Hand Me Down (4 page)

I peer at my face in the bathroom mirror while waiting for the hot water, place my palms on the cold countertop. Dark purple-blue circles mushroom out from under my eyes and my skin hangs where there used to be cheekbones. My hair is scarecrow yellow and full of split ends. I blink, but the red still runs in jagged lines like lightning through the whites of my eyes. My eyelashes are every girl’s dream, though. I could start an infomercial for crying.
New! All-day, all-natural mascara!

After I’m dressed, I often watch TV in the living room with Rambo’s brown square head and black jaw on the cushion next to me, snorting occasionally. Dad is supposed to pick me up, but most mornings he’s late if he comes at all. Since he lives closer than Mom, is unemployed, and already taking Jaime to school, Mom signed me up for the impending weekday train wreck. At least Jaime and I will be together.

While I wait for the honk outside, I work on my math homework, pushing through the equations step by step like assembling puzzles. Jaime and I spent hours in our shared room while our parents fought, putting together odd-shaped cardboard pieces until they formed Care Bears or forest landscapes. I taught Jaime to start with the edges and work her way to the middle, to find
the joint that connects each piece to its neighbors. The concentration worked as a decent defense against Mom’s self-muffled cries and Dad’s screams, and algebra has a similar logic that keeps me focused.

Today when I finish, Dad’s white Toyota pickup still hasn’t appeared in the driveway. It’s already a half-hour into my first class so I call Crystal’s number. Jaime answers on the first ring.

“No school?” I say.

“Nope.” She yawns. “Dad didn’t even wake up this morning,” she says today. Other times it’s been, “He promised to take us tomorrow,” or “He really is sick, I can hear him throwing up.”

For two months we’ve talked in the mornings instead of going to school. I missed the day I was supposed to give my oral presentation on
A Tale of Two Cities
in English. I have a D in French, a C in math, and I was dismissed from my theater class project because I failed to attend required rehearsals.

“This sucks,” I say.

“If you lived here, Dad would let you take his car,” Jaime says.

“No he wouldn’t.”

“He said he would.”

“Well, he shouldn’t. I don’t have a license.”

“So? Neither does he.” I hear a wet, smacking sound so she’s either sucking her thumb or smoking. “He said lots of things would be easier if you just lived here.”

“Easier for him.”

“He’s mad at you for being stubborn and selfish like Mom.”

I shake my head. “He can’t keep his head out of the toilet long enough to take his kids to school.”

“He said if you lived here, he could afford to buy a bigger TV and he wouldn’t have to go to bars to watch sports so he wouldn’t stay out as late.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” I say, but it worries me. I know inviting Jaime to live with him was not out of the goodness of his heart, but I’m not sure what he’s up to.

“Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could drive us to school?”

“Dad would do anything to avoid responsibility,” I say.

Jaime says, “He wouldn’t let me drive his car.”

Jaime likes skipping school. She’s done it for years but now, without having to pretend to go somewhere else, it’s much simpler. She steals cigarettes from Dad’s secret pack, pulls the ten-foot phone cord out to the shed in Crystal’s driveway, and talks to boys named Surge or Chilly whom she met at the liquor store up the street from the trailer park, exhaling smoke into the grooves in the metal roof.

“Can you wake him up?” I say and immediately regret it. I won’t risk sending Jaime into the minefield that is our hungover father, but I miss the order of school, the predictable routine, the obvious right answers. As much as I’m trying to keep up in my classes, I’m losing my teachers’ trust, and know that I’m falling behind not just with assignments but with important instruction as well.

I say, “Never mind” at the same time she says, “No way.” Catching up with school isn’t worth her confronting a half-asleep and possibly violent man twice her size. I’d chance it if I was there, but I’m glad to hear she wouldn’t.

“Are you okay?” I ask, because my other thoughts,
Don’t trust him, Stay alert
, would just piss her off. She’s heard it all before, and
I think she’s enjoying being away from my mothering as much as Mom’s.

“I’m fine,” she says, and I hear a ding.

“Jaime,” I start but she says, “Gotta go, my Eggos are ready,” and then she’s gone, leaving the dial tone buzzing in my hand.

I take off my shoes, pull the comforter I brought from Mom’s onto the couch, and settle in for another day of watching the same movies on Gary and Carol’s black box cable channels. They’ve been cycling
Casper
,
Apollo 13
, and the second
Ace Ventura
movie. Today will be the eighteenth time I’ve seen
Congo
.

Rachel calls me when she gets home from school. “Where were you?”

“Here,” I say.

“Watching the telly?” Rachel says with a bad British accent and a deep voice.

I smile at her exaggeration. She’s already trying to cheer me up. “Not much else to do here,” I say. “Why can’t I have normal parents who force their children to go to school instead of refusing to take them?”

Rachel laughs. “If you were a normal teenager, you’d love staying home all day and watching TV,” she says in her regular voice.

“What did I miss in English?”

“Not a lot,” she says. “We discussed
Lord of the Flies
. People said stupid things.”

“I’m almost finished with it,” I say. “That book has some messed up stuff.”

Rachel says, “Yeah, we talked about some of the violence.”

“I had a math test today, too,” I say.

“Can you make up the test?” Rachel says. “I could pick it up from your algebra teacher.”

“Thanks,” I say. “But my first- and second-period teachers think I’m ditching since I miss those classes so often.” No school bus comes out this far. To take the public bus, I have to walk a mile and transfer twice. It takes two hours and I usually don’t make it to school until third period. My first-period French teacher told me through her hot pink lipstick and thick accent that if it was true my father wouldn’t drive me, I needed to tell the school counselor. She assumed I had been lying when I declined moving through “the proper channels” to get the “appropriate attention” and wouldn’t take any of my late work. I sigh. “If you asked for my test, Mr. Suarez would probably think I was trying to cheat.”

“My Liz Wiz would never cheat,” Rachel says.

“I don’t think it would even help at this point,” I say. Rachel already knows that without a scholarship, there’s no way I can afford college, and college is my only way out.

“My mom says the world always balances itself out,” Rachel says. “When she left my dad to follow her Wiccan path in Reno, she promised someone else would come into my life as a friend, to support me. And then I met you.” She sounds proud and certain, like that’s proof of her mom’s fortune-telling power.

“Well I hope something good happens soon.” I pick at my nails. “I think the next few years are going to get worse.” On the muted TV, murderous gray gorillas are bashing heads with their powerful arms.

“You are the strongest person I know,” Rachel says softly. I know she admires my ability to handle obstacles, but I also know she’d
never trade her safety for my strength. “You know I’ve got your back, right?” she says.

“I know,” I say, smiling. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

We sit there for a few heartbeats, time that in person would be a hug. She says, “Enough mushy stuff.” She clears her throat. “Want to spend the night this weekend?”

“Maybe Friday night,” I say. “I don’t think my mom will let me out of church.”

“Ask, okay?” she says. “We can watch a good movie.”

“Okay,” I say, but I know Mom will say no. She does the exact opposite of what I want these days like she’s spiting me because I didn’t behave as she’d hoped.

“Righto, then,” Rachel says with the English accent. “Cheerio, old chap.”

I laugh. “Bye,” I say.

On Saturday night I watch
Ultimate Fighting with Gary on their big-screen TV. Sundays are devoted to football at this house; tomorrow he will be watching at least three games and with Picture in Picture, sometimes two at once. When Carol goes to sleep tonight, Gary will make us tumblers of Jack and Coke, and we’ll watch late-night comedy sketches or movies with the lights off and surround sound on, and share a bowl of popcorn with Gary’s special mix of cayenne pepper and garlic salt coating the stove-popped kernels, Rambo at our feet. A few weekends we’ve gone next door to play darts with Gary’s neighbors after their wives also fall asleep.

The first time Gary took me, I was curled up on the couch
watching
SNL
. He unlocked the door carrying a sloshing half-full jug of whiskey and a two-liter bottle of Walmart-brand cola. When I asked where he was going, he said, “Nowhere.”

I squinted at him. “Does Carol know about this?”

Gary sighed and said, “Come on if you want.” I jumped up and opened the door for him. He stuck his lighter in his back pocket and flipped on the porch light. “But just this once.” He didn’t ask if I needed a jacket, didn’t comment on my bare feet. As we stepped onto Cody’s driveway he said, “You stay smart in here, okay?” I nodded.

In Cody’s garage I was enveloped in clouds of cigarette and cigar smoke, white swirls circling the room like ghosts, dancing into my nose and inflating my brain until my head felt swollen and weightless. I stood in the corner sipping my cocktail, watching the giant hands tick on Cody’s three-foot-tall Budweiser clock, and listened to alcohol-heavy breaths around me rally back and forth through the haze:
Hey, man, wazzup? How’s the wife? How’s the job? Jobs blow. Fuck yeah! Wives blow, too. Not enough, man, right?
Laughs faded in and out, the smell of motor oil mixed with smoke and cologne and my spiked soda, and Cody’s hanging tools reflected the spotlights he used for fixing cars like disco balls.

“Hey, Liz, you know how to throw darts?” Cody’s face crystallized right in front of mine. I blinked. “Darts?” he said and held up a blue-and-yellow-flagged metal arrow. “You ever played?” I shook my head. He took my hand. “Let me show you.”

I followed Cody’s Phish T shirt to the line of dirty masking tape on the cement floor in front of the dartboard while Gary watched us with narrowed eyes. From behind me, Cody lifted my elbow and
placed it in his palm. He wrapped his other hand around my wrist and jiggled. “Loosen your hand,” he said in my ear. “Relax.” My knees already felt mushy, my body so light, it was easy to sink into his words. He skimmed his fingers down my torso from armpit to waist, squeezed my hip, and pushed me forward. “Lean into it,” he said and pressed his chest to my back. I let go of the dart. He held his breath. Bull’s eye. “Wow,” he said and hugged me. “You’re a natural.”

I smiled and it took thirty seconds for my mouth to catch up with my brain. “Cool.”

He smiled and brushed my cheek with his knuckles. “Cool,” he said. He draped his arm around my shoulders and tucked me in against his ribs. I settled into his warmth, leaned my head against his chest, and closed my eyes.

Tonight, Gary and I are
betting on Ultimate Fighting with Fritos and Oreo cookies. “Ante up,” Gary says as Carol sits next to him on the couch. We each put two cookies on the modern off-white coffee table in front of us, shoulders bumping as we lean forward.

“That looks gruesome,” Carol says and turns to me. “You like this?” Thirty seconds into the fight and the thinner wrestler is bleeding from a two-inch gash in his forehead. The blood streams into his eyes and splatters red on the white mat.

“Yeah,” I say. Skull wounds may look gruesome, but it’s the bruises under the skin no one can see that kill without warning. “Head wounds bleed more than they hurt,” I say a half-second before Gary says the same thing—guess where I learned it?—and
Carol raises her perfectly shaped left eyebrow and dips her chin at him, or us, and I can’t see his reaction. Her red lipstick has faded, and she looks less pale, her cheeks pink from the warmth of the house. The phone rings and Carol shakes her hair-sprayed curls.

“You’ve corrupted this girl,” she says, getting up.

Gary says, “A Frito on the sumo guy,” and adds a chip to the pile on the coffee table.

“Nah, the karate cowboy is kicking his ass.” I pop a chip into my mouth from the bag Gary is holding.

“It doesn’t matter how hard you punch if the fat blocks the pain,” Gary says through a mouthful of corn. He licks his fingers. “Sumo man all the way.”

“Elizabeth,” Carol calls from the kitchen. “It’s your mom.” Rambo jumps to attention at my feet when I get up. He follows me into the kitchen, his unclipped nails clacking on the tile. I hear Gary tell Carol, “That dog really loves her.”

Carol says, “Does he?”

“Hi, Mom,” I say into their plastic wall-mounted phone. It’s the old-fashioned kind with a rotary dial.

“I hear you’re watching violent fights?”

“It’s TV.”

“Carol says there are no rules.”

“They can’t bite.”

She pauses, then says, “I just wanted to make sure you would be ready for church tomorrow.” Despite her refusal to pick her pastel-blue Ford Taurus pulls into Gary’s driveway before he or Carol wakes up.

“I’ll be ready,” I say. It’s the only morning I don’t wait for Carol
to finish in the bathroom and it’s colder when I have to warm it up myself.

Mom says, “I love you.”

I say, “Bye.”

On the way home from church, Terrance turns up the radio when the Seal song from
Batman Forever
comes on. I know because I’ve see the movie twelve times. “Watch this, Liz,” Terrance says. “Noah knows all the words to this song.”

Noah does, and he sings in his little baby voice, having no idea what the words mean. “Kiss from rose on grave,” he sings, rocking his head back and forth in his car seat. It’s cute, his baby teeth like tiny diamonds in his smile, but everything Noah does is cute. He’s two.