He kisses her again instead of answering. Then he says, “So this was all a clever ploy to get information out of me, eh? I’m the older guy, all worldly and shit?” He laughs again. A lot of things seem funny to him. “So, do you? Think about me? Is that what you’re saying?”
“I asked you a question first. Why do you stay here, when you could go wherever you want?”
“No, you did not. I asked you, do you like me?”
“Okay,” Magda says, “so my answer is, I don’t get you. Why stay here?”
“Why not? It has beaches. It has pretty girls. There’s plenty of pot and four seasons. Why go anywhere else? I went to Tortola once, to surf with some guys. It’s supposed to be paradise. It kind of was. There was great pot and it was hot every day and the waves were amazing. But there were big spiders and people were way poor and the cops were psychotic, even worse than here. Say what you like about the Island, it’s just easier.”
He hooks his hand into her belt and kisses her again. Then he slides his hand up and moves it over her, like he wants to touch every small place on her skin. She gasps and he laughs again, but softer. When he puts his other hand down the front of her jeans, she has to lean against the back of the truck and try to stop the sounds coming out of her throat. The muffled clacking of the little Hitlers comes right through the aluminum wall and into her body. She crumples up the front of his shirt in her hands, holding on so she wouldn’t slide down onto the ground.
In the end, she lets him hold her up, but they wind up on the ground eventually anyway. They sit there together, smoking with their backs against the truck. When she realizes she’s leaning against him she sits up. So, it is good. Better than pretty much anything. She gets it, but that doesn’t mean she wants to wind up like Isabel. Or her mother.
“I need to go back, Jeff. I left my friend Isabel at the top of the pit.”
“I’ll walk you,” he said. “You can introduce me.”
“No, it’s okay.”
All she can think is that things shouldn’t come together, Jeff and Isabel and Charlie. As long as she doesn’t actually meet Jeff, Isabel won’t ask. She’ll just talk on and on about Charlie and whether he means that they’re together again or whether he was just a bastard. She’ll be so busy with all that, it won’t occur to her to ask what happened to Magda in the meantime.
“No, I’ll go alone,” she says, and an expression flies across Jeff’s face that makes him look just like her father.
Is he mad? But the shadows move and then he’s smiling down at her. It’s the kind of smile that makes you feel littler than you are, like there’s something crucial you don’t know.
Back at the top of the pit, the Glinnicks’ yard is empty anyway. Isabel is long gone. Magda stands there, alone and shaky and wet between her legs. She knows she’ll be up all night, redefining hunger.
ten
IN THE STREETS behind Dunkin’ Donuts, Ruth feels herself flicker in and out of the almost dark, like she’s walking in a country with no one in it, a place that can only hold emptiness. She told Isabel and Magda she had to stay in, just so she could walk her own streets for an hour, gather up the night and breathe it in. It’s her world back here, and she wants to fade into the in-between blue of it, just for a while.
South Highbone sidewalks are made of perfect cast-cement squares with careful edges. Sometimes the spaces in between the squares have grass and dandelions, but that only makes the checkerboard feeling of everything more depressing. There are three kinds of houses on identical square plots; that’s how much choice there is. Also, people have different driveways, gravel or asphalt, or grass with two cement strips, and you can tell the Italians from everyone else by the yard Virgins and the truck-tire planters.
All of that is solid. All of that is real, but Ruth could be a ghost passing over the sidewalks. Every window is emitting blue television light, falling out onto every front lawn. She could be dreaming one of those dreams where an endless succession of doors keeps opening, one behind the other.
“I want to show you something.” He speaks right into her ear, then falls in next to her, moving down the sidewalk.
“Mackie,” Ruth says. “I didn’t hear you.”
“That’s why they call them sneakers.” He points down to the dirty laces on his Chuck Taylors, then holds a piece of paper in front of her. When she reaches for it, he pulls it back.
“Well, how are you?” He smiles in the twilight like the Cheshire cat. “Been thinking about me?”
“Yeah, sometimes.” Ruth looks down and away. “What’s on the paper?”
It is a drawing of a girl, with her back bent and her body open to the sky. There are no marks on her, but Ruth can see there’s no blood inside her either. Her eyes are open, seeing nothing and everything.
“Did you draw that?” It reminds Ruth of something, but she can’t think what.
“This is what you see, isn’t it?” He holds the paper open to the streetlight.
“Sometimes. Sort of.”
“Don’t be scared of it,” he says. “You’re different, I told you. That’s a good thing.”
“Did you draw that picture, Mackie?”
“Where you going, Ruth Carter?”
“A friend’s house. Sort of a friend. I told Isabel and Magda I had to stay home tonight.”
“But really you just wanted to be alone.” He nods. “You wanted to do something yourself.”
“Matt is from South Highbone.” Ruth kicks at a pebble and shakes her head. “They want to steal his weed and turn his life upside down, and, you know, he kind of belongs to me. He belongs to here. I just want to talk to him. If I said that to Magda she’d be mad at me.”
“Why can’t you have your own ideas?” Mackie folds up the drawing. “Doesn’t that piss you off?”
“Yeah, kind of. Lately. They think all kinds of stuff about me just because, you know, what I look like and who my mom is.”
“When you’re mad,” Mackie says, “that’s when you’re really you. It’s like you drop right down into yourself, like you’re all the way there. Ever notice that about people? When they’re mad, they stop hiding.”
“I don’t want to hide anymore,” Ruth says.
“See?” He smiles again, glowing there in the streetlight. “I’m a good influence.”
Ruth stops on the sidewalk in front of Matt’s house, but Mackie doesn’t leave. Matt’s front lawn is much neater than Ruth’s, even though he’s only twenty-two and lives there by himself. His friend Sal is a landscaper. Girls always go on about landscapers, because they work in the sun without shirts and turn brown and have muscles. That’s just one of the things Ruth doesn’t get about other people.
“You know,” she says to Mackie, “why is there a Highbone and a South Highbone? Never mind, actually. I already know that. My mom got born because some manager at the aircraft factory got my grandmother pregnant and then ignored her. Why aren’t they pissed off? And how come no one at school but me and Magda and Isabel wants to talk about Sister Carrie? Also, what the hell is so hard about quadratic equations?”
Mackie just laughs, loving every word, and she feels it again. Release. Recognition. Her anger blossoms into something like happiness, or maybe it’s just relief.
“What is up with those girls who spend every minute between classes brushing the Farrah Fawcett wings back into their hair? Why do they want to look exactly like each other? Why did football players cut my friend Charlie’s face with can openers just because he has jail tattoos? I don’t get why if there are enough listeners out there to support the Bad Music Hour on WUSB, me and Magda and Isabel feel like the only people in the world who understand each other.”
“I understand you,” Mackie says. “Do they? Really?”
“Magda says it isn’t that complicated. People suck, she says. They suck more the closer they live to water or high ground. Other people work for the people who suck. If they’re lucky. Magda sees right through a lot of things, she really does. B
ut you’re right, Mackie. Sometimes it’s like they’re pretending I’m there, talking to me when they can’t actually see me. They think Danny and my mom are some kind of great innovation in home life, like living at my house is perfect. My mom’s all right, but I don’t get why she keeps moving the next man in. I don’t get what they’re for. I mean . . . sorry.”
Mackie laughs again. “Not a problem. I’m all ears.” He makes a keep-it-coming motion with his hands.
Ruth looks down at the sidewalk, where her shadow is stretching out alone in the streetlight. She thinks about the density of bodies. About floating away.
“Look, Ruth. Your body stops the light. You’re here. You’re solid. You’re real. Those things you see, you can tell them to me. You shouldn’t be scared of them. They’re what make you special.”
He slips the drawing into her back pocket and pulls his watch out by its brass chain. He looks at the time and then turns to walk away.
“Why don’t you ever say hello or good-bye like normal people?” Ruth shouts at his back.
She stares after him until he lifts up his hand. Without turning around he waves it. Matt looks out between the curtains in his front window, then lets them go and comes to open the front door.
“What the hell are you doing shouting in front of my house, Ruth?” Matt whispers. “Get inside, before somebody sees you.”
“I came to see about something?” She looks up at him from the steps.
“Uh-uh, Ruth, no. . . . You better come in, but I’m not inviting you to sit down.”
“Oh, come on, Matt. Sell me a nickel bag. My money’s green.”
“And your mother is a good customer. Shit, I say it again. You can’t come here for weed. Your mother’ll have a fit.”
“Yeah, right. If I don’t get it from you, I’ll steal hers. That pisses her off. I only want a nickel bag. Come on, let me sit down just for a minute.”
The sunflowers on Matt’s curtains and the old brown carpet full of burn holes wash away her anger. She thinks of Virgil Mackie, walking away into the distance.
“It’s nice in here,” Ruth says. “Did you get all this stuff, or was it like this?”
“My mom did it, before she . . . left.” Matt misses a beat and looks away, and Ruth uses the distraction as an opportunity to sit down. She knows what happened to Matt’s mom. People in South Highbone know, and anyway he’s mentioned it before. Isabel and Magda don’t get the whole story. Like Mackie says, sometimes it’s Ruth who really sees things.
Matt looks at her now and rolls his eyes. They’re nice, but not in a sex way. He’s beautiful in two dimensions, like an old black-and-white movie, or an old photograph of sadness. It never seems like you could reach into his space and touch him.
“Right, I’ll roll one up and smoke it with you,” he says, “but if anyone else comes, you’re out the kitchen door, and no whining about it, right?”
He turns the TV down and goes into his room for his stash box. The middle of the couch sags, and there’s a lot of crap on the coffee table, beer cans and ash trays, a bong and an orange juice carton. Matt’s house is exactly how he wants it. It must be great to live alone.
“I don’t want your mom pissed off at me,” he says. “She’s not just a customer. I like her. She’s cool.”
Great. Matt, too. She came here tonight because she didn’t want to be invisible. Matt is the kind of thing she knows. He’s supposed to get her.
“Yeah, well I like her more than my friends like their moms, but she can be a pain in the ass. There’s a definite boyfriend/no boyfriend oscillation to her. She’s different at different times.”
“Ruth, can I just point out you have no concept of what the school shrink calls ‘maternal instability’? They put that on a statement about me, you know. You got no idea. At. All. Everyone knows where my mom is.”
“I’m not gonna pretend I get it,” she says, “but nobody thinks it’s funny, Matt. Anyway it’s only because I live over here. My friends who live down in the village don’t know.”
“I’m just saying, your mom is cool. Don’t knock it.”
“All right, all right.” Ruth waves a hand and looks up at the ceiling. “I get it. She’s Saint fucking Caroline of South Highbone. She does take care of business, even though I bet a social worker would say she doesn’t. Even though it’s my dad who never took care of anything, they’d never say that, would they? It’s all on her. But we eat, we sleep, I get pens and pencils and paper for school. Whatever.”
“That’s a lot, man. She’s on her own.”
“Not at the moment. Anyway, sometimes she talks to me about cool stuff, but you have to catch her in the right mood. She never stays still, my mom. She takes a little too much care of business, you know? Sometimes I wish she’d slow down.”
“My mom used to sit in the same chair for days. Trust me, it isn’t that great. I used to take care of her. After she stopped working I got the job at the hardware store, and it was all cool, even though when I came home she’d be in the same position I left her in. I had to kind of wake her up. It took a while to get her to eat and take a shower and stuff.”
Matt is quiet for a minute while he opens up some buds onto a double album cover and starts to break them up. When he speaks again, it’s like he isn’t talking to her at all.
“Sometimes she’d wake up at night and I’d have to get up and watch her so she didn’t hurt herself or break anything. She was scared, too. When she was sitting still, there was nothing behind her eyes, but if she was moving at all she’d be scared. Then she lit the shower curtain on fire while I was at work. I got home and there were cops and everything here. Social Services said she had to go.”
Matt moves a pizza box to get to the lighter and the ashtray underneath it. He’s quiet for so long that Ruth gets uncomfortable and speaks.
“Maternal instability? Ha! People get paid to point out the obvious.”
Matt puts the ashtray down on a copy of Astronomy magazine that says “The Voyager Mission” on the cover.
“That yours?” Ruth points.
“Yeah, it’s interesting. Whatever.”
“What happened to your dad?”
“’Nam,” he says. “There was a little money for that, too.”
“You’re due for some good luck, Matt. You need to roll the dice again.”
“That’s what I’m doing, little Carter. Quit the hardware store a month ago. I’m an entrepreneur now, baby. I won’t keep dealing forever either, just till I can get some serious cash built up. It’ll all be cool.”
“So can I have a nickel bag or what?” Ruth holds out one of the five-dollar bills she got from Old Mr. Lipsky.
“No, you can’t,” Matt says, “but I’m smoking you up. Take it or leave it.”
Matt lights the joint with a lighter that says Coney Island on one side. The other side has a woman in a grass skirt on it. There’s a layer of liquid over her and when you turn it upside down and back again, her bikini top comes off.
Tits, tits, tits. It’s always about the tits.
After a minute or two Matt starts to look a little embarrassed about all the things he’s told her. When the doorbell rings he looks out the curtains again and it’s like she’s seeing the same moment from another angle. He says, “It’s only Charlie. He called first to ask if he could stop by before work. Called first, like a normal, polite person. You hang out with him, don’t you? You don’t have to go.”
“No, I will,” Ruth whispers. “Please don’t tell him I was here. He’s got, like, a big brother thing for me and Magdalene and Isabel. He’ll kick my ass. He thinks we should let him cop for us.”
“Whatever.” He looks at her like she’s a ridiculous child.
“Please, Matt.” Now she even sounds like a ridiculous child.
Matt has a soul. You can see it behind those eyes, but right now he’s looking straight through her just like everyone else.
“All right, all right.” He motions her through into the hallway.
There’s a bathroom and the basement door, and then two bedrooms and the kitchen at the back. The windows are wooden and swing open from hinges on the top, just like hers. It’s the same house really, except hers is turned in another direction, with the living room between the kitchen and the bedrooms. South Highbone is like a B-movie version of Levittown, all divided up by those prefab sidewalks. Turning the houses in different directions and moving the front doors around is what gives people the illusion of being different from each other.
“Listen, Ruth.” Matt pushes the garbage pail aside to open the kitchen door. “I really don’t want you to come back here without your mom.”
Her mouth opens but nothing comes out. She can’t form words because she has no breath, like someone just hit her.
“I’m not being mean. It’s just . . . I’m way older than you and your mom is my friend and what if I get busted or something and you’re here when it happens? It’s just not cool, okay?”
She leaves through the neighbor’s yard, climbing the chain-link fence at the back so Charlie won’t see her from the living room window. It matters now if Charlie sees her there, because they will be back. Who cares what Isabel does to Matt’s life? He’s on the other side; he’s the one who just said so.
Matt’s neighbors have those planters that Italian dads make out of truck tires and paint brick red. These ones are full of some elephant ear things with white stripes on the leaves and the little purple flowers. There’s a yard Virgin, too. These are the kind of Italians Magda’s dad is always trying to keep her away from. “Your mother wasn’t like that,” he says to her. “Her parents were educated.” As if going to college makes you not want a yard Virgin anymore. Actually, it probably does. No yard Virgins once you join the people who really suck.
Magda and her dad always talk about Mrs. Warren in the past tense, like she’s dead, but Ruth imagines her new life every day. Mrs. Warren is so beautiful, Ruth likes to think of her on dance floors under Mexican stars, singing in bars with bloodred candles and dark-eyed painters. When Ruth draws her, Mrs. Warren looks like the Virgin would if she didn’t have to fold her hands all the time, if she could kick off those robes and have a drink and say exactly what she thinks. Still holy, just real, too.
Little Wrecks Page 8
