by Sarah Bird
Didi’s father, on the other hand, still got around fairly well. He even managed to tape his radio shows from the studio he’d set up in their garage. Mr. Steinberg always treated Didi more like a grandchild than a child. Like there was a real father somewhere doing all the hard stuff like discipline and all he had to do was the indulgent, grandfather stuff like hand over the keys to his Mustang and never check what time she came home at night or whether she’d done her homework or brushed her teeth. He’d converted their garage into a studio and Didi and I helped him tape his shows there. He let us pull the old vinyl records, black and shiny as a cockroach’s back, out of their covers and cue them up on one of the three turntables he used. I loved the names of the albums: I Sing the Body Electric, Bitches Brew, Pithecanthropus Erectus, Black Pastels, Ezz-thetics, Descent into the Maelstrom.
Nobody else had ever talked to me the way he did. “Cue up this side for me, babe. Mingus in Stuttgart.”
“Which cut, Mr. Steinberg?”
“Mr. Steinberg? Who let my father in here? I told you Mort. Mort!”
“I’m sorry. Mort.”
“Okay, third cut. Now, listen to this. It will freak your bird.”
All I knew about Mr. Steinberg—Mort—was that he was the black sheep of a wealthy Jewish family somewhere back in Chicago and had a small trust fund that allowed him to do what he wanted: to be a disc jockey at a failing radio station and play the jazz records he loved so much. I knew that he called Didi babe and she called him Mort and that he believed and taught Didi to believe that, against all evidence to the contrary, her shit did not stink.
There was nothing Didi could do that Mr. Steinberg wouldn’t find charming and cute and forgivable, from getting in a fender bender with his beloved ’Stang (“It’s only money, babe. It can be fixed. Thank God you weren’t hurt.”) to flunking English (“I met that teacher of yours and she’s a real chromosome case. Don’t sweat it, babe.”) to getting expelled for skipping (“You can learn more hanging out at the mall, or wherever it is you go, than that factory for bureaucrats will ever teach you. Assholes.”).
When Mr. Steinberg got too weak to tape his show, Didi knew it was the end. That’s when she got even more hard-core about “keeping consensual reality at bay.” Her mother always had lots of pills around the house and Didi started dipping into them. Percocet, Ativan—she especially liked “the floaty ones!” She stopped asking me about my father and I stopped asking about hers. Talk was for things you could change. When all the “sharing” and “feelings” in the world wouldn’t stop one cough from being wrenched from one pair of ruined lungs, talk was worthless. Didi and I knew that. She knew I had her back just like she had mine and talking about it only made it worse.
Didi’s parents dealt with their fear like bears, each Steinberg denning up in his or her own pain. Mr. and Mrs. Steinberg never had much in common to begin with. They just didn’t fit together. Him: bald, glasses, a vinyl nerd with no interest in humans unless they had recorded on Blue Note before the Second World War. Her: twenty, thirty years younger, beautiful as Natalie Wood, barely speaking English and always vaguely pissed off in a petulant way that made her look like a Pekinese dog. They, literally, didn’t even speak the same language. They were an even less likely couple than my parents. One day, I overheard Didi and her mom arguing and out of the jumble of furious Spanish, Didi hissed the phrase “mail-order bride.” I never asked Didi about it and she never brought it up, but suddenly her parents made a little more sense.
It was a surprise when Mr. Steinberg died before Daddy. After the funeral, there was a reception at Didi’s house. A few neighbors dropped by. Some of the other oncology patients and the nice nurse who wore the fish smock showed up. None of Mr. or Mrs. Steinberg’s family came. No friends. There was no one to wrap their arms around Mrs. Steinberg and make her feel safe enough to cry. Instead, Mrs. Steinberg opened Mr. Steinberg’s liquor cabinet, took out a bottle of Chivas, filled a snifter, and never faced life without a glass in her hand from that moment forward.
When Mrs. Steinberg finished the Chivas, she bought a white plastic bucket of margaritas and kept it in the freezer. She scooped a frozen margarita out for every meal and several snacks during the day. Overnight, her fragile, doll-like beauty disappeared and she developed the poochy gut and spindly legs of the serious boozer.
Didi unhinged a little less dramatically. For the next few weeks, I walked to Pueblo Heights because I never knew when, or if, Didi would be going to school. Even though I’d barely spoken five words to any of my teachers, I went to all of Didi’s and told them about Mr. Steinberg. I begged them to cut Didi some slack, to give her special assignments she could do at home. My workload got pretty intense finishing my work, Didi’s normal assignments, and all of her special makeup projects. But I was actually happy to have extra stuff to do since Didi was immersing herself in two activities: groupieing and getting wasted on the West Mesa. I don’t know why I had faith that in time she’d come back. Maybe because I could no longer imagine my life without her.
I didn’t mind being stuck at my house since it gave me more of a chance to be with Daddy. That was when I noticed how my mother’s peculiarities had blossomed. The sicker Daddy got, the worse her nerves were. The only time she left the house was to go to her new church. When she wasn’t at HeartLand, she was on the phone talking to other members whom she called “sister” and “brother.” She ended all her conversations with them by saying, “Bless you.” She had taken to telling me things like “Give Satan an inch and he’ll become your ruler.” And “What you weave in this world, you wear for eternity.”
She was happy when the Skankmobile stopped appearing in our driveway every morning. I’d spent my whole life catering to my mother’s peculiarities. So, when she insisted that I start wearing one of the long denim skirts with an elastic waist that all the women at her church wore, I just put it on. Right over the jeans that I rolled up so they didn’t show. Then, as soon as I was out of her sight, I’d yank the skirt off and stuff it in my backpack. When she informed me that Didi was “an agent of Satan,” all I did was nod. There was no point in arguing. There never had been.
Seeing me leaving the house in the long skirt and not riding with Didi made my mother hum with righteous joy. She relaxed and one night, about a month after Mr. Steinberg’s funeral, she went out for groceries and left me alone with Daddy to watch the History Channel. Right in the middle of the Battle of the Bulge, he huffed out one word, “Stars.” My father loved looking at the sky. His favorite thing about Albuquerque had been how clear the sky was, how many more stars he could see here than in Texas.
“I don’t know, Daddy,” I said. “Mom’ll get mad.”
Daddy didn’t waste any more of his breath arguing. Instead, he just raised his hand and pointed his finger toward the window where a bit of night sky, a few of the stars he wanted to see, were visible. His skin seemed stained by grape juice. When I pressed his purplish fingers, a dead white spot remained for minutes.
I bundled him up in the quilted camouflage jumpsuit he used to wear when he went hunting back in Texas. He hadn’t had it on once since we’d left Houdek. I tried not to notice how the suit drooped on him like a little boy in his father’s clothes. I disconnected him from the big tank of oxygen that stood in the corner and hooked him up to the little portable canister he used on the rare times when he left the bedroom.
“Your chariot, sir,” I said, pushing the wheelchair up to where he sat on the edge of the bed, breathing hard from the exertion of getting dressed. He waved the chair away and tried to stand on his own. When he started wobbling, I angled the chair under him and he half-fell into it.
When I pushed him outside into the cold night air, he closed his eyes so that even the lids could drink in the wild, free feeling. Then he opened them, pointed his finger to the sky, and, one word at a time, exhaled the names of the stars. Big. Dipper. Little. Dipper. Ursa. Major. Ursa. Minor. North. Star. When he finished, he said, “Can. Always. Fi
nd. Your. Way. Home.”
Because there was a little smile on his face, I laughed as if he’d made a joke and said, “Yeah, Daddy, now I can always find my way home.” Then, exhausted, he fell asleep and I pushed him back into the house.
Chapter Six
Around that time, my mother officially went off the rails and plowed headlong into HeartLand. The sisters began coming to our house, bringing gigantic bags of old clothes that Mom washed, then cut up into squares of fabric for the church’s quilting operation. Her hair had grown long and she was wearing it in a bun that skinned all the hair back off her face, then rested like a dowager’s hump on her neck. She switched from the long denim skirt to pioneer dresses. She wore kneesocks to cover the little bit of calf that showed and bought special shoes that looked like they’d been cobbled a hundred years ago. Actually, they had just been manufactured at HomeTown, HeartLand’s headquarters, and cost a fortune.
The literal cap came when Mom was awarded a “prayer covering,” a kind of bonnet that all the HeartLand females wore. There was a special ceremony, a “consecration,” when she was awarded her “covering.” It usually took place at the church but my mother got a special dispensation so they could hold it in Daddy’s room. I watched my father’s face as they placed the white lace hat on her head. He looked over at me and did what he used to do when we hid out at the Dairy Queen: he winked. But the sparkle in his eyes now was from tears. I knew he was thinking about what was going to happen to me when he was gone, and that, combined with the fear that Didi might not come back, made me start crying, too. The sisters hugged me and said not to worry, my mother had told them that I had chosen to walk God’s path, and, if I stayed on it, I too might be consecrated in less than a year.
The HeartLanders really started swarming over us after my mother was consecrated. They promoted her to making quilt tops. While I waited for Didi to come back, I started quilting with my mother so I could spend as much time as possible with Daddy. That’s what I told myself anyway. Actually, it scared me not only how good I was at quilting but how much pecking out stitches as small as a sprinkling of salt soothed me. Even the sisters noticed how fine my handiwork was. When they came over to pick up the finished work and made a fuss about it, my mother pouted like a little kid. I didn’t care. I tried to make my stitches microscopic just to hear someone tell me I was doing a good job.
Who knows? Maybe I would have gotten completely hooked if Didi hadn’t reappeared. But she did. One morning when I was gathering up the report I’d written for her about McKinley and the Tariff of 1890 so she wouldn’t flunk American history and I already had the long denim skirt on over my jeans, she honked. My mother and I both identified the honk immediately. We stared at each other as we worked through a long series of lightning calculations that yielded the same answer: my mother was not big enough to stop me. I walked through the door and out to Didi.
All she said as I jumped in the front seat was, “Nice skirt.”
I ripped the denim skirt off and stuffed it under the front seat.
“You have that history report?” she asked, backing out of the driveway.
I plucked the neatly typed paper out of my backpack and held it up for her to see. She smiled and nodded, her eyelids drooping like a cat’s in the sun, then held her fist up. I tapped it with mine. Didi put the Skank in first, revved the engine, and we peeled out in a spray of gravel.
I knew I would pay, but I didn’t care. Didi was back.
Chapter Seven
Didi returned with a new mantra that we both followed: Stay distracted. We never talked about our mothers, about how things were at home. School became an afterthought. We put most of our energy into the jobs we both got at Pup y Taco, a take-out place based on a marketing strategy that reasoned, if you don’t like Mexican food, there’s always hot dogs. The only other thing we put any energy into was groupieing. Actually, Didi did the groupieing. I tagged along for logistical support, taking care of the details the way I always did.
I was the one who made sure that the tank of the Skankmobile was filled so we could get to the airport where Didi could flirt with the car rental guy enough to weasel the name of the hotel where R.E.M. or Ever-clear or whoever was in town was staying. I was the one who installed the extra memory in her computer so she could run her astrology program and do charts for whichever band member she was currently obsessed with. Didi was the one who played the roadies and got the all-access backstage passes. She was the one cool and sexy enough to get chosen from the pack of skinny girl groupies. She was the one the stars would point to as they whispered to a flunky to make sure she—that one there with the lips, the mouth, the jeans lower than anyone else’s—was at the party. After.
I didn’t like thinking about the After part. The part when the doors closed and Didi was one of the throwaway girls with the band or a pack of roadies. She called them missions and that was the part I liked, the part that was like a spy mission. Scouring the city for glimpses of tour buses, getting gullible hotel clerks to reveal room numbers, raiding maids’ uniforms from unguarded hampers, swiping tiny bottles of shampoo and conditioner. The last had nothing to do with getting to the band; it was just my own little vice. I liked everything up to meeting the band. The actual band, the stars, held no interest for me whatsoever. That was when I would leave.
We established our groupie division of labor the first time I went with her on a mission. Limp Bizkit was playing at Tingley Coliseum. Built on the state fairgrounds to host rodeos, Tingley looked and smelled like a big barn. Didi loved it since security was impossible there. I followed her through the chutes usually used to herd livestock into the ring that had been covered with a fake floor and turned into a mash pit. The roadies picked her out as soon as she appeared. When the show was over, they herded her toward the tour bus.
She turned my way and asked, “You coming?”
The prospect utterly panicked me, but I’d already learned enough from her to give something resembling a cool reply and answered, “You have your own compulsions to answer to, but, as for me, just because a sweaty hillbilly in a black T-shirt with thirty tour dates printed on it has carried Fred Durst’s amp is never going to be enough reason to let him stick his tongue in my ear, much less anything else anywhere else. Period. Nonnegotiable.”
Didi laughed. She loved my answer since she hadn’t really wanted me to stay.
The day after a mission, she always gave me a vague report, which usually meant translating the evening into “coins of the realm.” The coins of Didi’s realm were blow jobs. I’d come to accept the blow job as Didi’s standard unit of currency. But Didi didn’t give blow jobs, she deposited them. In her own personal economy, every second she spent on her knees was another second that she banked in her future celebrity account. Another second that some future Didi groupie would spend on his or her knees in front of her. All that was incidental, though. Even meeting the stars was not the point. Sure, Didi would rather have been with someone famous than any of the boys who existed in our actual world. But Didi’s secret, the secret that only I knew, was that the real reason she groupied was to learn how to be a celebrity. Because Didi knew, had always known, that she was going to be famous. She just had to hang out with enough famous people to learn how to become one herself. And if the price of lessons was a few blow jobs, she considered that a bargain.
We didn’t yet know what she was going to be famous for. There were plans for the first truly kick-ass girl band that would make the world totally forget they’d ever heard of Courtney Love. One night, she’d returned from a mission with an old Fender that some roadie had given her. I bought a practice pad and some sticks so I could be her drummer. But the metal strings hurt Didi’s fingers and I never got the money together to buy an actual drum set, so we ditched that idea. Didi switched to singer-songwriter and started working on her material.
That her voice wasn’t all that good never really mattered. She had something more important than a good voice: she could put he
rself into every word she sang. I think there was just so much of Didi, so much personality, so much ambition, so many definite ideas about so many things, that it all flowed out when she opened her mouth. It wasn’t ever pretty or even pleasant. But, right from the start, it was all her, all Didi.
We were lucky that we always wanted different prizes. She wanted to hang out with famous people and be famous herself. I just wanted to hang out with her. The biggest groupie prize Didi ever went after were the Strokes. She discovered the New York group before they were famous, and, as soon as she did, all other bands ceased to exist. She loved their aura of dissipation, the way they harkened back to a lost era of rock ‘n’ roll glamour and decadence that she was certain she would have ruled over had she not been born too late. Also, as she informed me about eighty-five times a day, the lead singer, Julian Casablancas, was “hotter than lava.”
As for our jobs, Didi called Pup y Taco, Puppy Taco, but after the renaming she didn’t have much to do with the take-out joint other than collecting a paycheck. I was the one who flipped the Mexi-burgers and shredded bales of lettuce for crispy tacos. She was the one who redid her makeup and stared in the mirror wondering if Julie would like her better with short hair. I was the one who pulled the baskets of fries out of hot grease and scrubbed counters with bleach at the end of our shift. She was the one who flirted with customers and blasted Strokes music and turned every shift we worked together into a party that I was happy to be invited to. My hair always smelled liked tacos, my forearms were speckled pink and white from grease burns; I did all the work, and I didn’t care. The twisted, tweaked math nerd part of my brain loved nothing better than organizing complicated tasks, adding columns of numbers in my head, and doing the tax without a calculator. When I got into a perfect groove—five burgers working, a load of tots in the fryer, and figuring tax on three Mexidogs, one Big Red grande, and two Sprites chico—I was as high as Didi ever got on weed, Ritalin, and Stoli.
