Drift

by Victoria Patterson

  “What are you talking about?” she said. “What towel?”

  “I didn’t for you,” he said, fingers on his forehead. “I didn’t look out for you, and that’s why you left.” He felt himself shaking his head. “I’ve got to for Anthony.” He stood, the phone cord stretching and the phone clattering beside him—but he held on tightly to the receiver. The floor rolled under his feet, as if he stood on the deck of a rocking ship, and he steadied himself against a wall. “I’ve got to snap my towel because Deader Industrial is coming to take him away. Listen; I’ve got to go now, but I’ll call you back later.”

  Leaning against the sink, Michael watched in the mirror as foam expanded in his mouth while he brushed his teeth. Brushing his tongue, something he’d never tried before, seemed like a good idea in order to camouflage his breath. When he was done, he spit forcefully and foam splintered across the mirror. He wiped his mouth with his arm.

  The building was vacant, all the offices deserted for the night. He walked unsteadily to the Newport Marriott, two blocks away, where he knew taxicabs waited at the front entrance for the tourists. He saw a young man with long hair sitting on a bench, a skateboard at his feet, who appeared to be contemplating a water fountain outside the hotel. He approached him, with a sense of unity, and when he sat beside him on the bench, the young man smiled at him.

  Tenderness came over Michael, a general sense of goodwill; he was impelled to sing an instantly made-up song: “Deader, Dad-der, Deader, do-der; Donald is a fucker; Deader, Deader, Deader—”

  The young man was silent; his eyes were calm and steady, and his bare feet were perched on his skateboard.

  Michael hummed the song some more, and when he got bored with it, he stopped. He knew he was staring, and he leaned even closer. “I should leave,” he said. “But I don’t know where to go. I don’t know what to do.” Then, “Does your hair get tangled?” When the skateboarder didn’t reply, he repeated the question, “Your hair—does it get tangled?”

  “Sometimes,” the skateboarder said.

  “How old are you?” He looked like he was in his late teens, maybe his early twenties.

  “Sixty-five,” the skateboarder said.

  Michael laughed, a good hard inebriated laugh, and although his new friend didn’t laugh, he appeared to enjoy his joke. Michael kept laughing, it came out and out and out, as if there was boundless noise inside him, but when the doorman shot him a warning stare, he raised his hand in acknowledgment and quieted down.

  They listened to the fountain, a gurgling flow in the center, water hissing at the base and along the edges, and then spurting back toward the center at a range of levels, as if someone hidden somewhere were controlling it. Michael had a desire to stay on the bench and be with the skateboarder—he felt a peaceful and drowsy alliance—but when a cab pulled up, he remembered his purpose.

  “You take care now,” he said, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say, and the young man gave him a little wave. He slipped at the curb, getting in the back seat, but the cabdriver pretended not to notice.

  Peeling a twenty from his wallet, he thanked the cabdriver, and stepped out of the cab, again stumbling at the curb. Lights were on in Penny’s home, and a surge of shock passed through him at the sudden thought that Donald might be inside, ruining his plans to reason with Penny. If he couldn’t have her back, at least she could witness his pain, and he’d make her promise not to fight when he asked for joint custody. That’s all I want, he’d tell her. Joint custody. The taxi moved along the street, stopping at the corner, and disappeared.

  Seeing the coiled hose next to a planter sidetracked him, and his body swayed as he focused on the path to get to his roses. Sweat tickled his forehead and dampened his underarms, and he told himself he must not fall, must not make noise. Before beginning his task, he unzipped his pants and pulled them, along with his boxers, down to his knees. He urinated in the planter, pressure releasing in his bladder; his stream arched wonderfully, a dark-golden hue in the moonlight. A flicker at the curtain of Penny’s bedroom window worried him, but he decided he’d imagined it, and he pulled his boxers and pants back up.

  The familiarity of hosing his roses, the weight of the hose in his fist, the spray soothing his Rugosas, Albas, and Don Juans, calmed him. A small, chilly wind passed over him, and he leaned his head back to stare at the dark sky. He sat on the grass and contemplated the night, letting the hose leak into the grass, spreading wetness on his pants. He lay down beside an enlarging puddle, hearing the flow of water near his ear, and from this angle, the misshapen rosebushes seemed to have eyes. He floated, not a part of anything, completely lost. He was afraid of falling apart, but it was already happening, and in the end, although he wasn’t a confirmed believer in God, he decided that it was beyond his control anyway.

  He closed his eyes, the darkness of his lids a blurred black-purple. The dampness of the grass and the soothing trickle of the hose encouraged slumber, and he let his body fall into the earth, release. His breathing slowed, succumbing to the large weight of something deep and heavy.

  “Michael,” said a voice that sounded very much like his father-in-law. “Son.” He opened his eyes, and Mr. Deader stood over him, wearing a dark robe, sleeves folded at his elbows. “Time to go,” Mr. Deader said, reaching out a pale hand.

  He grabbed hold of Mr. Deader’s hairy forearm. “That’s right,” Mr. Deader said encouragingly, lifting him to a stand. “Come on, come on.” He noticed Mr. Deader’s leather slippers, the kind he imagined an old writer might wear. Tiny lakes of gleams and shadows had formed in the grass from the hose.

  “I’ll drive,” Mr. Deader said, staring at him without any apparent judgment. Michael estimated his intoxication level: he’d sobered up like lightning.

  Mr. Deader sidestepped the wet grass and puddles, and when he leaned over to turn off the hose, his rear appeared soft and pillowy. The curtain at the window above Mr. Deader flickered, and that’s when he understood that Penny had witnessed him peeing in the planter, and she’d called her father, who lived just three blocks away, requesting that he dispose of him.

  Inside Mr. Deader’s copious Rolls-Royce, warm air blew at Michael from the heater, while Mr. Deader drove him back to the apartment, explaining his and Mrs. Deader’s position regarding the situation: “Donald’s three years older than my wife,” he said. “You think I’m happy?” His pale hand released from the steering wheel and lightly squeezed Michael’s knee.

  “We think of you as our son,” he said. “We’re heartbroken. But you’ve got to pull it together. Understand?”

  Michael stared at the lit-up dashboard, the muscles in his arms and chest and legs tightening. “I want joint custody,” he said. “That’s all.”

  “Of course, of course,” Mr. Deader said, nodding. He looked old and tired.

  They were quiet, and Michael stared out his window. They passed rows of palm trees, the moon appearing and disappearing from the fronds. Michael looked back at Mr. Deader, who seemed to be considering unpleasant matters. His unwieldy and bulky body shape reminded Michael of Kenneth, and he wanted to tell Mr. Deader about how he’d been kissed by a man for no apparent reason.

  Mr. Deader turned the knob for the heater and the warm air lessened. “You can’t work for me,” he said, as if they’d been discussing Michael’s employment all along. “Penny, you know, she won’t stand for it.”

  “I’m not much help anyway,” Michael said.

  Mr. Deader chuckled, kindly, and he heard himself laughing as well. He realized this was the most intimate he’d ever been with his father-in-law. Mr. Deader passed him a look, as if letting him know they weren’t supposed to be enjoying each other, and they were serious and quiet for the rest of the trip.

  “You’re good at other things,” Mr. Deader said, as Michael stepped out of the Rolls-Royce. “You’ll find your way.”

  Michael came around to Mr. Deader’s side of the Rolls-Royce, and Mr. Deader opened his door. He swung his legs
around, leather slippers at the gutter, pale yellow pajama bottoms showing from a part in his robe. “Okay, Son,” he said.

  Pain ballooned inside Michael’s chest. He shivered, standing in damp clothes before Mr. Deader, the breeze cool on his neck. He wanted to say “Goodbye, Dad,” and was sure that Mr. Deader wanted to hear it—was waiting to hear it—but he couldn’t: he’d always been Mr. Deader of Deader Industrial LLC. And he was now. “I don’t know what happened,” he said instead, shaking his head.

  Mr. Deader grimaced, as if in pain.

  “It’s like I became someone different, and Penny saw me change, and she had enough.”

  “Disappointments,” Mr. Deader said in a defeated way, “shape us.”

  “It’s my fault,” he said, wanting Mr. Deader to understand the full extent of his regret. “For not doing something to stop it.”

  “No more urinating in my daughter’s roses,” Mr. Deader said, unsmiling.

  It was a planter, Michael thought. I peed in the planter.

  “Find a job, get another place to live, pull it together,” Mr. Deader said, looking hard at him, staring into his eyes, as if making sure his point had been taken. He positioned his legs back in the Rolls-Royce. “Get your joint custody,” he said, turning his key and starting the engine. He shut his heavy door.

  Listening to the motor fade as Mr. Deader drove down the street, the skin on his arms and the back of his neck prickled. His situation wasn’t as bad as he’d imagined; he couldn’t wait to call Lisa in the morning and tell her he had the favor and faith of Mr. Deader.

  His stomach weakened as he poured the remains of Wild Turkey into the slick steel kitchen sink; and as he flushed the smell with tap water, he thought of how he might live up to Mr. Deader’s expectations, believing, for the first time in four days, that he might have a chance at joint custody.

  And it was Anthony’s face he imagined as he lay on the mattresses, crying again. This time it was a soothing release, not self-pity, the tears running down the sides of his face into his hair, dampening his pillow.

  He imagined swinging Anthony in the air, and he thought of how Kenneth had raised him temporarily from the earth, as if stirring his helplessness, reminding him that everyone was feeble. Power, he decided, was a tricky, capricious thing. He saw Anthony watching as he let himself be lifted, and he could smell the ocean, feel its breeze in his hair.

  Tijuana Burro Man

  ON A DRIZZLY WET-CEMENT Thursday, Rosie’s second week of eighth grade, her English teacher turned off the lights and made the class look at a slide of Vincent van Gogh’s painting Starry Night while Don McLean’s song (inspired by the artist) “Vincent” played on a tape player. Then they were to look at the slide for ten more minutes, in silence. Miss Deleo said their assignment was “to feel.” When the lights came back on, they were to write whatever came to mind. Miss Deleo called it “stream of consciousness.”

  Rosie wanted to be cool and hate the assignment like the other students—groans and eye rolls. She wanted to be like Heather, sitting at the back of the classroom, green eyes so light they looked translucent, elbow at her desk, chin in palm, staring indifferently at the screen. Heather (every other girl was a Heather, so Rosie preferred to think of her as the green-eyed girl) was beautiful. They’d just come from a school rally. The frequent rallies were supposed to foster school spirit and were a permissible opportunity to ogle: cheerleaders skipping, jumping, cart-wheeling to the middle of the gym floor—whooping and hollering—ponytails swinging, skirts lifting to reveal blue panties, backsides embellished with the school logo: a white-bearded and bare-chested Sea King emerging victorious from the foam of a wave, wielding a trident. Cheerleaders, Rosie believed, proclaimed the requirements of her sex, an exaggerated example, an ideal. But say—just say—in her imagination, she’d been gifted with the looks, confidence, and agility to fling and contort her body before the entire student and teacher population—she could never fake that sort of enthusiasm, ever. The green-eyed girl was too cool to be a cheerleader: she always looked bored and this made her superior. Her family was hugely wealthy, exemplified by her wardrobe, and the combination of money and looks put Miss Deleo at a disadvantage: the green-eyed girl didn’t really have to give a damn; she simply crossed her legs and the guys wanted her, the girls wanted to be her.

  Last year in seventh grade, Rosie had a bad perm. As if that wasn’t horrific enough, a photograph in her school yearbook (place the yearbook on a table, let it fall open, and it would land on the picture) had humiliated her. Newport Beach High School encompassed grades seven through twelve, ensuring her disgrace from peers as well as from the five grades above her. In a classroom full of students, it appeared as if the cameraman had yelled, Hey, Rosie!, hers the only face turned to the camera, startled, a whooshed fan of kinky hair, a glimmer of metal from the hardwire of her braces. She was pale, but appeared ghostlike because of the flash. The caption under the photograph: What planet are you from?

  She’d make sure nothing like that ever happened again, and already had racked up hours naked and supine in the ultraviolet lights of a coffinlike tanning booth at NewportTan, smelling of sweat and chemicals, trying not to tip her protective goggles, ignoring claustrophobic sensations. She never got tan, was perpetually red hued, but it was a start—and her braces had been removed, her perm had died an unmourned slow death; and with the aid of Sun-In and lemon juice, her hair was streaked a dirty blond, coarse and weathered like the surfer girls.

  Girls at her high school were so thin their legs resembled arms. Some came back from summer break transformed by breast augmentations and nose jobs. This past summer, in a great panic, Rosie had even persuaded her mother, B, to take her to a plastic surgeon. Her right breast was slightly larger than its mate and she was sure this was a deformity. B had no way of calming her, but the doctor had convinced her that she need not go under the knife and that the incongruity might modify naturally with time.

  It wasn’t as if Rosie wasn’t used to adapting: she’d moved plenty as a child, traveling because of her father’s job (Latin Coast representative for Namco Powder Metals Inc.), living in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia. Despite her shyness, her introspective and sensitive nature (Grandma Dot called her The Big Feeling), she was a scrappy survivor, even somewhat of a leader.

  When Rosie was in third grade, her father started working for B’s father, so that they could settle once and for all near Rosie’s grandparents in Southern California. The divorce, three years later, was nasty and scandalous. B asked her father to fire her ex-husband as a show of solidarity, but Grandpa refused, whether out of continued loyalty or as a favorable business decision, Rosie wasn’t sure, though knowing Grandpa, she suspected the latter.

  There’d been rumors of B’s longtime affair with Rosie’s new stepfather, Will, a gynecologist and obstetrician, twenty-three years B’s senior. And a confirmation, a drunken phone call from Will’s ex-wife, answered by Rosie three weeks after moving into their new home in Newport Beach, two days before she was to start the seventh grade. “Look at your birth certificate,” Will’s ex-wife had said, after expounding on the number of years she’d been married to Will (thirty-four), and her children’s (Stanford graduates—two surgeons, one lawyer) shared hatred for B, and (even though she hadn’t stated it), by association, Rosie. There was a hint of shame in her slurring voice, “Can you find your birth certificate? I want you to look at it.” And then, as if sensing that Rosie was about to hang up in self-preservation, she hung up first—but not before coolly adding, “Your mom’s a slut.”

  Rosie did find her birth certificate, fishing in the avocado-colored file cabinet next to B’s dresser in the walk-in closet. The attending physician’s signature was Will’s, confirming her suspicion: A pregnant B had met Will when she’d traveled solo (not counting Rosie, in utero) to California (from Colombia, Argentina, Brazil?), to deliver Rosie—troublemaker by birth—in a state-of-the-art hospital. It was a large, complicated, indigestible piece of infor
mation that she’d been attempting to digest in secret ever since, considering B, Will, Dad, Grandma Dot, and Grandpa weren’t keen on heavy discussions, particularly anything having to do with the communal pain of the divorce. All B had told her was that she’d flown to California in her final trimester of pregnancy because she was experiencing “difficulties” (further questioning, futile); that Grandpa had driven her to the hospital and stayed in the waiting area; and that before they’d left for the hospital, she’d taken a shower and shaved her legs (she didn’t want to have stubble-haired legs). But Rosie wasn’t so sure she wanted to talk about it either, a blossoming of shame—in her fertile imagination, an undeniable responsibility.

  Tell the green-eyed girl that her birth had been the catalyst for her mother to meet her lover, subsequently instigating the dissolution of her parents’ marriage (not to mention the marriage of the spiteful woman with the slurring sad voice), and she would’ve been nonplussed. What would it be like to be someone like that? Did she even think about death? She didn’t worry. She wasn’t sensitive. She looked good. It never occurred to her to ask questions. But Rosie could tell she was dumb. Last week, after being called on by Miss Deleo, the green-eyed girl had earnestly tried to answer a question about the difference between a first person and a third person point of view: “A third person is someone who has heard something through someone else . . .” She’d played it off, but not before giving Rosie a secret look. The look said, Yeah, I might be pretty but I’m really stupid. What am I going to do with my life? It was gone in a flash and then she returned to her normal bored and superior posture, and Rosie was relieved: it wasn’t natural to be worried for the green-eyed girl.

  The slide projector was propped on a stack of books. Rosie’s desk was toward the side of the classroom so that she could see the slightest ripples of the screen, a fist-sized rock tied to the end of a cord keeping it weighted down. The song finished, the projector hummed, tittering laughter swept through the classroom. “Shh,” Miss Deleo pressed a scrunched index finger to her lips—then quickly withdrew her hand, placing it behind her back. “Ten more minutes. Silence.”