Drift

by Victoria Patterson

  B was pretty in the same casual and confident manner as the green-eyed girl. Rosie was doing her best to develop in that direction, but she had a brooding intensity. Grandma Dot said it was like the cloud of dust that circled Pigpen from the Peanuts comic strip. And unlike B, who thrived in her new cherry red Mercedes convertible, wealth hadn’t lessened Rosie’s anxiety. She envied people who found comfort in material possessions: shallow, naive, carefree, happy. (Although she did appreciate the “emergency bankcard” Will gave her: stick it in the bank machine and it magically spat out twenties.) She was subject to depressions, insomnia, melancholy, increased by the nagging guilt that she should be happy: she could’ve been born an Untouchable in India, for instance. She’d just read about them in World History. Talk about a shitty fate. She pitied the stupid-wealthy, hated them for their ease, and she certainly didn’t want to end up like them. She’d never be able to live under the illusion that owning a Mercedes would make her a worthwhile individual—although she did believe that having perky breasts and a cute little figure might help.

  Grandma Dot saw through people across the financial spectrum with a vocal judgment akin to a searing laser beam, often sharing her insights. She usually left Rosie out of her judgments, thank God, because Rosie didn’t want to cry. When Rosie had asked Grandma Dot what she would change, if she could change just one thing about her life, Grandma Dot had said: “I wish I’d been more beautiful.” “But you are beautiful,” Rosie had said, because it was true. And the pictures when she was younger! “Pah,” said Grandma Dot, lighting up a cigarette. “Phooey.”

  Her parents’ divorce, in collision with puberty, had amplified a desperate hunger: love me, love me, love me—even if I hate you—love me, and fulfillment appeared (to a large degree) to be contingent on her physical appeal. When she’d fantasized about becoming a writer, she’d written a story about an ugly librarian who had developed a pen pal relationship with a handsome widower that eventually evolved into a deep love. The man begged the ugly librarian to let him meet her. He wanted to marry her. The ugly librarian worried that the man would take one look at her and run. The ending of the story eluded Rosie: Did love prevail? Or did the widower’s love dissolve? Hard as she tried, she couldn’t compose a satisfactory ending and had decided not to be a writer (too hard!) soon after.

  Miss Deleo stood near the corner, bluish in the light, leaned up against the wall, hands behind her back. Something was wrong with her hands—deformed—fingers scrunched together; she hid them behind her back or in her pockets, made the students write on the chalkboard. She reminded Rosie of a hummingbird, frantic and excited. She probably shopped at JCPenney. Her dress had a bold flower print; her wide belt had stars studded across it. It was her first year of teaching and she had ideas. Was she aware that the students called her Miss Dildo? Her big brown eyes looked on the verge of tears and Rosie wanted to learn for her sake, just so she wouldn’t cry. Besides, no one had ever turned off the lights and instructed her to feel.

  Rosie rested her head on her arms against the cool of the desk and tried to drop into the Van Gogh painting. She rubbed her fingers against a tiny sentence carved into her desktop, FUCK YOU AND YOUR MAMA, appreciating the crude frank message and the meditative feel of the grooves. She could hear B’s voice, “La di da di da—we live and we die and that’s it.” It bothered her that her stepfather made his living by exploring women’s vaginas. After the phone call from Will’s ex-wife, she’d come across his medical books, stacked in his office—slick photographs of vaginal disorders, close-up and inside: pink and red and sores and ooze. He wasn’t the type of man she expected to steal B’s heart: spindly and freckled legs scattered with bruises and burst capillaries, like beads puckered beneath the skin of his calves. A gut. Reddish gray hair, thinned and combed over his shiny head. Large, mottled hands, fingernails broad and slightly yellow, hands that had pulled Rosie into the world (B’s legs spread open!), ready or not.

  She’d caught him this morning, hunched and smoking a cigarette on the patio, using a paper Dixie cup as a disposable ashtray. “Don’t tell B,” he’d said, as if B couldn’t smell the nicotine on him. He wore thick brown glasses, and there was a perpetual scab near his forehead from all the times he kept hitting his head on the open car trunk, a bag of groceries in hand or one of B’s tennis rackets—Oh God!—even when she stood near him, warning him, “Watch your head, Will, watch it,”—clunk. She couldn’t help but have empathy pains: her stepfather was old and accident-prone; but no matter what, it was impossible to respect a man who wore pink with yellow. When she’d first met him, he wore his green pants embroidered with tiny whales, sprigs of water erupting from their blowholes. Rather than change the way he dressed, B encouraged his bad taste, buying him ties decorated with pumpkins for Halloween or Christmas elves at Christmastime; and they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Rosie’s bedroom window overlooked their shower window, and she could see the back of B’s head bobbing up and down against the steamy glass. If they weren’t having sex, they were asleep, and they were heavy sleepers, possibly from all the sex. She had no memory of affection between B and Dad, whereas Will and B were always touching.

  And what about Dad, broken and defeated, living in a gated condominium in Costa Mesa, a man-made creek running down the middle of the complex, ducks quacking. Earnest, sensitive (he, like Rosie, cried at movies), in the process of healing with the help of Jesus Christ, and with the understanding of Lori, fifteen years his junior, a delicious and buxom born-again Christian. Rosie attended Maritime Church with Dad—for Dad—on Sundays, but instead of giving herself over to Jesus Christ, as Dad strongly encouraged, she’d developed a recurrent and involved fantasy: a pack of Hells Angels driving through the huge stained glass depiction of the one and only beatific and bearded J.C., his hands aloft, as if to touch the air, shattering the colored glass, shards of J.C. falling everywhere; Hells Angels wreaking havoc, the church filled with screams and drugs and the choir girls giving sexual favors, ending with her riding off—through the same gap in the window—on the back of a motorcycle with her own personal tattoo-covered savior.

  Church was a participatory hypocrisy. One more place where she didn’t belong, where the worst thing she could do was be herself. What planet are you from? And by the way Dad sometimes looked at her, it was as if he knew that sin was genetic; that she shared not only B’s nose and cheekbone structure, but also B’s proclivity for extramarital sexual relations. Already a sinner without meaning to be, and in any case, definitely on her way to more sin—in other words, she was doomed. But she was resigned: sinful as her life was, it would never be ordinary. For instance, she’d been flashed twice within the last month while walking near the ocean, both in stark daylight. The first time was from a distance: she gazed toward the rocks and saw a fat, squat man watching her in return, his hand flashing spasmodically at his lap. Two weeks later she took a different walk along the sand. A scrawny older man with wrinkled knees came seemingly from the ocean; he opened the Velcro fly of his wet swim trunks, revealing a patch of graying pubic hair and the curved arc of a pale-veined penis. Both times the men had scurried away like happy little crabs, and although she’d yelled expletives, she’d sensed that she’d gratified them by playing a role. These things didn’t happen to so-called normal people.

  “Van Gogh,” Miss Deleo’s voice was wistful, “painted Starry Night while in an insane asylum. ‘La Tristesse durera toujours,’ I believe, were his last words. Does anyone know what that means?”

  No answer. Long pause.

  “‘The sadness will last forever.’” Miss Deleo waved a cupped hand abashedly in front of her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll be quiet now.”

  Once in a while at Maritime Church, the congregation sang “Amazing Grace,” and Rosie would feel something, clinging to it as proof: maybe, just maybe, she could please her dad; maybe, just maybe, she could become a Christian. But there had to be more than looking and acting and sounding the same as every
one else. And it was like asking her to believe in Santa Claus, after she’d witnessed her parents putting the presents under the tree. And why hadn’t Dad asked her to live with him? Why hadn’t he fought for her? Was there something wrong with her? When they drove out of the church parking lot, she’d stick her middle finger up, at her side by the door (where Dad couldn’t see) flipping the bird one last time, a heavy mix of guilt and cynicism. Last Sunday, she’d smuggled John Updike’s Rabbit, Run into Teen Worship, blocking out the Christian rock band, and read hungrily, camouflaging the book inside a Bible. Entering the angst-ridden world of a car salesman, it had occurred to her that she wasn’t the only freak. Besides, she concluded, she’d rather be a freak than a Christian.

  Miss Deleo flicked on the light switch, her fingers cupped as if holding a tiny chick. Rosie blinked, adjusting to the light, and quickly scribbled three sentences. She thought of the man with no hands: stubs, creases of skin pinched in inverted stars like the ends on a sausage, trying to get something out of his pocket, head down, crouched next to Will’s idling Mercedes at the Tijuana, Mexico, border crossing.

  Tijuana carried the same designer tennis outfits as the Newport Beach Country Club (Fila, Ellesse, and Adidas), but without the inflated price tags; Will had taken B and Rosie shopping on Monday (only a two-hour car drive from Newport Beach). In the back seat with the plastic bags of clothes, waiting in a line of cars to recross the border, avoiding a look out her back-seat window at the sprawl of human despair, Rosie sat, the sun sending glints of light across her arm like phantom butterflies. And then the man with no hands was tapping a stub against the glass of her window. Her eyes locked into his. Lip and chin tremble, and then she was crying—hot fat tears sliding down her cheeks. He tried to get something out of his pocket, a fruitless endeavor, moved away, merged into the sea of beggars, but there were a thousand other reasons to keep crying, just look out the window!—her emotions seeping out without her permission, built up from the reality of Tijuana. The same as when Grandma Dot had taken her to visit her great-aunt at Newport Crest Convalescent, and a woman with no visible chin or neck sitting in a wheelchair had grabbed at her arm and called her Frank, and then Aunt Lydia had kept saying, “When am I going to finally die? When will this finally be over?”—the corner of her mouth crusted with mashed potatoes and spittle. She’d unexpectedly broken into sobs and had to wait in the parking lot for Grandma Dot to finish the visit.

  She pressed her cheek against the car window, cool on her skin. Don’t look, she told herself. Tijuana all around her, even in the sounds and smells. The tears were coming but she stifled her noise. And then B’s eyes caught her in the rearview mirror: she hated when B looked at her impatiently, as if her sensitivity were an ugly troll, and B wanted it gone, out of sight, so they could continue with their contented lives. “What’s wrong, Rosie?”

  No answer. Lip tremble.

  “What’s wrong?”

  No answer. Chin tremble.

  “La di da di da—we live and we die and that’s it. Lighten up.”

  Rosie had her photograph taken that same day, on a burro painted black and white to simulate the appearance of a zebra, although most of the paint had faded. A sombrero, tijuana stitched in red thread across the brim, made her forehead itch. She leaned forward, touching the burro’s strawlike fur, warm against her hand. He shook off a fly, fur rippling under her fingertips. She knew it was a male burro because of her earlier examination of his leathery, sagging testicles. She tried to convey her sympathies to the young man taking her photograph, and his look showed that he understood. He told her to say “tortilla,” her cheeks stiff with an “I’m supposed to smile now” smile. A flash went off and his camera made an agitated noise. Will paid with a crisp twenty-dollar bill, saying the change was a tip. Will and B started walking down the street and she turned to go with them. The man stopped her with a hand to her elbow.

  “I need your phone number,” he said. “Teléfono. For the photograph.” He looked her age, already with a wispy mustache. She didn’t understand why he would need her phone number when she had that photograph (colors muted, as if covered by a glaze), but he had his look, as if they were in agreement. He handed her a scrap of paper and a pen. Hurriedly, she scribbled her name and phone number. She had the fleeting impression that she was disappointing B, a sharp jab: the lure of an action out of the ordinary. She handed the pen and paper to the man. He was pleased and her sadness lifted at the thought that she had made someone happy. She waved goodbye and ran toward Will and B. They were entering a store with cheap prescription drugs, perfumes, and clothes, and she didn’t want to miss out.

  They drove back to Newport Beach in silence; she was compliant and tired, spent from her earlier crying jag, watching the sunset bleed across the ocean; they drove past the warning signs for the illegal immigrants making a running break: a yellow diamond shape with the black silhouette of a family, the mother gripping the arm of her daughter (pigtails and ribbons) and pulling so hard, the girl’s feet left the ground. She searched the terrain: more patrol cars. They drove past the breastlike domes of the San Onofre nuclear power plant, tops covered in bird shit, like frosting on cupcakes. At the tip of each dome, there was a red light blinking slowly—like the bell buoys—not in unison, and never completely off: barely red, and then all lit up red.

  And then there was the shrill ring of a phone at two A.M. She picked up the phone in her bedroom at the same time as Will. She could hear Will’s heavy breathing. She imagined his droopy boxers, his red and gray chest hairs.

  “Hello,” the voice said with an accent. “I need to speak with Rosie.”

  “Who is this?” Will asked.

  “I take picture. She helps me. I cross border. I need place to stay.”

  She could see the burro’s tail swinging at the flies, smell the dirt, hear the children pleading for her to buy Chiclets.

  “Hang up, Rosie,” Will said, irritated.

  She hung up her phone and lay back in her bed, looking around her darkened bedroom. B had let her decorate the room, allowing her “free expression.” She’d painted the walls black and taped up advertisements from magazines of scantily clad men. They stared at her with inflated chests and seductive eyes. In the dark, they looked like monsters. She thought about the strangled noise of the camera. B would be mad. Will would give her a lecture; she could already imagine it. Her heart pulsed in her temples—thump, thump. She hated the feel of her own blood coursing through her veins. She tried readjusting her head on the pillow. She was a chronic insomniac and this event was more fodder for a thought-infested evening. Bags under the eyes were a beauty detriment. If she didn’t look good, she wouldn’t belong. She wanted the bed to swallow her. She wanted to disappear. How could a stranger be calling her for help and she couldn’t help him? Where would he go? How did he cross the border? Would he be okay? How could she be so stupid? How was she ever going to make it in this world? Grandma Dot had told her to “toughen up.” But how was she supposed to do that? Her door opened and Will stood in the doorway. He flicked the light switch. B went back to sleep, no doubt. She would send Will to do her dirty work.

  Will sat on her bed, facing her. He had on blue boxers and the tuft of copper hair near his forehead was at attention stance. She felt wide open, lonely and stupid. He smoothed hair from her face, tucked it behind her ear. “No more,” he said, but he wasn’t angry. He was tired, sorry, concerned. “Jesus Christ, Rosie, you can’t go giving our phone number to strangers.”

  “Maybe he wanted to send more copies of the photo?”

  “No more,” Will said. There’d been only one other time, when, standing between the bathroom and the kitchen of The Palms, she’d written her phone number on a napkin for a Mexican busboy eight years her senior, simply because he’d wanted to continue their conversation away from the clamor and bustle of the restaurant; but, after a series of aborted phone calls, Will had gone so far as to change their phone number, and she knew better than to argue with
him.

  “You have to stop,” he said.

  The bell rang and Rosie looked at what she’d written:

  La di da di da. We live and we die and that’s it. Fuck you and your mama.

  She couldn’t turn her paper in. Papers rustled, backpacks zipped, and she wrote on another piece of paper:

  I don’t know. There’s the night sky and clouds and stars and moon, swirled together, but it’s not messy. I’m sorry he was in an insane asylum. And that he said that thing about being sad forever. Didn’t he cut his ear off? He must have been very confused.

  Miss Deleo gave her a wet-eyed look as she turned her paper in. Outside the door, she could see the green-eyed girl, lip-locked and leg-locked with her boyfriend beside a trash can. And a soft, static, silver white rain.

  John Wayne

  WILL WAVES HIS HAND in what Rosie thinks looks like a peace sign, but it’s his signal for bring me two more, and their waitress—cleavage bursting in a corset, lips and cheeks colored the same artificial pink—hustles to accommodate. B crosses her legs, gaze following the waitress. Rosie shifts, the skin on the backs of her thighs (she’s wearing her green paisley miniskirt) rasping against the burgundy Naugahyde of the booth.

  Five Crowns is Grandpa’s favorite restaurant, but her grandparents canceled (Grandpa’s gout is acting up again). Dinners can drag on, torturous, even without her grandparents, prime rib bleeding on plates next to Yorkshire puddings, her thoughts uncontrollable and grim. Her cousins, aunts, uncles disapprove of B (affairs are bad) and, by association, her; and if they don’t disapprove, they’re damn well supposed to. A whole side of her family: gone. Poof. And it takes energy, alertness, and discipline, politicking for her grandparents’ affection, garnering what she can for B, memorizing jokes to amuse them, distracting them from their usual blunt judgments, Rosie spared because she might cry, and no one wants that. When Grandma Dot is affectionate with her to the exclusion of the others, kissing her on the lips with a loud “Mwa!” and holding her hand, it makes her feel powerful and guilty. And Grandma Dot is the only one who stands up to Grandpa, rolling her eyes, making dramatic expressions in Rosie’s direction, as if they are privy to an underlying deception. She prefers Grandma Dot in private.