by Kate Wisel
“I j-just,” he said, slurring, “I hate doors.”
“I can see that,” I said, and pushed the heavy door against the wind as he flew out into the street with his palms up against headlights that swerved past him.
Seamus ran his hands up my torso, then unclipped the back of my bra, tossed it over Gerry’s face. Gerry brought his beer to his lips between the straps. Seamus’s hands on my neck reeked of gasoline. He hooked them over my throat, then ran his fingers up the back of my scalp as they caught in my hair. He scrunched a fistful to get my head back. I let my jaw hang open so Gerry could see the gleaming curds of my sparkling pink throat. Gerry put his elbows on his knees.
During Thanksgiving break, Gerry and I stood in the front yard of Seamus’s mom’s house sipping French vanillas while Seamus packed up her piece-of-shit Victorian. Gerry had paid for my coffee. I hated him because he was a foul human being with a nightmare existence, but times like that, both of us standing around, waiting for Seamus to do something, I did love him.
Seamus stuck his head out the third-floor attic window with an old Sony TV in his arms. I can still see him, big arms around the box as the TV edged its way out. It dropped from the sky, pieces scattering like electrical fire on the walk. I took out my camera to take a shot, all the busted chips and green wires splayed like guts. I called it something dramatic, like “Broken City,” and tacked it up on the corkboard. I hadn’t been back to class since.
On the carpet, teeth turned crooked in my stomach. Sweat pooled in the small of my back. Seamus blocked my scrappy left hook. The teeth flared, numbed. I went slack as Seamus fucked me like the world was ending. One time I had blacked out on the carpet like this. It was late night and Gerry was nodding out on the recliner. Seamus brags to this day, to anyone he can tell, that it was the best sex he’s ever had. It wasn’t the first time I had to take the morning-after pill, but it seemed like the most important.
Seamus swiped my stomach with a rag, then tossed it at Gerry. I wrapped my arms around my shoulders and curled into myself as Seamus stood tall. I sprawled out my arms like wings in the snow. Seamus reached down and slapped my stomach. He stepped back, admired the handprint reddening above my belly button, as Gerry stood up from the couch like it was his turn.
It was his turn.
He looked down on me like he always wanted to, then slid off his tank top. The burn on his throat caught the light, a gleaming pink blur. The burn was alive. It glowed like a halo, crowning his throat. It flashed itself as it came toward me, then winked. I waited, and the waiting made me smile, because I thought I knew what came next. But Gerard didn’t hesitate. There was no twitch, second thought, no stutter. He raised his boot above my chest and stomped. Even the carpet heard the crack.
FRANKIE
SHELLEY BENEATH US
DRIED BLOOD ON THE wall of our building by the stairs, where Shelly’s crouching. The streaks go faint around her head, then drip into exclamation points. She holds a sponge and scrubs as we walk towards her, my thumbs hooked under my backpack. It’s heavy with psych textbooks and Serena’s old jean jacket with the fur collar she gave me once October hit, when walks to Emmanuel started to freeze through our bones even in the white sun.
Serena walks ahead of me in the hall, then lays her palm on Shelly’s heaving back. I look away from Shelly’s crying and the blood, rusty as the leaves on our steps. We call Shelly a lady, the downstairs lady, but really, she’s only a few years older than us. She lives alone, beneath us in the ground-floor apartment. No cable when we first moved in and Shelly was clunking around beneath us. Every night we’d hear the screech of her faucet.
One time we were taking out the trash. Shelly a slit of flesh through the cracked bathroom window. Stringy hair unwashed like when we comb ours through with coconut oil. She was belting a show tune on the toilet, her knees knocked together. Her nipples bright as zits. Serena does this impression of it, but it’s more serious than mine. She fake knits with the chopsticks from our takeout and rocks back and forth. The air still, operatic.
“My dog has cancer,” Shelly says. She says it in a whisper, fast, like a cough.
“We know,” I say, and can’t shake the cold from my voice. She’s crouched, rounded back, knees and shoulders pointing forward like a gargoyle. A strand of hair falls straight across Shelly’s face. Serena fixes it behind her ear.
“He got out the front,” Shelly says. “He’s gone!”
“Do you want us to look for him?” Serena says. Her dark eyes water at the faintest hint of feeling. She follows it, pain a highway with fast, conspicuous signs. She skipped three days of work to swing with me in the park when my mom died, knowing she’d be fired.
Later, Serena tilts her head back in the shower. “Shelly’s dog’s going to kick it soon.”
“That dog has malaria up the asshole,” I say.
“It’s cancer.”
“I know that.” A stream of white soap pools down her chest, frothing around her DNR tattoo. She taps the razor against the tile, a habit I hate, the suds hardening to scum I can’t clean with Clorox.
“Sorry,” she says, letting me wash my hair first.
In the kitchen, Serena sprawls on the couch in a bra, her nipple spilling out of the cup. She lights a pine tree candle, then a cigarette from the glow, and dips her finger in the oily puddle of wax. Our coffee table a junkyard of mugs, candles, and remotes. We talk till the Tylenol PMs slow our speech, then fall asleep at four, blanketed as mummies.
When it’s bright, I tiptoe in wool socks around the kitchen to start coffee. I set a steaming mug down in front of Serena, her hair splayed as if in midair. I see her smashing bricks through windows in a dream I’m not alive enough to be in. Swimming through shards to save bodies in bathtubs. I slip into her room, glide on one of her lipsticks before my 9 a.m. I pull the stick across my lips, then smack. There’s a guy in the front row whose name I don’t know, with tan elbows and hair that dips above the back of his neck.
I race down the steps, the frost on the window making diamonds of light on the bloody wall. It’s when I’m outside, when I drop my backpack to lock the door, that Shelly’s dog surges towards me, paws my chest. He’s almost human, his limbs stretched to my shoulders, tongue hanging loose and hot. Blood covering half his face like a ski mask where the tumor at the top of his head had burst.
I lurch back onto the railing, scaling the side, breathing through the pinhole in my lung. The eagerness of his eyes, unaware of his injury. Trained to be called to and held by Shelly. He backs away and stays by the door. The loyal huff of his breath in the cold.
Fucking dog. I jump off the side of the railing and sprint. If I loved you, I think on the jam-packed train, I’d have to help you. I shuffle late into school. The math on the board is my friend. I jot it all down, lulled. I know the chance of it being true is virtually zero, but I think the dog died the moment I saw the striation of my lips in the girls’ room mirror. The color drained and dried across my mouth.
GOOD JOB
MCDONALD’S WAS A LONG time ago. I wore a maroon visor and my cutoff jeans. I was fourteen, then fifteen. The walk was three miles and I did it both ways, after school when the cars from Route 9 blew my hair straight back, then at night when I veered past the broken mattresses below the underpass. I had to wear that visor, which was the only part I hated and maybe the smell that fused with my sweat, a mop soaked in sewer water.
It was my job to take out the trash at the end of the night. Hot puddles of chocolate milk gurgled on the asphalt as I hauled the sopping bags over the fence. Trash juice ran down my legs and pooled through my sneakers, still damp from the last shift.
My first paycheck I cashed at the supermarket and left half for my mom in the bread box. I made six dollars an hour, and with my first raise five cents more, but half that was something to her. Our manager Glen let us store liters in the walk-in fridge, and when Serena came, I slid her trays of french fries when he faced the highway in the corner booth, sulking wit
h his Sprite. I made a point to tell Serena that I wasn’t about to eat dinner off the dollar menu for the rest of time.
One job was community service, so I didn’t get paid. September of sophomore year, Raffa and I were caught in a car trashed with empty cans and unprescribed bottles of oxy littered under the floor mats. Benny was driving but barely. Maria was a Mexican woman who ran the Salvation Army. Tuesday nights the trucks came to unload trash bags filled with gemstone rings, jean jackets, Sega games, and paperbacks.
Before I stocked shelves, she let me sort the junk on a foldout table and pick the VHS tapes I wanted to keep. She let me pull my arms through jean jackets, and she’d clap at me in the mirror. On the ends of the shelves were hairy lollipops, cold pennies, and tarnished quarters. I kept all the change and dumped my mason jar at the Coinstar, closed my eyes as the change rattled through the slot. I’d guess the total, shoot low so I’d feel rich, then watch the screen light up like a video game with all those cherries and diamonds spinning and flashing.
I took the slip up front and had enough to pierce my lip. Maria was the only one to notice. She called me Frankie baby, lindo, conejito. When there were no customers, she showed me Kodaks of her babies in Mexico. She’d drive me all the way home, her plastic rosary clattering around the rearview mirror. Most nights I’d find my mom snoring on the kitchen floor, arms clasped overhead like a diver, her drowned breathing a broken radiator.
At Ernesto’s, the oversized white tee with the doughboy logo was a downgrade, but I could tie the extra fabric with a loose rubber band. I also learned how to swear in Greek and stretch pizzas that, despite my best intentions, melted into the distinct shapes of hearts. I then had to deliver them down Comm Ave in my mom’s rickety Jeep, which I started with a butter knife. One time Brendon LaMarre, the guy whose neck I stared at for two grades straight, swung open the door to his brownstone in his own band’s T-shirt.
“Nice shirt,” he said, snorting.
“You too,” I said, and wanted to hurl the steaming box into his garbage by the curb. I zoomed off and circled the Shaw’s parking lot listening to the whole Radiohead album before I went back to pick up the next batch of orders.
In the summer, the lady who ran the restaurant at the golf course showed me how to drive the beer cart steady over bumps.
“Do not, and I mean do not, drive fast,” she said, her sunglasses on the top of her head. “You will tip this thing right into the swamp.”
In the kitchen I counted change, my back an hourglass of sweat, as she overflowed a teaspoon, then whipped up muffin batter with her eyelashes theatrically low, like I wasn’t what she was measuring.
The course was green as postcards, and I’d pop the cooler on the sides of the cart, a treasure chest of silver cans, three bucks each. A man in a pink polo, his temples beaded as the can in his fist, would tilt the beer back while I sorted through the ice, his eyes on the drawstring of my shorts.
The next summer I drove the cart like a maniac, tearing off into the woods while grown men waved clubs in the air, the tailpipe of the cart dripping gasoline. The branches in the woods made shadows of lace on the pages of the books I found in my attic—mysteries, the edges cornered. I wondered what my mom had been thinking when she read those same words.
Sometimes Serena would meet me, her skinny legs hiking up the path. I’d toss her a beer. Then we’d swerve back down to the course, and with Serena hanging onto the seat next to me, I felt giddy and protected, and charged five dollars a beer. There were grass stains on the men’s golf shoes when they plucked out bills from their leather wallets. I looked them dead in the eye when I handed them their ice-cold Coors Lights, said thank-you with my lips wide and pink. I was careful about the counting. I marked the beers and left exact change, to the cent, in an envelope at the end of the day. I’d store the extra cash under the pull-out register and count the stack when I parked the cart in the shed. I tucked the twenties into my bra. The way I figured it, what were two extra bucks to a hundred well-off men when two hundred was a Christmas morning for my mom? I didn’t get fired right away.
I cashed checks at Shaw’s. I’d leave my mom big bills and odd change in the bread box. I’d come back with groceries, too, cream cheese, rotini, Toaster Strudels. One time I bought a whole rotisserie chicken, just for me, just once, and ate it on the bench by the mini carousel, pried it apart, peeled off the glistening skin, and dangled it onto my tongue.
I didn’t buy nail polish or tampons or thick magazines. I bought gas for the Jeep, most times in quarters. I stopped filling the tank all the way when I found red Solo cups of warm chardonnay in the cup holders. I bought white paint at Ace when she asked me to sand the rotting back porch and fix the color. I poured the paint into an aluminum tray. It guzzled out in the heat and smelled like cat pee. The tarp on the aboveground pool was torn and held down by concrete bricks but it flapped uncontrollably, so I yelled for my mom to repeat herself. She stood behind the screen door, cigarette up by her ear, the smoke twisting a gray wreath around her eyes.
“You’re doing a good job.”
I worked at Staples and the lights made the insides of my eyes look like an Etch A Sketch when I shut them, my fingers pressed to my temples. One time I got a call and had to ask my manager Linda to drive me to the bank and then to the police station in West Roxbury during our lunch break. A third DUI meant I had to take the rest of the money from my savings. I signed a clipboard and waited. On her way home, my mom talked to Linda about mousse versus gel and discounts for printers at Staples.
After that I was told I could stay at the register, rearranging pens. I wrote things down on the loose sheets of office paper that circulated in the back rooms. I’d ring up a customer real quick, hand them the plastic bag and receipt with a genuine smile. Then I’d tilt my head to jot down estimates. By that time, calculating my earnings felt like loosening the cement that was drying inside me. I was sixteen but had skipped a grade. College was coming. I did basic math. It would take four months of six-hour shifts at Staples. If I took out an eighty-thousand-dollar loan, I’d be fifty-seven and a half by the time I could pay it all back. Other times I tried to write what I was thinking, but it was harder.
I needed a side job. I saw a flyer tacked to a phone pole and started to babysit for a one-year-old down the street. Emma nestled into my arm to take bottles, her eyes shut with trust. She tottered around the carpet, falling to her knees. She waved her hands for me to pick her up, and I would rock her into my chest, not letting go, even when she kicked.
Emma’s dad insisted on driving me home. I climbed into his tall SUV and he drove the four blocks slowly, then pulled over into the back parking lot before Comella’s. I tried to mistake the AC for his breathing. I stared at the teeth-whitening billboard across the street, but he slid his pants down to the pedals.
“Will you suck it?” he said.
I bent above his lap and he jerked his hand down my neck, then crammed my throat with his cock, which tasted like used Band-Aids. Outside I heard a breeze, the bird’s frantic reporting, my ears warm and chirping. My sour spit slicked down him in white strings. As he started to cry, he came.
“Oh my god,” he said. “Oh my god.”
He covered himself and put his forehead on the wheel. I wanted to kill him.
“It’s okay,” I said, looking back at the billboard. “Don’t worry.”
I worked at the grocery store pulling spoils. Cardboard boxes of rotten bananas weighed more than I did, but I’d wheel them away with the dexterity of a gymnast. I kept an X-Acto knife hooked to my side like a cop. I would slice empty boxes apart like they were faces I hated. They let me wear headphones and I’d zone out hard, hiding gum under my tongue for hours at a time. Yogurt was my favorite to stack. I’d kneel on the other side of the fridge with the cold boxes, the garage door open so the outside world looked green and remote. Six-packs of plastic felt cool on my fingertips, and I loved to get them perfect. On my lunch break I swiped a yogurt from the spoils bin�
��usually only the top was busted. I sat on the church steps and licked the inside of the lid while a Catholic Mass filtered out, women’s heels clacking past me, varicose veins flashing through flesh-colored tights.
I’d know before I walked home that my mom had peed her pants on the couch. Midnight, and I’d help her step into a new pair of underwear in the living room. Oversized bottles of Carlo Rossi would be spread aimlessly across the coffee table like giant jugs of piss. She’d tip over, her thighs glowing in the darkness as she kicked her legs into the air, screaming generalities at a person who wasn’t there: “Not this time, motherfucker,” or “You knew it. Everybody was.” She’d tire of herself. She’d take her knees up to her chest on the carpet in one final heave. I’d get her up and she’d steady her palm on my back as I slid her pants up one leg at a time. If she’d stumble, I’d think of choking her with them, the fabric wrung around her neck. Instead I whispered, “Good job,” or “Come on.”
I chopped onions and never cried. I did dishes, my sleeves rolled up past my sunburn, my wrists bumping against floating steak knives while the froth disappeared down the drain. Behind the bar I inhaled the buttery sting when I poured chardonnay. I climbed ladders to hoist the long ends of mops horizontally across a gray movie screen. You can’t imagine the dust, the accumulation of human hair. I was so small against the screen, the size of an ear.
I counted drawers, came to prefer numbers to words, the lull of exacting. I often checked my savings, swiping my card outside the vestibule to contemplate the tiny green digits. I filled out my FAFSA and waited for my mom to just sign the last page. I left it on the counter. I kept saving. I waited.
