by Kate Wisel
Dad yells over his back, “She’s going to be a tasty baby, ain’t she, Rio?” Rio smiles his sweaty grin. His checkered pants are held up by plastic wrap.
“Yes, cheffy!” Rio says.
Dad yells, pointing to plates. “Sexy those up.”
Rio and the others circle him in orbits, bringing him plates and olive oil. He points to the stove and Rio leaps to the pot. And like that I’m found. Dad sees me on the stairs. His eyes searing through smoke. It’s quick, like if he had a camera, he could shake a Polaroid, watch me appear. Take his Sharpie to the back, Serena, Stairs. But he turns to the burners.
When I close my eyes, I see Dad and a circle of fire he can’t get out of. Flames from the explosion. I see Lester Levine held from his ankles on the top floor of the Four Seasons, a muscled guy yelling, “Where’s our money?” His clicky shoes falling to the concrete twelve floors down. Just like Dad told it.
At Dad’s last restaurant, a strange man ran down the back stairs during prep. Dad called after him, but the man darted into the alley. After the last plates went out, he was wiping the counter when a big boom thundered through the pipes. Everything burned. A policeman held back Mom from the tape. Jewish lightning, Dad called it. Everything in ashes.
“Did Lester need money?” I asked, chewing my straw at Bruegger’s the next week. James glanced at me, then back up at Dad.
“He didn’t need it,” Dad said. “But he was after it.”
No one found me. It’s dessert time and Mom’s sipping coffee. James and I hide underneath the table, Mom’s bare ankle bouncing. We are shadows through white linen. We bang Matchbox cars, flip them off the ramp of the leg. We slip Mom’s shoes back on.
“Look,” Sharkey says. He finds us under the table, crawling under with a striped rag over his shoulder. He’s cupping one hand over the other.
“Hurry,” he says. His pointer finger is covered with drippy chocolate from the downstairs stirring bowl, big as me, and he says, “Taste it, Serena,” like a dare. James watches me in a squint. I’m the only one who gets sweets.
Tuesday comes. Mom cuts hair at Studio 27 and Dad has to watch us. He picks us up after school on the court by the redbrick wall where James’s friends fight till there’s blood in the snow. I stay close to James, late like all the Metco kids who wait for buses.
“I’m Ambrosia,” says an older girl. “What’s your name?” When she smiles, her braces sparkle.
I lie and say, “I’m Snowy.”
We walk home in the cold. Dad walks ahead, taller than the basketball hoop in our backyard. He keeps a hand hidden in his pocket. James walks in front, Dad in front of James. Caleb’s nose is red from over Dad’s shoulder, the sky dim and orange. Before we get to go inside, Dad opens the back gate and we shrug off our coats. Our backyard is small with the rusty basketball hoop and the chain-link fences.
“Go back and do it again,” Dad says, his voice even. He keeps our time as we sprint, pacing with his watch up by his throat. “Again. Impress me.”
We kick up the slush, crash our fingers into the fence, then turn and run back. I’m slow in the cold. It burns my throat. The fence feels farther every time. My arm buzzes when Dad yanks it. He bends down so I have to look him in the eye.
“Who’s the prime mover?” he says. “Huh?” When I don’t answer, he shakes my arm. “You, you are. You understand what I’m saying?”
Dad picks up a frosted football, runs backwards, then spirals it towards me. It drops between my arms. I toss it back lazily. Dad sends it back spinning.
“Let it come to you!” he says as the ball bounces hard against the frost. “Let it come to you.”
In the garage, Dad lifts weights and listens to sports radio from the boom box, and there are only two boxes left, frames wrapped in newspaper. His leather jacket, dirty baseballs, weights and spoons and Bob Dylan cassette tapes. When I was smaller, Dad held out his arm on the bench in the garage and flexed, his T-shirt torn at the armpit. The hair there curled like the tail on the pig, only his was dark and wet.
“Feel these muscles, chica,” he said, and I traced the hard lumps of his arms. “These are to protect you.”
Then he’d lift me onto his stomach on the red bench. He’d hold my hands over his hands on the shiny pole, then hike the weights off the handle, lower the bar all the way down to my chest till it touched. We’d push the bar into the air together, all the way to a hundred as “Hurricane” played, his armpits stinking like onions and the tip of my hair wet from that sweat. Last week I took that tape from the boom box he unplugged. Maybe he’ll think it got lost. Or forget he had it in the first place.
Mom comes home and we run to the door. James holds her scarf. We fight to hang it. She sits on the stairs, unbuckling her heels. She smells like hair spray when I’m in her arms. She pecks every part of my head.
We sit at the table and Dad stands over it. Floorboards creak like a hungry belly. I can tell because he’s quiet. And when Jamesy spills his milk, Dad yanks him from the chair and rips off his shirt. Makes him eat without it.
From the table, we hear the garage door slam and then the clink of the weights spinning on the handles. The harder the weights slam, the more Mom smiles. Her teeth a darker and darker purple from wine. Mom whispers, like a test we can ace, “Everybody name one good thing about their day.”
James looks up at her. Caleb says his first word: “Mum-ma.”
It’s late when we drive Dad back to his apartment on Columbus Ave. I sit in the back seat and stare out the window. People in coats cross the walk when it says Don’t Walk. Mom ticks on the blinker. Outside the fast window, black branches reach like fingers, then pull farther apart. We pass the train tracks by Northeastern where pretty girls sit on benches wearing earmuffs and striped scarves. On Dad’s street, Mom slows down. A guy walks into Dad’s building with a case of beer over his shoulder. Dad leans over to kiss Mom on the cheek, but she turns to the window.
“We’ll see you next Tuesday,” she says, but it sounds out a question.
Instead of going home, we drive all the way to Lester Levine’s in Newton, where all the one-story houses have big lawns and long driveways and front doors with potted plants and bronze doorknobs. Mom tells us to wait, to be good, no dumb smile, then comes back with an envelope she tears apart with her nail.
We walk with Mom down the cereal aisle. She tells us we’re going to take a picture with Dad for a magazine called Food & Wine. Caleb waves his arms out from the cart, blabbering to Mom, who says, “Hi!” I throw Lucky Charms into the cart, but Mom takes it out. I throw another box in.
“Who cares?” I say.
James smirks at me from across the cart, his backpack half slung over his shoulder. Mom looks at me the way she does when I’m poking Caleb’s eyes.
“You didn’t get that attitude from me,” she says. “Serena?” I toss another box into the cart. She bends to touch my arm.
I get right in her face, grinning so she smiles back, like when I’m going to kiss her. I narrow my eyes.
“Shut up,” I say, still smiling.
She pulls her face back, her mouth hung open where all her dark cavities are. She puts her hand on her cheek. James takes her other hand.
“Don’t cry, Mom,” James says. I walk ahead, trailing my hand over the rows and rows of bright boxes.
“Shut up, shut up, everyone just shut up,” I sing as I smack one off the shelf.
Mom leans over the sink and scrubs. She wipes, dusts, sprays, and sweeps. She takes us to Filene’s Basement. In the dressing room, she drops to her knees to button James’s new shirt, her purse hanging heavy on her wrist. She twirls me in a zipper dress that itches and pricks. The mirrors triple her smile. It makes me want to cry, but I don’t.
“You can cut my hair,” I say. She bends to cup my cheeks. She wraps my hair all around her finger till there’s no more of it and asks me if I’m sure. At home, I sit with my arms hanging over the kitchen chair as the water from her spray bottle trickles down m
y neck. Dirty-blond hair falls to the tile by her painted toes. When she’s done, she takes me to the bathroom and holds up a hand mirror. I keep my head down, then peek. I have bangs.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, then bury my head in her shoulder.
Dad and photographers come to our house. They take over the kitchen to set up lighting and big black equipment. They take test shots of Dad cooking omelets. He moves around like a robber, sneaking a butter knife out of the drawer and slipping a rag off the handle to keep on his shoulder. He waves me over from where I’m waiting by the doorway.
I go to the stove. He rests his hand on my back. He hands me a piece of cheddar cheese, then lifts me up by the waist in my velvet dress. I drop the cheese. The ends curl up yellow in the heat. We flip the omelet in the air together. His hands over my hands on the handle. Burning hot but it feels nice on my palms.
When it’s time to take the picture, we all stand behind the counter. There are green plates in front of us with mint leaves and diced fruit. The photographer angles us together as Dad wipes oil from the edges with the rag. Mom holds Caleb up to her cheek while James stands by her hip. They fit. The photographer switches lighting and move us around.
“Come up,” Dad says, the way he orders sous chefs around in kitchens. Outside the window it’s snowing hard, the trees sagging and white.
I say, “No.”
“Chica,” he says. “Come up here now.” He tries to pull me, but I twist out of his arms and sink to the floor.
“Serena,” Mom says. I start to shake and cry.
“Leave her alone,” Dad says. “She’s a baby.” He cracks his knuckles. “You want to act like a baby? I’ll treat you like a baby,” he says. He yanks me up and I go flying into his arms. He squeezes my waist, hard, like he’s trying to hurt me.
I wrap my arms slowly around his neck, my eyes burning as I watch the snow erase our backyard.
The photographer changes a bulb and turns my chin to the lens. It takes forever. We have to look right.
Dad stares straight into the camera. His chin is up as the photographer holds fingers in the air. All the while I’m thinking how I want to be called Snowy. How I’ll be eight in two days. All I want is to be forgiven.
“Beautiful, right there,” the photographer says, and snaps.
CALIFORNIA
NIKO WIPED SWEAT WITH his collar, then left me with the tattoo guy, who slid a stool under his legs. My nose was broken for the third time. Everything I saw—and I saw everything—contained the swelling’s shadow.
“Sure you don’t want to know?” the tattoo guy said.
“No,” I breathed. “I don’t.”
Tattoo guy contemplated the veins splaying down my forearm, blue as the alcohol in the jars.
“Never done this.”
“Even better,” I said. The choice was his. It was arbitrary, yeah, but you can’t say I didn’t decide. Later, at the patio for happy hour, Niko would point to the beer I’d like. The waitress would scan our menus, her eyes flitting to the wrap of plastic on my arm.
“Do you read?” I asked him.
“I like Melville,” he said. He was tracing, then rubbing the practice words clean with a rag. Thinking of something worthier.
He lifted my arm like it would drop, then rolled back on his chair to inspect the evenness of the words. He swiveled to wipe the needle. I assumed he was satisfied. We caught eyes, our necks flinching. Then he found his way back to my arm, stretched my skin taut. The tattoo guy looked a lot like Niko before he started wearing button-downs to cover the tie-dye look of his sleeves, though he was his own boss, sold high-end electric guitars to kind of famous punk bands. I taught first graders how to write their loopy names on lined paper and had the entire summer off.
“A kid died in Southie,” I said. “His mother left him in the car.”
The tattoo guy tucked his hair behind his studded ear, teeth bit over his lower lip in concentration. A drowning woman twitched on his arm, black waves, squids siphoning up her ankle. He wore his sleeves like medals.
He said, “Having children is child abuse.”
Niko had gone off, disappearing into the heat on a mission for cigarettes and cash. He’d kissed my throat, in front of the tattoo guy. Without him, I felt the relief of the AC, the sweat that ridged my wife-beater drying out on the nerves of my neck. The heat wave outside had me pressing ice to my eyes. Dogs suffering on chains type heat. The kind that would make our beer boil on the patio.
“What if I’m writing something obscene?”
“I don’t give a fuck,” I said. He winced like smiling could kill him. A long time it had taken him to apply that design. A long time it had taken me not to look. I wanted not to know: what I thought, what was there. Now it was happening. He was engrossed, shading me black, his thumb pressed to my pulse. The moan of the needle revved, he steadied his hand, and the pain, like his hand, was delicate. It was a finger in warm wax, hardening. A careful carving. Nothing like getting hit. Blow by blow in bright, ecstatic cracks that fainted like fireworks.
His ink was a slow, low dose, milking through my blood like a capsule. I liked the bounce of the needle, smooth as the wheels on a plane when it skims the tarmac. My arm his paper and the drone through his fingers a blossoming. We were cheek to cheek. I didn’t fidget. When I did, it was towards him, as if he were pulling something out of me. He turned back, one gloved hand still hooked to my arm, and soaked a cotton swab in alcohol.
He could have been drawing the outline of California: the state you think of when you think of escape. The date: July Fourth. Line from a book: Call me Ishmael. Bobcat: the knowing eyes. Old lyrics: “I’d like to help you in your struggle to be free.” With his hand like that on my wrist, I thought of clothes packed in a bag to the brim. The clothes in my mind were always neat and never mine.
NATALYA
ENGLISH HIGH
IN DAYLIGHT, IN DORCHESTER, she’s not ghetto, no matter how hard she does or doesn’t try. Here, the shootings make newspaper headlines in the Globe, the paper she used to read aloud to Mona, despiser of English. Here, drive-bys and homicides don’t rhyme like the lyrics on her mix. Behind the wheel, Nat’s face is round as a dinner plate. Pale and bloodless. Caterpillar-green eyes made greener by black liner.
Dorchester is the ghetto, or that’s what Serena calls it. Nat drives past the MSPCA sign and the bus stops and the Dominican barbers who sit in front of the windows in folding chairs no matter the weather. She makes the tires wail at a red light. Raffa cranks the volume and they sit transfixed, mouthing, Murder She Wrote. A flake of snow hits the windshield like a bug and dies. The barbers claim the corner, sway their jean-slung hips. Metal picks stick out the sides of their heads, their hands outstretched in the white air. Nat feels the bass on the wheel as the barbers limp toward the rumble of the Intrepid.
Nat looks elsewhere as they circle the car, dropping their coats, the flash of an armpit. Hands cupped to the window, their breath making marks. Her eyes straight ahead, the color of frozen grass, their Soviet coldness. She revs it and the barbers jump back at the hips. Through the red light the street blurs, one green eye in the rearview. Serena leans forward from the back seat, the corduroy fabric like a couch from the seventies. Her arms splayed like she’s flying.
Nat parks outside the Laundromat on Dot Ave. Boarded-up storefronts, aluminum doused in graffiti. Police tape whipping in the wind. A woman with a gummy crack-mouth hobbling past, singing. Outside Lucky Supermarket, an abandoned swivel chair wrapped in plastic, the coil hanging cut on a pay phone. A kid in a Sox cap and an oversized tee stands on pegs to zoom through the intersection, yanking back his handlebars to pop a wheelie.
Raffa lights a cigarette.
“Put that out,” Nat says, watching the kid pedal back. The cigarette arcs out the window and she imagines her fake ID jumping the same way, out of her back pocket like a fish in open water.
On the street, they’re a music video. A flock of slow motion. Glass from busted-up
windows crunches under Nat’s worn Nikes. Serena redoes her ponytail, a neon elastic in her teeth. By her feet, a guy sits slumped by the peeling green bike rack, a black beanie pulled over his eyes. He holds a piece of cardboard, Omar, Army Vet, in his stoic hands.
The door chimes. Nat doesn’t recognize herself. The delayed blur of three bodies on the surveillance. The tightness to their T-shirts make their hips look like bottles of cheap perfume. They swing open freezer handles, keep their backs to the clerk, who stretches over the counter like a cat, blowing wax off a scratch ticket. Nat fingers the cash in her hand, soft as Mona’s pajamas when she was small enough to climb into her bed.
Nat leaves the liquor store with a thirty over her shoulder, snow dropping hard then, like dollar bills from a game show ceiling. Feeling victorious, she slips the extra bill in the homeless guy’s empty DD cup.
He lifts his beanie, his name in her throat two thuds: Victor.
Back in the car, she slides the thirty under Serena’s calves, her fingers numb from the shock of the cold. The cold of the shock. Raffa clicks a lighter as a cop taps a knuckle on the window.
He lines them up on the freezing curb, collects their IDs, his boots crunching in front of the Laundromat. Victor is now standing, leaning against the bike rack, watching the cop scrutinize the fakes.
“Where are you from?” he says, then cranks his neck to spit into the gutter by Nat’s shoe. His accent is movie-thick, which only means he’s from somewhere outside Boston, like Chelsea or Revere. Nat keeps her elbows propped on her knees.
“You going to answer me?” Nat looks up at him, his cartoon jaw. She wonders if this is what having a father is like: “Are you going to answer me? Do you think I’m made of money? Don’t talk back to your mother.”
