And She Was (10 page)

“That okay with you, Henry?” The Caddie’s door moaned as she shoved it closed. “I’ll have her back to you by the time you’re done.”

Dad nodded.

“Okay, then.” Yolanda balanced a case on each hip. “Give me five minutes?”

We watched her hobble toward the garage, Dad and I side by side. Our eyes took in the custom Mary Kay job still ticking in the heat.

And we laughed aloud this time. Cowboy sat between us, looked from one to the other, then tilted his head up and howled. Not a husky howl, all lonesome and eerie. But a broken puppy howl, tentative and willing.

I fought down the bubble of hope-need that rose in my throat.

Yolanda and Phil lived in an apartment attached to their shop. The front door opened up to the store counter, the back door to the junkyard proper. Yolanda ushered me to her dining table, a typical ’80s glass and brass thing. I sat in a brass and faux wicker chair and looked out at a living room of emerald green carpet, berry couches with emerald accent pillows. A poufy flowered valance over the sliding doors to the back.

Yolanda had it all set up—probably not regulation Mary Kay setup, with incense burning, a Kenny Rogers tape playing, and the bottle of bourbon on a pink tablecloth. I could see the flip charts and the cosmetic mirrors and the pencil and order forms all lined up. It was all so clean and smelled of air freshener, the kind you put in your car.

Yolanda poured us both a tumbler of bourbon. “You want ice?” She had to yell over Kenny’s singing.

I nodded. She went to the fridge and pulled out a tray. The bourbon splashed as the ice hit. I took a sip. I’d been to a Mary Kay party or two in my life, and this was the first time I’d been served booze or listened to speaker-perforating Kenny Rogers. “Is this normal?” I shouted. “Bourbon and makeovers?”

“It’s one of the tricks I picked up. They won’t tell you all the tricks at the sales seminars.” She lifted a steaming washcloth from a boiling pot on the stove with tongs and let it drip before pressing the water out. She set it on the table in front of me.

“First thing,” she said, taking a swig from her tumbler, “is cleansing. And you’re going to talk. I got to know some things about your dad—
and you. Get all that old stuff off your face so we can see what we got to work with.” I heard her refill my glass as I scrubbed away at myself. “So tell me,” she said, “about your dad.”

I set the smeared washcloth to the side. “Aren’t you supposed to start with the Mary Kay story?”

“Dang, I forgot the flip chart.” She propped an oversize flip chart on the table beside her. “Okay, this is the Mary Kay story.”

“What?” I yelled.

“The Mary Kay story,” she said, exaggerating her lip movements for my benefit. “This is Mary Kay. She’s going on seventy in this shot. This is what really sold me on the products. Just look at her.” Yolanda and I both swallowed more bourbon. She lit a cigarette and flipped to the second page—a young woman chatting on the front porch with another woman. Yolanda squinted at the caption. “This is what Mary Kay is all about, making friends, changing women’s lives.” She laid the flip chart down. “Thing is, before I can figure out what kind of change you need, I got to know how you started out.”

I stared at her. “Aren’t you supposed to go all the way through the chart? There’s a lot more pages there; I can see them.”

“Yeah, well.” Yolanda flicked her ash tip into the ashtray. “I like to improvise. Mary Kay doesn’t want robot makeup saleswomen, you know. Besides, that picture of Mary Kay really says it all.”

She set a trio of toner, face and eye moisturizer in front of me. “Go ahead and put all that on,” she yelled. “So here’s what I know already. Your dad’s a smart guy, from a good family, some money from construction. He goes to college but can’t cut it, gets kicked out. He meets your mom. She’s the best-looking piece of cake he’s ever seen. They get married, have you. How am I doing?”

“No, you got it wrong. He met her before he got kicked out. He was almost done with his degree in Russian history. And it wasn’t his fault. She was keeping him up all the damn time and he had to cheat to get a midterm done. And I don’t really want to talk about it, okay?”

She stared at me a moment, then yelled, “I think this music is too loud. We can’t really talk with it this loud.” She got up and turned it down.

“That’s better. You want to put the creamer stuff around your sensitive eye area. Yeah, that’s better.” She took hold of my face and turned
it to each side. “Just what I thought, you’re a winter. Most blondes are a summer, but if you’re really light, you slide toward winter.” She rummaged in a large plastic pink case. “I get it now. You blame her.”

I stopped dabbing at the creamer. “No, I didn’t say that. But he got caught. He bought a paper from some guy, and maybe the paper was too good. It didn’t help that the guy had sold the same fucking paper to another guy in the class. And it wasn’t construction. Dental moldings.”

Yolanda squeezed a dollop of pink-tinged beige on my cosmetic tray. “Here. Try this foundation. Use upward strokes first to really get it in, then down to smooth it.”

I smeared the foundation on my cheeks.

“No, not like that. Don’t you listen. Blend.” She pushed aside the cosmetic mirror, turned my chair to face her, and refilled both our glasses. “I’m just going to do it. You’re gonna muck it up.”

She started in with the contour; I lit a cigarette and kept talking. I didn’t want her to have it wrong, to have the wrong impression of how Dad had ended up here.

“She gets pregnant, with me. He gets a job driving a truck around town, delivering beer and stuff. His folks are pissed and probably embarrassed for him. They don’t like her one bit. He gets pissed right back, marries her, and cuts them off. Ta-da, a family is born.”

It only got worse from there. Yolanda moved on to blush, eye shadow, mascara. I didn’t tell her that my mom ground my dad into the dirt daily for loving her. In the early years, he’d sit at the table, reading the latest analysis of Russia’s ambitions, arguing out loud with the author, explaining how the author didn’t understand the nature of the Russian people, which undergirded everything that went wrong. He writes editorials for a couple history magazines and the newspaper. I am so proud of his name on the page, and when he reads his words to me, I think he’s a giant among men.

And I remember her screaming at him, waving the paper. “You’re embarrassing me with this shit. You’re an embarrassment.”

By the time I am eight, he isn’t reading much history anymore, and she’s done with him. She’s going out a lot. We both know there are other men. She’s got jewelry and clothes he didn’t buy. She gets a job selling real estate and shows too many houses late at night. And Dad knows. He’s drinking more. He’s drunk even in the afternoons. He drapes his
love on her every time she comes home—I love you, hon; anything you want, hon. And she hates it. He’s weak and he’s pathetic; I see it in her eyes. We have a loser for a husband-father, a “spineless prick,” she calls him. She’s going to win; he’ll leave and I’ll be at her mercy.

I picked up the mirror and looked at how the makeover was going. The purple eyes and all that creamy cakey foundation stared back at me. Mom favored purple eyes. Once I had the fuchsia lipstick on, I’d look just like her.

Yolanda returned and stood in front of me, surveying her work. “You look great. Right shade of lipstick is all you need.

“I look like a middle-aged whore.”

“Don’t be silly. It’s the light in here. It’s not flattering. You’ll look great. When we’re done, I’ll light a candle and turn off the lights. You’ll look great in the candlelight.”

“Everyone looks great in candlelight. Maybe we should just turn off all the lights. Bet I look great in the dark.”

“You know what’s going on here,” Yolanda said, digging in her case for a lip color. “You’re pretending to hate your mother so as you don’t got to blame your dad for anything. You can blame a person without betraying ’em. He wasn’t a helpless victim, you know.”

I stared at her as she stretched my lips out under the pressure of a waxy mango lipstick. “Ya don’t know da hurst huckin ting aout it. Hu do ya tink ya er?” It didn’t come out right, not just because I couldn’t move my lips, but because I was kind of stunned and couldn’t get my thoughts in place.

“Shhh. Let me turn off these lights.” She did and lit a candle. “Tell me, what was so bad about your mother you’ve got to run so far behind her to kick her in the fanny.”

“Okay, how about this one. I’m sixteen in my senior year and I start screwing my English teacher. Mom’s real proud of me and all, makes sure the house is empty for us whenever we have plans. Then she finds this new guy, the owner of one of the bars we hang at, and she starts wanting the house for herself. He’s married, of course. So she rents this cabin for me and Mr. English Teacher. It’s an hour out of town on a mud puddle of a lake. I spend the whole summer after graduation screwing my teacher in this little cabin. No one ever finds out. We are so discreet. Mom is so fucking proud of her little girl, who can bag a
teacher before she’s out of high school and keep her reputation up all at once.”

I stared Yolanda down, and she dropped her eyes. “You want more? Because I’ve got more. You want to know about the boyfriends I had that she fucked? Or the ones she had that I fucked? You want to know how we laughed at Dad? What we called him?”

Yolanda pushed the cosmetic mirror in front of me. She was silent for a minute. “Okay,” she said, “you win. Your mom was a cruel heartless hussy and your dad was holy and blameless. You win.”

She packed up the flip chart and all the tubes and compacts. I could not believe this junkyard therapist crap. I stared at myself in the mirror, in the candlelight. I couldn’t breath, move.

“I’ll put together a box of the products we liked on you,” she said. When I still didn’t respond, she added, “Hey, you know what, I’m not even gonna charge you wholesale. It’ll be a gift. I want you to go out into the world with your new face and knock ’em dead.”

Yolanda was right. I did look better in bad light. I looked like my mom.

When I stepped back into the evening light, I felt like something raw and wounded. But well layered with cosmetic protection. Dad, Phil, and two other guys were sitting on the front porch talking. Cowboy’s front paws drooped over the edge, his massive head resting on Dad’s thigh. The other two guys were bums like my dad. I watched from the car as Phil handed each of them a few bills. My dad stuffed them deep in his jeans and headed toward me. Cowboy leaped off the porch and fell in beside him. The other two men melted off toward the yard.

He stopped a few feet from the car. I knew what he saw. He saw her. I shrugged.

“I had no choice.”

Dad grunted and reached for the door handle. Cowboy leaped past him as he opened the door, falling over the emergency brake and ending up with one pair of legs on each seat.

“Back,” Dad yelled, and Cowboy jumped and wiggled between the seats. He immediately turned to face the front, his huge jaws protruding between us. And that’s the way we rode to the diner. Father and daughter together again after so many years, gratefully unable to look
at each other through the gray-brown-striped head of the world’s ugliest dog.

I noticed right away how the other customers watched my dad as we found a seat at Joe’s Good Food and Drink ten minutes later. They were all stares, followed by glances that stretched the eye muscles, refusing to let the neck turn. Even those sidewinder looks could pick up the evidence. I used to feel so proud being with him. As a little girl, I remember watching the faces of the people he talked to, registering the effects of his big words and sure pronouncements. I used to think that everyone believed my dad was the smartest, most knowledgeable dad in town. Now I watched those faces registering a bum, a drunk. He was way too thin, his rear end disappearing behind pockets of red-dust jeans. Broken blood vessels marbled his face under a sunburn that flaked bits of skin across his nose and cheeks. His eyes had that vague cast that goes with final stages. But most of it was in his attitude. He had a subservience about him, like he’d be just puppy-happy if you smiled and treated him like half a man. He thanked the waitress five or six times for seating us.

“How’s your mom?” he asked while picking at an egg. We’d gone with breakfast even though it was past five.

“Same. She’s got a new husband. He’s about seventy. Has money. She’s talking about starting a dance studio for disadvantaged girls.” I rolled my eyes to let him know I didn’t think much of Mom’s ever-changing plans.

He chuckled. “She always did have big ideas.”

“Or not big enough.” I looked at him across the table, his meal still mostly intact. “She’s still a mess.”

I figured her latest man would last all of two years. I’d called Mom a few weeks back to congratulate her on the wedding, which I’d neglected to attend, even though it would have been only a three-hour drive. I just couldn’t handle the thought of meeting yet another soon-to-be ex-stepfather.

“How long you going to stay with this one?” I had asked.

“Oh, sugar, you got to be like that? He’s a good one. You’ll like him.”

“How long, Mom?”

She sighed, a tribulations-of-motherhood sigh. “This hostility is not attractive, Brandy. Lighten up.”

But Dad didn’t really want to hear about Mom. Just that she was okay, proof his leaving hadn’t left a permanent mark. We talked about the weather, about Grandma, renewed an old discussion about what kind of car would be best to drive in a demolition derby. Then he got all serious.

“So you got anywhere on becoming a historian?”

“No.”

“I heard you were enrolled up at Seattle.”

“That was four years ago.”

“Never finished?”

“No.”

“No plans to get back to it?”

I shrugged.

“Still plenty of time.”

“What are you, my career counselor?” It suddenly pissed me off, him doing this father act. Trying to help me get a plan for my life.

He lowered his eyes to his plate and pushed toast through puddles of egg yolk. “It’s just you had the grades. You coulda gone to any school you wanted.”