Sunshine State

by Sarah Gerard

  Dedication

  To Mother-Father

  Epigraph

  The Florida sun seems not much a single ball overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination.

  —John Updike, Rabbit at Rest

  Life feeds on life, it has no choice. Life stokes its furnace with life, but not with life in general; it burns the unique and particular life of the individual, and when there’s nothing left to feed to the flames, the fire goes out.

  —César Aira, Shantytown

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  BFF

  Mother-Father God

  Going Diamond

  Records

  The Mayor of Williams Park

  Sunshine State

  Rabbit

  Before: An Inventory

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Endnotes

  About the Author

  Advance Praise for Sunshine State by Sarah Gerard

  Also by Sarah Gerard

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  BFF

  I’ll begin our story with that afternoon, we hadn’t spoken for a year—like so many years when we didn’t speak—when you pulled up next to me on my walk to work and offered me a ride. I climbed into the passenger seat of your Dodge Omni, knowing I’d begun another cycle, and still another. Feeling that I’d been tricked again, that I should have refused. You caught me in a moment of not knowing.

  If I start there, I should say that by this time we’d already gotten the tattoos that linked our right and left hips together into a single message: “Forever / & ever.” And I should say that, at a glance, my text appeared to spell “Beaver”—too perfect that yours bore the autonomous word while mine was dependent.

  Do you know mine is covered up? I hope yours remains. I hope you still see it in the mirror and it surprises you some mornings in your half sleep. You’re the only woman I’ve loved this way: enough to want to hurt you.

  I’m reminded of your first tattoo, on your back (tramp stamp, so Florida). You told me you orgasmed while getting it, your nerve endings so close to the surface of your skin. Like many things you told me, I don’t know if it’s true. Even twenty years after we met, I can’t tell when you’re lying, but have learned to assume you often are. I’ve learned to hope you are sometimes.

  Our friendship was a sticky web. Our friendship was a black box. Our friendship was a swamp full of cottonmouths.

  Another of your tattoos: an alligator eating up your left arm. (Is it left, like mine, or right? Are we mirrors even now?) The tattoo covers another, some text you got when I got my text. Mine: “Resilient in the clutch of darkness.” Yours: “Your blues ain’t like my blues.” Whose pain is deeper? Who wins?

  I have to start over, like we started over so many times, with the call you made in our nineteenth summer. We hadn’t spoken for a year. I went away to college in New York; you stayed in Florida. You didn’t go to school. Nobody in your family went to school.

  If I could quantify what came between us: the cost of tuition.

  If I could quantify what came between us: the cost of your mother’s one-bedroom rent subtracted from my parents’ four-bedroom house in a gated neighborhood.

  If I could quantify what came between us: the cost of diapers, formula, hospital bills.

  The last time we spoke before this, we planned to get coffee and you never called me back. You never showed; you disappeared. That day, I wore a pink slip I’d turned into a dress, copycatting your style, which has always been effortless.

  You shinier. You prettier. You taller. You thinner, more popular.

  In middle school, you had friends and I had you. You made it so you were my only friend. Don’t think I didn’t know.

  Was it really so important, so often, to know you were first? You were first.

  It’s stupid I’m still mad at you for this. It’s stupid I’m even still mad at you for things you did when we were ten. When you told me you had gone on a date with my boyfriend, he was hardly my boyfriend.

  And what was I wearing on the day you finally called, a full year later, linking summer to summer? I don’t know now. But I was driving that same car some thousand miles away from you, and you asked me to spell your daughter’s name. I got it wrong and you laughed.

  Wasn’t I supposed to be an English major? Yes, but I’d never heard that name. It’s unusual, like yours. It means “pure” in the language of your ancestors. In another it means “sea,” like the gulf we grew up swimming in together. The many, many ways we’re the same: blue eyes, brown hair, small breasts, freckles, and the moles on our bellies, which we called the moon and stars. Your daughter has your eyes.

  Your body: You were always biting your fingernails. Your fingers are long and thin, like your arms, like your legs, like your nose. Do you remember saying my nose was a ski slope? You traced your finger down and it leapt into the air, and you laughed your loud, bigmouthed laugh.

  Your body: Years later, you asked me why I didn’t tell you that you were too good for stripping. I didn’t know you wanted me to tell you.

  My body: Do you remember saying my shoulders were broad, that I couldn’t wear the tank top we’d just bought together, two of the same, and how I didn’t wear it? But you did.

  My body: Or the afternoon when you got on my bus without permission and we walked home through a tornado? I wore a black flowered skort with a matching tank top and leather platforms. We took shelter in the covered walkway of a Baptist church and shivered and laughed as the rain painted everything white.

  Your body: Or the funny face you made by pinching your nose closed and inhaling hard, crossing your eyes. Or the face you made when I borrowed your pants and laughed so hard I wet them in the back of our friend’s dad’s car coming back from an eighth-grade party.

  Yours: You were nearly paralyzed giving birth the first time. You didn’t want an epidural, but the nurse convinced you and then botched the administration. You told her something was wrong, but she didn’t believe you. You told me this many years later.

  Yours: You dreamt of being a model.

  Mine: I split my face open jumping from a train I hopped with the crew change you gave me. I’d never model. Later, I embellished my tattooed text with a half-sleeve train emerging from a tunnel.

  Mine: You said my ass was big, and I still believe you.

  Ours: We slept with our hips together, holding hands.

  The year we met, my parents moved my family from the house where you first knew me, where my father answered the door our first time together and saw your mother standing on the other side of the screen and called her by name. We joked that they had been lovers. We joked or we wished.

  You were the closest thing I had to a sister. I knew your body like it was my body; I knew it as it was changing. I knew when you got your period before me because I could smell it. And because you told me about it, drew me pictures of it, told me everything you could about how the blood clotted, how it felt, how it tasted. I knew your breasts as they were changing into shapes I could hold in my hands. I saw your naked body so close to mine so many times in the daylight, and the darkness, and the water, and the moon. I saw you pee. I saw your pubic hair changing color. I saw your face getting older.

  I loved you when you grabbed me by the sides of my head and smelled my hair. I do that to my husband now. You do that to your husband now, and to your children. You loved me like a child and a sister and a mother. You were my twin.

  I loved you when you held my hand expecting that I would hold yours back, and I did.

  We ran down the streets of my neighborhood, pr
epubescent, wearing nothing but skin, hiding behind trash cans when trucks turned corners and caught us in spotlights. We climbed into other people’s boats suspended from docks over dark water, hearing fish below hurl themselves into air, smacking down on the surface.

  I lost my virginity so soon after you because of you. You were the first one I told. I wrote you a letter the day it happened and drew you pictures, wanting you to see. My mother found it and put me on the pill. I lied and said that I loved him. He was just some boy.

  When your mother finally earned enough to move you into the condo, we held on to the sides of your hot tub and fucked the jets with our knees above the water. It was there that you met your daughter’s father, lying by the side of the pool in the sticky sun, turning brown the way I never could. You wanted to catch his eye and it worked.

  You knew you were pregnant as soon as you stood up from the grass where you lay with your daughter’s father. I see you walking your bicycles back to the duplex you shared with him then, with its haunted Murphy bed and its daisy-colored sunroom—the fear in your face and the hexagonal sidewalk sections beneath you, and this is something you’ve said to me that I believe.

  Your mother slid down the laundry chute of a foster home on sheets of waxed paper. She described the sound of climbing back up: boom—boom. We were teenagers when she gave you to the state because you couldn’t be trusted, with her or with yourself.

  There were times I knew you hated her. You’d come home to her on the recliner, corpse-like: TV on the floor, drink in hand, Misty cigarettes on the particleboard table, overweight, hair dyed red, made-up, drunk. She called me to complain about you. Did you know that? She took your daughter when you were coked up and homeless and could no longer protect her. You couldn’t even protect yourself. I think of the midnight you said you were going to break into your abandoned childhood home. It was somewhere to sleep.

  When you lived in that house your bedroom was a converted living room. A door led from your room to the front of the house; you both entered from the back. A boy lived in your neighborhood: your first love, the first male since your father to touch your bare skin. You were seven in the attic of another boy’s house. There were two others there. You told me this story.

  And nearby, the day we went exploring in the ruins of an abandoned house, I leapt from one wooden plank to another and landed on a rusty nail and cried. We were ten. I was wearing white Keds and bobby socks. By the time we got back to your house, the heel in my shoe was red and I was leaning on you, heavy. Your mother shook her head as she called my mother.

  I remember your house was blue.

  You moved out of it the year after I met you, into the low-rent apartment across from the Bosnian children you found annoying even though they were refugees from genocide. You came home alone after school and ate cheese quesadillas from the microwave, a survival technique I found strange until later, when I first heard you say “poor.”

  You turned twelve. At your party a man passed us and returned to where we chased one another on the grass. We hid from him behind a vined white lattice, giggling at the fact of his maleness. You broke loose from us, screaming, waving something above your head—a sunhat? You knew to be afraid.

  I walked as far down the driveway as my parents’ cordless phone allowed me that night when you said you were going away. All the houses slept with their eyes open, and the bush by our garage smelled of jasmine, and I was trying to cry, but I couldn’t. So I had to pretend.

  I pretended other times with you. I pretended we were still best friends when we got our tattoos. I pretended to take your side when my father fired you after giving you a job when you were desperate. I pretended sympathy when you told me you wanted to kill yourself. Your daughter was three; how could you? I pretended to trust you many times when I didn’t. You shouldn’t have trusted me, either.

  What you were wearing the day we came to pick you up at the girls’ home, my parents and I, and nobody asked us our names, or made us sign things, or even saw you leaving: A coral-colored vintage dress cinched at the waist. A necklace that hung between your breasts. You had gained weight from the Paxil and you called the dress your Marilyn. You wore, maybe, plastic flip-flops and anklets. Short hair. And I wondered if you wished they cared more, the people at the home. I wondered who had cared about you other than me. You can love someone without trusting her—you know this better than I do. I loved you completely. I love how you think water can feel things. I love that you always smell of sage. I love that you découpaged your coffee table. I love how you think you’re punk rock, even now.

  You were diagnosed, but you were never crazy. You were caught between the fear of leaving your mother and the fear of staying. Caught in the horror of being complicit in your endangerment every time she told you to fix her a drink. Caught in the need to protect her, though she didn’t protect you; caught between the habit of being a child, obedient, and the need to rebel, as a woman.

  It’s not your fault you couldn’t escape.

  There was so much I didn’t know about you, and I’m angry with you for thinking that I did. I’m angry with myself for failing to see it. For being naïve for so long.

  I hurt you.

  Twice you ran to Miami: First, when you fled that home with another girl, who you told me looked like a pixie. I wonder if that was true. Second, when you awoke in a hotel shower, covered in blood, with your daughter half a state away and no way to escape the room.

  I hope that was a lie.

  Lies I know you told me:

  You were abducted by aliens in the middle of the night when you were five. They took you from the kitchen in a bright light that came down from the ceiling. Your mother found you sleeping on the tiles in the morning. You never told her about the abduction.

  You modeled for a JNCO ad when we were thirteen. In the ad, you were standing on a glass floor looking down into the camera. The cuff of the jeans was twenty-one inches in diameter, the biggest JNCO style to date.

  You are distantly related to Chris O’Donnell, whose last name is a derivative of your family name. Or, more likely, your last name is a derivative of his family name. You met him once.

  You used JTT’s bathroom.

  You were writing the dialogue for a pilot cartoon with a famous producer who specifically asked you. This person was a good friend of yours who could help me with an after-school arts program I was trying to start at the time. You gave me his email address. The email bounced back.

  You were dating a member of Bob Marley’s family. You left your daughter with your mother to go to Miami to meet him at a music festival. It is because of him that you awoke in the hotel shower, covered in blood. He abandoned you there.

  You weren’t sleeping with the man who worked for my father at the same time you did and who borrowed your car to visit his mother in Tampa. He got high on heroin on the way and totaled your car. You couldn’t get to work.

  You know things about the “sacred art” of tai chi.

  In New York, you accidentally dialed your boyfriend, now the father of your second child, and let him listen to a conversation we were having about a man you wanted to fuck. When he called you back screaming, you were surprised.

  You didn’t know, when you convinced your stepfather to buy you and your daughter tickets to California, that you were going to find your way from San Diego to LA to be at my courthouse wedding.

  You weren’t a little proud when our friend picked you to give her solace after I cheated on her friend with the man I later married. You invited her over and listened while she told you all my secrets. You weren’t a little excited when you sat down to write me the email that ended our friendship. It didn’t thrill you to feel superior in that moment, knowing that I could also lie.

  You wilder. You freer. You louder. You bolder. You bigger. More jaded.

  To try to set limits was a betrayal. There was always something you were asking for that I wasn’t prepared to give. Your stepfather wasn’t even your stepfat
her anymore when you arrived at his San Diego mansion with your daughter, already pregnant with your second. You told me you found him full of pills and booze, that you couldn’t stay there. You called me in LA and I told you to come. What choice did I have?

  In the hours before my wedding, we hiked to the top of Barnsdall Art Park, overlooking the city. We ate figs on the grass with my almost husband, and your daughter disappeared into the trees to peer through the windows of the quieted art museum. At the wedding, she posed between us for a family photo: a child to three, all of us smiling.

  I made the mistake of needing you once, too. Before you visited me in New York, I told you I had a choice to make and asked you to help me make it. I’d fallen in love with a man who wasn’t my boyfriend. You wanted this to be our time and instead I made it mine.

  Were you mad at me for betraying a man who hadn’t abused me?

  Or were you mad at your father, who choked your mother while you watched when you were three? At the man who stalked you to work at the strip club and threw plates at you while your daughter slept in the next room, whose house you fled for a battered women’s shelter. The man who overtook you at a party, whom all of your friends still talked to. Your daughter’s father, whose name you wouldn’t allow to appear on her birth certificate, who later went to prison.

  Or your then-boyfriend, who once swung the broad side of his shovel into your pelvis; who came home drunk one night and peed on you while you slept; who dragged you across your apartment by your hair; who, you once explained, you find sexy because he’s primal.

  After the wedding, you wanted to ride with us to Malibu to throw our vows into the water. I said no. You weren’t invited.

  When you found out you were pregnant a second time you asked me if you should keep the baby. I sat on the edge of my ex-boyfriend’s bed in upper Manhattan, watching him smoke out the window with his ear cocked, and I told you to do what you felt was best.