Josephine Solis, on the other hand, was the model of the perfect mother. She got up at five in the morning to cook her kids a hot breakfast. They said prayers and did catechism. I didn’t even know what catechism was, but Mrs. Solis acted like Tony's weekly classes were an unbreakable appointment with God himself. Tony and his sisters always wore clean, pressed clothes, their hair always trimmed and combed into place. She taught them to be polite and respectful. If Tony or his sisters ever acted up in public, Mrs. Solis turned the hairy eyeball on them, and they snapped back into line like that. Tony never charged his lunch or had to borrow paper or pens; Mrs. Solis sent him to school prepared. Mrs. Solis came to every school play, sat in the front row, and clapped for her son, politely thanking the teachers for devoting their time to educating her children and encouraging them to continue their education in college. She made hot lunches with fruits and vegetables and homemade flour tortillas. Sometimes she even sent warm tortillas in the morning for everyone in the class. Put a little butter and honey on those babies and it would bring a tear to your eye. I always got excited when I saw Tony carry in the little round tortilla carrier thingy. Those were the days I got a hot breakfast, too.
So, my... “family” was my family and Tony's was Tony's. But I was white, and he was Mexican, so theoretically, according to the bigoted world I’d grown up in, I should still have been above him. At the very least I was even with him. I decided at some point to prove how things really stood. I had a weird kind of admiration/attraction vs. envy/defiance thing with Tony. In my screwed-up mind that meant I had to show him how he really wasn't better than me.
Now, anyone with a brain could see I could never accomplish this by trying to be as good as Tony. That was not going to happen. But what I could do was try to make him as bad as I was.
I flirted with him. I made off-color remarks and then winked at him. I made remarks to my friends about how fine his butt looked, loud enough he would overhear.
Nothing worked. He'd give me a tolerant smile or a blank stare and go on like he didn't want anything to do with what I had to offer.
Again, anyone with a brain or a shred of self-respect would have given up and gone on. But for me, with my self-respect registering in the negative numbers, his rebuffs were like throwing down a gauntlet. That's the great thing about being me. Give me a chance to humiliate myself and make someone else miserable, and I pursue the task 110 percent.
I finally got Tony to sleep with me the night of the homecoming football game. We were all at a keg party in the middle of someone's cotton field and I was – as usual – drunk and obnoxious, dancing on a tailgate and pretending like I didn't wish I had somewhere else to be. Trisha and Scott walked by, holding hands and mooning at each other. I looked at them and I felt so low. Alone. Lonely to the point where all I could see and feel was black. I missed Trisha so much, missed having someone to hang out with. But she'd become too good for me, and now she had a guy who looked at her like she was the only person in the world, and I didn't know how to stop my white trash tramp thing.
I climbed down from the tailgate and headed away from the fire the guys had built, away from the cars and pickups parked along the turnrows. I found a little cluster of mesquite trees, dropped down beside them and cried. I kept thinking there wasn't any point in going on with this life; it was just too screwed up.
I was there maybe five or ten minutes when Tony appeared out of the dark. He didn't say anything, just sat down on the grass beside me, slipped his arm around my shoulders and held me.
I was equally mortified and grateful. I mean, I was cool. I was tough. I did not cry. But man…I don't think anyone had ever touched me out of kindness before, not like that. I didn't know my dad, or even the man I'd learned the year before was my real dad, and mom wasn't exactly a hugger. Every time I got close, she said I smelled like sweat or hair or that I was making her claustrophobic.
Of course, other guys had touched me by that point. Not as many as my reputation claimed, but enough that by that night of homecoming I already knew what girls like me were good for. But those touches were rushed, harsh and selfish. Taking. Tony's touch was giving.
I sobbed against him for I don't know how long. Finally, I sat up and saw a big wet splotch on his maroon shirt. He handed me a handkerchief and I wiped my eyes and nose.
Once I stopped crying, I was really embarrassed. I was acting like such a loser, and with witnesses.
Tony lifted my chin and looked me in the eye. “Better?”
I looked away. This was a nightmare. What if he told someone? Anyone? Everyone? I was way too cool to be crying.
So I kissed him. He tried to pull away, but I was insistent and pretty desperate. I just followed right after him, kissing his lips, his neck, whatever I could get hold of. Even now it's humiliating to know he didn't really want to be with me. But I guess a 17-year-old guy isn't going to hold out too long when a girl is sucking on his neck and unbuttoning his shirt.
From that moment on, I told myself the whole crying jag was a ploy to get Tony to be with me. I wasn't sad and lonely at all. It was all just an act. I even told other people that. I'd rather people think I was manipulative and slutty than vulnerable.
I'm pretty sure that was Tony's first time. Not his last with me, though. We began what I generously called “dating” after that. He didn't want his mom to know about me, of course, so he didn't hold my hand at school or take me out, or anything like that. Mostly he snuck out of his house at night and came over to mine.
To my utter confusion, he wasn't only interested in sex. He asked about me, about how I was and whether or not I'd done my homework, what were my plans for my future, what did I want to do with my life. Of course, I hadn't done my homework, and told him as much. “You need to apply yourself, Salem,” he'd say. Then I'd show him the best way I knew to apply myself, and school and grades would become a distant memory.
Tony confused me but he thrilled me, too. He treated me kindly, respectfully. In my perverse way, I was always trying to shock him, trying to get him to see how I really was and how I really should be treated, but no matter how I acted, he was always kind to me. I was flummoxed.
One night over Christmas break his mom caught him sneaking back in and all kinds of trouble broke loose. It was bad enough that he'd snuck out; when she found out he'd snuck out to be with me she just about had a stroke. She forbade Tony from seeing me again. She threatened to send him to military school or to a monastery. She threatened to file statutory rape charges against me because Tony was still seventeen and I'd turned eighteen in October.
He told me he couldn't see me anymore, but by that time, I was already pregnant.
Hell hath no fury like the woman whose prize son has been “trapped.” The truth was, I had not been trying to get pregnant. We used protection, and I certainly never intended for Tony to marry me, but as soon as my mom found out, she latched onto a new reason to have a big drama and ran with it. She marched over to Tony's house and told his mom that her son had knocked me up. Mrs. Solis's eyes rolled back in her head. She mumbled something in Spanish and keeled over.
All the daughters came running and screaming. Tony stared at me with a weird mixture of fascination, horror and concern. Mom bent over and slapped Mrs. Solis on the cheeks and ordered her to get a grip. I think Mom was really upset because it hadn't occurred to her to faint, and now it was too late.
The situation quickly deteriorated into a battle between the mothers, with Tony and me being bit players who were threatened by Mrs. Solis's hairy eyeball every time we so much as opened our mouths.
Mrs. Solis wanted me to go to a home for unwed mothers and give the baby up for adoption.
“Nothing doing,” Mom said. I wasn't going to be shipped off like some dirty secret while Tony went on living his life like he'd done nothing wrong.
Well, Tony was not going to marry me. He was just a boy who had his whole life ahead of him.
What's Salem, an old lady?
Tony's
going to college. He's not going to ruin his life by getting tied down to some white trash, then she said something in Spanish, I'm not sure but I think it meant whore.
Then Mom fainted. Well, her eyes rolled back and she fell down, but she wasn’t fully committed. Half a second later she was up and trying to scratch Mrs. Solis's eyes out.
Tony held his mother back while his sisters and I dragged Mom off their porch. The neighbors called the police.
Looking back, I can't believe I let Mom get so involved in the situation. I knew whatever she did was only going to make matters worse, but I was scared. I'd never been so scared. A baby? What was I going to do with a baby?
I finally called G-Ma, something I should have done at the beginning. She told me to drink a lot of milk and go to bed early, and she told Mom to back off. G-Ma is the only one who could accomplish that.
In the meantime, Mom went around Idalou telling everyone I would have to get an abortion if Tony didn't marry me. I hadn't even considered that. I don't know why, because to some people it was the obvious choice, but I knew I'd never be able to go through with it.
The Solises were Catholic, and abortion was completely out of the question. One afternoon around the middle of January Tony showed up on my doorstep in a sport coat and slacks, his hair slicked down, and a terrified look on his face. He looked like a seven-year-old boy in a seventeen-year-old body.
He had a tiny ring. I knew he didn't want to marry me, and I had no idea if I wanted to marry him or not. But I didn't know what else to do. I just stood there holding the screen door open, staring at that ring, thinking there was no way it would actually work. Tony was a nice guy. He was not going to put up with me. I'd do something to screw it up within the first month.
I looked over my shoulder at Mom, standing with her arms crossed, a cigarette hanging out of her mouth, her eyes squinted against the smoke.
I thought, at least it would get me out of here.
I looked back at Tony. He said softly, just loud enough for me to hear, “It's okay, Salem. It's gonna be okay.”
I don't know if he was trying to convince himself or me, but I thought, maybe it will be. He was nice, he was always good to me, and maybe I could be good to him. I mean, I hadn't tried to be good in a really long time. Maybe I could pull it off if I tried hard enough.
I took the ring, and two weeks later Tony and I were married in the tiny Catholic church. Tony's side of the church was full of pressed and polished, mournful looking family members. G-Ma, Mom and Mom's drinking buddy Susan were on my side, as well as a couple of friends from school. As I walked down the aisle carrying my bouquet of plastic flowers from Bill's Dollar Store, I heard Mom – as did the entire church – stage whisper to Susan, “Can you believe I'm gonna be related to a bunch of damn Meskins?”
A stellar day for the Grimes family.
Chapter Four
Frank held the door open for me. “Your ex-husband? I didn't know you had an ex-husband.”
“Yeah, well, it was a long time ago.” I threw my keys on the bar and scratched my neck.
“How come he was arrested?”
“I don't know, Frank.”
I was trying not to be snappy, but I wasn't doing a very good job. I felt antsy and nervous and like I was on the verge of biting someone's head off. Too bad for Frank he was so handy.
Why did I have to face two of the worst things I'd ever done, on the same day? This was too much to deal with. Guilt and shame rolled around inside me, wrestling with pride and defensiveness. I latched onto the latter two.
After all, the thing with Scott was as much his fault as mine, right? And nobody made Tony sleep with me, either. I mean, sure, I did come on strong that first time, but he came back for more all on his own. He could have ignored me the next day the way the other guys had done. And it wasn't like I'd poked a hole in the condom. That was either a God thing or a Trojan thing, but certainly not anything that could be laid at my feet. I really hadn't wanted to marry Tony; I'd only done it because it seemed like the right thing to do. I hadn't wanted to ruin his life. I hadn’t wanted to take his future and screw it up. I’d never wanted to hurt him.
I never wanted to hurt anyone, actually, except maybe myself – and Mom, on occasion.
But I had hurt everyone else. I screwed up my life and Tony's life and Trisha's life and Scott's life. And now Tony was being put through who-knew-what and that was probably my fault, too, somehow. I didn't know how, but I was sure that when all was said and done, somehow I was going to be at the root of this, too.
To top it all off, my car was cratered. Man!
Since I couldn't drink, I opened the fridge to see what there was to eat. If I can't have alcohol, my second choice is always Mexican food. Beef and chicken enchiladas with lots of melted cheese and sour cream. Real sour cream, too, not that nasty fat free stuff I bought one time when my pants started to get too tight. And chips. Lots of corn chips with queso. And margaritas. Six or eight of them to make me loosen up and laugh about nothing at all.
I had to settle for peanut butter and apricot jelly. I tossed a loaf of bread on the bar and muttered, “Help yourself,” to Les and Frank.
Les declined, but Frank – darn his high metabolism – got a tablespoon out of the drawer and dug a good half cup of peanut butter out of the jar and smushed it across a piece of bread. He looked at the jelly jar. “Got any grape?”
I gave him a look, and he decided apricot was fine.
I thought about Trisha's sneer as she looked at me and made that remark about Fat Fighters. I dug into the peanut butter and stuck the spoon in my mouth while I spread golden apricot jelly over the bread.
“What you need is a quart of milk to wash that down,” Les said.
“No, what I need is a fifth of Jack Daniels.” I slapped the bread together and took a ferocious bite. I felt like my head was going to start spinning any second. “Do you ever feel like God is punishing you?”
Les nodded, which surprised me.
“When?”
“Like most people, when things aren’t going the way I want them to. When I know I've done something wrong and expect to be punished.”
“But what if you haven't done anything wrong? What if you're trying to do something right?” I tossed the spoon into the sink with a clatter. “What if all you're trying to do is live a good life and climb out of your hole, and God keeps thumping you back down? I was on my way to a meeting yesterday, for crying out loud. I did not want to find a dead body. I did not do anything wrong. I was trying to do something right. And not only do I get the joy of a dead body forever planted in my mind, but now I have Trisha thrown in my face, and Tony, too. I can't catch a break.”
I didn't want the stupid freaking sandwich anymore, and I didn't want Les and Frank there. I dropped onto the cracked leather recliner. Stump jumped into my lap with her heavy, bony feet. I kind of wanted to shove her off, but I didn't.
What I really wanted was a drink. Just so I could not feel so crappy. Just so I could take a break for a while and figure out what I was going to do. Just to make it go away for a while, just a little while. I knew drinking was the short-term answer for a long-term problem. I knew it wasn't going to solve anything. I knew that. But at the moment I didn't care. Right at the moment all these feelings were pelting me at once: shame, regret, sadness over what I'd done to Trisha, and sadness over what had happened to me and Tony so long ago. The reason we'd had to get married, the reason we got divorced, it all made me feel really sad, and I hate feeling sad more than anything. I didn't want to do it one second longer. A short-term answer would be just fine, thank you very much.
Les sat across from me on the ottoman. He put his elbows on his knees. “You know if you make it through this one you can make it through just about anything.”
“I don't care.” The future loomed pointless before me.
“I know you don't, not right now. But you will.”
“I doubt it.”
“You will. Things will
even back out and you'll be proud of yourself for being strong.”
That almost made me laugh. “Believe me, I'm not strong. I'm pissed off.”
“That's okay.”
“I feel screwed over.”
“That's okay too.”
“It's not okay, it sucks.”
“That's good.”
“You're such a weirdo.”
“I know that.”
“I hate this! I don't deserve this.”
“We all hate it, Salem. No one likes being an alcoholic. Nobody wants it to be this hard.”
For some stupid reason, after everything else, it was the tenderness in Les’s voice that put me over the edge.
The tears sprang up so fast I didn't have time to stop them. Within seconds my face was soaked and I had snot.
I gasped for air between sobs and curled up as small as I could. Les rubbed my back.
“I was on my way to Moe's,” I said between hiccuping sobs.
“I know.”
“I'm not strong. I'm a complete screw up. I mess up everything.”
“Shhh.”
“I don't want to do this anymore. It's too hard.”
“I know.”
“It's not worth it.”
“You're right.”
“I was happier being a drunk.”
“Of course you were.”
I sat back and swiped the back of my wrist across my eyes. “What kind of pillar of support are you? Where's my buck up speech? Where's my encouragement?”
“You don't need encouragement. You need a good stiff drink.”
I kicked him. Ugh. I’m such a freak show.
He's just as bad, though. He stood up and kicked me back. You'd think a gentleman would have gone easy on me, too, but he didn't.
“Ow!” I rubbed my shin. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“What’s wrong with me? What the hell is wrong with you?”
The Middle Finger of Fate (A Trailer Park Princess Cozy Mystery Book 1) Page 6
