Drift

by Victoria Patterson

  John Wayne skateboards beside her: to Marguerite, down the hill to Larkspur, Iris, Heliotrope, over to Goldenrod, Fernleaf, and Dahlia, ending at Carnation. She likes the way his wheels sound on the concrete and how, when he’s gliding, his toes tip over the side of the skateboard.

  The stairway is behind her grandparents’ kitchen, and as she walks up the steps, she sees through the kitchen window below Grandma Dot and Grandpa bent over their meals at the kitchen bar, watching the television in the living room. The apartment is angled above the garage in such a way that they can’t see her, but she can keep tabs on them. She hears the soft pads of John Wayne’s bare feet on the steps, following behind.

  “Oh,” John Wayne says when she opens the door and turns on the light with the red light bulb. He follows her inside, his voice reverent. “Wow-wee.” A hammock-like chair hangs by a thick chain from the ceiling in the corner of the room. The shell of the chair is fat wicker and crimson pillows tie through the slats. On either side of a bed are two plastic reading tables in the shape of giant dice. The bedroom is soaked in an eerie red hue from the bulb.

  He sets his skateboard beside one of the die-shaped tables, sits on the bed, and stares around the room. She sits next to him, fear and excitement passing through her, as if she’s writing her phone number for the Tijuana Burro Man a thousand times over, and no one can stop her. His hand next to her thigh feels like it’s touching her, but it isn’t. She likes the way it looks against her uncle’s red bedspread—his fingernails with dirt underneath them, and the pinkie filed to a triangle and longer than the rest.

  “Did you see me watching you?” she asks. Supposedly, he’s brain-damaged, but she wonders if he understands more.

  With four fingers, he draws what appears to be a loopy S on the bedspread in the space between them, over and over, S S S.

  “You’re watching me,” he says, and she doesn’t know what to say. She tends to mistake suffering for depth, and she decides to ask a question that will help determine whether he’s a really deep person.

  “Do you ever cry?”

  He doesn’t answer, pulling at his shorts’ pocket and unearthing a small plastic bag filled with marijuana.

  He rolls a joint on the bedspread with papers from his T-shirt pocket; the ritual soothes him and his hands work quickly. He may not know how to talk, she thinks, but he sure knows how to roll a joint. He pulls a silver Zippo lighter from his shorts’ pocket, flips the top open with a flick, and produces a steady flame. He sucks on his joint and his eyes squeeze shut as he inhales, his eyelashes peeking out, darker than his hair. His inhale is lengthy and she feels how he takes it all the way through his body, imagining the smoke coursing through him. There’s pleasure in watching him smoke a joint just because he appreciates it so. She could watch him smoke joints all night.

  He holds his breath for what appears an impossible length of time, and when he opens his eyes, his eyes smile and the smoke comes out in a rush. He hands the joint to her and she does her best to copy, but she’s scared to hold it in so long. She doesn’t want to have a coughing fit like the first time she smoked a clove cigarette by the tennis courts with Chris. After an abbreviated suck and exhale, she hands the joint back to him.

  Although Grandma Dot never comes upstairs—no one ever does—she still doesn’t want Grandma Dot witnessing drug use in Uncle Stan’s apartment, and she gets up to shut the blinds and lock the door. At the side by the bed, she opens a window so that they can hear the bay, lets the blinds fall over the window, careful not to disrupt an assortment of handmade yarn-fraying dream catchers propped against the wall. The small bay waves lap onto the sand, a calm sound. She goes to the closet, finds Uncle Stan’s bong behind a box of clothes, sure that John Wayne will love it, majestic and intricate, tubes poking from the blue glass.

  By the time she returns to the bed, he’s preparing another joint. She sees the spent joint stubbed in Uncle Stan’s hand-shaped ashtray, a soft line of smoke rising from the butt. When she hands the bong to him, he smiles so beautifully, she wants to hold him in her arms and tell him she can make everything all right. He sets the bong next to his feet. The breeze rattles through the blinds. After the second joint, she stares at him, willing him to speak. When he does, his voice is soft, and he stares at his hands.

  “I don’t talk so much,” he says.

  “I don’t care,” she answers.

  “I had an accident,” he says, gazing forward. “My head got hurt.”

  “That’s okay.”

  He nods and says, “I like it here. Can I stay?”

  “Sure,” she answers. “But you’ll have to be careful. I’ll give you a key.” Her head floats separate from her body, and she realizes she must be high because she feels no panic at giving John Wayne permission to live in her uncle’s apartment. It only seems right and true.

  He drifts around the bedroom, exploring, touching, and smelling things. She watches as he strips off his T-shirt and puts a necklace over his head. It’s her uncle’s necklace with the sharp tooth that resembles the curved incisor of a beast, and it looks good against his skin.

  “Keep it,” she says, thinking it’s only right since it looks so good on him. She wants to give him everything. She’s feeling generous and noble.

  He stares at her, but it’s like he hasn’t heard her or doesn’t care. She’s sitting on the bed and he kneels next to her legs. His chest looks like a boy’s chest but it’s longer. He puts a hand on either side of her hips and sets his head in her lap. She tries to work out the tangles in his hair with her fingers—blond hair streaked with sun. He smells like ocean and she imagines for an instant that he’s really a merman.

  He lifts his head and smiles, his eyes blue, but with white in them. She’s never seen eyes like that. They remind her of clouds, making him seem incapable of bad thoughts, but also empty. She smiles back, her heart full.

  He stands and unsnaps and unzips his shorts, letting them fall to his ankles, and then kicking them away with a foot. His actions appear automatic, as if he’s performing a ritual. There’s no life in his eyes. He isn’t wearing underwear—his penis at half-mast, surrounded by light brown pubic hair. It’s only the third adult penis she’s seen in real life, not just photographs. Her stomach tightens, as if a dangerous animal has made an appearance. And at the same time, she’s embarrassed and humiliated.

  “Stop,” she says, covering her eyes with a hand. “What are you doing?”

  She watches through her fingers. She’s hurt his feelings—his mouth turns down comically, like a clown’s mouth. She pulls at his arm and gets him to sit next to her on the bed. Hunched forward, his head hangs lower. His penis is slack between his legs and she thinks it’s odd that a penis can look sad. His palms are facing upwards on his thighs, as if he’s waiting for something to fall into them. He brushes his left foot against his right leg, and she leans over for the bong, places it in his lap, hoping this will cheer him.

  After she reminds him to put on his shorts (knowing that he would gladly get high naked), he fixes the bong instead of rolling another joint. She hears the faucet from the bathroom, and then he returns to his position next to her on the bed, holding it like a trophy. She smokes with him while the wind rattles the blinds and water gurgles in the bong.

  He pulls at the glass mouth and holds the smoke, motioning with his hand for her. Pressing his mouth against hers, he blows smoke into her, his hand on her thigh, his tongue against her teeth. She closes her eyes so that she can’t see his face because she knows she’ll feel protective and that will ruin everything. Besides, with her eyes shut, she can just barely believe that this is the way good friends smoke pot.

  Henry’s House

  SHE WAS NOT UNHAPPY. That was what Melody told me as she washed dishes, one year into her marriage, after the thrill of the honeymoon in Spain and Greece had worn off, and the novelty of wealth had lost some of its luster. She smiled, a false ease to her face, and handed me a glass to dry. Her eyes appeared sorry, and
I knew she’d asked me to come inside and help so that we could be alone, away from her mother. This was my second summer taking literally Melody’s insistence that her home was my home, no longer ringing the doorbell, simply letting myself in through an unlocked side door.

  Melody had a maid that came every Tuesday and Thursday. She had a sleek stainless-steel KitchenAid dishwasher. Yet we washed and dried the old-fashioned way, as if roommates again in our cramped apartment. Etched on the outside of the glass she handed me were three delicate gold lines, and as I dried with a dishtowel, I wanted to believe that she wasn’t unhappy, as she’d claimed, but I was aware of my own greed, my self-interest in her contentment, and it made me uneasy.

  A sizable hallway led to her kitchen, and I heard her dogs—Jules and Jim—their nails clicking on the rose-veined marble, before I saw them. “Hello, babies,” I said, though I thought of them like freakish, fragile stuffed toys, little cloud puffs with tails curling over their butts in plumed question marks. But they didn’t feel delicate, damp noses pressing into my calves. I leaned over to pet Jules, whom I could distinguish from Jim by his blue collar; his fur had a woolly quality, and his body was dense beneath; his ears were shaded a darker buff, a hint of apricot color around his mouth, the remnant stain from dog food.

  “Go on,” Melody said, tapping Jim with a bare foot. “Get.” Despite my efforts, she could tell I didn’t like the dogs, and they sauntered, side by side, out the open sliding glass doors.

  Their purchase, three months after Melody’s wedding at the Newport Marriott, had been to stifle any maternal urges. “It’s either that,” Melody had explained, “or get pregnant; Henry doesn’t want more kids, and God knows I don’t, so there you go.” We both had eleven-year-old daughters and had vowed not to have more children, knowing firsthand the difficulty of raising the girls without help from their fathers. But I couldn’t understand why she’d buy dogs like that when she could have anything. Wealth, I often felt, was wasted on the wealthy, and I liked to imagine what I’d do with money, disappointed that Melody didn’t share my good taste.

  We’d worked together at the Newport Beach Golf and Country Club—where she’d met her husband, Henry—serving golfers iced teas, Styrofoam cups of chili, and hot dogs from a movable cart that sat along the ninth green; but now only I worked there, handling the job of two, a three-dollar raise as compensation. Melody would change that fact if she could, but instead she bought me clothes and food and paid for her and my daughter’s summer camp in Catalina, which was where the girls—best friends like us—were for two weeks.

  Watching Melody, it was as if she was waiting for permission to speak openly; she was unusually concentrated on the plate she washed and her body radiated need. She wore a hot pink Fendi bikini, a wavy pattern embedded in the material in silver metallic thread; her legs, arms, and stomach were lean and tan, thirty-one years old, eight years younger than me, but with a teenager’s body. She wasn’t wearing her seven-carat princess-cut diamond ring, and I knew that if I’d asked why, she’d say it was heavy and chafed her finger. Her eyes were weighted with emotion, blue green, the right eye darker, and in the left, two flecks of gold brushed in.

  I wore what Melody called a tankini with its matching cover-up to conceal the spider-veined cellulite on my thighs. She’d bought the tan-colored Christian Dior bathing suit and cover-up at Neiman Marcus, more appropriate for my body type, which wasn’t like hers, though my breasts—not too large, not too small—were in proportion to my hips and legs.

  “The General is happy,” she said, nodding toward the window above the sink that overlooked her pool. Sometimes she called her mother The General. Her mother, Cindy, stood on the second to last step of the shallow end, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat and dark sunglasses; she was in some type of contented reverie, the trim of her skirted bathing suit floating, and her fingers circling figure eights, creating small rippling outlines in the water. Thick, leathery scars ran down each of her thighs from her premature hip surgeries, adding to her indomitable appearance. “Hip dysplasia,” she explained to anyone who asked, “like a dog.”

  Cindy and I had believed that Melody would do well, that she’d marry money eventually, and we’d encouraged her. Each of us had gained, as if Melody’s marriage, her home and her pool, made up for all the bad things that had happened in our lives, for all our struggles. Weekdays Cindy arrived at Melody’s wearing her dental hygienist uniform, much like a nurse’s, and changed into her bathing suit in a back bedroom that was designated as hers.

  The sun reflected in the pool, and I blocked out Cindy, staring instead at the deep end, a mesmerizing whitish blue ripple, magical. Part of Melody’s charm was her impetuousness, how she spoke without thinking—there had been Melody’s love affairs, two with women, and her experimentation with drugs. She’d been diagnosed with bipolar disorder as a teenager, although a milder form, and had been taking lithium and valproate as mood stabilizers, adding Saint John’s wort and omega-3 fatty acids as herbal conduits.

  I knew that Cindy worried, like I did, that Melody would destroy a good thing. “Five years,” Cindy had whispered after Melody’s wedding ceremony, as if we’d orchestrated a deal, staring hard at my reflection in the Newport Marriott bathroom mirror while I applied lipstick. “She needs to last five, according to the prenup. If he catches her having an affair, she gets nothing.”

  Melody coughed, and I turned my attention to her, saw her wipe the back of her wrist against her chin, and then continue washing her plate. I thought before speaking, wondering how to reassure Melody, wanting to find out what was going on, how she really felt. My motives were partly strategic. “It’s me,” I said, flagging the dishtowel in front of her. I said my full name as emphasis: “Katherine Lynn McAllister. Best friend. You don’t have to pretend.” When that didn’t work, I used the nickname she’d given me: “You know, your best friend—Kat.”

  And then a change passed over her; I saw it spread through her body, a shuddering. She set the sponge and plate down. She bent over, her wet hands gripping the edge of the sink, her knuckles pink. I felt her taking deep breaths.

  “His smell,” she said, turning off the water and facing me. She smiled her slanted smile. I was surprised to see a twinkle in her eyes. She was talking about Henry. He dyed his hair a metallic black, but I guessed he was in his sixties. Along with his uncanny ability to make money, he was a chain smoker. She grimaced, as if imagining his smell, and her eyes stayed on mine. “It comes all the way from the inside. There’s no way to get rid of it, no matter how much he brushes his teeth.”

  “It can’t be that bad,” I said.

  She smiled, as though she found the subject amusing. “He can’t go down on me,” she said, reminding me of the lewd way she had talked when we lived together. “He tries,” she said, “but he loses his breath and starts coughing.” She mimicked a sputtering, hacking cough, crouched over, hands crossed at her side. “The main event isn’t any better,” she said, and she made convulsing motions with her hips, spasmodic, while she continued to cough.

  When she was done, she looked back at me, pleased and challenging, as if daring me not to laugh at her imitation. And I laughed, even though I liked Henry and thought of him as noble for marrying Melody, because, like me, she had what people called “an unfortunate past.” I couldn’t help but believe that Henry had known that I needed rescuing, and in his kind way, had taken me in as well. Wouldn’t it be great, I often thought, to be married to Henry, but I was almost beautiful, whereas Melody was beautiful.

  “He snores,” she said, wanting to maintain my attention. She made wheezing noises; she pretended to be asleep, waking herself with a loud gargling noise. There was light in her eyes, as if she’d waited a year since her honeymoon to tell me these things.

  My face was hot and there was a twirl of anger in my stomach. “He’s not that bad,” I said.

  “Why don’t you sleep with him,” she said. She smiled slowly and it lingered on her face. “You’d li
ke that,” she said. “Wouldn’t you?”

  I stared at her, a sharp pain in my chest.

  “Oh, that’s right,” she continued, her voice trembling a little, “you don’t fuck men anymore, because of your poor broken heart.”

  “Please, please,” I said. “You’ve got a good thing.” I was shaky, and I wondered if my face had gone pale. Melody’s lips had touched my cheek on her wedding day, when we were saying our goodbyes. When she had pulled away, her hands had stayed on my arms, and she’d given me an unswerving look. At the time I had understood, only because I knew her so well, but I had not wanted to admit what I’d seen in her eyes. I continually shook off the memory, no matter how many times the image came back, because her expression had been an acknowledgment: she’d married a man she did not love, and she’d done so in large part to please me.

  I gestured at the expansive brass sink, the dishwasher, and the marble countertop, white veined delicately with rose. “Don’t mess this up,” I said.

  She appeared shocked that we’d spoken so honestly, but rather than being concerned about my feelings, she looked around, panicked, as if her mother had come inside without us noticing. She relaxed when I nodded toward the window above the sink and we watched Cindy swimming a lazy backstroke across the pool, her straw hat and sunglasses resting on the tile near the shallow end.

  Melody called me that same evening. After our obligatory apologies, we talked in a general manner for about ten minutes, before she brought up her dogs, Jules and Jim. She talked about our time together, eight years total, living in the apartment with our girls, saying that it had been peaceful.