by Michelle Tea
“What is wrong with you?” her grandmother spat. “I’m trying to fix you up from your tumble and you’re acting like I’m trying to kill you! You bang your head or something?” Kishka opened her mouth and her tongue slid out to moisten the scarf. Sophie shut her eyes again but too late, too late, the sight of her grandmother’s tongue, thin and pale as a worm, forked like a snake and rising from a coil at the back of her throat, made her feel sick.
“There, there.” Kishka patted the wound gently with the moistened scarf, cleaning the red smears off Sophie’s chin. The old woman glanced at Angel. “Well, children hate getting a spit bath from an adult, but it’s my right as a grandmother, isn’t it?” She knotted the scarf back around her neck and pulled Sophie in for a hug.
“My little Humpty Dumpty took a real tumble, didn’t you? Did you bang your noggin?” She released Sophie, held her at arms length, her hands on her shoulders. Kishka smiled, a smile Sophie had seen all her life. Had she bonked her noggin?
She placed her hands gingerly on the top of her head, on her shoulders and knees, on her face. No part of her body felt hurt, but some strange place inside her felt deeply bruised.
The thought of the bird, of her grandmother’s tongue, sent a pukey feeling straight through her. It had been like a vision from the pass-out game, only terrible. Sophie worried that she had brought that dream space too close, and now her body was falling into it on its own.
“You only tumbled from a little bucket, for goodness sake,” Kishka said. “I think you just gave yourself a scare. You gave us a scare, too! When did your lazy mother drop you off? Oh, here—Angel, this is my granddaughter, Sophie. She got her mother mad at her and now she’s going to be staying here at the dump all summer. Sophie, this is Angel. He runs the glass recycling until I tear it down and fire him. Which is any minute.”
Sophie looked at Angel, and Angel winked at her. It was a quick wink, so quick wondered if she’d really seen it. As she reached to shake Sophie’s hand, Angel winked again, slower, if a wink can be slowed. “Great to meet you.” Angel’s voice was gruff, but female. Sophie peered at her. What was this strange day when everyone was something else? Angel pushed a bit of hair behind her cap with—well, could hands be male or female? Sophie was starting to feel dumb. She knew Angel was a girl, but her nana seemed to think Angel was a guy, and Angel somehow knew that Sophie knew she was a girl, and appeared to enjoy putting one over on her boss. Sophie relaxed, relieved to be included in the joke, if that’s what it was.
“No egg on your head?” Kishka reached out and ruffled Sophie’s curls, her fingers getting stuck in a snarl. “Well, what the—doesn’t that mother of yours comb your hair? It’s a rat’s nest!”
“I’m fine, Nana,” Sophie finally spoke. She helped pull her grandmother’s fingers from her hair. Just regular-old fingers, bony and old. Sophie’s hair tangled easily; if she didn’t brush it each morning the snarls formed in sleep would continue to weave together throughout the day. She pulled a rubber band from her pocket and pulled the mess of it quickly into a bun. “Mom’s really busy,” Sophie explained. “She had to get to work.”
“There’s no excuse for walking around looking like a homeless person,” Kishka insisted. “I can be mad at you about it, or I can be mad at your mother. Which would you rather?”
Sophie realized as her grandmother stared at her quietly that she expected an answer.
“My… mother?” she said.
“I thought so. Smart girl.” She went again to ruffle Sophie’s hair, thought better of it, then reached into her housedress for a pack of cigarettes. “Anyway, I was just telling Angel here that his tumbler is too loud; it makes it impossible for me to take my naps, and I’m an old woman—old women need naps.”
“I can get a smaller tumbler, but everything will take a lot longer. And it’ll cost a few hundred dollars.”
“You’re not getting a penny out of me, mister. Figure it out! And, I’m going to leave my granddaughter here with you. You like this part of the dump, don’t you, dear? It’s pretty?”
“Yeah,” Sophie said, gazing back at the sparkling drums of glass. “It’s really pretty.”
“Well, Angel will let you help him. And if anything”—Kishka took a drag from her cigarette, let the smoke leach from her body, thoughtfully—“weird happens, Sophia, you come and tell me right away.” Kishka glared at the tumbler. “And someone will be on his way back to Puerto Rico so fast his head will spin.” Kishka scuffed away from the glass recycling area, her plasticky sandals kicking dust up her legs, a haze of smoke drifting around her. “I’ll be in my trailer, trying to nap, if anyone needs me!”
“I wouldn’t want to wake her up,” Sophie said when her grandmother was out of sight.
“I don’t want to,” Angel said. “The machine’s just noisy, and we have a lot of orders, and I think all that lady does is sleep.”
“No, I didn’t mean you did,” Sophie said quickly. It felt sort of awful to have been left there with Angel. Sophie didn’t like being around strangers. It made her self-conscious even when she wasn’t reeling from a bunch of weird experiences—or hallucinations. “It’s more like, my grandmother’s kind of scary! I don’t ever want her mad at me.”
Angel smiled and shrugged. Her easy calm was foreign to Sophie, who was only ever around high-strung, sort of stressed-out people. It made her even more compelled to jabber nervously. “She seems to like you well enough.” Angel cocked an eyebrow and waited for a comment from Sophie, but Sophie was scattered and nervous.
“So, you’re from Puerto Rico?” she asked. “My best friend Ella is from Puerto Rico, too. Her parents are, she’s from here.”
“I’m actually not Puerto Rican,” Angel said. “I’m Mexican. But I’m not from Mexico, I’m from here. And my parents are from here, too. My family has been here a while.” She scratched her head beneath her knit hat. “And, I’m not a guy. But you knew that.”
“Why don’t you tell my grandmother?” Sophie asked.
Angel wrinkled her face. “She’d just act weird about it. And, the less your grandmother knows about me, the better.”
Sophie felt a pull to know something, something more about Angel. What it felt to be a girl like she was, tough like a boy, so casual about it. She felt that part of herself pull outward; then, remembering the smack of impact, she drew it back in. Sophie busied herself playing with a bin of beads. Angel looked at her curiously.
“You okay?” she asked. “From your—fall, or whatever that was?”
“Yeah.” Sophie nodded.
“You want to talk about it?” she asked.
Talk about it? What was there to talk about, if it was just a tumble? Angel’s eyes were wide and steady. Did she know that Sophie had seen something? The girl shook her head quickly. Her head felt fine. She wished it didn’t. If it was throbbing, if it was cut or bumpy she could maybe explain to herself the terrible things she’d seen. But she was fine. Maybe she was going cuckoo.
“You want to see the tumbler?”
Sophie nodded.
Angel led her into the crooked building. Up close, Sophie could see that it was nailed together in the same ramshackle style as the shelving outside. The wood was the same, planks that looked like driftwood, uneven and rough, with gaps for sun and rain to fall through. A giant blue tarp lay bunched by the machine.
“To keep it safe from the elements.” Angel kicked it with her boot.
The tumbler wasn’t as big as she thought it would be—a roll of steel with a confusion of entries and exits.
“It’s so loud it feels like an earthquake,” Sophie said. “I thought it would be bigger.”
“It’s the glass. It’s very loud. It sounds nice to me, though. If you listen closely you can hear each piece singing as it tumbles, I swear.”
“Really?” Sophie was skeptical. “Maybe the machine is making your ears ring or something.”
Angel laughed. “No, no, it’s the glass. You’ll hear it too, after you’ve b
een here a while.”
That just made Sophie more certain the tumbler was ruining Angel’s eardrums. She leaned against the machine, scanning the dirt floor for shards of glass, which there were a lot of. The whole place was a mixture of sparkle and grit, sort of magical in an ordinary way, and for the first time Sophie considered that maybe her punishment wouldn’t be so punishing after all.
Angel taught her how to clean the mucky glass that the garbage trucks rumbled in, each of them wearing thick gloves like they were doing important, dangerous work. She showed Sophie the bins for brown glass and green, for white glass and clear glass. She told her to keep an eye out for things that looked special, might be antique. Once the glass was sorted, Angel showed her how to smash it, which was really great fun. They wore goggles to keep the sharp dust from their eyes. They poured the rubble into the tumbler, and turned it on gingerly, half-expecting to hear Kishka scream at the sound of the churn. But the churn was too loud to hear anything; Angel had to motion Sophie to follow her outside the shack, waving at her with her fat, goofy gloves.
By the outdoor shelves where Sophie had fallen, Angel pulled off her gloves and tugged the goggles from her face, knocking her wool hat to the dirt in the process. Her dark hair sprang free, long bangs flopping into her face. Sophie thought it made her look more like a girl, all the hair, and then swiftly changed her mind, deciding she looked more like a boy, like one of the shaggy-headed jerks riding through Chelsea on their dirt bikes, looking for girls to torment with whistles and kissy sounds and awful comments. Angel looked like them, only nice, which meant Angel didn’t really look like them, either. Sophie figured that Angel just looked like Angel, and decided not to think about it anymore.
“Good job, kid.” Angel clapped Sophie on the back, collecting her too-big goggles and gloves. The goggles stuck in the snarl of her hair and for a terrible moment she imagined she’d need Angel’s help to get free. She hated the thought of Angel touching her snarls. Why didn’t she brush her hair more? Sophie resolved to groom herself better. She had a job now; she wasn’t just rolling on creek beds with Ella. She couldn’t wait to tell her friend about her excellent day, about Angel and the glass and the tumbler.
“I have something for you,” Angel said, reaching deep into the pocket of her work pants. What she retrieved sat round in her hand, spanning her palm. It was a piece of glass, a blue so faint it was like the thought of blue, the very beginning of the color. Caught inside its frosted center was a scalloped seashell, white with a stripe of rose at the bottom base, like the last glow of an excellent sunset before it sank into the sky.
“Wow,” Sophie breathed. “How did you make this?”
“I didn’t,” Angle said. “I didn’t tumble it, either. It’s sea glass. It came like that right out of the ocean.”
Sophie inspected it, turning it over in her palm. She pressed her fingers against its smooth edges, feeling for a ghost of the sharpness that had long been worn away by the sea. “But how did it happen?” she asked. “Like, was it glass someone made with seashells and then it got dumped in the ocean and rolled around?”
Angel shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess that could have happened, but it’s really old. It’s very mysterious. I did do this”—she pointed to a hole at the tip—“so you could, like, wear it as a necklace.”
Sophie thrilled at the thought. “Yes!” she said. “That’s so cool.”
“But you can’t let your grandmother see it, okay? She thinks half the things that come into this place are worth something, and they’re not, but she’ll take it and put it in her trailer and that’s the last you’ll see of it. Keep it low.”
“Okay.” Sophie nodded solemnly. She pulled her house key out from her t-shirt and strung the sea glass onto the rope. “I think it needs a really nice chain,” she said wistfully. “But I’ll wear it on this for now so I don’t lose it.”
“Right on.” Angel gave her a salute. “See you tomorrow. Get some sleep. Your bones are going to be sore after all the work we did today.”
Chapter 7
“So, how did it go?” Andrea asked cautiously, with a lilt of cheer in her voice that was mostly fake. Sophie had been so volatile, Andrea imagined her daughter had spent the day bored out of her gourd amongst heaps of garbage, feeding a festering hate. She peeked over at the girl and returned her eyes to the road. Washington Ave. glided by, a strip of grocery stores and barber shops, restaurants selling pupusas and plantains, or pizza and subs, or chow mein and chicken wings. Sophie’s belly rumbled.
“It was fine. I tumbled glass. What’s for dinner?”
Andrea sighed at the thought of cooking anything for anyone, even herself. The air conditioning at the clinic was broken, cooling the building in fits and starts all day, making work even harder and more annoying. If it were next week, closer to payday, she’d stop and pick them up a pizza, but it wasn’t next week, and the dollars folded into her wallet were a thin bundle. “I’m having cereal,” she said. “You are free to fix yourself whatever you like.”
“But I worked,” Sophie whined. She held her hands up to show her mother, but they were creaseless and clean. She’d forgotten about the gloves. “I worked so hard I had to wear gloves,” she said. She brought her hands to her hair and dug around her scalp. “Look,” she said, finding a pebble of glass caught in a web of snarl. “Glass in my hair, even.” She laid the red orb on the dashboard, where it caught the dimming sun and glowed like a coal.
“We both worked,” Andrea said, “so we’ll each make our own supper. If I could pluck an asthmatic child from my hair to illustrate, I would.”
Sophie laughed, and Andrea almost laughed, and the mood between them felt lighter than it had in days. Andrea was relieved that she wasn’t retrieving the same angry, stubborn girl she’d dropped at the dump. All day she’d mused upon that strange feeling she’d had pulling away in her car, a wonderful emptiness. She longed to feel that feeling again, but found it hard to explain even to herself. She’d have thought that feeling nothing would feel like death—something scary—but it had felt light and wonderful. And when her emotions poured back into her each feeling felt louder than before, more noticeable, as if she’d become numb to them without realizing. What were these feelings she felt toward her daughter? She felt ashamed at many of them. Fear? Awe? She brushed it away. Those were old feelings; she didn’t need to feel like that anymore.
Sophie understood in a new way how tired her mom must be after eight hours in the sweaty clinic. She didn’t think that Andrea had worked as hard as she had, lifting buckets and smashing glass, but still, work was tiring. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll have cereal. It’s too hot for real food, anyway.” The bolt of ugly feelings she’d felt from her mother seemed very far away, buried beneath the adventure of the dump. In the pleasant quiet of their drive home, Sophie almost pulled the sea glass from beneath her shirt to show her mother. Her hands touched the cord, but stayed there, fiddling. She dropped her hands to her lap. The glass lay cool and heavy on her sternum. It was from the ocean; there was no telling what part of the world it had come from, how many years it had taken it to wash up in Chelsea, currents and sand grinding its edges. It felt incredibly precious, too precious for anyone to see or touch. They arrived at their home without Sophie mentioning it. Andrea pulled two bowls from the cupboard, and Sophie heaved a gallon of milk from the fridge.
* * *
SOPHIE LOOKED AROUND for a place to talk with Ella on the phone. Their house was only so big, and the phone was a cheap piece of plastic, growing staticky when you walked it too far from its base. Sophie wished she had her own phone, a cell phone, and that she had a real room to take it into, a proper bedroom with privacy, not the glorified walk-in closet attached to her mother’s bedroom. She looked in on Andrea, already passed out on the couch, a milky cereal bowl before her on the coffee table. The television was blaring some news program, and the loud hum of the fan spun coolness onto her mother. This was the most privacy she was going to get. Sophi
e figured it was enough.
On the other end of the phone Sophie could hear the cacophony of Ella’s home. People hollered in dueling languages for the girl. Sophie could hear Ella’s younger siblings calling for her, excited and important to be delivering news of a phone call; older voices, her mother and her aunts, were a steady roar of talk. Sophie could imagine them circling the dinner table, eating cookies and drinking coffees. She felt a pang of loneliness at her own empty house, her tired mother already asleep with the sun still shining, creepy television newscaster voices intoning darkly through the apartment. Sophie wished Ella would invite her over, but knew it wouldn’t happen.
“Hello?” Ella was breathless at having run through the house.
“Hi!” Sophie said. “What’s up?”
“Nothing, just a million people over here as usual, a girl can’t get any space. I’m dying to get out of here.”
“Are you having a nic fit?” Sophie asked. Never having smoked, Sophie didn’t know what a nic fit felt like, just that her friend claimed to have them, and once she started having one it was all she thought about, all she talked about, until she smoked a cigarette. Sophie thought nic fits were strange and boring.
“No way, my house is so smoky with everyone over here, I just had a cigarette right in my bedroom and no one even knew!” Ella sounded proud, having found away to make the chaos of her home work for her. “I got burned at the beach today. It was hot, huh?”
Sophie had forgotten about the beach. She was surprised to feel not a single pluck of envy at having missed something. “How was it?”
“How do you think it was? Awesome. There were so many cute guys. One gave me the rest of his pizza—he was soooo wicked cute.”
“What’s his name?”
“Junior. Which is crazy, right, ’cause I’m a junior, like my mother’s name is Ella, and he’s a junior, ’cause he’s named after his dad, like his real name is Tony or something. But I was like, Junior! That’s got to mean something.”
