by Marc Parent
Maybe that’s why I thought about any of this old crap today, not because Selena needed stuff for her downmarket sex story but because of the TV news. Or maybe it was because I wore the Frye boots, dug them out of the closet for the first time in ten years and wore them with a kilt (my old uniform skirt from Purchase Country Day) and a turtleneck. “Oh . . . my . . . God,” said Ariel, the assistant fashion editor. “Ralph Lauren on crank.”
“Great headline, but I don’t think you’ll get it through,” I said. “I was just cold and bored.”
“Return of the Frye boot,” she said. We all talked like that.
Jessamina was on the news. Is that why I wore the Fryes? Jessamina Perez, wearing a cheap white cable-knit sweater, her hair in an unflattering bun. She didn’t look that different than she had when she was a kid. I had a good eye, even in college. My RA once said she swore I’d end up running a fashion magazine and I froze her so fast, what a crappy thing to say, and now here I am passing judgment on the latest shape in evening bags while, according to the alumni mag, my RA is a neuro-biologist at Hopkins, thank you very much, bet she doesn’t give a shit what kind of evening bag she carries.
She’d been a funny-looking kid, Jessamina, with big teeth and eyes with a little too much of a pop to them. But there are two kinds of funny-looking kids, the kind that turn into ugly adults and the kind that turn into Lauren Hutton. I was pretty sure that Jessamina was going to be pretty when she grew up, and I was right.
She was eleven when Jesus showed up with her, pushing his way into my room using her skinny flat plank of a body like a shield, steering her by one shoulder. “Shit, man, I got a big problem here,” he said. “I’m gonna lose this goddamn job.”
“And that’s my problem how?” I said, looking the girl up and down. She was wearing jeans that had been long enough for her before her growth spurt, a T-shirt with faded flowers across the center, and a white quilted jacket that had gone grey along the edge of the cuffs. She was carrying a book in one hand and a backpack by its strap in the other.
“Popi, I can stay home alone,” she whined. “I can take the train back.”
“Bullshit,” he said. “No way.” He talked over her head. “I had her downstairs in the break room, the old guy came in, started giving me all this grief, this is no place for kids, on and on, he’s an asshole. So I figured she can stay up here until I’m done.”
“You’re crazy, Jesus. I have a class at three.”
“That’s okay. She’s good. You sit down, Jessamina, you read your book. She’s always reading the books. She’s going to college.”
“I coulda stayed by myself,” the kid said, not looking at me. Her book dropped down as though it was heavy in her hand. It was a library copy of Little Women with a sappy drawing on the cover of four girls having a picnic.
“I gotta go,” Jesus said.
“How come she’s not in school?”
“Some stupid thing, what the hell—”
“Professional development day,” the girl said.
“How the hell they think people take care of their kids when the teachers are always taking off—”
“I coulda stayed home. I coulda locked the door.”
“No way,” said Jesus.
“I have so much work,” I said.
“Later,” he said, dropping his hand from her shoulder and slamming the door.
I looked at her. She looked at the floor. I picked a pile of clothes off the one big chair in my room and dropped them on the floor behind the chair. “So sit,” I said.
He was right, I guess, she wasn’t any trouble. I didn’t mind her as much as I expected. She reminded me a little bit of my sister. It was something about the way she held her hands, as though they weren’t really attached, were something breakable someone had given her that she had to hold really carefully. There was a kind of ballet thing she had going on that my sister had had. Duh, my sister had been taking ballet since she was three. She could raise her foot above her head and not even breathe hard. She’d stand out there on the tennis court waiting for the ball with her feet in third position. I don’t know why the hell she needed to play tennis in the first place.
I took a shower, checked my mail, made a cup of tea, and the girl just sat there. I don’t think she was really reading. She had her face all tensed in the center in a kind of pissed-off look. I was the expert at that look. I can make my face look like a fist without even trying.
“Don’t you judge me!” my mother used to say. Like I cared.
When I came back from class she was still reading, but her face had gone all soft and when she looked up, startled, I could tell she was crying.
“What?” I said. She looked down at the book in her lap.
“Oh, shit. I hate that part.”
“What part?”
“The part where Beth dies. I hate that part.”
“What?”
“When Beth dies and she writes the poem about her and her mother’s all bummed and then Amy marries Laurie and they—”
“Amy marries Laurie? Amy? The mean little one? Marries Laurie? The guy?”
“Oh, shit,” I said, putting my books down. “I gave the ending away.”
“Beth dies?”
Not my finest hour. “I’m staying home next time,” the kid said when Jesus came back for her. “You’re welcome,” I said when he left with her.
The next time was a month later, on a Sunday morning. I was asleep and I was in no mood. Gus and I had had a fight about whether he should major in philosophy, which he liked, or history, which he could use, whatever the hell that meant. It was really a fight about why I didn’t want to go down on him, which was one of his favorite topics. The others being whether Harvard was a better law school than Columbia, and whether he would win the prize for best senior thesis. (He didn’t, and he went to Georgetown, and I didn’t go down on him because he didn’t go down on me. I guess you could say it was political.)
This time she had a book called My Very Best Friend, with a picture of one girl looking down the hall at the back of a whole group of other girls. You could look at the cover and be able to recite the whole stupid thing aloud: used to be my friend, then she got in with the popular crowd, then she dumped me, then the popular crowd dumped her, then she learned what’s really important. You could tell by the colors—sky blue, pink, a kind of medium purple—that it was the kind of moron story where the girl takes her two-faced bitch of a friend back, instead of telling her to kiss her ass and the friend develops a bad crystalmeth habit.
“So how is that?” I said after I came out of the shower. Luckily I’d spent the sex hours at Gus’s or the room would have reeked of it. I like my room to smell like Pine-Sol, the way it did in boarding school. That’s another reason why I never let someone spend the night after sex. Jesus was perfect. He didn’t even want to spend his whole lunch hour.
She was looking out the window. “Is that someone going to the bathroom?”
“Probably,” I said, kicking my towel under the bed and rummaging in my drawers.
“That kind of underpants look uncomfortable,” she said.
“My mom says having a tattoo isn’t so good for a girl,” she said.
“It’s kind of a boring book,” she said.
“Here’s a good one,” I said to shut her up. I handed her my old copy of Alice in Wonderland. My name was on the title page in crayon right next to Lewis Carroll, the perv. Now the book is in my bedroom on the table next to the Bakelite alarm clock that my grandfather gave me when he got Alzheimer’s and thought I was either his mother or his fifth-grade teacher.
“My mom says you’re not supposed to write in books,” Jessamina said.
“It’s my book. I can do what I want. Where is your mom, anyway?”
She looked out the window again. “She’s not feeling good,” she said.
“Jesus is your father?” I never assume anything about family relations.
“He’s my mother’s boyfriend. He’s
like my father. My father lives in Jersey, and he’s got two jobs so he doesn’t come around too much. Jesus is better. He takes us to Burger King every Saturday for dinner. Last summer we went to Orchard Beach and he got a lobster. I didn’t want any. It looks gross.”
“It’s all about the butter.”
“I had fried clams. You can’t even taste the clams.”
“If you get a bad fried clam you’ll puke all night,” I said.
“How can you tell if it’s bad?”
“I’ve never figured that out,” I said. “I guess if you puke all night.” I put on my down coat. I could tell from the steam rising from the grates in the quad that it was freezing out. “You want anything from Café No?”
“What do they have?”
“Coffee.”
“I don’t like coffee.”
“Yeah, you’ll get over that. Hot chocolate? Bran muffin?”
“Can I have a corn muffin and some hot chocolate? He’ll pay you back.”
It wasn’t such a bad day. I had a Poli Sci paper and having the kid around kept me at the computer, although I wasn’t sure whether it was because I was afraid if I left her alone she was going to steal my jewelry, try on my clothes, or just wig out. For a long time the only sound in my room was the hollow tap of laptop keys, the swish of pages turning, and the loud pounding of hot water coming up through the cast-iron pipes to the radiator, which worked fine now. Jesus bled it once a week.
“What’s a comfit?” she said after about a half hour.
I just handed her the dictionary. I wasn’t going to be spitting out definitions every other paragraph. She kept going back and forth from the book to my big old abridged OED. (I still have that, too, on my desk at work, because you never know when you’re going to need a really arcane word to describe a scarf. Right.)
I was almost done with my first draft and Jessamina was about halfway through the book—I looked when she was gone and she’d just gotten to the part where the Duchess hands Alice the baby—when Jesus let himself in with a passkey. “Damn,” he said. “I couldn’t hear nothing, so I thought you went someplace.”
“What, like I took her to a bar?” I said.
“There’s no noise, no talking, no music, no nothing.”
“I had a lot of work. She’s reading.”
“Yeah, she’s always reading.”
“You got a key to her room?” Jessamina said.
“I got a key to all the rooms, baby. Put your coat on. We’ll go get pizza.”
“I’m not hungry. I had a corn muffin.”
“Your mommy’s home.”
She leapt up and the dictionary fell to the floor, discarded. “Yo,” I said. “That’s an expensive book.”
“Sorry. Can I borrow this one?” She held up my Alice .
“No way. If you ever come back again you can finish it. Or get it from the school library. This one’s mine.” But I let her put a Post-it inside so she’d know where her place was, although she scarcely looked at me as she scrambled into her jacket.
“Get her a decent coat,” I said the next time Jesus stopped by alone.
“What are you, her mother?” Jesus said, smoothing his T-shirt over his pecs, which were something to see.
“God forbid.”
“You need to whatchamacallit,” he said.
“Man, you are articulate.”
“Fuck you. You need to try acting like a woman sometime. Like you’re normal, nice.”
“Oh, yeah, nice. That’s really useful. If I were normal and nice I wouldn’t be lying here.” If I’d been normal and nice I wouldn’t have gotten off on the look of disgust he gave me when I said that.
That was the last time, it turned out. Not the last time I saw him, but the last time we had sex. The last time I saw him was two Saturdays after that, when I was starting to wonder whether I was going to have to go to work on him again with the Frye boots and the service calls. My closet wasn’t closing right. I was going to call and complain on Sunday. But he showed up Saturday with Jessamina again. She was sulky but you could tell that she wasn’t mad, and as soon as she took off her jacket— that same thin grimy jacket, polyester with lousy fill—she was reaching for Alice.
Jesus looked bad, like he hadn’t slept and hadn’t showered, and I wondered for a minute if he was doing one of the other girls in the dorm. It wasn’t like him to be unkempt. He was the kind of guy who treated his mustache as though it was a house pet. “Just keep an eye out for her,” he said, running his hand through his hair, and for once I couldn’t think of some smart-ass thing to say. His cell phone, which he kept clipped to his belt, started chirping, and he sighed. “The machine thing’ll get it,” he said.
“Popi, answer it. You know how bad she’ll get.”
“She can’t get any badder. Any worse. Goddamn it.” The phone stopped, then started ringing, stopped, then rang again. Thank God he didn’t have some stupid song, “Pomp and Circumstance” or “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Ring four and he flipped it open. “What?” he said, and you could hear screaming coming from the phone all the way across the room.
“Ay yi yi,” said Jessamina, tears running down her face and dropping onto my good copy of Alice, turning the faded red cloth cover vermilion again.
“Listen to me,” Jesus said, but whoever was screaming wasn’t listening. “Listen. Listen. All right. All right. Yeah.”
He hung up and looked from Jessamina to me, then back again. “I guess she told you,” I said.
“Shut up. Just keep an eye out for her. Stop crying, Jessie. Stop right now. Everything is okay.” He said something in Spanish and the girl jumped up and held on to him around the waist, moving her head from side to side until the front of his shirt was wet with tears.
Then in English he said, “I’ll be back to get you later.”
After he was gone she started to cry again so I just shut up and did the reading for my Econ class. She started on Alice, but after a while I heard the book fall to the floor and when I looked over she was asleep, sitting on my bed with her back against the wall. I nudged her over with the flat of my hand and she fell onto the bed on a perfect diagonal, like a small tree. I covered her with my duvet. She snored evenly, even when late afternoon came and the light disappeared and I had to put my desk lamp on. Just before six o’clock she said “maybe” very loudly, and then “sometimes,” and went back to sleep for a few more minutes. When I turned around again she was in the same position but her eyes were open and she was looking at my back.
“Is it nighttime?” she said.
“Not yet.”
What it was was at least an hour past the end of Jesus’ shift, but I didn’t say anything. Part of me was pissed that I was stuck with this kid, that I didn’t know where she lived or how to get her there. Part of me figured that something bad was happening and that I’d better cut her and Jesus a little slack. The voice that had come freight-training out of that cell phone had sounded a little bit like my mother’s voice when the cops in Hilton Head called, only instead of “All right” she’d said “Are you certain? Are you certain?” over and over again until I’d wanted to scream. But she’d screamed enough for us both.
“Do you like Chinese food?” I said.
“Egg rolls,” she said.
“They’re full of fat,” I said, but I got them anyhow and had some myself. I got her to eat lo mein, too, but she wouldn’t touch the Szechuan prawns.
“I can’t believe I’m spending Saturday night eating Chinese food in my room and studying like all these other losers,” I said, and when she started to sniffle I added, “Okay, okay, it’s fine. It’s all good. He probably just had to take care of business.”
“He probably had to take my mom to the hospital. That takes all night sometimes. Sometimes there are people who are shot and their heads are all messed up and there’s all this blood and they have to take them first.”
“Yeah, okay, too much information. So you’ll just have a sleepover here.”
&
nbsp; “I had a sleepover with my friend Jasmine over Christmas vacation. We went to the movies and to Chuck E. Cheese.”
“I’ve never been to Chuck E. Cheese.”
“It’s like a restaurant and an arcade, so you can eat and like play video games.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. And Jasmine has a brother who won high scorer on Blast ’Em and we got a free pizza. It was kind of a gyp because we’d already had pizza so we didn’t want another one and they said we couldn’t have a coupon for it so we had to order it then. We took half of it home in a box to Jasmine’s other brother. He’s in a wheelchair ’cause when he was born something went wrong and he’s all hunched up on one side. You have to cut his food up in little pieces or he chokes on it.”
“Where is this?”
“Chuck E. Cheese?”
“No, where you live?”
“The Bronx,” she said. “Pelham Parkway.”
At least I had a clue.
I let her have the bed that night and although she was all nervous during dinner she slept soundly. I was the one who kept waking up, trying to figure out why I was on the floor. When it was morning I wanted to go out to the diner to have a hot breakfast but she said no, no, we had to be there when Jesus came back or he’d be angry. I tried to tell her the guy could let himself in with his passkey (smoke a doobie, take a nap) but she wouldn’t listen. Another corn muffin, another hot chocolate. I just had coffee and a cigarette, blowing the smoke out the window while she wiped her delicate hands very carefully and looked at me like I was practicing Satanism instead of ripping through the first Newport of the day. Love that menthol, especially with a latte. You get that dark numb patch at the back of your tongue that reminds you you’re alive.
