“Why?” I asked.
“I thought it was beautiful, lying there in the middle of the road like a—”
“Not that.” I stomped my foot. “The phone calls, the breathing, the asking me out and not showing up, and now a bone? What the fuck kind of game are you playing?” I could smell the alcohol on my breath. “I’m not drunk,” I said defensively.
Francisco ran his hand through his hair. “I wanted to get to know you better.” He looked at me hard. “I’ve had a rough time. This isn’t easy for me, either.”
I looked frantically around. “I thought you had dogs.” My voice was accusing.
“In the backyard,” he said, moving toward me. I looked around in alarm. The room was small and cluttered; there was nowhere to run.
“I have to go.” I zipped my coat and turned to leave, but then I thought, in my blurry, drunken haze: what would the Oprah Giant do? I doubted that she would walk away from a man like Francisco, especially when he had such a goofy, lovesick look on his face. I felt my legs moving forward, heard my grandmother’s voice counting in Polish: Jeden, and I took one step forward. Dwa, and I took a second step. Trzy, and I was standing in front of him. Cztery, and my arms reached out to him. Pięć, and I was in his arms. Sześć, and we were moving across the room in a clumsy, awkward dance, my face pressed against his neck, the heat of his breath tickling my hair. Siedem, osiem, dziewięć, and we were in the hallway. Dziesięć, and we waltzed in our hideous way toward the bed. Jedenaście, and my shirt was off, and we were no longer dancing. I pulled his shirt off, too, and his chest was smooth and warm. “Stephanie’s out in the car,” I whispered, as he traced the curve of my spine.
“I know,” he said. “I peeked from the window. You almost stepped in dog poop on the way in.”
Hearing him say that caused tears to come to my eyes. It was the most romantic thing anyone had ever said to me. We held each other like that, on his bed, our bare chests pressed together, the beat of our hearts thudding away the seconds.
“Sorry,” I said to Stephanie when I finally made it back out to the car. She was reading a poetry book called the fever almanac, which had a woman’s nyloned leg over the cover. She looked up and shrugged.
“It’s retro. You totally needed to get laid.” She fastened her seat belt and jerked the car into drive.
“I didn’t,” I said. “Just, you know, touching.”
“Touching is totally the best part,” Stephanie agreed. I looked out the window and watched houses and snow-covered yards flash past, my belly doing happy little flip-flops, my nose still filled with Francisco’s scent. When we stopped for the traffic light on Minnesota Drive, I looked over at Stephanie. She sat straight, her shoulders relaxed, her pleasant face opened and vulnerable. I could imagine her twenty years from now, older but still as strong, still making it through on guts and good nature.
“You’re going to make it, you know? I mean in life. You’re going to do okay, Stephanie.”
“Oh, well.” It was the first time I had ever seen her blush. “I’m totally…it’s just, Mrs. Richards, I have been working my ass off for, like, my whole life trying to rise above the family fiasco. It’s totally exhausting. My soul is wrinkly and aged from such unflinching effort.”
I didn’t believe it. If anything, Stephanie’s soul shined brighter than anyone’s. I wanted to tell her this, but it would have embarrassed her and besides, I think she already knew.
Chapter 16
Saturday, Jan. 7
“JESUS, LOOK WHAT THE SLED DOG dragged in,” Mr. Tims said to Sandee as he whipped ranch dressing and horseradish sauce together for tonight’s prime rib special. Sandee looked awful, her skirt wrinkled, her blouse splattered with a couple of days’ worth of grease, and instead of the perky high-heeled shoes she always wore, she had on a pair of scuffed hiking boots. Her feet looked enormous and ungainly as she clomped around the pantry picking up her order.
“I haven’t been sleeping well,” she admitted, slamming a beef burrito onto her tray. “Not that it’s anyone’s business. Damn it, where’s my pico de gallo?” She hefted her tray to her shoulder and lifted it above her head; there were sweat stains beneath her arms, but I kept my mouth shut and followed her out to the dining room with the missing salsa.
“There you go. Doesn’t that look good?” Sandee’s voice was high and fake as she served the plates, enchilada sauce splashing a fattish man’s lap. “Sorry, honey.” She pulled napkins from the extra supply she kept tucked in the bosom of her blouse. “Some days it’s all shit.”
“Isn’t that the truth,” the man replied a little too heartily.
“Cig dig,” I hissed. “Five minutes.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she muttered. A few minutes later we crammed together in the far handicap bathroom stall, since it was too windy to stand outside. I let Sandee sit on the toilet, since she was the worse off, while I leaned up against the sink.
“So what’s up?” I asked
She tapped the heels of her hiking boots together three times, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. “Nothing,” she said defensively.
“This is about what happened at the hotel Saturday, isn’t it?”
“I said, nothing happened.”
“Nothing?” My voice raised in disbelief.
“We curled up in bed and watched a foreign movie without subtitles, and then he fell asleep. He snores, though not consistently. More like a stutter.”
“You sure?” Sandee wasn’t the kind of woman men lay beside in bed without initiating sex. She was too ripe, too lush. Seeing her in a bra and panties was like seeing a fuller-figured version of a Victoria’s Secret model. She had that kind of sexual presence.
“It was a relief to lie there and hold hands and not worry if my stomach was too fat or if I should act less experienced than I really was. I slept so well. I don’t think I’ve ever slept that way with a man before, not even Randall.” She kicked at the toilet paper littering the floor. “It isn’t good, is it? Lying there with him like that?”
“Probably not.” I thought of how I had felt holding Francisco on his bed, how warm and safe it had felt, yet also scary, the way I had so quickly left my defenses behind. “I saw Francisco without his shirt on,” I offered.
Sandee picked toilet paper off the bottoms of her hiking boots. “How was it?” she finally asked.
“We just held each other. Sort of like what you guys did.” I felt momentarily ashamed, as if we had both failed to properly entice our men. Yet while I couldn’t speak for Sandee, those few minutes of touching Francisco had been more intimate than any sex. “Maybe,” I began hesitantly, “Maybe we’re both falling in—”
“Don’t!” Sandee held a sheet of toilet paper up like a shield as she pushed past me and stormed out of the stall. I caught up with her in the bar bumming a cigarette from a table of half-sloshed secretaries. It took three tries but she finally managed to light it. She inhaled and choked. “I’m going to marry him, aren’t I?” Her eyes were hard and fierce. “I’m going to end up with a fish-and-game warden. We’ll eat caribou steaks while dead animal heads watch us from the walls.”
“I think you’ll be h—”
“Happy?” She shouted. Heads turned. “Who the fuck ever said I wanted to be happy?”
Monday, Jan. 9
“Mom.” Jay-Jay interrupted my nap by shaking my shoulder, but my eyes refused to open. “Wake up. There’s something outside.”
“Moose?” Last winter a moose got tangled in the neighbor’s Christmas lights and the fish-and-game department had to tranquilize the poor thing before they could cut the wires from around its belly. I wondered if Sandee’s Joe had been one of the bearded guys who had shown up with tranquilizer guns and nylon netting.
“Mom! You have to look.” I popped open one eye. Jay-Jay stood before me with a peanut-butter-smeared face and wearing one of Stephanie’s shirts with a picture of Santa Claus and the caption “Never trust a fat man.”
“What?” I pulled the co
vers over my face, but Jay-Jay tugged them away.
“It’s some kind of bone, I think from—”
I was out of the sleeping bag in a second, Jay-Jay and Killer following as I sprinted for the door.
“See?” Jay-Jay pointed to the snow-covered porch chair I had neglected to bring in. “There’s a note but it’s all soggy, something about—”
I snatched the note from his hands and stuffed it down my bra; the paper crinkled deliciously against my breasts. “Give me the bone.” I held out my hand.
“But, Mom, it’s a clavicle. See how it curves? Doesn’t it look like a dragon wing?” Jay-Jay carried it inside and carefully set it on the kitchen table. “Maybe it’s part of a secret code.” He rubbed his hands excitedly. “We have to put it together to decipher the message. It could even be from the CIA.”
“It’s not the CIA,” I said, removing the note from my bra and smoothing it over the table. “It’s from Francisco.” I skimmed over his slanted handwriting. “He’s headed down to San Diego for a forensic anthropology conference.”
“That guy from the phone?” Jay-Jay’s voice rose. “Does Dad know?”
“There’s nothing to know. He gave me a bone, that’s all.”
“I don’t want to see it.” Jay-Jay pushed the bone toward me. He looked upset.
“Honey, I know you love your dad and it’s okay. I love your dad too, just not in the right way.”
“You could try,” he insisted. His voice trembled. “You could both try.”
“It’s too late.” My voice was gentle.
“Growing up sucks.” Jay-Jay slammed the clavicle on the table.
“It does,” I agreed, wondering for the hundredth time how the divorce had affected Jay-Jay. There’s no way he could have come out of it undamaged, though we tried to shield him from the worst of it.
The night Barry left for good, Jay-Jay was over at Laurel’s. When she brought him back he raced through the door and stopped in the middle of the living room. “Dad?” he yelled, his face white, his heels raised as if to make himself taller. “Dad! Dad! Dad!”
I pulled him toward me. He was four at the time, his face round with the last of his baby fat. He kicked and punched, bit my arm, screamed and cried until I gathered him up and carried him to the rocking chair, where I rocked and smoothed his hair as I murmured, promising him things I had no right to promise. When he finally settled down, I carried him to bed and slept next to him the rest of the night, his chest shaking every so often as if even in his dreams he was fighting off loss.
Thinking about this made me so sad that I decided to make kolachkes, a Polish cookie Gramma whipped up when she was hit with the lonelies. As I cut the butter into the flour I missed Gramma so much my knees shook. I wanted her near; I wanted to smell the oniony reek of her sweat and feel the comforting pat of her paw-sized hands across my back.
After I filled each cookie with fruit, I wiped my face with the dish towel. “Let’s take Killer out,” I yelled to Jay-Jay, who was in his room doing homework.
It was a cold and quiet night. The snow drifted high against the trailers as we headed for the lagoon, Jay-Jay pulling his sled behind him until we reached the big hill across the street from the high school.
“Push me, Mom, hard,” he ordered, and I pushed against the orange plastic sled until he was flying down the hill, Killer chasing after him and nipping at his jacket.
“Okay, now it’s your turn,” Jay-Jay said after his third trip down the hill. I situated my ass on the very small seat, tucked my legs across the narrow strip of plastic, and held tight to the sides. From a sitting-down position, the hill looked very big and very steep.
“Are you sure this is—,” I started to say, and then I was zooming down the hill, picking up speed and jolting over bumps. I couldn’t help hooting and hollering because there was something so benignly dangerous in the slap of the wind across my face and the scratch of the sled scraping ice. I veered to the left before I reached the bottom and crashed into a rock, my nose leaking blood over the snow.
“Wow, Mom, you’re bleeding.” Jay-Jay was impressed for once. He handed me his mitten, and I pressed it to my nose as he gathered the sled, called for the dog, and started for home. I followed his small back as we slipped and slid up the hill. Every so often he turned and patted my arm as if for encouragement.
“It should stop soon,” he said. “Unless you have hemophilia, then you’ll probably die.”
I nodded and walked behind him and it was strange, almost as if he were taking care of me. I wanted to cry, not because I was sad but because I felt so full of the night, and the cold, and Jay-Jay’s solid neck as he turned and shouted, “Mom, hey, Mom, let me know if you want to slow down, okay?”
Oh, children will break your heart, the way they leave, a little more each day, pulling and pulling, and no matter how much you long to pull them back, you have to let them go. You have to follow them until you know the shape of their shoulders, the set of their knees, the way their feet turn inward or outward as they move confidently away from you.
Gramma’s Kolachkes
¼ cup yogurt, fruit or regular
1 package yeast
1 egg
1 cup shortening (butter works best)
2 cups flour
½ teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
Jelly or canned fruit
Preheat oven to 375˚. Mix yogurt and yeast together and let set 10 minutes and then add egg. Cut butter in with dry ingredients and roll out dough. Cut into circular shapes and make a thumbprint in the middle of each one. Fill with jelly or canned fruit. Bake 10–15 minutes. Sprinkle with sugar while still hot. Then tuck a napkin across your lap to catch crumbs as you stuff the cookies into your mouth. If you need extra filling, spoon in preserves or canned fruit. Still feel lonely? Have another one. And another. Eat the whole damned batch by yourself.
Wednesday, Jan. 11
Uh-oh.
“Do you know how much you owe on your credit cards?” the Oprah Giant wrote in perky green script in today’s blog. “Then you’d better figure it out, girlfriend!” she continued. “Overspending isn’t a sign of prosperity; it’s a sign of insecurity and a lack of self-respect.”
That was easy for someone with three best sellers and a cushy motivational speaker job to say, but I’d bet my ass that even the Oprah Giant couldn’t make it on a waitress’s salary without going into serious debt. I dumped my unopened mail across the table and tore at the envelopes. I had been paying a good chunk of my Saturday shift wages to lower my balances and they were lower, granted. Still, seeing the numbers in staid black ink was startling: how could I owe so much and still have so little?
I followed the Oprah Giant’s advice and wrote letters requesting payment plans to all of my debtors. Thankfully, she had included a form letter to edit (i.e., copy word for word).
The next step was to cut up all but two of my credit cards, one hidden in a hard-to-reach location for emergencies and the other kept in the freezer and thawed out only for essential purchases.
“You’ll feel deprived the first few weeks,” the Giant wrote. “You might even have a temper tantrum or two because, face it, owing money isn’t the most adult decision you’ve ever made.”
I ate three brownies, two cookies, and the chocolate bar Jay-Jay had hidden in his nightstand before spreading my credit cards over the table. Their plastic faces shone in the overhead light, so bright and cheerful! They were like friends, flashing their sixteen-digit numbers and promising me all the things I wanted but couldn’t afford. I picked up the scissors, gritted my teeth, and sliced through a Gap card, followed by Capital One, American Express, Old Navy, and Alaska Bank Visa. After I destroyed my stash, I hid my Alaska Airlines Visa in the ceiling tiles above the TV. Then I filled a Ziploc bag with water and placed my Denali Credit Union MasterCard in the freezer, where it sagged forlornly against a bag of Tater Tots.
“Did you remember to get yogurt?” Laurel stragg
led into the kitchen, rubbing her eyes. It was five thirty at night and she was just getting up. “The kind with the fruit at the bottom, not mixed.” She yawned and sat down at the table, totally unconcerned with why I was shoving pieces of hacked-up credit cards into an empty orange juice carton.
“It’s so I can’t fit them back together and online shop,” I explained, but she ignored me and reached for a cookie. “Okay, I owe a little on my credit cards.” I threw down the orange juice container and waited for her to reprimand me, but nothing came. Laurel was still in a funk. Two nights ago she had met with Hank to tell him about the pregnancy. He held her hand and said all the right things. Then he promptly changed his phone number and e-mail account and had her name blacklisted at his office. Laurel had told me this story three times already, and I was afraid she was getting ready to tell me again, but she let out a dramatic sigh and reached for her laptop instead. I sat down across from her and browsed the University of Alaska art brochure I had picked up at the college.
“I met this guy,” I heard myself tell Laurel. “He’s this customer at work, an anthropologist with the most amazing hands. He touches me as if I were an artifact, like I’m worthy of praise.” I paused for a moment, embarrassed at my level of intensity, but she was busy tap-tap-tapping away at her laptop, so I continued. “I went out with him but he never showed; the evening was a disaster so I thought, okay, that’s that. But then he gives me a bone, a femur. Then we necked on his bed, but nothing more. Until a few days ago, and then a clavicle appears on my doorstep. Is that creepy, do you think? Or would you say it was more—”
“How do you erase tabs?” Laurel interrupted.
“Did you hear anything I said?”
“You got a bone, and then another. Now can you help me erase tabs?”
“Don’t know how.”
She pounded a couple more keys and turned the computer screen toward me. A spreadsheet filled the page, each column a different shade: yellow, black, red, brown.
Dolls Behaving Badly Page 17
