A Good Distance

by Sarah Willis

“Yeah.”

  He nods, a slight, sexy grin. “Thought so. You like that acid I sold you last week?”

  I nod. It was a little speedy, but this is not the time to complain.

  “I’m going to my place to lay back. Want to come?”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  Lannie puts the car in reverse, laying his arm across the back of the seat. I like the feel of it behind me. He’s a tough guy, and now I feel tough.

  His place is really cool, a duplex he shares with two other guys. When he kisses me in the living room, with his hand sliding up my blouse, I get tense. “Chill out,” he says. “They’re asleep.” We screw on the couch, then smoke pot.

  I don’t tell my mother I’ve dropped out of school. Instead, I wake up at the regular time and go to the school parking lot to meet Lannie. I learn to make nickel and dime bags, always a bit short, but not much.

  “Try this,” he says. We’re at his place, and his roommates are sleeping. They sleep till one or two in the afternoon, crawling out of bed just as we’re leaving to go back to the parking lot for the after-school crowd. They didn’t like me being here at first, but now they like me. Everyone likes me.

  Lannie slides a rimless mirror over and takes a small dark glass vial out of his shirt pocket. Unscrewing the tiny cap, he carefully taps the vial, sifting white power out onto the mirror. It’s cocaine. I’ve never seen it, but I know. I’ve got drug instincts. I watch him inhale the cocaine through a rolled-up dollar bill, and then I do the same. It burns my nose. In seconds I’m speedy and something else. Talkative. I want to talk.

  “Did I tell you what I did to my mom’s cigarettes once? You won’t believe it. I emptied them in the sink, on top of the dishes, then poured her booze over them. She didn’t even mention it. I wonder if she knows I’m cutting school? I don’t care. What can she do? Pick me up and carry me? Maybe I should get a job, get my own place, get out of there. I should go fill out an application at Record Revolution. That would be cool, to work there. Do you know anyone there I could ask?”

  Lannie nods, rubbing his nose with his palm. I can feel myself wanting more coke already, but he puts the vial back in his shirt pocket.

  “Yeah,” he says. “Ask Dan. Tell him I sent you.”

  “Do you have cards? Let’s play cards.” I need something to concentrate on. My mind is like bees. He gets up and actually finds cards. They’re old and sticky. “Gin rummy?” I ask. It’s all I know how to play. We’re halfway into the first game when he puts his hand down.

  “Let’s go upstairs.”

  I know what he wants. I was thinking about it, too, but thinking about it, not feeling it. I don’t want to have sex, I want to talk about sex. I want him to tell me everything he’s done, but I don’t want to touch anyone now.

  “Hey, I was winning,” I say.

  “Come on,” he says. He points to the steps with his chin, then walks upstairs, not looking back. I follow him. I follow the slight bump of cocaine in his shirt pocket.

  The sex is awful, creepy, like my skin’s crawling, but intense because I can’t shut my eyes. By the time I go home to make dinner, I have a headache and my teeth ache.

  “The school called,” my mother says as I walk in the door. She’s sitting in a chair, waiting for me.

  “I don’t go there anymore,” I say, my chin up.

  “Why?” she says. She says this like she really wants to know.

  “I’m flunking everything. I feel stupid. They make me feel stupid. They don’t know my name, I’m just some dumb kid. I got sick of it. I’m going to get a job and save some money and go to Hollywood.”

  “Jennifer, you need to go to school.”

  “Why?”

  “Because your father would have wanted you to.”

  It is exactly the right thing and the wrong thing to say. If I didn’t have a headache, if my teeth didn’t hurt, if she didn’t slur those last words just ever so slightly, I would probably break down and cry, tell her I will go back. But I am just on the other side of the line, where it’s exactly the wrong thing to say.

  “Well, he’s dead, and you have no right to be talking for a dead man when you’re sleeping with someone else.”

  She holds perfectly still, staring at me, not saying a word. I leave the room and go upstairs. It’s been a long day, and even I know when I have said too much.

  When I wake up late the next morning, my mother’s already gone. Standing in the doorway to her bedroom, I look at her neatly made bed, the way the things on her bureau are arranged simply; a brush, a jewelry box, a school picture of each of us. I am so sorry for what I said. For everything. If she were here right now, I would tell her. She would understand why I am the way I am, even if I don’t.

  I decide to go downtown, to the place where she works. I take the bus, which I hate. I think of Lannie and his car. Of Lannie and his mouth. His coke. I want to go back to his house so bad right now it makes me afraid.

  My mother’s office is near Ninth and Euclid, and it’s almost noon. It’s snowing and people walk with their heads bent down, watching their step, avoiding the slush sprayed up by passing cars. Crossing the street, I look toward the door of the building, where she works on the seventh floor. I see Joe coming out the revolving door, his arm around the waist of some woman. The woman, a redhead, is looking at him with the same bright eyes my mother looks at him. I keep crossing the street, getting closer to them, but he’s not looking my way at all. He says something in her ear, and she laughs. Then he kisses her, pats her on the butt, and turns and walks away.

  If I tell my mother, she’ll think I am just trying to break them up, and get mad at me. I need her to love me right now.

  The receptionist says my mother is in a meeting. Would I care to wait?

  “Sure,” I say. I sit on a dark leather couch held tight with leather buttons. The desk the receptionist sits behind is curved and polished. People in suits walk by and look at me, turn away, and try not to look again until they are almost out of sight. My bell-bottom jeans are torn at the bottom and soggy with melting snow. My flannel shirt is a few sizes too big. I didn’t wash my hair today, or yesterday. I sit for ten minutes, which seems like an hour, but the clock says it’s been only ten minutes. My teeth ache. I could just write her a note. If I went to Lannie’s and did coke, I could write a long letter. I’m sure of that. And I’m getting hungry. The receptionist said it will be a long wait. I’ll go to Woolworth’s and eat something. I tell myself I’ll come back, knowing I won’t.

  I get on the bus. I go to Lannie’s. It’s a transfer, then a walk. I’m cold and wet when I get there.

  “Where were you this morning?” he asks me.

  “I slept in,” I say.

  “I was counting on you.”

  I’m unlacing my boots, but I can hear the frown in his voice. “Sorry,” I say.

  “You’re wet.”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “You should take off those pants.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Take them off here.”

  I do, right in the kitchen.

  After we make love, we do coke. It works better this way. It’s almost perfect.

  Every day I go to Lannie’s. Every day we do coke. He doesn’t offer me as much as I’d like. One day he leaves a vial of coke on his dresser and seems to forget about it. I slip it in my pocket.

  Friday night Lannie has something to do he can’t tell me about, so I stay home. Most of my friends thought the idea of Lannie was cool—the guy in the car—but none of them want to be associated with him, so they stay away from me. Alone in my room, listening to Jefferson Airplane, I do coke by myself. This is not a good idea. I go into my sister’s room. It’s like having a conversation with a plant. She just ignores me. I go into my brother’s room. He gives me the finger. “You’re high,” he says. “Get lost.”

  There’s always my mother.

  She’s asleep on the couch, still wearing her yellow dress and high heels. She was suppo
sed to have a date with Joe tonight, but he didn’t show up. That happens more often now. I haven’t told her about him kissing that lady. She should know what a creep he is. She’s so innocent about this stuff. She probably thinks he loves her. I need to save her from herself.

  “Mother,” I say, shaking her shoulder. I have all this energy. “Mother!” I yell. She jerks, and her eyes open and close, as if looking at me was too much to handle. I’m getting pissed. No one in this house wants to talk to me. I’ll do more coke and just fucking talk to myself. But I should eat before I do any more coke. I can’t eat on coke; the food tastes dead, disgusting, like cardboard. I’ve lost some weight. I don’t look so good in bright light.

  I eat three bowls of cereal, then throw up. I’m not trying to throw up, it just happens.

  Back in my room I turn up my music and just as I’m snorting my second line, I hear someone stomping up the stairs. Thinking it’s the police, I jerk and spill everything; all the fine white powder flying into the air. And it’s only my goddamn brother.

  “Turn down your music! It’s too loud!”

  “Get out of my room!” I can’t believe the coke has all spilled.

  “You’re a drug addict! You’re a poor excuse for a human being! Look at you!”

  I pick up the mirror that held my coke moments ago and throw it at him. “Get out of my room!” The mirror shatters at his feet.

  “You’re disgusting!” Peter yells. His hair is cut short. He’s a stupid jock. Well, not stupid, really, but an asshole. I pick up my shoe and throw it at him. He moves to the side. I jump up and run at him, and the next thing I know I’m on the floor, my head pressed to the wood, my arm behind my back. He is going to break my arm.

  “Turn your music down. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I say, because he’s breaking my arm.

  “Good. And listen, Betsy and I are going to a movie. When Mother wakes up, tell her I took the car.”

  Oh, yeah. He gets to drive, and he just turned sixteen. I’m seventeen and three months, but I’m not allowed to drive. “Let go of my arm!”

  “Promise me you’ll stay here and watch her.” He gives my arm a little extra tug.

  “Yeah. I promise. I’ll stay here.” What else am I going to say? He lets go of my arm. As soon as he walks down the stairs, I jump up and get a playing card to gather up all the spilled coke. There’s so little. Not enough. I can’t breathe from crying. I couldn’t snort it now, anyway. I climb into bed and put the pillow over my head because I can’t close my eyes. I can’t breathe under the pillow, so I punch it hard and throw it against the wall. Walking over to where the shards of the mirror cover my floor, I look down. I can’t see myself. The pieces are too small to hold even a fraction of my image.

  I do all the coke that I scraped up. It really burns my nose, and I think maybe I got some broken mirror mixed in by mistake.

  I’m really edgy. Some part of me was planning on giving the coke back to Lannie. What if he finds out I took it? I feel like spiders are crawling all over me. Then I remember the two downers. Quaaludes. That’s what they are. I take both of them.

  In fifteen minutes I’m floating. I can hardly see straight. And I’m hot, in a sexy way. I need Lannie. What in the hell is he doing that I can’t know? I decide I’ll get dressed sexy and go see him anyway. None of my clothes are sexy, so I go into my mother’s closet and find her little black dress. I put it on, and her stockings, and her black high heels. We have the same shoe size.

  My legs are so wobbly, I can hardly walk down the stairs. My mother’s still out. She’ll never know I left. I’ll come back before Peter and Betsy come back, so I can keep my promise to my brother, and so he won’t break my arm. As I’m about to leave, the phone rings. It’s Joe.

  “Hi, Jenny,” he says, like were old friends. “Can I talk to your mom?”

  “She’s not here,” I say.

  “Huh? I thought she would be. We were supposed to go out. Something came up. Could you tell her how sorry I am? It was unavoidable. An emergency. Tell her—”

  “I saw you, you asshole,” I say. “With the redhead. Is she your emergency? Well, I told my mom all about you. She stood you up tonight. She never wants to see you again. It’s over. She told me to tell you if you even look her way at work, she’ll slap you, right in front of everyone. She said stay out of her life!” I know my words are slurring, but I think he gets what I’m saying.

  “Look, I just—”

  I hang up the phone. Pick it back up. Leave it off the hook. I grab my coat. In high heels I stumble outside, slip in the snow and fall on my butt, smacking my head against the side of the porch. It hurts like hell, but I start laughing, giggling. God, I was good on the phone. He’ll be scared even to look her way. I go back inside and put on my tennis shoes that were by the back door, then walk away, toward Lannie’s house, carrying my mother’s shoes. The shot of adrenaline from the fall on my butt has really kicked in the quaaludes. I’m as white and fuzzy inside as it is outside. I can hardly feel the cold. My stomach’s doing all sorts of waves, like I’m in the ocean. Snow is frozen water, right? I’m in the middle of a big white ocean.

  Lannie’s place is over a mile away. Less than halfway there, I’m weaving pretty badly and not sure where I am. I see this old one-room schoolhouse that’s used to store desks and file cabinets. It’s a historical building and can’t be torn down. I break a window and crawl in. I pass out under a desk. In the morning I’m awakened by two policemen.

  This time my mother doesn’t come to pick me up right away. It’s late at night when my mother shows up at the police station, carrying a paper bag. She talks with the cops for a while, then signs some papers. I’m not talking to her. How could she wait this long to get me? It’s got to be eleven o’clock at night.

  She tosses the bag at me. “Go change,” she says. “Right now.” I’m still wearing my mother’s little black cocktail dress. They must have told her. A cop points to the bathroom. I’ve been here a while—I know where it is. When I come back out, I hand her the dress. “Let’s go,” she says. I can smell alcohol on her breath. Her hands are shaking. I’m scared just to get into the car, but how far can I run from a police station?

  It’s sleeting and the car’s covered with a thin sheet of ice. “I’ll do it,” my mother says, grabbing the ice scraper from the backseat. “Just get in the car.” She chips at the ice with a vengeance, and I hope it keeps sleeting and she keeps scraping until she’s sober, but she quits when there’s just enough space to see out, not bothering with the back window. In the dark of night, slivers of ice on the windshield are lit up like jewels and I think how pretty it is, how cold things glitter in the dark. Then my mother gets in the car and slams the door.

  At first she can’t even get the key into the lock to start the car. I sit with my arms folded tight across my chest, hoping the key will break. But after some fumbling, the car starts and she pulls out of the parking lot, the car slipping and sliding on the ice, almost nicking the back of a police cruiser. She drives fast and makes the first light. At the next light, where she should turn left to go to our house, she turns right. The car fishtails and I grab the handle on the door. “You went the wrong way!” I yell.

  “You think so?” she says. It’s not a question, it’s a sneer. The car weaves across the center lane and back again.

  “Jesus, you really are drunk! Be careful!”

  “Be careful? You put on my dress, run away in a snowstorm, again, and I come to the police station to get you, and you don’t say sorry or anything, just tell me to be careful? Who the hell do you think you are?”

  “Your daughter!” I shout. “But I wish I wasn’t!”

  She turns onto North Park, which curves along the small man-made lakes in Shaker Heights. Ancient, thick trees line both sides of the street. On the left is the lake, frozen but not solidly—there are watery spots from the thaw last week. There’s almost no traffic. People are staying in tonight, unless they have to go to the p
olice station to get their daughters.

  We’re going at least fifty. The road is covered in a shine of black ice. “Where are we going?”

  “Oh, who cares?”

  I can’t look to see if she’s smiling because I can’t take my eyes off the road, but I can feel her grin, I can feel it on my skin. I have goose bumps the size of molehills.

  She swerves into the left lane. There’s a car headed right for us, but it veers into the next lane at the last second, the horn blaring. We were inches from being killed! My mother yanks the steering wheel, and we swerve back into our lane. My heart’s thumping hard. “You’re scaring me.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yes! We could get killed.”

  “I guess we could. As a matter of fact, I think that’s pretty much what I’m going for.” The car speeds up. “You think I don’t miss him, don’t you? Don’t you?” she screams. “Well, I do. Want me to prove it? Will you leave me alone if I prove it? Here! I’ll show you just how much I miss him.”

  “Stop it!”

  “Hey, kid,” my mother says, so calmly, so quietly, that I turn to face her. She’s looking right at me, not at the road. “Let’s get this over with. Just you and me.” She’s crying now, wet trails running down her cheeks. I want to put my hands over my eyes, but I’m holding on to the door handle with one hand and the other one is braced against the dashboard. My mother turns the steering wheel toward the lake.

  Going at least sixty, the car spins on the icy road, turning in a large circle. I’m screaming so loud that I don’t know if she’s laughing or screaming, too. There’s towering piles of snow plowed up along the side of the road, with dozens of huge trees just behind them. If we hit a tree, we’re dead. If we miss a tree, we’ll go into the lake. The back of the car catches a snowbank, and my head flies backward, then forward, and smashes against the dashboard.

  The next thing I know, my head’s killing me and my arms ache. There are no sounds, and I think I’ve gone deaf. My mother’s head is against the steering wheel. She may be dead. I reach out to touch her arm. She sits up, slowly, and looks at me, puts a hand to her head. She shakes her head. “Oh, well,” she says. “I tried. Maybe I can do better next time.” Then, looking both ways, she eases the car back out onto the road and heads home.