All You Get Is Me

by Yvonne Prinz

  “What do you mean?”

  “I didn’t tell you about the lawsuit but I swear I didn’t know. No one told me.”

  “What lawsuit?” he says, and I want to die.

  “Um, look. We need to talk. Can you meet me at the tar pits?”

  “When?”

  “I can be there in fifteen minutes.”

  “Okay. I’ll see you there.”

  Unfortunately, my bike is in the shed so I have to walk past my dad and Steve, who are busy revolutionizing the world of sustainable farming.

  “Where are you off to?” my dad asks as I ride past them on my bike.

  “Just a ride.” I pedal like the Wicked Witch of the West, trying to avoid any more questions about where I’m going.

  “If it’s exercise you’re after, you can bring the seedlings up from the greenhouse.”

  “I’ll do it later,” I yell over my shoulder.

  Why can’t Steve do that? Why is it that my dad always has some backbreaking task at the ready whenever he sees me without a tool in my hand? Has he forgotten our agreement?

  As I bump along the road to the tar pits I try and sort out my thoughts for Forest so that I don’t come off looking hysterical. I take deep breaths and arrange my features into calm like the monks at the monastery, who actually are calm instead of just trying to appear that way.

  Forest is already there when I arrive and he’s sitting cross-legged on the sand by the water, writing in his notebook. He turns around when he hears my bike on the gravel. He looks grim. I walk over and sit down next to him on the fake beach.

  “I’m really sorry about your mom,” I start.

  “Yeah. Thanks.” He puts his notebook in his book bag. “It’s Jerry. He lied about breaking it off with the receptionist. She called my mom at home and told her everything. Apparently Jerry has been telling her that he’s going to leave my mom and run away with her. I guess even she finally figured out that he was full of crap. She’s twenty, by the way.”

  “So why would your mom try to kill herself over that guy?”

  “I don’t think she was really trying to kill herself. I think she was just trying to get his attention. Anyway, she’s so messed up right now, I really doubt she’s thinking straight.” He runs his fingers through his hair.

  “Sorry. I’m so sorry.” I look out over the water and swallow hard.

  “So, what did you mean about a lawsuit?”

  “Yeah, um. Tomás is suing your mom for wrongful death. She should get the papers today sometime.” I hesitate. “Or, that is, when she’s out of the hospital.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know, I just found out.”

  “Stop saying you’re sorry.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Look, my mom knew that this might happen. I’m sure she wasn’t expecting all this to just disappear. I know it sounds crazy but now that someone is actually calling her on it, now that she’s not getting away with murder, maybe it’ll be okay.”

  “Really, you think so?”

  “I don’t know. People can go insane waiting for the other shoe to drop. You know what I mean? Guilt can make you do crazy things.”

  “I guess that’s true. Do you think she’ll leave Jerry?” I scoop up sand in the palm of my hand and let it flow through my fingers.

  “I hope so. She’ll have to work through it on her own. She used to be a really strong person, full of opinions and ideas. I like to think that that person is still in there somewhere.”

  “Did you tell your dad what happened?”

  “Yeah. He’s on his way out here. That should be interesting.”

  “Do you think he can help your mom?”

  “No, but he can do his psychiatrist thing on her and get her thinking straight. You should meet him. I want you to.”

  “Okay. And, about the lawsuit, my dad says that your mom’s insurance company will probably settle and there won’t even be a trial. So it’s not like she’ll go to jail or anything like that.”

  “Really?”

  “Uh-huh.” I decide not to tell him that I’ll probably be called as a witness. I’ll wait on that little bombshell. He doesn’t need to know that today.

  We sit there, side by side, for a minute, looking out at the dark water. An orange dragonfly hovers above the glassy surface, buzzing from one side of the pool to the other, touching down here and there. Finally, Forest puts his arm around my shoulders and I lean into him, sliding my arm around his waist. We stay like that for a long time.

  Later, at home, I make my famous black bean chili and set the table for me and my dad and Steve. Miguel and Tomás have gone off to a bar where farmworkers gather to listen to Latin music and drink a couple of cervezas and unwind. There’s a real taqueria next door to it where they make Mexican food that tastes like the kind they get at home. The owners leave their Christmas lights on all year-round and the floor is covered in peanut shells.

  My dad and Steve are vegetarians and Miguel and Tomás are not, and although they’re really polite about it, I’m sure the crumbled vegetable protein I’ve got searing in the frying pan isn’t very appealing to them. It’s supposed to taste “just like ground beef” but no matter how many spices I dump on it, it never really comes close. Who do they think they’re kidding? I slice some tomatoes I just picked that are still warm from the sun and toss them into the pan. The liquid in them sizzles when it hits the heat. I simmer the mixture for a while and then add it to the black beans and tomato sauce I’ve got cooking in a big pot. Steve comes in with an armload of baby greens and dumps them on the counter. He mixes up a quick olive-oil-and-lemon dressing in our big wooden salad bowl, whisking it with a fork, and tosses the greens in.

  “Voila.” He holds up the bowl for me to see and then sets it in the middle of the table. He pours himself a glass of water and sits down at the table while I fill big bowls with chili.

  “Where’s my dad?” I plop a bowl in front of Steve, prison-style.

  “He’s coming.” Steve sniffs the chili. “Yum.”

  My dad comes in the house a couple of seconds later and scrubs his hands at the sink. He dries them on the kitchen towel while looking out the window over the sink.

  “Anyone want wine?” he asks, looking at Steve, who raises his hand like a grade-school kid with the right answer.

  My dad goes to the pantry and comes back with a bottle of Reynaldo’s wine. Steve suddenly looks very interested in his chili.

  “You guys got into the wine pretty good while I was gone,” says my dad, pulling the corkscrew out of the drawer.

  “Yeah. That was Roar. She went a little crazy.”

  I kick him hard under the table.

  “Ow!” He rubs his shin.

  My dad ignores us and pours himself and Steve a tumbler of wine.

  I eat my chili quickly. I’m in no mood for my dad or Steve tonight. I’ve got a lot on my mind and it’s nothing I can discuss at the dinner table. They don’t really need me there anyway. My dad is still bubbling over with new ideas he wants to share with Steve. Plus, the deal around here is, if you cook you don’t have to clean up. I put my bowl in the sink and feed Rufus out on the front porch, pouring a little black bean chili over his dog food like gravy. He stands there with his tail wagging. Rufus loves beans, but my bedroom will be filled with toxic gas tonight.

  I go upstairs and close my bedroom door. I fall onto my bed and dial Storm’s cell phone number. She picks up after several rings.

  “Jesus! Where have you been?” she says without even saying hello.

  “Sorry, I’ve got a lot going on. What are you doing?”

  “I’m out shopping for a new best friend. Lucky for you, I haven’t found anything I like yet.”

  “So, what’s going on with you? Are you still dating the Marlboro Man?”

  “Yeah. I think it’s getting serious. He gave me a gold horseshoe necklace last night. It has a little diamond in it that you can only see under a microscope.”

&
nbsp; “Really?”

  “Really. I think he got it at Wal-Mart.”

  “Do you like him?”

  “Well, he’s a lot of fun, and he’s awfully cute. He says ‘dang’ all the time like it’s a word. How cute is that?”

  “Don’t you think you should tell him your real age?”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  I sometimes forget that Storm plays with boys the way a cat plays with a ball of string. This relationship could be over tomorrow.

  “Anyway,” she says, “enough about me. Tell me what you’ve been up to and lie if you have to.”

  I sigh heavily and give her the whole story about my weekend with Forest, his mom, the civil suit, the witness thing, everything. Storm reacts in all the right spots but she’s most interested in whether Forest and I have gotten to third base yet. I never know which base is what, though. I’ve never even seen a baseball game.

  “If you’re asking if I’m still a virgin, the answer is yes.”

  “Well, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little disappointed.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind, Storm. You know how much I hate to disappoint you.”

  Storm and I make a plan to meet at the tar pits the next morning for a swim and I hang up the phone not feeling much better about anything. I lay there on my bed, watching the evening breeze ruffle my curtains through the window. The air smells like cool rosemary and sweetgrass and the weeds Steve pulled today. I hear Rufus climbing the stairs to my room and I get up to let him in. He sticks his face in mine and breathes dog-food breath all over me. Then, in a gesture of thanks for the meal I just served him, he licks me on the lips with his big pink tongue. Then he burps a mixture of black bean chili and dog food into my face. If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.

  I suddenly remember that thing that Forest said about wanting me to meet his dad. That seems kind of serious. He wouldn’t introduce me to his dad unless he was planning on knowing me for a while, would he?

  “What on earth will I wear?” I ask Rufus, but he’s busy with his post-dinner hygiene session, which I can’t even watch.

  From my bed I can see my entire pathetic wardrobe hanging in the closet. On the floor, there’s a pair of white leather knee-high go-go boots with stacked heels that used to belong to my mom. Sometimes the boots make me miss my mom more than her photo does.

  I wish she were here right now to help me decide what to wear. I wish she were here so I could say to her, “I met a boy.”

  Chapter 12

  My mom always kept a tube of Chanel lipstick on a little table near the front door of our house. Her shade was Shanghai Red. A little tin mirror with a silver peacock attached to the top of it hung directly above the table. The last thing she would do as she was going out the door was expertly apply her lipstick. She had the kind of coloring that comes alive with red lipstick. It made her eyes dance and her skin look like porcelain. She also had a vast collection of vintage sunglasses, which she shopped for relentlessly in secondhand shops and at garage sales. She had every shape and color you could imagine, including plaid and leopard print. She also had a couple of cat’s-eye pairs with little rhinestones at the temples. One pair that I remember loving more than the rest had a large, squareish cream-colored frame and amber lenses. Whenever she wore those, she would tie a silk scarf around her black hair so that she looked like someone who lived on the Italian Riviera and drove around on a Vespa saying, “Ciao, bella!” Of course this was all before she changed into someone else.

  Back then my mom and I always delighted in dressing up. Every time we stepped outside the house we saw it as another opportunity to be someone else. My mom never edited my outfits. If I showed up at the breakfast table in a bathing suit, knee-high vinyl boots, and a gorilla mask, she would smile and ask me what I’d like to eat.

  My mom was a great playmate. Nothing was too messy or too hard or too silly for her. If we made anything to eat, no matter how simple, we always pretended that we were taping a cooking show and we’d look up and address our studio audience as we tutored them in the fine art of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. If we got on an elevator, we’d pretend to be spies, and a trip to the playground was an important archaeological dig. A nature walk was always an Andean or an Arctic expedition narrated by me or my mother, in a British accent.

  For reasons I never understood, my mom refused to buy me any dolls. She told me that she didn’t like the gender roles imposed on little girls by encouraging them to “play house” or take care of fake babies. I did own a few dolls, though. I bought them myself with my allowance at garage sales and secondhand stores, the same places my mom found her sunglasses. I treated them as though they were little mannequins. Instead of playing with them I would dress them up in outfits designed from scraps of fabric and costume jewelry and toilet paper. I would pose them around a little table piled high with food and plastic farm animals on little platters, as if they were posing for a Dutch master to paint.

  Before I started school, my mom would take me out to art galleries all over the city and we would walk from one painting to the next, my mom looking at each painting carefully, from one angle and then another, the way an art critic might. She would say things like, “Well, technically it’s quite accomplished but it lacks soul. It’s not speaking to me.” She said this with such authority that it always drew raised eyebrows from the gallery worker, who probably had a hard time believing that a real art critic would travel around with a five-year-old dressed in a tutu and rubber rain boots.

  After my mom started painting, she couldn’t go inside those galleries anymore. I don’t think she could bear to compare her work to an artist’s who had already made it to a gallery showing. I think it reminded her of how far she had to go. Her ego was very fragile. Besides, by then I was in school for several hours a day, so she had no one to go with. As I got older I started to understand that my mom and I were quite different. She wanted to be in front of the camera and I wanted to be behind it.

  The white platform go-go boots were the only piece of my mom’s clothing I took with me to the farm. She bought them in a consignment shop on Haight Street for twenty dollars. She claimed she was practically stealing them. I remember thinking, on the day that we left the city, that they were just too fabulous to leave behind. Now, when I look at them sitting there in my closet, cracking and gathering dust, next to my flip-flops and sneakers and work boots, they look absurd. It’s hard to believe that the woman who gave birth to me once considered those boots a go-to item in her “casual” wardrobe. The longer I go without seeing her, the harder it is to imagine her in those boots.

  Shortly after we moved to the farm, I completely lost interest in fashion. It seemed silly to wear anything but T-shirts and jeans. No one would notice if I put any effort into the way I look anyway. My wardrobe now is almost identical to Steve’s, which is just plain sad. I do have some spectacular sun hats, though. More for practical purposes than anything else, but my mom used to say that an interesting hat says a lot about a person.

  Storm has a subscription to both Italian and French Vogue and she practically camps out at the mailbox waiting for them. She reads them cover to cover and keeps me up to date on every new trend that I’m completely missing the boat on.

  “Kelly bags are in this year,” she’ll inject into our conversation. “Chandelier earrings are all the rage for the holidays. Spike heels are out, stacked heels are back in,” she’ll announce, as though it’s headline news.

  She also likes to designer-name-drop. To Storm, knowing your designers is like knowing your state capitals. Names like Prada, and Versace, and Dolce and Gabbana, and Chanel are a drug to her. Just whispering them in her midst has been known to improve her mood considerably. Storm doesn’t have the money for the real thing, so her outfits tend to be a bit Frankensteined together and I do give her high marks for creativity. When she cuts a matronly wool plaid skirt that she found at Goodwill into a miniskirt with a pair of sheers and shows me the same Burbe
rry skirt in Vogue for nine hundred dollars, I tell her she’s a genius.

  My laissez-faire attitude toward fashion annoys Storm to no end, but then she’s never so much as picked a flower out of a garden, so one cannot expect her to understand that Jimmy Choos are not the appropriate footwear for turning the compost heap or cleaning out the chicken coop.

  Now that I’ve met Forest, I’ve started doing subtle things that I haven’t thought about for a long time. The other day I changed my earrings, small gold hoops, for the first time in two years. I replaced them with a pair of turquoise drop earrings set in silver, a gift from Jane and Steve for my last birthday. Forest noticed right away. He also noticed when I exchanged a purple faded bandana for a blue one in my hair, and when I dabbed a bit of violet perfume on my wrists, it seemed to send him somewhere. I’m toying with pulling out the cowboy boots that Reynaldo and his wife had made for me by a friend of theirs in Mexico, which I wear very sparingly because they’re a little on the fancy side. I keep them high up on the top shelf of my closet in their original box, wrapped up in tissue. There’s a certain kind of girl you see quite a bit of around here who wears boots like that. These girls are a hot commodity on the rodeo scene and there are a lot of fringes and studs and rhinestones involved in their look. When the rodeo comes to town, they ride in the parade on the backs of spirited horses whose hooves have been spray-painted silver, or in Mustang convertibles driven by local Realtors wearing cowboy hats. They wave like the queen of England at the crowd lining the street, their heavily made-up faces frozen into a rictus for a smile. It’s impossible to tell their age but you know that when they disappear there will always be someone fresh and young to take their place. A few of these rodeo-queens-in-training go to my high school but I don’t know any of them personally. I don’t register on their radar at all. I’m not descended from rodeo royalty and I’m not interested in the young sons of cattle ranchers that they seem to favor for boyfriend material. I’m neither a threat nor interesting enough for them to know, so they look past me. They don’t know that I’ve taken hundreds of photos of them. Some of the photos of these girls are the best I’ve ever taken. They’re the kind of photos that you always hold closer to your face so you can try to catch a glimpse of what’s behind the mask.