Like Mandarin

by Kirsten Hubbard

  As angry as I was at Mandarin, most of all, I missed her.

  I missed the childlike Mandarin, who twirled in the cotton, danced through the grocery store aisles, flew across the empty football field with both arms open. I missed the passionate Mandarin, who looked into the glass eyes of a trophy and saw the wild animal it used to be. I even missed the impulsive, dangerous Mandarin, who pulled me into the murky canal waters, drove her ancient truck way too fast, painted my eyes and led me toward the bonfires. Because even as she terrified me, it was that Mandarin who finally woke me up.

  Until our friendship, I’d never known how good my life could be.

  That was her fault too.

  Early on Saturday, I took a walk in the badlands.

  I brought my English notes, although I didn’t plan to study much. If finals were anything like midterms, I had nothing to worry about.

  I followed one of the water trails tapering into the hills. The only sounds were the crunching of my shoes, the occasional low-pitched buzz of an insect, and the hush of a gentle wind—not the slightest bit wild—ruffling the dry grasses and shrubs. As I stopped at a crest, gazing out at the gradients of blue hills, brown hills, gray hills, I thought, Mandarin would have loved it out here.

  Because despite the silence, the badlands didn’t only contain dead things. On my walks, I’d seen ground squirrels and jackrabbits, rattlesnakes, and hawks soaring over prairies of salt sage, the kind we used to chew as little kids. I’d seen oases, where the water burbled up from underground and green things grew. And summer grasshoppers that popped away from my feet like water tossed onto a hot skillet.

  I’d been so cautious about sharing my magic places, I hadn’t showed Mandarin any. Not the badlands. And not the Tombs. Not the Virgin Mary rock. Or any of my rocks.

  I had called Mandarin selfish. But maybe in my own way, I was selfish too.

  I didn’t start back until the midday sun became so hot my blood practically simmered in my ears. Although home life had rarely been pleasant, after the fiasco at the tri-county pageant, an uneasy cloud had seemed to envelop our entire house.

  Without pageants pending, Momma didn’t know what to do with herself. She wandered from room to room, up the stairs and down. She drank so much coffee I wondered why she didn’t go into cardiac arrest. She started meals but didn’t finish them, leaving the ingredients all over the counter. When we passed each other in the kitchen, it was hard to tell who was giving the silent treatment to whom.

  Really, Momma and I were just stalling. Like boxers in their respective corners before a match began, each waiting for the other to make the first move. If there had been just the two of us, the dance could have gone on forever. But there was a third contestant in the ring neither of us had anticipated.

  I had just climbed out of the shower when I heard a splashing sound. At first, I thought I had water in my ears. Then I glanced out the bathroom window and spied Taffeta in the backyard, which was strange for several reasons.

  First, our backyard was a disaster: an overgrown wasteland of broken toys and weeds. My sister seldom played out there, especially since the Millers had a swing set complete with monkey bars and a faux rock-climbing wall.

  Second, she was wearing her tri-county pageant dress, along with her Little Miss Washokey tiara.

  Third, she was sitting in the baby pool.

  I wasn’t sure whether I should be concerned or delighted. In my room, I pulled on a T-shirt and underpants. Then I flew down the stairs, jerked open the sliding glass door, and stepped outside.

  “Taffeta! What the heck’s going on?”

  My sister didn’t answer. She sat with her chin on her fist, like that sculpture The Thinker. Her uncombed hair straggled down her back. The murky rainwater from the baby pool had soaked into her dress, staining it the color of grease.

  “Did you put all that on yourself?”

  She still didn’t answer.

  “I didn’t think you had it in you.” I knelt beside her. “Guess I shouldn’t have underestimated you. When you want to, you can be a real stubborn brat.”

  No reply.

  “I mean that in a good way.” I offered her my hand. “Look, Taffeta. I’m sorry I left your pageant early. Truly sorry. So you’ve made your point. Will you get out now?”

  She shook her head. At least it was a response.

  I prodded the earth in front of me until I found a stone. With my thumbnail, I began to scrape away the dirt.

  “This reminds me of last winter, when you begged me to push you on the swings. Remember? I didn’t want to, because it was so windy. But you kept whining, so I finally gave in.”

  My sister shifted in the water. I could tell she was listening.

  “So I pushed you. And soon the wind picked up, just like I said it would, and you started swinging all crooked. You wanted off. But your mittens stuck to the chains. Don’t you remember? We had to leave them there. Momma was so mad.…”

  I heard the sliding door open. Momma, wearing her infamous muumuu, stood in the doorway.

  “Oh,” she said.

  Like it was perfectly normal for her daughters to congregate in and around an old baby pool that hadn’t budged through two winters, one daughter in her underwear, the other wrecking the pageant dress into which she’d sewn all her superficial hopes and dreams.

  “You didn’t even know she was out here,” I said accusingly, scrambling to my feet.

  “Don’t be silly. Of course I did.”

  “That’s not true, Momma! You couldn’t have known—you’d be freaking out!”

  Even though I was yelling, for once Momma didn’t raise her voice. She looked at me and said quietly, “I always know where you girls are.”

  You girls? I shook my head, thinking of all the far-flung nooks and crannies where Mandarin and I had assembled. “No you don’t. You have no idea where I go.”

  “I know more than you think.”

  “How?” I demanded. “How do you know?”

  “I have my ways.”

  Thinking of Polly Bunker, I narrowed my eyes. “Gossip.”

  “That, and other methods.”

  “You could have just asked.”

  “You never would have told me.”

  She was right. “But it would have meant something,” I said. “The asking.”

  At last, Momma came over and stood in front of us. Her eyes wandered from one daughter to the other. I could tell it took her every milligram of willpower not to swoop Taffeta out of the baby pool and dunk her, pageant dress and all, in a soapy bath. But she just stood there with her arms crossed.

  “I know I’m not a good mother,” she said at last. “But I know I’m not a terrible mother either.”

  I sighed. Did she expect me to be thankful? In my opinion, there were far too many mediocre mothers, and fathers, and not nearly enough good ones. In Washokey, at least. Maybe my sample was too small.

  “You know, Grace, I didn’t mean to be pregnant with you,” Momma began.

  “Momma …” I glanced at Taffeta.

  “Just let me finish. Things like that don’t necessarily happen when you’re ready. Hell, I wasn’t much older than Mandarin. Eighteen’s just a number. I wasn’t anything near an adult … It was the hardest thing I ever had to do, growing up that fast.”

  “Then why, Momma? Why’d you have me in the first place?”

  The question shot out before I could stop it, burning my eyes, my throat. I ordered myself not to cry. Not now. Not worth it.

  Momma shrugged helplessly. “You were my baby.”

  She took a step closer.

  “After everything I went through, I promised myself I’d make life easy for you girls. That’s what the pageants were about. I wanted the world to fall down at your feet. When you wrecked your Little Miss Washokey … it was like you were flipping me off. All that time I’d spent—I thought it was our time.”

  “The road trips,” I said. “Not the pageants. The pageants were your time.”
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  It felt strange saying them out loud, the words I hadn’t been able to articulate for years and years. They came easier than I’d have ever believed.

  Just words. Nothing more.

  “I guess it was how I knew to be close to you,” Momma said. “And we were close, way back when. Weren’t we?”

  “We were,” I agreed quietly.

  Neither of us said what should have followed: Maybe we can become close again. But I knew we both were thinking it.

  We stood there for a while longer, our eyes flickering away from each other’s. Finally, Momma reached down and lifted up Taffeta. She didn’t resist. Brown water streamed from her dress, seeping onto Momma’s muumuu.

  “You don’t have to be in pageants anymore,” Momma said to Taffeta. “You don’t ever have to sing again, if you don’t want to.”

  “But I want to.”

  “Really?” Momma and I exclaimed at once. I felt like my brain was about to spontaneously combust. All my memories of pageants were tinged with irritation. It had never occurred to me that my sister had actually enjoyed some part of them.

  “I just get to choose the songs I sing,” she said. “Songs I like singing. How about that?”

  “Sure, honey!” Momma’s eyes looked misty. “Like what songs?”

  Taffeta thought for a moment. “Maybe something disco.”

  I waited until Momma was busy in the kitchen making Hawaiian salad and Taffeta was getting dressed after a much-needed bath. Then I dug through the scum in the baby pool until I found what I was looking for.

  I kept it in my hand as I dialed Mandarin’s number.

  I followed the back road west of town, the one used mainly by farmers driving sheep or riding horses. It was a dirt road, but years of animal droppings made it look paved in cakey hay asphalt, mashed by animal hooves and pickup truck tires. Every once in a while, I’d come across a new pile of crap. Some were huge.

  By the time I reached the river, it was almost sunset. The wind picked up, but I couldn’t tell if it was a normal wind or otherwise. I put a hand over my mouth and breathed through my fingers, attempting to keep my head clear.

  I had no idea which Mandarin I would encounter that night: happy, angry, somber, or hysterical. I needed to be ready for any of them.

  When I arrived, she was standing at the base of the Tombs, dressed in her lavender sweater, with the ridge of her clavicle jutting out over the neckline. It was the first time I’d ever seen her without black eyeliner. She held the jackalope head against her thigh, her fingers wrapped around the antlers. “So this is your place, huh?”

  “Someplace magic,” I replied.

  She glanced at the spot where she’d besieged Tyler with stones. “I didn’t know,” she said. “I promise.”

  I shrugged and turned away, leading her up the boulders to my cave in the Tombs.

  Once inside, I sat with my legs crossed. Mandarin didn’t sit right away, though. She circled the space, stooped over, one hand flat on the stone walls. When she reached the cave painting, she paused and looked at it for a long time.

  “It’s the Virgin Mary,” I said. “Supposedly. Remember the stories?”

  “She isn’t, though.”

  “Isn’t what?”

  “Mary.”

  She sat at last, with her back against the wall, the jackalope head in her lap. The smudgy black eyes of the painted woman peered over her shoulder.

  “So why’d you want to meet?” she asked warily.

  I cleared my throat. She was going to find out anyway, but I knew I should be the one to tell her. “I told Ms. Ingle you didn’t do a service project.”

  Her reaction was right on target.

  “But school’s not over till next week!” The jackalope tumbled from her lap. “Why’d you have to go and tell her that?”

  “She asked.”

  “Why didn’t you lie?” She rose to her knees, but I didn’t budge. “You had no right to do that, Grace. That was our fucking project.”

  Any other time, I would have backed down. But not that night. If I’d stood up to Momma after fifteen years, I could handle Mandarin Ramey. “Wrong,” I said. “You couldn’t even choose a topic. My project was helping you out.”

  “Well, you didn’t, Grace. You ruined everything!”

  “You mean graduating? Are you honestly going to tell me you think you’ll pass every final next week? That’s not my fault. You ruined that for yourself, Mandarin.”

  We glared at each other.

  And after one, two, three beats, Mandarin dropped her eyes. She picked up the jackalope and set it in her lap facing up. “I know,” she said.

  I thought I might feel happy about this tiny victory. I didn’t.

  “I just … I don’t know what stops me. Everybody knows I’m screwed up on the outside—all the stuff I do, I mean. They don’t know how I’m screwed up on the inside. Only the people who get close.”

  “You solve that easy enough,” I said. “You don’t get close to anybody.”

  “Well, you. And I had friends in elementary school too, y’know. Sarah Cooper at the A&W wasn’t all bad. And there was this one girl …”

  “Sophie Brawls.”

  Mandarin raised her eyebrows. “I guess you heard about the fight. And what happened after. It got so blown out of proportion. Not the fight, I mean—that was huge. For us. But it was ours to settle. When Mr. Beck got involved, and then the cops … Sophie didn’t even try to stop it all from happening.

  “And then there’s my mother.…”

  She paused, as if to catch her breath.

  “We used to make dolls out of cottonwood down. Her and me. We’d cut shapes from old shirts and sew them up. I once heard you can’t truly hate a person until you’ve cared about them. Until you’ve loved them. And boy, do I ever know about that. It happened with Sophie Brawls. It happened with my mother—”

  “Why don’t you contact her?” I said, interrupting her, afraid my name was next. “She lives so close. Riverton’s just a few hours away.”

  Mandarin snorted. “She abandoned me when I needed her. So now that she wants me, why should I make it easy for her? She deserves to wait.”

  I ran my fingers over the gritty surface of the stone floor, thinking about Momma. After the incident that morning, I could no longer deny it: she had tried to reach out to me over the years, in various, mostly misguided ways. But I’d ignored her efforts. I’d wanted to punish her, just like Mandarin did her mother.

  “But for how long?” I wondered.

  Mandarin shrugged impatiently. “She could make more of an effort than arrowheads. What the fuck’s that about? Like, embracing my maternal heritage?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe it’s about how you’ve hurt each other. They’re weapons, after all.”

  “When did you get so damn wise about mother-daughter relationships?”

  My turn to shrug.

  “That reminds me.” Shifting forward, I reached into my back pocket and withdrew the arrowhead I’d salvaged from the baby pool. “I shouldn’t keep this—it’s not right.”

  Mandarin accepted it. She held it up, but there wasn’t enough light to make it glow.

  “I don’t want her to know how messed up I am,” she whispered.

  And then it all made sense.

  Mandarin wasn’t just afraid of failing herself. She didn’t want to fail her mother.

  That was what kept her in school. That was why she clung to her hopes of graduating, as impossible as she made it for herself.

  I knew her failing wasn’t my fault. It would have taken someone a thousand times stronger to force Mandarin to finish a single math assignment on her own, let alone complete a service project for the community she hated. But even so, my chest ached for her. Like the first time I’d seen her with a man, I wished for the power to destroy whatever monster made her sabotage herself.

  If one even existed. Maybe it was Mandarin’s official mythological creature.

  “Manda
rin …” I hesitated, not knowing what to say. “It’s getting kind of stuffy in here. Want to go out on top?”

  When she nodded, I led the way, following a staircase of boulders to my lookout above the Tombs. The river reflected the colors of the sky. It looked like a gulch of molten lava. I heard the high-pitched whoop of night birds in the snarled vegetation bordering both banks. Beside me, Mandarin tapped the head of her jackalope.

  “Where do you think those other animal heads went?”

  “Maybe they’re tangled up in the tree roots somewhere, or stuck up against a beaver dam. Or maybe they sank.…” I glanced at Mandarin’s face. “But I’m sure they made it. Round the bend to the Missouri River.”

  “The Missouri? I thought the Bighorn went into the Colorado River.”

  “Apparently the Bighorn flows north,” I explained. “I read it in my history book. That almost never happens—most rivers flow south. It’s actually pretty amazing. So they’d end up in the Atlantic instead of the Pacific. But who cares, right? An ocean’s an ocean.”

  Though when I pictured the elk head bobbing out at sea, slapped by waves, it wasn’t a much better image than it being jammed among the other heads in the brush downriver. At least that way it wouldn’t be alone.

  “Mandarin,” I began. “There’s something I just don’t get. You say the people here are one of the main reasons you want to escape. If not the only reason. But do you really think people are different outside of Washokey? What if you leave, only to find more of the same? Where’s there to go after that?”

  Mandarin stared out at the river.

  “Maybe it’s just your way of looking at them,” I added.

  “Maybe you’re right.” Her voice shook. “Maybe I can’t be happy anywhere.”

  Her tears looked like garnets in the light of the sunset. My heart broke. I closed the space between us, pressing myself up against her, placing my hand atop hers. It felt fragile, like a broken bird. For how strong she could be, how angry, how violent, how manipulative, she could also be the complete opposite. Not just somebody I admired, wanted to be like—but somebody who needed me.