by Alex Behr
I gained weight from lack of exercise and a diet of store-bought food. Maybe I was scared, too, that Tim or his friends would find me. I wanted padding, psychologically. We cooked on a hot plate because we parked by a building with an electrical outlet on the outside. We could even watch TV. The cops bothered us only on street cleaning days. China Basin in those days was empty, just gulls and stray dogs and us.
One day, I bought a pair of white pants from a guy in the Mission. I wasn’t worried about getting them bloody, like in sixth grade. I had stopped menstruating, because I was on the pill. When you lived in a bus, you didn’t want to mess with tampons, and I certainly didn’t want to get pregnant. The guy had a sidewalk sale set up in front of a movie theater that showed Fellini and the usual art crap. The rest of his junk looked pilfered—brass candlesticks, paperbacks, votive candles, a My Little Pony with its tail ripped out.
I held up the white pants in front of me, judging that they’d fit. They had rhinestones down the sides. I ducked into a bookstore to put them on. It was next to the café where the Mission’s Red Man sat all day, his face covered with a thin sheen of red face paint.
I put on the pants, forcing up the zipper, and followed a girl who also wore white pants. I followed people for sport, not loneliness. She had bleached white hair, like Debbie Harry, and wore high heels with a white blouse and white pants. All that white blinded me. I felt like I’d met my twin, only someone with more sex trapped in fabric and leather shoes. I crossed in front of blatting scooters and cars, not pausing, knowing the vehicles measured their speed based on mine, and I was matching hers.
I followed her as far as a tamales cart and I let her go. She was looking back at me, and I had nothing to say.
I knew when I married Ebin that it was stupid. He proposed to me with a ring from one of those dollar stores on 24th and Mission. He sang me an Elvis song, and it was so off-key I gave in and said yes. Besides, my dad and my close friends thought it was a terrible idea, which was a great incentive to disregard their advice. We even bought a piñata to celebrate and filled it with trinkets and fortune cookies from our favorite Chinese place.
He collected underground comics and put blankets over the bus windows, so he could read in the dark all day. He stopped washing his socks, buying new ones with a poor person’s mentality. He shopped at the cheap stores on Mission, which either got them from outlets or stolen off a truck or something. They usually held up around five washes or so. He didn’t think to invest in good pairs.
He had a talent, but he wasted it at first. He drew on things all the time: Styrofoam cups, Post-Its, sneakers, MUNI buses, abandoned brick buildings, and, of course, highway underpasses in the Mission, close to his favorite bars. He used Sharpies and spray paint, which gave the bus a chemical smell, but I didn’t mind.
He used to draw all over my skin, but that stopped after we got married. He stayed skinny and I got fat, like the nursery rhyme about Jack Sprat and his unnamed wife. We licked the platter clean, until there was nothing left to enjoy.
Ebin, before he got famous, made triangle origami dogs. Just four folds—one for the head, two for the ears, and one for the bottom of the head. We scattered them on the floor of the bus, with our dirty socks and doll heads. We didn’t care. I thought Life would care; that God, a facet of Life, didn’t like clutter and would judge us, but the more cluttered the bus became the less I cared. Since we were made in His image, I couldn’t imagine He would care either.
The reason why I’m telling you this is that some people back then did make it, and they did even more drugs than we did. It was the early nineties, and singers whipped their cocks around microphones; they drank and threw up in cabs. The girls from the Art Institute stripped and never wore underwear, even after work. They lived in a perpetual state of early childhood—skipping that preadolescent angst that I had gone through, where I was stuck: feeling responsible for my mom and dad, but not taken seriously by anyone.
Around the time I bought the rhinestone pants, Ebin and I were fighting more than usual. He wanted to make the bus a commercial enterprise and compete with the mariachi buses that took late night parties around the Marina and the Mission. Theirs had painted sides and velvet paintings on the inside, and the mariachi bands were authentic, or sounded good enough for the drunks. But Ebin could never figure out what we would do with our stuff while we ferried people around. We collected books and flotsam and had nets and milk crates to try to hold all of it.
He drew all day, and I had to get the right permits from the city. He felt he could offer a new experience: a Ganesh statuary, marigold garlands, and Bollywood hits blaring from the speakers. But he was ahead of his time, as usual. We didn’t even have a toilet. We had to put our crap in pockets of tinfoil at night and leave it by the docks at dawn.
I yelled at him that he was ruining my life. “I’ll leave so you can ruin it yourself,” he said.
When you live in a bus, you lose that urban propriety—if it ever existed. I walked around the city and couldn’t hear much from the windows, but I’m sure people screamed at each other and broke things. I yelled on the bus and I yelled as he walked away, with a paper bag full of drawings. I ran down the street after him. The white sky glowed above telephone wires looped between concrete buildings. A parked car had its headlights on, shining on me, though it was still light outside.
Ebin didn’t come back for several days. I tried to make the bus nice with handsewn curtains and succulents. I wrote poetry, filled out job applications. When he stayed away for a few weeks, I took a vacation from the bus, staying in the East Bay with friends relocated from Portland.
I got a job as a secretary for an alternative school in Emeryville, an industrial city between Oakland and Berkeley. One day at lunch, I found a metal shrine next to the railroad tracks. It was in shape of a human, with a feather-like headdress. The stomach was made of a metal camping plate, and it had a candy gummy fish as the belly button. I walked there with a friend from work. I didn’t feel like I was cheating; we were just idling by the tracks headed north to Portland. He used to jump trains when he was young, and I suspected he put the shrine there to woo me. We picked a way around the broken glass to have our picnic. He said he’d help me with my high school GED.
I heard Ebin got a show at a Mission bookstore and all his pieces sold. I couldn’t believe it when I stopped by to sell used comics. The owner showed me the receipts and the reviews in the free weekly. Supposedly a collector came by, too—one of those yuppies who liked to eat at the sushi places taking over the Mission, not caring about the parking tickets or the junkies begging for change.
But what really struck me was the piece that got the most attention. Ebin had taken my rhinestone pants, the white ones, and had handstitched a sinuous piece of red velvet down the side of one leg, like a lava flow. And he covered the pants with my stories, poems, and secrets. He wrote it in block print, like he was a crazy person at one of those art studios for autistic people. And through the words and the velvet were marching soldiers, unicorns, elaborate forts and weaponry, even a silhouette of the crazy Red Man. He didn’t do it for me, or for our dead love. He did it for himself, for some strange vision. I thought it was hideous, but it sold.
WET
My husband breaks a slat of the bed I grew up in. It’s a mahogany sleigh bed from the 1800s. The headboard is stained with handprint ghosts from our son’s dreams.
My husband sets up our son’s new bed and mattress. He let our son use a box cutter to slice through the shipping cardboard, and it slips into the fake black leather. A small gouge.
Say nothing.
I say something to the boy, the almost-teen, couched as an insult to the husband. He glares at me.
This is uncomfortable.
I go to my office, the third bedroom of the sad house. I have books and fabric scraps. I have dead friendships and active stomach bacteria. Famous people never email back anymore. Was I boring? Don’t answer. Don’t answer.
Yes.
I have stained teeth and an undeniable love of cheese.
If everything is out in the open I can see it, until there is nothing to see after all. Rectangular shapes and colors. Is it moldy? A closet full of secrets—but why?
I have a bad gin headache and many unfinished projects. I can’t find Advil. Four coffee mugs and one espresso cup in bedroom. Fifty books I will never read. I have lost the sweetness, affection, lust, and pride in the other. I forget the pet names (but I remember). I give up the teasing (I transfer it to the cat).
I live with a polite stranger, a slob. I am a slob.
“Mealworms can be ground into butter. They taste like cow milk!” The top of my brain is pressing upward into my skull. It’s my fault.
This Big D. Not the dick. The divorce.
I cut off my left arm with nail clippers. It hangs on. I can’t snip the final pieces of dried-out skin.
The initial hurt: I saw it on my arm, too. “I’m in love with—.” A flap cut into the shoulder. The cuts extend on either side, forming a bloody jelly roll. Not till death. Till legal documents coming through the email.
At night, I tuck our son into his new bed. He tells me: “You and Dad are divorced on SimCity.” I was a grandmother on it, rocking the baby. That gave our son points. Now my boyfriend is my husband’s roommate, a black guy.
Soon our son never visits that game anymore. Digital limbo. Soon I will never be married to my husband except in nightmares.
Our son asks: “Is sperm white? Is it brown like poop? Or yellow like pee?”
I say: “Ask your dad.”
I cry in therapy. Divorce is violent. My husband. A nice person. Except when he swears. Except when he looks at me sobbing on the chair, on the rug. Anywhere. Our house is welcome to all tears.
Moths eat the felt pads inside the piano. Fleas jump on our son’s iPad. Maggots squirm inside the sesame seed jar. Their perverse dance. I destroy my liver. I grow a mustache.
Our adolescent son screams. Now he’s a toddler. Now he’s an infant. He is in the womb. He’s the cells that formed him. Does the egg scream when it’s pierced by the sperm?
The window doesn’t fit right in the frame. It’s an old house with a lot of potential. Where are those clouds I made of carbon dioxide words, my greenhouse gas of hate? Do they form steam in the bathroom? I am cold.
My husband drives to the dump with the futon stained with pee and tears. He tells me he wanted to drive off a bridge. Two days later he leaves the country for a year. My son and I spin in our rooms. Two months pass. Then: snow.
“Mom, come out.” The son, twelve, shirtless, in shorts and sandals. He runs into the night, now white, like a healthy uterus, its tissue open to life. Flakes cover the harm: the cat’s grave, the thorns. The suburban failure machine. I laugh at the son for his snow dance, his delicious chaos.
I make a snow angel. The metaphor fails. The son stomps it out. No angels here, so we raise our tongues to the stars: we taste what melts.
THE COURTSHIP OF
EDDIE’S FATHER
I get a ride with Ann-Marie, the mother-in-law, to the family picnic. She turns left from the road into Golden Gate Park, bullying the Honda over the curb, onto the bike trail, and toward the picnic area.
“Cool it,” Ann-Marie says. She waves at me while she speaks, and her thin, gold bracelet nearly hits my fucking face. “If we get stopped, point out the cooler in the back. People drive to these picnic spots all the time. That’s what the trails are for.” She likes to be bad. She yanks on her skorts. Jenny, my wife, has a matching pair. She told me that a skort is shorts and a skirt put together. I am truly sorry to know.
I try not to look at Ann-Marie’s tan, waxed calves, knees, and thighs, shiny with tennis buff. I slink down, shut my eyes, and stick my foot on the dash.
“Down, please,” she says, nudging my thigh. I cringe. Mothers-in-law should not touch any of sons-in-law’s body parts that attach to “privates.” Especially when said son-in-law wears shorts and his mother-in-law touches skin with (I open my eyes) pale, silver nails.
A kid in a camouflage outfit stands by the trail, his feet outspread in the patchy grass. He shoots at our windshield with a high-powered water gun. Cherry liquid smashes against the glass.
I roll down the window and flash the peace sign, but the kid, no older than eight, raises the gun to shoot again. Ann-Marie agitates the windshield wiper. “Damn brat!” she says. I say nothing. I like his style. He could’ve been my kid, if I’d ended up with his mom, whoever she is, instead of Jen.
“So, we’re here!” Ann-Marie says, once again thrusting me into family submission. “Do you see that woman? Crystal?” She slams the brakes on the grass.
I sit up and look for my wife and kid. I look for Crystal, our kid’s birth mother. He has her smile.
Jenny walks up to get the stuff from the car. She looks pissed but maybe it’s because she’s not wearing her sunglasses. She has a natural squint. Her legs, though—just like her momma’s. She’s wearing skorts, too. Red ones. But her top is stretchy and tight.
The baby monitor had sputtered this morning with the animal whines of our child. Jenny straightened out so her butt no longer pressed against my stomach. I rose to fetch Eddie, feeling the ache in my lower back. The kid was crying, no doubt, because he wanted the soft plastic nipple of his bottle. I have Jenny’s audacious breasts to myself—when I’m lucky. Eddie got to suck tit for only the first few days of his life, before we adopted him.
“Where’s the baby?” I ask Jenny.
“At the children’s playground—with Crystal.”
“Did everything go OK?”
“Yeah. Her plane was on time,” she says. I wait for more details, but she adds, “Why are you so late?”
“Oh, honey,” Ann-Marie says, opening the back door of the car. “I was out of gas. Then we needed money.”
“She forgot her card. We had to go to our bank,” I say. I feel nervous, as if covering for something perverse and tawdry, but Jen can’t read my mind.
“Jesus.” Jenny turns to carry cups, napkins, and other crap to the picnic area.
“Is that a nice thing to say?” Ann-Marie calls after her. “This is our day, honey. Your first Mother’s Day.”
Gary, one of Jenny’s brothers, steps out from the grill and throws a football at me. I duck, and the strings on the ball scrape my cheek. He’s wearing a Cal sweatshirt with the sleeves torn out. He calls out, “Dude. Set an example! You don’t want Eddie to grow up to be a wuss.” I try to balance the football on my finger to impress him, but Gary walks back to the grill to man the tongs.
The chipped picnic table staggers with plastic bags and soda bottles. No one bothers to talk to me. Gary’s new girlfriend looks good in her turquoise tank top and shorts, squirting suntan lotion on her arms. Gary and Mike—Jenny’s other brother—fuck with the BBQ, and four of their kids use a jump rope to tie the fifth—the youngest one—to a eucalyptus tree. I feel bad for him. Those trees are sticky.
I sit at the picnic table, hoping no one asks me to do anything important, like find Crystal. I’m scared of her. I saw her intestines, after all. That’s about as intimate as you can get with a virtual stranger. It was in the adoption plan that we could be at the birth, and she ended up having an emergency C-section. I almost passed out when they cut her open. Jenny, however, watched everything.
I take a fat Meyer lemon from a bag, slice it open, and squeeze it into a glass. Just one lemon produces about a quarter-cup of juice. I add bottled water, and the membranes float in the liquid. The seeds sink to the bottom. A genetic waste. We don’t ingest and shit them onto the ground for procreation.
There’s a shame in our marriage, and her whole family knows it. It sparked nice and bright at our first adoption meeting. Jenny and I sat with a group of strangers in a fluorescent-cursed room and chewed pepperoni sandwiches with extra mustard. Everyone grilled each other about who spent more on medical treatments, with the fat lady up front exhorting u
s on what fools we were to spend money on in vitro fertilization. “If I had a business where I’d take twelve thousand bucks from desperate couples with only a twenty-five percent guarantee they’d get what they want, why, sign me up!” And everyone talked about who did the pricking with the inch-long needles and who had the endometrioses and who had the chemical pregnancies and who had the mangled tubes and who produced eggs one by one, like a chicken. None of the guys with the folded arms copped to dead sperm, though.
We spurted out our tale: seven years of marriage and five miscarriages due to a pH imbalance. “They’re all your children. You have to honor that,” the lady said. We told them Jenny’s body rejects my DNA. It rejects our fetuses. “But you’re so young!” the counselor said. “You can adopt! We can help you,” and she put a sticker with a baby’s face on my shirt.
Jenny’s body thinks those mini-fetuses are an infection, an invasion. She barely shows an interest in me anymore. The last time we told the family we were pregnant, one of Gary’s kids, the delicate genius, leaned his head on Jenny’s belly and said, “I don’t hear babies crying inside you anymore.” I didn’t say that at the meeting. I can keep some secrets.
Jenny described how we went on as a happy couple, enjoying our annual trips to Carmel, and how I taught lessons at the back of a guitar store in Berkeley, but the lady interrupted her and said, “Then you felt something’s missing, didn’t you? You realized God has another plan for you.” Jenny looked stricken. A true atheist. I got her a Coke. She swallowed her tears and turned pink.
After lunch, a couple came in with their baby, a crawling, squirming girl. The guy told us how he had bought a twelve-pack and sat in a hot tub the first night they brought the baby home, too overwhelmed that a person, their birth mother, could give up her baby so they could be parents. Everyone stared at the little girl as if to eat her up. But I looked at the guy. Later, I guessed he was half in love with their birth mother.
