Summer in the Land of Skin

by Jody Gehrman

  “Goddammit,” Lucy says, rolling her eyes. “Those people need to kill themselves.”

  At Purgatory Corner, there’s a new guy on the porch wearing overalls and looking like a cadaver propped up on the steps; he screams at the Goat Kid house, “Turn that shit down!” You’d never expect that much sound from him, just looking at his sickly frame. He must have disproportionately large lungs.

  Lucy shakes her head and says, “This corner is nuts, man. White trash everywhere you look.”

  I go upstairs and pour us both some coffee. When I join her again, I ask casually, “Where’s Arlan?”

  “Painting.”

  “That’s right.” I pause before asking, “What’s the latest on the baby front?”

  She scoffs. “Fuck, I don’t know. We have to decide soon, though.”

  “I thought you’d already decided.”

  “Arlan thinks he wants it.”

  The coffee is bitter and lukewarm. I put it down. “Do you?”

  She curls her legs up close to her and wraps one arm around her knees. “I don’t think so. But the clinic has to be the creepiest place on earth.”

  “How many times have you been?”

  She looks at me. “Three. This will be the fourth.”

  “Oh,” I say, trying not to sound shocked.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she says, bristling.

  “Like what?”

  “Like you’re looking at me.”

  I pick up my coffee again and choke down another sip. “I’m not looking at you like anything.”

  “I don’t believe in their guilty fucking stupid Catholic rhetoric, okay?”

  “Whose?”

  “The whole world’s,” she says. “I have no guilt about taking care of what needs to be taken care of. It’s their attitudes that get to me. I don’t need to be exposed to that. I don’t like doctors sticking shit up inside me and then giving me a lecture about birth control, and I hate those insipid nurses with their sanitary outfits and their caked-on makeup—the whole thing just gives me the fucking creeps.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Okay.”

  “Don’t ‘Yeah, okay’ me,” she says, raising her voice. “I’m serious. I don’t know if I can go back there.”

  “Aren’t there other clinics—like in Seattle?”

  “Sure,” she says. “They’re all the same. Creepy, creepy, creepy.”

  The Goat Kids turn their music up even louder, and the cadaver on the porch screams, “Hey! HEY!” He gets no response.

  “Call me crazy,” I say, “but I don’t think dreading a trip to the clinic is a good enough reason to commit yourself to a lifetime of parenting.”

  She covers her face with her hands. “Oh God,” she says. “I need a drink.”

  “Not to mention nine months without alcohol—or smokes.”

  “Forget that,” she says. “No way.”

  “What—do you want to pickle the little thing inside you? Have it come out reeking of gin and bumming a smoke, first thing?”

  She stares off at the distance, and I wonder if she even heard me. After a while, she says, “Sometimes I think about it. Imagine a baby that’s half Arlan, half me. What a weird, fucked-up creature that would be!”

  “A beautiful little monster,” I say.

  “I’ve got to tell him no way. I’ll make an appointment tomorrow. I mean, come on, what are we thinking? It’s too crazy.”

  I reach out and remove a strand of hair from her eyes. “Just tell me when the appointment is. We’ll smuggle in a bottle of vodka or something.”

  She laughs without opening her mouth. There are tears in her eyes. “Sometimes I’m really, really tired,” she whispers. She blinks, and her lashes knock a pair of tears over the pinkish rims of her eyes. “This morning, I could barely get out of bed.”

  “Hormones,” I say, wiping one of the tears away with my thumb.

  “Just tired,” she says. “Tired of everything.”

  We sit there, staring out over the yard, watching the fog, until the Goat Kids’ music gets so unbearable, and the cadaver’s protests so belligerent, we have to take our coffee cups and head inside.

  I’m trying to sketch a timeline of my father’s life, and I see now how many pieces are missing. It’s frustrating and a little eerie, like trying to spell your own name and suddenly realizing you’ve forgotten most of the letters. I know the basics: born and raised in Palo Alto. Tried Stanford, dropped out to travel. Pretty soon after he got back to the States he started taking classes at the music conservatory in San Francisco. He didn’t last long there, though, before dropping out again—I remember he told me once it was too stuffy, that the professors wouldn’t know funky if it bit them in the ass. He married my mother, the harp and sax player with soft gray eyes. She was a little older than he was, and had just graduated from the conservatory with honors. In the wedding pictures they both look stunned and confused—very fresh and alive but also startled, like they just said something they wished they could take back, only it was too late.

  He had money, and she didn’t. It was a big issue. Both his parents were dead by the time he graduated high school, but they left plenty behind. I never heard much about them—in fact, I hardly remember him reminiscing about his childhood at all. Mom would occasionally bring up his inheritance with bitterness, implying that he was spoiled and pampered. She grew up dirt poor in some little town near Fresno, a place she never wanted to visit and rarely mentioned, except in her blackest moods.

  Sometimes I liked to imagine a romantic wrong-side-of-the-tracks sort of courtship between my parents. My father in crisp, expensive slacks and a bloated bank account enchanted with my mother, who could barely make rent in her little studio above the Chinese takeout joint. Unfortunately, I know it didn’t turn out to be much of a fairy tale. I remember the arguments; my mother was obsessed with home furnishings, good wines and shoes. She was always pining for a vintage pinot noir, or some sleek, strappy sandals down at Nordstrom, even in the early days when her hair was long and she smoked pot and cooked tofu. My father, on the other hand, hated to talk about expenses. He seemed to think that money was dirty, and that the best way to deal with it was to deny its existence entirely; that was the only way to be sure it didn’t own you. Sometimes, when she got on him about the new leather couch she had to have, he would chant at her, quietly but relentlessly, “Make money your god and it will plague you like the devil,” until she stormed out of the room.

  Early in my parents’ marriage, Bender and my father opened the shop. I’ve pieced together the basics on that, too, though it’s taken a little prying on my part. Bender seems reluctant to talk about their friendship in too much detail, as if he’s worried I might ask the wrong questions. They started the business when they were in their early twenties; they’d been friends since high school, and it seemed natural to make a living doing what they loved. They’d been messing around with building and repairing stringed instruments for years, hanging out in Rot Gut’s studio every chance they got since they were fifteen. It started out as a small business, mostly doing repairs and fixing up antiques they got for cheap at flea markets or estate sales. Slowly, they started building their own guitars from scratch. They named their shop The Mermaid Garden, based on some shared LSD trip Bender was hopelessly vague about—he claimed he’d forgotten the details, but the shine in his eyes told me otherwise.

  Sometimes he’ll start a story and then he’ll trail off or change the subject with an awkward non sequitur, looking embarrassed. He seems okay when I ask about the early years; it’s the later ones that make him jumpy and uncomfortable. Instinctively, I sense his hesitance hinges on the mysterious falling-out they had, just before he sold Dad the business and moved to Santa Fe. I was only about three when that happened, and I can’t remember any of it. I get the feeling there was some event that tipped their friendship over a cliff, leaving only broken pieces behind.

  The Skins are off and running, with the help of a slick, pierced,
very pretty bunch of groupies who apparently saw God at the debut on the Fourth and haven’t stopped talking about it since. The band has had half a dozen gigs now, and each time the crowd size swells. Already, people are yelling out titles and singing with the choruses, as if they were raised on these songs.

  The secret, of course, is Arlan. Women peer over their dates’ shoulders at him, hang around after and try in vain to strike up conversations. His first moments of terror on the Fourth seem like a distant memory. Now he stands on stage with unshakable confidence, gripping his guitar with nonchalance. He wears a metal harness to hold his harmonica; the harness is vaguely reminiscent of headgear, the kind geeky boys wore in junior high. But when you see his mouth sliding up and down the slender, silver shape, eliciting noises that are part train, part animal moans, you forget all about headgear. In fact, you forget all about everything when you see Arlan like that.

  Arlan’s songs are almost always built around a woman’s name—something outdated and not terribly pretty like Virginia or Alice. He makes you want to be these women, and you know if you were you’d reinvent the name; you’d be wearing some thin, shapeless cotton slip in Tennessee and maybe you’d have braids and definitely you’d smoke; you’d hang laundry out to dry on hot summer evenings and Arlan would come driving up in a rusted-out Cadillac or an ancient Ford truck with a thin cloud of dust rising under his wheels, the sky turning a melancholy blue in the wake of a violent sunset, and you’d watch him get out and squint at you, his face sweaty and dark, his hunting knife glistening on the dashboard, and you really wouldn’t care if he planned to slit your throat or brush your hair back tenderly—the difference would be minimal, because you’d be ready for anything with him.

  Every woman in the audience knows these things, when we watch Arlan’s fingers caressing the frets, stroking the mic as he leans in a little closer, his lips nearly touching the metal mesh. We can’t take our eyes off him. But Arlan never really looks at us when he plays. His ecstasy is always moving past us, over us; his eyes might rest on a face for a moment, but there is nothing more than a fleeting trace of recognition before he moves on to another world, someplace hot as whiskey in your chest, someplace beautiful and dark. It is precisely the private nature of this ecstasy that makes every woman watching him think of sex—not foreplay or flattery, but the moment when a man comes inside you, the moment that is never really yours.

  One of the pages in my bundle of letters is undated, and it seems more like a journal entry than a letter. He hasn’t even written Bender’s nickname at the top of the page, like he usually does. It’s scribbled in particularly difficult-to-read lettering on a piece of heavy paper torn from a notebook. One edge is ragged and uneven, obscuring a few letters at the margin, as if he ripped it out carelessly.

  Oh God. Going up is so easy. One minute the walls are just walls, the next they’re multidimensional tapestries dripping with the history of the universe. On the way up there’s a surge of wonder and delight, like discovering it’s the first day of summer vacation, and here you were thinking it was the dead of winter. It’s down that creates the problem. Gravity is the enemy. Now that I’m back between the walls, the fit is tighter than ever.

  Helen and I went for a walk in the afternoon. It was just us for the first time in forever. We walked to the Mission; she smoked a little pot, but she didn’t want to shroom because last time she felt the top of her head disintegrate and run all over her face and it scared her so badly she hasn’t tried it since.

  We walked to that Nicaraguan place we love, and on the way I told her about the time Aida taught me to samba. It was wonderful. She smelled of peppers and musk and her hips were like an intricate, well-oiled machine, shifting and reversing with incredible precision and grace. I was right at eye-level with her breasts; they were moving in time with her hips, and her low-cut blouse showed the clean, dark line of her cleavage. I remember staring at that crevice with such simple, pure awe, wondering how one line could hold such mystery.

  This was before everything happened, of course. I was maybe twelve, and the world was just opening up, and a woman’s body was still the strangest, darkest fruit of all. I didn’t feel shame, that afternoon, learning the quick, mincing steps and the oiled hips of samba. What I felt was alive.

  I wanted to tell Helen all of this; I wanted to re-create for her the light on Aida’s hair and the luminous cinnamon of her skin. I guess it was just that the world seemed open again, as we walked. The mothers were calling to their children in Spanish and the bananas were piled high outside the corner market and the air smelled of meats turning tender in baths of salsa. I thought if I could connect this moment to that one, this beautiful day to that beautiful day, with Helen as my witness, maybe the world would become whole again.

  The optimism of the magical plant kingdom.

  I was just getting to the part about Aida’s breasts when Helen looked at me and said, “That woman practically destroyed you. How can you love her still?” And I thought, don’t we all destroy each other? Isn’t that what we’re doing right now? Killing each other with good intentions? I wanted to tell her about the nature of forgiveness—but more than that, I wanted her to see what a beautiful day it was, when I was twelve, when a woman’s body contained absolute mystery, nothing more, nothing less.

  Instead we walked the rest of the way in silence.

  Tuesday, as we’re building a counter along the south wall, I take the nails out of my mouth and say, “You knew Dad a long time, right?”

  “Met in the fifth grade,” he says.

  “Do you know who Aida was?”

  He pounds a nail in with two quick strokes, lines the next one up, does the same. “Sort of.”

  “What do you mean, sort of?”

  “She disappeared when we were pretty young.”

  “Who was she?”

  “His stepmother.”

  I struggle to recall anything my father might have mentioned about a stepmother, but there’s nothing. All I can see now is him dancing with a dark-haired woman, her breasts swaying in time to their movements, and then I hear my mother: “That woman practically destroyed you.”

  “She was kind of wild, I guess. There was twenty years at least between her and old man Medina.” I imagine the wedding photo: an old man, silver-haired and bent slightly at the waist, his tux immaculately tailored and yet somehow too large. He drapes an arm possessively around the young, tan bride with the mischievous smile.

  “Did Dad like her?”

  Bender shrugs, takes a tape measure out and measures the width. “I guess he did,” he says, when I don’t stop staring at him.

  “Why would my mother say Aida destroyed him?”

  “She said that to you?”

  “No, to my father. I read it in one of his letters.”

  He takes a handkerchief from his pocket, wipes the sweat from his brow. “You want to take a quick break?”

  “Okay,” I say, a little surprised.

  “Let’s go get an iced tea or something.”

  “Sure.”

  We walk downtown, and I see that the warmth of the day has brought the half-naked throngs out of doors again. We go to the Little Cheerful, a popular college hangout, and we order large iced teas, then sit outside in the shade of the awning, at a table that seems too small for Bender. He squeezes a wedge of lemon into his tea and pours from the sugar dispenser until the bottom of the glass shows a thick layer of white. “Old Southern recipe,” he says, when he notices me staring.

  We sit a couple of minutes in silence, sipping our tea and watching the girls in tiny halter tops and hippie skirts, boys in nothing but shorts, their bodies gleaming white.

  “You remember when I gave you those letters? I said you weren’t going to like everything.”

  “Yeah.” I feel a little nervous, suddenly. I decide I want my tea sweet, too, so I pour as much sugar as Bender did, and he smiles.

  “You’re also not going to understand everything,” he says, his face goi
ng serious again. “There were things he maybe didn’t want to remember.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, you know. Unpleasant shit.”

  “No, I don’t know.” Suddenly, I realize the power Bender has over me. He knows who my father was, and I don’t. “Tell me.”

  “I don’t know if it’s my place.”

  “Why is everyone so secretive about him? He’s dead. He forfeited his right to privacy, as far as I’m concerned.”

  Bender sighs, and when his eyes meet mine I see the sadness there. “Aida was a very unstable woman. She was lonely in the States, I think—her English wasn’t great. She was from Brazil—did you know that?” I shake my head. I think about adding that I didn’t even know she existed, before today, but I don’t. “She married your grandpa, and then he got pretty sick right away. She was only in her thirties, and everyone knew she was restless. Well…” He stares at his iced tea, his mouth tight. “Shit, Medina. I really don’t know how to say this. She, uh, and your dad. Were lovers, I guess you could say.”

  I feel suddenly sick to my stomach, but also riveted, like I’m straining to see a grisly car wreck. “Lovers?”

  He nods, not looking at me. “When your grandpa died, she took her share of his money and moved back to Brazil. Your dad was almost eighteen. He moved in with us for the last semester of high school.”

  It takes a second for all this to sink in. The closed door of my father’s adolescence opens a crack and allows me a sliver of a view. I’m not sure I like what I’m seeing. “Did he hate her?”

  “He was pretty hurt. But I think he always loved Aida—even after she left. She was a little crazy, you know. I’m not saying what she did was right, but she had a good heart, in a way. She was very musical; she got your dad into guitar when he was young. She did a lot of things wrong, but she got some things right.” He gulps down half his tea. “At least, that’s how I saw it.