Like Mandarin

by Kirsten Hubbard

  Talking to Mandarin came easy now. It was hard to believe I’d ever been too intimidated to do anything more than observe from afar.

  “So did your mom track him down?”

  I shrugged. “I think she was embarrassed. She didn’t want to make a bigger deal out of it than it already was. He never wrote or called. But I guess he knew about me, because years later, she got this letter from a lawyer with a check from his insurance. He got shot. Not while on the job. While hunting.” I paused. “Taffeta’s dad only lived with us for a year before he split. Fathers are unnecessary anyway, my mother says.”

  “Damn straight.” Mandarin withdrew a cigarette from the pocket of her blouse and lit it. “The biggest mistake women make is falling for men. They’re worthless. They’re worse than worthless.”

  “Then why do you …” I stopped.

  Mandarin raised her eyebrows. I was afraid she was going to get angry, like she had when I’d broached the same topic at the A&W. But our friendship was a million times stronger now. And I was dying to know.

  To my relief, one corner of her mouth turned up in a half smile.

  “Go on. You can ask me anything, y’know. I just don’t guarantee an answer.”

  “Why do you …” I paused again, trying to think of the best way to say it. “Why do you have … Why do you sleep with so many of them?”

  “Come on, Gracey. Isn’t it obvious? Or maybe you’re just too young to understand.”

  I wanted to object, but I thought it might make me seem even younger.

  Mandarin took a long drag on her cigarette. “There’s just something so …,” she said, “I don’t know … so exhilarating about making another person’s whole body respond. All their attention’s focused on you. Like in that moment, you are the most important person in the world.”

  “The most important person in the world,” I repeated slowly.

  Mandarin glanced at me. “To that one guy, at least. But I do it for me. Not for them. I hate how people insist a girl’s giving part of herself away when she sleeps with somebody. While men are gaining something. Why can’t it be the other way around?”

  “What about what everybody says about you?”

  “Who’s everybody? All the stupid hicks in Washokey?”

  I shrugged.

  “Look—it doesn’t matter to me what everybody thinks. You know that. But if I quit sleeping around, everybody’d think it did matter. See?”

  “Kind of.”

  “But it doesn’t,” Mandarin said, as if she still felt the need to convince me. Or maybe even herself.

  “So it’s not because of …”

  “Just say it.”

  Far off, a balloon cracked against the barbed wire decorations. “Not because of … what your father did to you?” I asked.

  “That’s what they all think, ain’t it? Nobody’d ever believe it, but my dad never laid a hand on me. I mean, he hit me and all, but no more than normal. He’s been useless as a father, maybe. Even useless as a human being. But he never did anything like … y’know. Nothing like that.”

  We sat there in silence for a while, listening to what sounded like cheers coming from the direction of the cafeteria. Mandarin drummed her fingers on the bleacher seat. Then, suddenly, she grinned.

  “Hey! Know what? I still haven’t given you your birthday present.”

  She stood. A wind shuddered the bleachers, as if Mandarin’s body had been the only thing keeping them still. She dropped the end of her cigarette and mashed it out with her bare foot. Then she reached into her cigarette pack and withdrew a small package of folded newspaper, taped many times.

  “I didn’t wrap it all pretty, like your mom did. And don’t expect much. It ain’t big. Or expensive. But—here.” She handed it to me.

  I pried open the wad of newspaper. An arrowhead fell into my hand. Not just any arrowhead, but the one I’d admired the most from her collection. Tiger skin obsidian. The moonlight gave it an unearthly glow. Before I could get a good look, Mandarin wrapped her hand around mine, folding my fingers over it.

  “I thought you should have it,” she said. “You’ll appreciate it more than I do.”

  I held my breath, but she didn’t explain any further. I felt her fingers tighten almost imperceptibly around mine. The edges of the arrowhead bit into my palm.

  “So about our escape …,” Mandarin began.

  “To California?”

  “I know we ain’t talked about it as much as we should have, but that doesn’t mean I ain’t been thinking about it. I got money saved up from cocktailing, way more than enough to start us out. I figure we can stay at a motel till we get an apartment. In the meantime I’ll be looking for an agent. So I can model.

  “But I don’t have any pictures to show them,” she finished.

  It took a few seconds for me to understand what she meant.

  “My new camera,” I said. “I can take pictures of you!”

  “You’d do that?”

  “They might not turn out too well, but they’d be something to show people, at least. If you want, I could get a book from the library, maybe—”

  “Gracey,” she said, releasing my hand. “Did I ever tell you how much I love you?” And swiftly and deliberately, without any warning at all, she took my face in her hands and kissed me on the mouth. Then she jumped to her feet, her hair swirling around her face like a tangled black witch’s wig. The bleachers boomed in the wind.

  “I’ve got to go,” she shouted. “Find me tomorrow! And happy birthday!”

  She banged down the metal steps and leaped into the empty football field, rapturous, her arms outstretched as if she were about to take off. I remained where I sat, until the wind quieted and my stomach relaxed enough for me to stand.

  As May came to a close, the final drumroll to the tri-county pageant began. Momma insisted I stay home every day after school to help prepare. Though all Taffeta’s dresses and accessories had long been completed, Momma couldn’t sit still. The afternoons were a frenzy of adjustment, reconsideration, taking apart, and putting back together. I spent my free time studying the photography books I’d checked out from the school library.

  I saw Mandarin after school just once that week, when we met for milk shakes at the A&W so I could fix the mistakes on her math homework. I’d slipped out while Momma had been painting my sister’s face in makeup with names like Frisky Flamingo and What in Carnation. Mandarin had ways to keep herself busy, she assured me, though I sensed that my unavailability annoyed her.

  At long last, I convinced her to consider helping the kindergartners as her community service project. She could serve ten hours in as little as two days. And after the way she’d talked to Taffeta, I knew she got along with kids. But getting her to approach the kindergarten teacher was another story. “That bitch’ll think I’m gonna corrupt ’em all,” she said.

  Taffeta seemed overwhelmed by Momma’s pre-pageant storm. She was the eye of the hurricane, but in a way, she was overlooked. As soon as Momma stepped out the door to run an errand, she came after me for attention—bringing along a game of Candy Land, a page to color, an opera song she adored.

  One time, she dragged the stereo to the kitchen and plunked it onto my lap.

  “Listen! This is my favorite part.”

  She turned up the volume. I listened for a second to the high-pitched garble of Italian. “Taffeta,” I said, “how is this your favorite part? You don’t even know what the words mean.”

  “I do too,” she insisted.

  “No you don’t—they’re in another language.”

  “Yes I do, Grace.” She swiveled the volume knob. “Listen.”

  Because graduation was drawing near, teachers ambushed seniors daily with pop quizzes to implicate the slackers. I still found it hard to believe that Mandarin planned to graduate, but that week, she ditched school only once: with me.

  Although she claimed she never got in trouble for it, I suspected that the regulations of the ditching unive
rse would be different for me. Like if I crossed the threshold of the school lawn and stepped onto the sidewalk, I’d be accosted by the whirl and whoop of an alarm, or a barricade of parents and teachers blocking my escape.

  “Chill out,” Mandarin told me after geometry on Thursday, the last day of May. “We’ll be fine. Just don’t run until we’re outta sight.”

  When the bell rang after lunch, we headed the wrong way down the hall from the cafeteria. We strolled through the double doors, over the lawn, and past the cottonwood trees, and if anybody saw us leave, they decided to forever hold their peace.

  Mandarin had chosen the perfect setting for our photo shoot: an old horse pasture where the canal joined the Bighorn River. It ran up against a barn, more cottonwood trees, and a row of abandoned stables. The whole lot of it was owned by Gary Householder, a sleazy old guy Momma said used to hit on her when she was a teenager. He worked as a supervisor in the bentonite mines, so we felt certain he wouldn’t be home until late.

  I’d been nervous about taking Mandarin’s pictures, but as it turned out, shooting came naturally to us both: her posing, me observing, with the camera lens like a two-way mirror between us, deflecting all discomfort.

  Each snap embedded another part of her in my brain. The way her lips, when relaxed, never fully closed. The jut of her cheekbones when she pouted. The deep depression in the center of her clavicle. There was no denying Mandarin’s beauty, and yet so much of what was beautiful about her was in the way she moved, the contrast of her radiance against the dry sea of badlands. It would take a far better photographer than I was to capture that magic. But for some reason, Mandarin seemed to trust my judgment.

  “Okay,” I said, “now flip your head back and close your eyes. No, keep them closed.”

  “Like this?”

  “Good, but don’t talk.”

  I tried to shoot from different angles, like the photography books recommended: on my stomach in front of her, kneeling at eye level, standing over her torso with my legs on either side. “Now we need another background,” I said.

  Mandarin opened her eyes, and I stepped back. “Like where?”

  I scanned our surroundings. “There’s a wood fence over there. Maybe you could, like, hang on it, or sit on it—”

  “Perfect! Let’s go.”

  Mandarin leaped up, grabbed my hand, and pulled me after her, bouncing down the slope of the horse pasture like a new foal. She hoisted herself atop the splintery fence. Then she leaned forward with her elbows on her thighs, her hair swinging.

  “How’s this?”

  In reply, I snapped two pictures. When I tried to snap a third, the camera clicked.

  “Hey, I’m out of film,” I said, feeling professional. “I need to reload.”

  Mandarin slid from the fence. While I tinkered with the camera, she wandered off, searching for a fresh background, I assumed. But when I glanced up few minutes later, I didn’t see her.

  “Mandarin?”

  I spun around, scanning the field. Where could she have disappeared to so quickly? I noticed a knot of ash trees near the canal and was about to head to them when I heard her shout from the barn: “Hey, Grace! Over here!”

  I approached the gaping doorway nervously, thinking of Momma’s stories about Mr. Householder patting her butt or using a broom to lift her skirt when she entered the grocery store. Extra-gross, because he was twelve years older than her.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t be in there,” I called. “Momma says Gary Householder’s a jerk.”

  “Why can’t you just say asshole like everybody else? You’re such a fairy princess. Do you shit rainbows or what? Say ‘Gary Householder’s an asshole.’ ”

  “Gary Householder’s an asshole,” I repeated, stepping inside the barn.

  My eyes strained in the dark. I wove through a maze of debris: ancient rabbit hutches, bales of hay, sacks of animal feed coated in hill dust. Sinister-looking farming contraptions poked out of the mess, with rusted cogs, wheels, metal appendages like insect arms. Dust motes drifted in the light streaming through gaps in the twenty-foot ceiling.

  “Seriously, Mandarin … This place gives me the creeps.”

  “Just get over here. It’s worth it, I swear.”

  “What’s worth—” I stubbed my toes on the rusty skeleton of a bedspring. A cloud of dust billowed into my face, making me cough.

  At last I found Mandarin in the farthest corner, unfolding a stepladder. “Check it out,” she said, motioning with her chin. I glanced up and saw a meat hook jutting from the planks, draped with an old leather cowboy vest and hat.

  “That old crap?” I scrunched up my face. “But they’re filthy, Mandarin. They’re disgusting.”

  “You won’t be the one wearing them, you pansy.” She tottered up the stepladder and lugged them down.

  “You’re actually going to put them on?”

  Clutching the hat between her thighs, Mandarin shook out the vest—“for vermin,” she explained—and held it out before her. The stiff fringe sprouted from the hems like thorns. The leather was marbled and stained, probably with nasty old Householder sweat.

  “It’ll be hot,” Mandarin said. “Like sexy cowgirl pictures. Playboy style. But I won’t be naked. See, I can take off my shirt, and the vest’ll cover my tits.” She slid the straps of her tank top from her shoulders.

  I turned away to give her privacy. “But doesn’t it bother you? It’s a dead animal. What’s the difference between a leather vest and a trophy?”

  “Photography is art,” she replied, like she hadn’t heard my question correctly. “And art’s all about taking chances. Taking risks. Otherwise you blend right in with the rest. No one will ever notice you. And look, I told you so! Sexy.”

  I turned around.

  She’d left the vest open in the middle. I could see the ridges of her ribs smoothing into her flat belly, the hem of her jeans. Under the dim light from the rafters, the hat shaded her eyes in a pool of darkness. She struck a pose, her hands on her hips.

  “So would you buy my magazine?”

  I nodded.

  “Hey! For my community service project, how about we send these photos to Mr. Beck? Maybe it’d spice up the morning announcements.”

  “Really, you should talk to the kindergarten teacher. She’s not that—”

  “Let’s just get these shot,” Mandarin said. “This thing’s scratching my skin, and it reeks like a steer corpse. Hurry up.”

  I aimed the camera at her and peered through the viewfinder. It was hard to see, but I snapped a photo anyway.

  “There’s not enough light in here. Maybe we should go outside—”

  A sudden clatter interrupted me. We jerked around in surprise. A deformed monster eclipsed the light from the open barn door: Mr. Householder, his arms piled with farm equipment.

  “Who’s there?”

  Mandarin and I glanced at each other. There was nowhere to hide.

  “Hey! What the hell’re you kids doin’ in my barn?”

  Mr. Householder’s angry face hit a shaft of light from the rafters, and he dropped the equipment he’d been carrying. He was short, with a pregnant-looking gut and eyes like pink candies set in pockets of dough.

  I backed into Mandarin. She grabbed my shoulders and repositioned me out of her way. “Nothing much, sir,” she said. “We were just admiring your taste in fashion.”

  “Why the hell you got my things on? Those’re my rodeo clothes! They’re special.” He took a step forward. “Take ’em off!”

  Mandarin didn’t budge. “They can’t be too special, seeing as how they were stuffed way in the back of this dirty-assed barn.”

  “Take ’em off this minute, or I’ll call the cops!”

  “Oh gosh—you’ll call the cops? What’ll you say? ‘Help, police! A teenage girl’s stole my crusty old vest and hat!’ What’s your problem, anyhow? Who died and made you king asshole?”

  He took another step, and his eyes focused on Mandarin’s face.

/>   “You’ve got to be shittin’ me. If it ain’t Mandy Ramey! I shoulda known by that filthy trashy mouth a’yours.”

  My jaw dropped. But Mandarin wasn’t fazed. “I might talk trash, but at least I don’t stink like I rolled in a dump.”

  “You got no right to talk back to me! I know all about you, Mandy Ramey.” Mr. Householder smiled darkly. “And I know what you are, too—nothing but a tramp, a cheap baby whore. Ain’t that right? Easy as pie! Everybody’s had a piece. You even came on to my boy.”

  His boy? Dale Householder worked for the sanitation department, and his belly was even bigger than his father’s.

  “In his wet dreams,” Mandarin said through clenched teeth.

  “And he turned you down flat. He knowed where you been. Wanna hear a little secret?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “I used t’be friends with your daddy,” he went on. “We was great friends back in the day, before he went and screwed up with that hoity-toity pretendian from elsewheres. I was there for him when she reappeared out of nowhere and left her big mistake behind. Guess she thought she was too good for him—and for you.”

  “Fuck you!” Mandarin screamed. “My mother’s dead.”

  She yanked off the hat and vest and flew at him like a furious harpy, hurling the vest at his gut and knocking him backward into a pile of scrapped wood. Mandarin scooped up her shirt and stood over him, making no effort to cover her naked breasts. “Go to hell and die, you sorry bastard.”

  She spit in his face.

  Then she ran for the door. I glanced at Mr. Householder, who flopped around on the barn floor like a half-crushed bug, swiping the saliva from his eyes.

  “Who you callin’ a bastard, huh?” I heard him holler as I sprinted after Mandarin. “Huh? I ain’t the one whose mom’s a whore!”

  When I burst into the light, Mandarin was already halfway down the grassy slope, heading for the thicket of ash trees by the river. So much for her tar-caked lungs. I finally caught up with her at the edge of the irrigation canal, not far from the rusty old car carcass. Her naked back was to me, and her shoulders were shaking. I’d never seen her so angry. I was afraid to touch her, to speak.