and very mature when she was with her. For me, it was a little different. I felt something that Beth also felt. On top of everything else, I needed to keep her well. I felt sorry for her, and I liked feeding her and caring for her. She was my friend, in a way, and I always felt like I was having an adventure when I was with her, but I also felt pity for her, hiding out alone there like she was. Nowhere to go, no one to see except the truckers and us.
Three weeks became a month and then, somehow, more than two months had passed, and winter was upon us. Tanya was becoming increasingly agitated during our visits. By the end of December, it would begin snowing, we all knew, and it wouldn’t let up until February. She didn’t have a plan. She never had. She mused about getting one of the truckers to let her hitch a ride with him out to California, or down to Florida. But there was something about the way she said this that let us all know these were only pipe dreams.
Beth snuck her blankets from her parents’ storage, and I bought her many sweatshirts and sweatpants from the dollar store with money she’d given me, which she wore in layers. She was paranoid that the FBI was after her. Sometimes it was the CIA and sometimes it was the NSA, though it was never the local police, which is what she should have probably actually been worried about. The reasons that the FBI, or CIA, or NSA might be after her were various and confusing, having to do with her husband, or boyfriend or brother, depending on which incarnation of the story she was telling that day, having deep government connections and trying to frame her, for what, it was unclear. She simply said, a wild look in her eyes, “I know that fucker’s tryin’ to frame me.” And after she took what she never wavered from referring to as her sinus medicine, she would lament the baby, which had either been beaten out of her, or which she’d been forced against her will to have aborted, or which she’d miscarried. I wasn’t sure what Beth believed, but I knew there was no husband or boyfriend, or brother, and there was no baby. There was just her shocked mind panicking like a tormented cat lurching at some constant apparition in the corners of her consciousness.
She was wide-eyed and more and more paranoid. Her past was a perpetually shifting narrative that, as she recalled its stories, sometimes seemed to surprise even her. She had no past, or she had many pasts. She had no foreseeable future. It was getting colder, and she had no plan. She was scratching at her own flesh till it scabbed and then scratching the scabs. She was trembling and chewing her lips. Sometimes, during the last two weeks, where she was chewing was bleeding, and one day one of her teeth fell out, and Beth cried, and I knew something had to change. There was blood coming from her gums where the blackened tooth had fallen out, and sinus medicine was crusted around her nose, and she just laughed and laughed, and laughed at the whole thing, and I knew something had to change.
It was a Thursday, dangerously encroaching upon a bad winter, and we were riding our bikes from school, an activity we would soon have to forsake, due to the oncoming snows. We’d start taking the bus again, and we would be fine. But what would she do? She didn’t have a plan, but luckily, I had one for her.
I told Beth I didn’t want to go to the cemetery right away. I wanted to take a different route, down Sycamore Street, where I knew of at least two empty houses that I thought could provide a good respite from the cold. We lived in a small town of just three thousand people, tucked into a valley on the western side of a small mountain. Nothing much happened. People didn’t move there. People either stayed, and stayed, or moved away, and the economy had been on a steady decline since I was small, so there was not a shortage of shabby, empty houses that had either been foreclosed on or altogether abandoned by owners who’d lost all hope of selling. The first house was in the middle of a residential block of town and quite exposed for our purposes, but we checked it out anyway. It was a small one-story thing, with a rotting porch, and many notices of condemnation stapled to the door and boarded-up windows. We crept in through the back door, and when we entered, it became obvious that we weren’t the only ones who’d broken in. Cigarette butts and empty beer cans littered the stained floor, and stupid graffiti covered the living room walls. It was cold inside, and we discovered that one of the bedroom ceilings was greatly compromised, crumbling in the corner, and rotten all the way through in one section, exposing the house to the elements.
We went down the road to the second place I had in mind, which was a larger two-story home that had been empty for a year, that rested on the edge of the residential street, tucked away inside a large, fenced-in yard surrounded by shrubbery, overgrown weeds, and trees, some of which were evergreens. This, I thought, would provide good cover, and if she draped the windows with blankets, would not draw much attention during the winter, even if she burned her candles at night. Beth and I dropped our bikes on the side of the road and crawled under the fence, pushing our way through the brambly weeds. It was more difficult to get inside this house as the doors had been boarded quite securely, but we were able to jimmy a basement window, and once we were inside, we saw that the house was in very good condition: dusty but sturdy, and not at all rotten. There was even a couch in the large living room, which, although it smelled of mold, would be usable. We were surprised to find that, although there was no electricity and the gas to the stove had been cut off, the water still worked. We could flush the toilet and run the sink. It didn’t get hot, but it was something. Beth was elated. “This’ll be like a mansion for her,” she beamed. We decided that we would convince her to move that night, after dark, but before it got too late. We went home, and I told my dad that I would be watching movies at Beth’s house until evening, and she told her parents that she would be with me, so that we could stay out past our regular curfew.
We met at the cemetery at six. We were disappointed to find Tanya wasn’t there. We spoke briefly about going to the truck stop to look for her, but somehow, that wasn’t an option. I think that would have been too real. Somehow, she would have seemed like a different person to us in a less private context. We waited around for a good hour. The mausoleum was cold, its stone walls exacerbating the chill, serving only to keep out the gusts of wind that came up intermittently as we waited. The sun was set, and we lit candles, noting that we could see our own breath rising and falling before us inside the mausoleum like a spectral warning of what would only be getting worse.
When Tanya finally arrived, she was drunker than usual, and the residue of her sinus medicine was crusted underneath her left nostril. “Heya, girlies,” she greeted us. “You’re out late. You bring me something? Here, look what I got.” She pulled two packets of Twinkies, some corn chips, a bag of Cheetos, a Pepsi, and a bottle of water out of her bag and laid them on the table. “You hungry? You have dinner?” She pulled a crumpled five, and three one-dollar bills out of her pocket and tucked them under a candle on the table. “I made some money today. It comes and it goes, though, don’t it? That was twenty big ones, and now look at it. Dang.” She’d told us she did “odd jobs” for the truckers, which Beth had presumed to mean helping them clean their trucks and pump gas, obviously not connecting the rantings of the first night of our meeting to actual, ongoing activities. At first, Tanya had been polite enough to answer Beth with, “Yeah, sure, that kinda stuff. I help ’em change the oil, give the hood a rub-down. Ha!” but she’d soon after that, during one of her sinus medicine binges, divulged and described in great detail exactly what the odd jobs looked like, and felt like, and smelled like, and how much she got paid for each type of odd job. Beth thought it was cool. I tried not to think about it too much.
She shook the Twinkie in my face. “You want some?”
I declined, but Beth opened the bag of Cheetos and ate a handful. I was anxious about getting things done, because we only had a few hours left before we had to be home.
“We found something
for you,” I told her. “It’s a place you can live in the winter. It’s warm.”
“It’s a big house,” Beth said, chewing on the Cheetos. “You’ll love it.”
“What are you talkin’ about? What house?” Tanya asked, tearing open the bag of Twinkies and diving right in. “These are so good,” she said through the mouthful. “You know what I seen today? I seen this guy with a weird little dog with a bandanna tied around its neck that said ‘little bitch,’ and I said to him, ‘Now hey, do you know what the difference is between a bitch and a—’”
“You’ve got to start packing,” I interrupted her. “We can stay a little later tonight and help you move.” I took a blanket off her bed and began folding it. “I can ride you on my bike on the pegs. We’ll have to make a couple trips. We can put your stuff in our baskets.” I finished folding one blanket, set it down on the floor and went to folding the next. But as soon as I’d picked it up, Tanya snatched it out of my hands.
“What the hell are you doin’?” she snapped. “What you got in your head? Move where? What are you talking about?”
“The house we found you!” Beth said excitedly. “It’s so beautiful. And it’s totally empty.”
“Where’s it at? How you know no one ain’t coming back?”
“It’s abandoned,” I said. “It’s all boarded up, but we’ve got a way in.”
“Why would we go in?”
I rolled my eyes. “You can live there through the winter,” I said loudly, exasperated.
“Where’s this house at?” Tanya asked, seeming not at all pleased.
“It’s in town,” Beth said. “Just at the end of Sycamore, before Natural Bridge Road. It’s real private.” She tried, “It’s hidden so no one will know you’re in there.”
Things to Do When You're Goth in the Country Page 7
