Break the Skin (3 page)

The smoke curled up from the match when she shook it out, and somehow it found me and I had to fan it away from my face. She spread a white handkerchief on the bed. It was early in March, and Venus was rising in the morning twilight. The time Rose had waited for, the perfect time, she said, because the goddess of love was riding on that morning star.

“I call thee, beloved ones,” she whispered, “to love us more than anyone.”

The curtains at the bedroom window were open, and over her shoulder I could see the sky just beginning to brighten in the east along the edge of Mt. Gilead and the far reaches of the trailer park. The three of us filled that trailer with our longings for love. Would any man ever have us? That’s what Delilah wanted to know. “Jeez, Laney. Look at Rose and me. Two gals on our way to being old maids.” I was young, and Delilah said there was time left for me. She was thirty-five, the same as Rose, and they were desperate. They’d had men to love them, only they were the wrong kind of men, not the kind to make a life with. Me? I’d never even been close to knowing what it was to be in love. So that morning in March—
Yes, it was 2008
, I told the police officers—when I had no way of knowing that Lester was in my future, I was enchanted with the idea that Rose could cast a spell to bring us the men of our dreams.

That’s how everything started—with this ache for love. We didn’t want our lives to be ugly. Really, we didn’t. We wanted what everyone wants—a pretty life, the sort that makes you want to get out of bed each day, excited to see what wonderful something might be waiting for you. We might have had that—I guess we’ll never know—if we’d only been more patient and not so certain that we were at the edge of last chances.

Birds were coming up from sleep in the woods behind the park, and they filled the air with their chatter. The trees were still bare, and their black limbs stretched across the sky. Soon there would be daffodils and hyacinths and the smell of the earth thawing and grass going to green and sunshine warm on my face when I stepped outside, but on that morning, we still hadn’t left winter behind. A little hoarfrost laced the grass, and it was cold in Delilah’s bedroom. I rubbed my bare arms to keep off the chill.

Rose had gathered seven straight pins from her sewing basket, and as she chanted the spell, she stuck each pin into the handkerchief. “Seven times I pierce thy heart,” she said. “Today the magic of Venus starts.” She
reached out her arms and took Delilah and me by our hands. We were a sisterhood of lonely hearts. Rose’s eyes were closed, and she was still chanting in that whisper that made a shiver go up the back of my neck. “I bind thy heart and soul to me. As I do will, so let it be.”

I closed my eyes, too. It makes me sad now to think of the girl I was in that room, to know my life was such that I had to believe in magic. What was the harm in believing in Rose? At least that’s what I thought then. I didn’t stop to wonder why, if what she claimed was true about spells getting you what you wanted, she was who she was—a woman sharing a trailer with the likes of Delilah and me, which was surely not what she hoped for herself.

She chanted a whisper of promise, and I let it take me outside myself until it felt like I was looking down from a distance on that white cloth and Rose bending over it with her pins.

Then I heard her whisper my name, heard her call me back to my body. “Laney, you’re trembling,” she said. “You poor thing.” I couldn’t speak. Rose’s chant had swallowed up my voice. I didn’t know how to say that I’d seen all the way to the deepest part of me—I guess it was the little girl inside me who came out every time I sang, the little girl who was bruised and aching because her father, a kind and decent man, had gone away and she had no way to get him back. “It’s just for fun, Laney.” I let Delilah put her arms around me, let her hold me close. She said, “Tell her, Rose. Tell her we’re just fooling around.”

Rose bent close to the candle and blew it out. The light dimmed all around us.

I won’t speak for Delilah, but I suspect, like me, she felt her heart open to what might be possible, even for the likes of us. We didn’t know what was about to happen, or how we’d let it sweep us along once it did.

Rose’s voice came from the darkness. “I guess we’ll just have to wait and see, now, won’t we?”

WHEN WE LIVED
together that spring, Rose had a doll, a poppet she’d made from black cloth and stuffed with birch bark, garlic, and rue. Mr. Mank, that’s who the doll was meant to represent. The manager at the Walmart where we worked the night shift, eleven to seven. For whatever reason, he was always giving Rose a hard time. She claimed it was because he tried to kiss her one night in the break room and she slapped his face so hard his glasses flew off, but Delilah told me that was only wishful thinking. Mr. Mank wasn’t chasing Rose, not a heavy girl like her. At any rate, she decided she wanted him out of her life, so one afternoon, not long after she cast the love spell, the three of us drove out into the country near New Hope and she tossed that poppet into the Bonpas Creek.

“Bum-paw,” we all called it, which was as close to the original French pronunciation as we could manage. The word, I’d learned in school, meant “Good Path,” and that’s what Rose said she needed, a good path for Mr. Mank’s exit from her life. The spring rains had come and the creek was up. We watched the poppet doll twist along with the current as it headed downstream. Eventually, the Bonpas would empty into the Wabash River and then the Ohio and finally the Mississippi, and carry that poppet all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

“Bye-bye.” Rose waved at the doll as it moved away from us. She blew it a kiss. “Good-bye, Mr. Mank, and good riddance.”

The next night, she called in sick, as she was apt to do whenever she just didn’t feel like working, and when she came into the store the night after that, Mr. Mank told her he was letting her go.

“How about that?” she said to me after she grabbed her jacket and purse from the break room and was heading out the door. Her big bottom made an angry little jostle inside her khaki pants. She threw her hands up over her head, disgusted. “Fired,” she said, and then she was gone. I watched her swinging her arms as she marched across the parking lot. The last glimpse I had of her was when she made it to Highway 130 and turned south, stomping away, as pissed off as pissed off can be, walking home.

“Well,” Delilah said when I found her in Electronics and gave her the news, “looks like that’s one spell that worked. She wanted Mank out of her life, and that’s exactly what she got.”

I felt sorry for her, tossed out like that, so our next night off I said it was time we painted the town. “Get slinky, ladies,” I said. “It’s our night to howl.”

“Laney, you’re bad,” Delilah said with a laugh.

She always thought it was a riot when I put on my vamp act, because I was about as unvampish as a woman could be. Little slip of a thing, straight up and down like a boy, a mess of dark curls that looked like a nest of snakes. But, like I said, I could sing better than the angels, and Mother called me “Little Bit,” her little bit of heaven. She’d always told me my good heart and my voice would take me places, but here I was, nothing down the road except my job at Walmart and my life with Delilah and Rose.

I sucked in my cheeks and made my lips all pouty. I put a hand on my hip and flounced across the room. I got up close to Delilah’s face and batted my eyelashes. “Hey, baby, was that an earthquake, or did you just rock my world?”

I had a list of pickup lines I’d overheard in bars, none of them directed at me. They cracked me up, and I used them from time to time to get a chuckle out of Delilah and Rose.

“Men,” Rose said with a roll of her eyes.

Why did we want them so much when they were so stupid? Just couldn’t stop ourselves, I guess. Couldn’t stop wanting them even if they rarely paid us any mind, or else gave us the sort of horndog going-over—
Ooh, you fine thing
—that we didn’t really want.

“We’ll change our luck tonight,” Delilah said. “Maybe even you, Laney.”

I had to turn my face away so she wouldn’t see how much that stung. I wanted to toughen up, to be as full of vinegar as she was. I wanted to prove that I could be more than Little Bit.

Truth be told, I guess I was more than a little in love with her, too, and I needed her to love me back. Not that I wanted to love her
that
way—you know, the way a woman can love another woman with her mouth and her hands—but more that I wanted to have her with me always, have the company of her. That’s what I wanted most of all. Daddy was gone, and Mother was crosswise with me. I needed Delilah and me to be enough for each other. Maybe we would have if I hadn’t had a soft spot in my heart for Rose, too—if I hadn’t got myself caught between them.

I’d had a big fight with Mother in January when I told her I was dropping out of school and going to work at Walmart. Soon I was getting cozy with Delilah, and Mother said that I was hiding my light under a bushel and letting my singing talent go for nothing. “You’re better than that, Elaine MaryKatherine Volk,” she told me, “and you’re better than that gal you run with. You could be somebody. She’s on a fast track to nowhere.”

Trashy, she said. Just look at Delilah and those short skirts she wore, and those men she took up with, doing God knows what, though it wasn’t hard to imagine.

I packed a duffel bag and walked out.

It was Delilah who gave me a place to sleep, who made me feel good. Delilah who called me “ ’Lil Sis.” Delilah who sometimes stole cosmetics from work and showed me how to put on lipstick and eyeliner and shadow and blush. It was a delicate balance for her. She’d spent too much time in the sun, and it was starting to leave crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes. She needed just the right concealer and moisturizer and foundation. “You could be pretty, Laney,” she said once, “if you’d try.”

It wasn’t long after this that Rose started working nights with us at Walmart. That’s how we met her and how all of us came to live together in the trailer that spring.

Late in the afternoons, when we were just waking up from a day’s sleep and Rose was still snoozing, Delilah turned on
Oprah
, and we
watched it together. “ ’Lil Sis,” she said from time to time, “you get me, you really do.”

That’s who I was, the one who got Delilah, and trust me, sometimes she was hard to get. She could be all lovey-dovey one minute—oh, she knew how to flirt—and then hard to the core the next. She’d set her jaw and purse her lips, and little wrinkle lines would flare under her nose. At work she could tell Mr. Mank to fuck off and leave her be and never catch his shit the way the rest of us did. Maybe it was because she kept that pistol in her purse and showed it to him one night.

“You’re going to get in trouble with that thing,” Rose told her.

“I’m not looking for trouble,” Delilah said, “but I’ll be ready for it if it comes knocking.”

Rose’s problem, according to Delilah, was she needed to grow a set of balls and grab what she wanted instead of relying on wishes. That was Rose’s way. She thought she could make the world to her whim by thinking what she wanted. Her energy would create what was best for her, and if she needed a little help, she had her poppets—poppets for healing, poppets for charms, poppets to sweep the ugly out of her life, and poppets to bring her joy.

Delilah called her “Mary Poppets,” but that was just a joke between her and me, and I felt guilty every time I laughed about it on account of I loved Rose, too—loved her because she was a big woman with a big heart, and because she loved so hard and felt so deeply, she always had a long fall to make whenever things didn’t work out to suit her. I was afraid life would always be hard for her, and that made me love her even more.

I was afraid to tell Delilah that those poppets intrigued me, made me think about how we might be able to have power over someone else. Maybe it happened, and we didn’t even know it. Maybe there were people in the world—strangers—and every little thing we did in our own here and now shot through space and tapped their hearts.

The night we were heading out, Rose got all excited, the way she
could when she was convinced something good was just around the corner.

“Tonight’s the night,” she said. She’d curled her lashes, and they swept up from her big eyes.

“For what?” asked Delilah.

“True love.”

So there we were strutting into the South End Tavern, a rough-and-tumble joint on Whittle Avenue just up from our trailer park. It was where the line workers from the poultry house went after their shift, where anyone underage could get served with no questions asked, where someone was sure to be gearing up on crank in the bathroom, where the bartender cracked heads with his ball bat if things got out of hand. Why in the world did we think we’d find the right kind of man there? I guess that was a sign of how desperate we were.

How ridiculous, too. From where I sit now, I’d laugh if I could. Just the picture of the three of us all glammed up—at least we thought we were. Rose in tight jeans and a cropped top, her bare belly rolled up around her belt line. Delilah in a snug wife-beater to make her chesticles stand out, and me, Little Bit, my own beestings two bumps in a T-shirt that said
Does This Shirt Make My Tits Look Big?

“It’s ironic,” I told Rose the first time she saw it and gave me a puzzled look.

“But, Laney, you don’t have hardly anything at all.”

“That’s the joke.”

“I don’t get it.”

“It’s ironic,” I said.

“Okay.”

And we were. Ironic, I mean. Just like Rose, who had no idea why my shirt was funny, we didn’t know how far we were from the sultry, on-the-make women we were pretending to be. I can see that now. One of us too big, but with a beautiful face. One of us too slight and boyish. One of us, the one closer to “just right,” too rough and hard. Yet all of us
as needful and as deserving of romance as any woman, no matter how beautiful, how average, how plain.

It was a Friday night, the best night because we were all jazzed up and there was a live band, a local group called Helmets on the Short Bus. The front man was a tall, lanky redhead, his hair in dreadlocks, a splatter of freckles across his face. When we came in, he was singing the opening verse of “Stairway to Heaven”—“There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold”—and Delilah stopped walking all of a sudden, her eyes on that man, as if she couldn’t look away even if she wanted to.