Dolls Behaving Badly (16 page)

I am grateful. At least some of the time. All of the time?

Some of the time.

Thinking of this made me so melancholy that I poured a shot of Baileys Irish Cream into my tea, and then I went back for a
second shot, and a third. I paced the house, eventually wandering into the bathroom, where I felt behind the towels for Francisco’s
bone. The minute my fingers grazed the cold surface, I became furious. Who did he think he was, giving me a bone? A bone!
Did he think I was a fucking dog? I swigged Baileys straight from the bottle and fumed. By the time Stephanie and Jay-Jay
returned from the high school basketball game, I had reached that state of drunken self-pity.

“We lost again,” Stephanie interrupted as she and Jay-Jay slammed into the house.

“There was a fight during halftime. Between two
girls
.” Jay-Jay’s face was smeared with chocolate. “The tall one got a bloody nose. It was so cool.”

“Two cheerleaders,” Stephanie explained. “One had totally been two-timing with the other’s dude. The principal tried to break
it up and they scratched him across the face.”

“How come I always miss the good stuff?” I hiccupped, covering my mouth so they wouldn’t smell the sweet Baileys’ fumes. “It’s
after ten, mister,” I told Jay-Jay as I squinted at the clock, which swayed back and forth. “School will be here soon.”

“Your voice sounds funny,” he complained as he headed off to the bathroom.

“My voice
feels
funny,” I yelled back.

“Chill, Mrs. Richards.” Stephanie snapped her gum. “You’re totally wound tight.”

“That’s it!” I pounded the table. Stephanie jumped. “Get your shoes, I need a chauffeur.”

“You’re drunk.” Her voice was disapproving.

“It’s just a few miles,” I insisted. “Laurel’s here in case Jay-Jay needs anything.” I jammed my boots on the wrong feet.
“How do I look?” My coat was inside out, my sweatpants stained with hot chocolate.

“Okay, I guess.” Stephanie picked up the keys. “But I’m totally not going to a liquor store.”

“Francisco’s,” I said as I followed her to the car, the cold air causing my head to ache. “Over past Earthquake Park.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Mrs. Richards.” Stephanie started the car as I fumbled with my seat belt. “You’re sloshed
and he’ll be, like, who is this woman? He’ll totally lose respect for you.”

“Good!” I haltingly gave the directions I had memorized from MapQuest during a melancholy lull last week, and a few minutes
later Stephanie pulled up in front of a pinkish-orange house with trees cluttering the yard.

“Ugly color but gutsy,” Stephanie said. “Think he’s married?”

“I don’t know.” It was an awful thought.

“Want me to come in for, like, support?”

I thought of her punching the guy in the belly at the abortion clinic but shook my head no. “Oh, shit!” I cried as I opened
the door. “I forgot the bone.”

Stephanie cleared her throat nervously. “I’ll just wait here for you, Mrs. Richards. Just don’t make it long. You only have
a quarter of a tank.”

I walked up the driveway feeling strong and vengeful. I pounded the door. Francisco answered on the third knock wearing a
black T-shirt and a pair of pajama bottoms printed with Scottie dogs.

“Carlita,” he said, surprised. I staggered against the doorframe and waited for him to invite me in. We peered awkwardly at
one another.

“A bone,” I finally said. “What the hell was that supposed to mean?”

“Oh,” he laughed. “It was, well.” He didn’t say anything else. He had his glasses on and his eyes were greener than I remembered.
I glanced down at his feet, which were bare and looked cold, and I started to cry.

“Don’t,” he said, his voice gentle. I wiped my nose on my coat sleeve, mortified. I knew I should leave but I couldn’t move.
“Want to come in?” he finally asked. I nodded and followed him into the book-lined living room littered with driftwood, bones,
and colored glass. “I like to collect things from the beach.” He shrugged, his face reddening. “Most of it came from down
around Homer. That raven wing there? That was outside of Hope; I had to fight another guy for it. Ended up costing me forty
bucks and three beers.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I thought it was beautiful, lying there in the middle of the road like a—”

“Not that.” I stomped my foot. “The phone calls, the breathing, the asking me out and not showing up, and now a bone? What
the fuck kind of game are you playing?” I could smell the alcohol on my breath. “I’m not drunk,” I said defensively.

Francisco ran his hand through his hair. “I wanted to get to know you better.” He looked at me hard. “I’ve had a rough time.
This isn’t easy for me, either.”

I looked frantically around. “I thought you had dogs.” My voice was accusing.

“In the backyard,” he said, moving toward me. I looked around in alarm. The room was small and cluttered; there was nowhere
to run.

“I have to go.” I zipped my coat and turned to leave, but then I thought, in my blurry, drunken haze: what would the Oprah
Giant do? I doubted that she would walk away from a man like Francisco, especially when he had such a goofy, lovesick look
on his face. I felt my legs moving forward, heard my grandmother’s voice counting in Polish:
Jeden
, and I took one step forward.
Dwa
, and I took a second step.
Trzy
, and I was standing in front of him.
Cztery
, and my arms reached out to him.
Pi
ęć
, and I was in his arms.
Sze
ść
, and we were moving across the room in a clumsy, awkward dance, my face pressed against his neck, the heat of his breath
tickling my hair.
Siedem, osiem, dziewi
ęć
, and we were in the hallway.
Dziesi
ęć
, and we waltzed in our hideous way toward the bed.
Jedena
ś
cie
, and my shirt was off, and we were no longer dancing. I pulled his shirt off, too, and his chest was smooth and warm. “Stephanie’s
out in the car,” I whispered, as he traced the curve of my spine.

“I know,” he said. “I peeked from the window. You almost stepped in dog poop on the way in.”

Hearing him say that caused tears to come to my eyes. It was the most romantic thing anyone had ever said to me. We held each
other like that, on his bed, our bare chests pressed together, the beat of our hearts thudding away the seconds.

“Sorry,” I said to Stephanie when I finally made it back out to the car. She was reading a poetry book called
the fever almanac
, which had a woman’s nyloned leg over the cover. She looked up and shrugged.

“It’s retro. You totally needed to get laid.” She fastened her seat belt and jerked the car into drive.

“I didn’t,” I said. “Just, you know, touching.”

“Touching is totally the best part,” Stephanie agreed. I looked out the window and watched houses and snow-covered yards flash
past, my belly doing happy little flip-flops, my nose still filled with Francisco’s scent. When we stopped for the traffic
light on Minnesota Drive, I looked over at Stephanie. She sat straight, her shoulders relaxed, her pleasant face opened and
vulnerable. I could imagine her twenty years from now, older but still as strong, still making it through on guts and good
nature.

“You’re going to make it, you know? I mean in life. You’re going to do okay, Stephanie.”

“Oh, well.” It was the first time I had ever seen her blush. “I’m totally…it’s just, Mrs. Richards, I have been working my
ass off for, like, my whole life trying to rise above the family fiasco. It’s totally exhausting. My soul is wrinkly and aged
from such unflinching effort.”

I didn’t believe it. If anything, Stephanie’s soul shined brighter than anyone’s. I wanted to tell her this, but it would
have embarrassed her and besides, I think she already knew.

Saturday, Jan. 7

“JESUS, LOOK WHAT THE SLED DOG
dragged in,” Mr. Tims said to Sandee as he whipped ranch dressing and horseradish sauce together for tonight’s prime rib
special. Sandee looked awful, her skirt wrinkled, her blouse splattered with a couple of days’ worth of grease, and instead
of the perky high-heeled shoes she always wore, she had on a pair of scuffed hiking boots. Her feet looked enormous and ungainly
as she clomped around the pantry picking up her order.

“I haven’t been sleeping well,” she admitted, slamming a beef burrito onto her tray. “Not that it’s anyone’s business. Damn
it, where’s my pico de gallo?” She hefted her tray to her shoulder and lifted it above her head; there were sweat stains beneath
her arms, but I kept my mouth shut and followed her out to the dining room with the missing salsa.

“There you go. Doesn’t that look good?” Sandee’s voice was high and fake as she served the plates, enchilada sauce splashing
a fattish man’s lap. “Sorry, honey.” She pulled napkins from the extra supply she kept tucked in the bosom of her blouse.
“Some days it’s all shit.”

“Isn’t that the truth,” the man replied a little too heartily.

“Cig dig,” I hissed. “Five minutes.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she muttered. A few minutes later we crammed together in the far handicap bathroom stall, since it was too windy
to stand outside. I let Sandee sit on the toilet, since she was the worse off, while I leaned up against the sink.

“So what’s up?” I asked

She tapped the heels of her hiking boots together three times, like Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz
. “Nothing,” she said defensively.

“This is about what happened at the hotel Saturday, isn’t it?”

“I said, nothing happened.”

“Nothing?” My voice raised in disbelief.

“We curled up in bed and watched a foreign movie without subtitles, and then he fell asleep. He snores, though not consistently.
More like a stutter.”

“You sure?” Sandee wasn’t the kind of woman men lay beside in bed without initiating sex. She was too ripe, too lush. Seeing
her in a bra and panties was like seeing a fuller-figured version of a Victoria’s Secret model. She had that kind of sexual
presence.

“It was a relief to lie there and hold hands and not worry if my stomach was too fat or if I should act less experienced than
I really was. I slept so well. I don’t think I’ve ever slept that way with a man before, not even Randall.” She kicked at
the toilet paper littering the floor. “It isn’t good, is it? Lying there with him like that?”

“Probably not.” I thought of how I had felt holding Francisco on his bed, how warm and safe it had felt, yet also scary, the
way I had so quickly left my defenses behind. “I saw Francisco without his shirt on,” I offered.

Sandee picked toilet paper off the bottoms of her hiking boots. “How was it?” she finally asked.

“We just held each other. Sort of like what you guys did.” I felt momentarily ashamed, as if we had both failed to properly
entice our men. Yet while I couldn’t speak for Sandee, those few minutes of touching Francisco had been more intimate than
any sex. “Maybe,” I began hesitantly, “Maybe we’re both falling in—”

“Don’t!” Sandee held a sheet of toilet paper up like a shield as she pushed past me and stormed out of the stall. I caught
up with her in the bar bumming a cigarette from a table of half-sloshed secretaries. It took three tries but she finally managed
to light it. She inhaled and choked. “I’m going to marry him, aren’t I?” Her eyes were hard and fierce. “I’m going to end
up with a fish-and-game warden. We’ll eat caribou steaks while dead animal heads watch us from the walls.”

“I think you’ll be h—”

“Happy?” She shouted. Heads turned. “Who the fuck ever said I wanted to be happy?”

Monday, Jan. 9

“Mom.” Jay-Jay interrupted my nap by shaking my shoulder, but my eyes refused to open. “Wake up. There’s something outside.”

“Moose?” Last winter a moose got tangled in the neighbor’s Christmas lights and the fish-and-game department had to tranquilize
the poor thing before they could cut the wires from around its belly. I wondered if Sandee’s Joe had been one of the bearded
guys who had shown up with tranquilizer guns and nylon netting.

“Mom! You have to look.” I popped open one eye. Jay-Jay stood before me with a peanut-butter-smeared face and wearing one
of Stephanie’s shirts with a picture of Santa Claus and the caption “Never trust a fat man.”

“What?” I pulled the covers over my face, but Jay-Jay tugged them away.

“It’s some kind of bone, I think from—”

I was out of the sleeping bag in a second, Jay-Jay and Killer following as I sprinted for the door.

“See?” Jay-Jay pointed to the snow-covered porch chair I had neglected to bring in. “There’s a note but it’s all soggy, something
about—”

I snatched the note from his hands and stuffed it down my bra; the paper crinkled deliciously against my breasts. “Give me
the bone.” I held out my hand.

“But, Mom, it’s a clavicle. See how it curves? Doesn’t it look like a dragon wing?” Jay-Jay carried it inside and carefully
set it on the kitchen table. “Maybe it’s part of a secret code.” He rubbed his hands excitedly. “We have to put it together
to decipher the message. It could even be from the CIA.”

“It’s not the CIA,” I said, removing the note from my bra and smoothing it over the table. “It’s from Francisco.” I skimmed
over his slanted handwriting. “He’s headed down to San Diego for a forensic anthropology conference.”

“That guy from the phone?” Jay-Jay’s voice rose. “Does Dad know?”

“There’s nothing to know. He gave me a bone, that’s all.”

“I don’t want to see it.” Jay-Jay pushed the bone toward me. He looked upset.

“Honey, I know you love your dad and it’s okay. I love your dad too, just not in the right way.”

“You could try,” he insisted. His voice trembled. “You could both try.”

“It’s too late.” My voice was gentle.

“Growing up sucks.” Jay-Jay slammed the clavicle on the table.

“It does,” I agreed, wondering for the hundredth time how the divorce had affected Jay-Jay. There’s no way he could have come
out of it undamaged, though we tried to shield him from the worst of it.

The night Barry left for good, Jay-Jay was over at Laurel’s. When she brought him back he raced through the door and stopped
in the middle of the living room. “Dad?” he yelled, his face white, his heels raised as if to make himself taller. “Dad! Dad!
Dad!”

I pulled him toward me. He was four at the time, his face round with the last of his baby fat. He kicked and punched, bit
my arm, screamed and cried until I gathered him up and carried him to the rocking chair, where I rocked and smoothed his hair
as I murmured, promising him things I had no right to promise. When he finally settled down, I carried him to bed and slept
next to him the rest of the night, his chest shaking every so often as if even in his dreams he was fighting off loss.

Thinking about this made me so sad that I decided to make
kolachkes
, a Polish cookie Gramma whipped up when she was hit with the lonelies. As I cut the butter into the flour I missed Gramma
so much my knees shook. I wanted her near; I wanted to smell the oniony reek of her sweat and feel the comforting pat of her
paw-sized hands across my back.

After I filled each cookie with fruit, I wiped my face with the dish towel. “Let’s take Killer out,” I yelled to Jay-Jay,
who was in his room doing homework.

It was a cold and quiet night. The snow drifted high against the trailers as we headed for the lagoon, Jay-Jay pulling his
sled behind him until we reached the big hill across the street from the high school.

“Push me, Mom, hard,” he ordered, and I pushed against the orange plastic sled until he was flying down the hill, Killer chasing
after him and nipping at his jacket.

“Okay, now it’s your turn,” Jay-Jay said after his third trip down the hill. I situated my ass on the very small seat, tucked
my legs across the narrow strip of plastic, and held tight to the sides. From a sitting-down position, the hill looked very
big and very steep.

“Are you sure this is—,” I started to say, and then I was zooming down the hill, picking up speed and jolting over bumps.
I couldn’t help hooting and hollering because there was something so benignly dangerous in the slap of the wind across my
face and the scratch of the sled scraping ice. I veered to the left before I reached the bottom and crashed into a rock, my
nose leaking blood over the snow.

“Wow, Mom, you’re bleeding.” Jay-Jay was impressed for once. He handed me his mitten, and I pressed it to my nose as he gathered
the sled, called for the dog, and started for home. I followed his small back as we slipped and slid up the hill. Every so
often he turned and patted my arm as if for encouragement.

“It should stop soon,” he said. “Unless you have hemophilia, then you’ll probably die.”

I nodded and walked behind him and it was strange, almost as if he were taking care of me. I wanted to cry, not because I
was sad but because I felt so full of the night, and the cold, and Jay-Jay’s solid neck as he turned and shouted, “Mom, hey,
Mom, let me know if you want to slow down, okay?”

Oh, children will break your heart, the way they leave, a little more each day, pulling and pulling, and no matter how much
you long to pull them back, you have to let them go. You have to follow them until you know the shape of their shoulders,
the set of their knees, the way their feet turn inward or outward as they move confidently away from you.

Wednesday, Jan. 11

Uh-oh.

“Do you know how much you owe on your credit cards?” the Oprah Giant wrote in perky green script in today’s blog. “Then you’d
better figure it out, girlfriend!” she continued. “Overspending isn’t a sign of prosperity; it’s a sign of insecurity and
a lack of self-respect.”

That was easy for someone with three best sellers and a cushy motivational speaker job to say, but I’d bet my ass that even
the Oprah Giant couldn’t make it on a waitress’s salary without going into serious debt. I dumped my unopened mail across
the table and tore at the envelopes. I had been paying a good chunk of my Saturday shift wages to lower my balances and they
were lower, granted. Still, seeing the numbers in staid black ink was startling: how could I owe so much and still have so
little?

I followed the Oprah Giant’s advice and wrote letters requesting payment plans to all of my debtors. Thankfully, she had included
a form letter to edit (i.e., copy word for word).

The next step was to cut up all but two of my credit cards, one hidden in a hard-to-reach location for emergencies and the
other kept in the freezer and thawed out only for essential purchases.

“You’ll feel deprived the first few weeks,” the Giant wrote. “You might even have a temper tantrum or two because, face it,
owing money isn’t the most adult decision you’ve ever made.”

I ate three brownies, two cookies, and the chocolate bar Jay-Jay had hidden in his nightstand before spreading my credit cards
over the table. Their plastic faces shone in the overhead light, so bright and cheerful! They were like friends, flashing
their sixteen-digit numbers and promising me all the things I wanted but couldn’t afford. I picked up the scissors, gritted
my teeth, and sliced through a Gap card, followed by Capital One, American Express, Old Navy, and Alaska Bank Visa. After
I destroyed my stash, I hid my Alaska Airlines Visa in the ceiling tiles above the TV. Then I filled a Ziploc bag with water
and placed my Denali Credit Union MasterCard in the freezer, where it sagged forlornly against a bag of Tater Tots.

“Did you remember to get yogurt?” Laurel straggled into the kitchen, rubbing her eyes. It was five thirty at night and she
was just getting up. “The kind with the fruit at the bottom, not mixed.” She yawned and sat down at the table, totally unconcerned
with why I was shoving pieces of hacked-up credit cards into an empty orange juice carton.

“It’s so I can’t fit them back together and online shop,” I explained, but she ignored me and reached for a cookie. “Okay,
I owe a little on my credit cards.” I threw down the orange juice container and waited for her to reprimand me, but nothing
came. Laurel was still in a funk. Two nights ago she had met with Hank to tell him about the pregnancy. He held her hand and
said all the right things. Then he promptly changed his phone number and e-mail account and had her name blacklisted at his
office. Laurel had told me this story three times already, and I was afraid she was getting ready to tell me again, but she
let out a dramatic sigh and reached for her laptop instead. I sat down across from her and browsed the University of Alaska
art brochure I had picked up at the college.

“I met this guy,” I heard myself tell Laurel. “He’s this customer at work, an anthropologist with the most amazing hands.
He touches me as if I were an artifact, like I’m worthy of praise.” I paused for a moment, embarrassed at my level of intensity,
but she was busy tap-tap-tapping away at her laptop, so I continued. “I went out with him but he never showed; the evening
was a disaster so I thought, okay, that’s that. But then he gives me a bone, a femur. Then we necked on his bed, but nothing
more. Until a few days ago, and then a clavicle appears on my doorstep. Is that creepy, do you think? Or would you say it
was more—”