MARTians (3 page)

“This way, you can stay here, rent-free, until the foreclosure. And you can keep the flowers green and everything lovely, just in case, you know, the market improves suddenly. Soup?”

I swallow and take the soupspoon she holds out to me. I can be trusted to live alone but not to feed myself. Ah, AnnaMom. It would be funny if I weren’t so scared.

We sit together on the slightly uncomfortable couch. We used to have a very comfy couch, but Jyll, the home stager, said it reeked of routine low expectations and had to be replaced immediately if we wanted the house to sell. All furniture tells a story, according to Jyll. When people see a couch like the one she provided, they imagine fun family togetherness. That’s a story that will sell, sell, sell.

Only it hasn’t yet. So we need to change the story. I assume that Jyll will show up and haul the couch away, because the story of family togetherness, fun or not, has been canceled. I assume this will happen because I have seen the moving vans come and empty out the other houses on the cul-de-sac. AnnaMom and I just sit and don’t say a word about our circumstances.

We do not say, either of us, what we both know is true: She is the reason we are in this situation. She made a choice a long time ago. She chose life, me, Zoë. And now we are both living with the consequences.

Anna Meric was a few months older than I am right now when she came to the conclusion she was pregnant. She had tried to come to every other possible conclusion — deadly cancer, anorexia, just losing track of time — but motherhood was headed her direction like a truckload of radioactive bricks, and finally she had to admit it. She admitted it several times, in fact, because confession is good for a person.

About twelve hours after the last time she confessed it, I was born. A couple hours later, Anna Meric, now my AnnaMom, was filling out forms that would shift the responsibility for me to someone else, who wanted it. This was the course of action proposed by the people in charge, and Anna could see the advantages, really she could. But she refused to sign the papers. Her act of defiance surprised her-own-self as much as anyone. Instead of doing what was obviously the best thing for everyone involved, she demanded the forms that would confirm that I was her daughter and she was my mom. While she was at it, she named me. Zoë, that makes sense; it means life. The Zindleman? That she just made up. It was not a name she borrowed from my father. I did have a father, but his approach to the whole matter of me was to admit his part in this fiasco of irresponsibility and then waive all rights.

His name was Ed Gorton.

Gorton isn’t a very musical name.

I like Zindleman better.

In some alternative universe, I suppose Ed and Anna got married and I was the first of many children. In some alternative universe, I was never conceived at all. But in this universe, I’m Zoë Zindleman, whose biological father, Ed Gorton, isn’t in the picture.

Anna Meric started over, although her decision to keep me was a complicating factor. It is hard to make a good impression when you walk into a job interview trailing a streamer of toilet paper. It’s even harder when the toilet paper isn’t stuck to the bottom of a shoe, but is tangled up in the elastic of some barely there underpants along with the hem of a businesslike suit. Anna Meric had the social disadvantage of walking around with her carelessness exposed.

Somehow she managed to overcome that first impression. She got a job. She worked very, very hard. Then Ed Gorton got kicked in the head by an ostrich. It killed him. It’s an unusual way to die, but not unheard of. The papers he had signed in the hospital established me as his sole beneficiary. We had money enough to move into this fine house in an excellent neighborhood and live happily ever after. If anyone asked, Anna Meric could honestly explain why the daddy wasn’t in the picture with tragic death, which is respectable, although I think she left out the detail about the ostrich.

“Hey! You! Last girl! Yes. You. Who else?”

“What?”

“That bus. It isn’t coming anymore. The bus you are waiting for.”

“How do you know what bus I’m waiting for?”

“We rode that bus together for eight years. I lived across the cul-de-sac.”

“Which cul-de-sac?” I say. There are a thousand, two thousand, three thousand cul-de-sacs. Saying that we lived on the same cul-de-sac — it sounds personal, but it might sound personal to a thousand, two thousand, three thousand girls sitting in bus shelters.

“Terra Incognita,” he says. “You lived in the beiger house; it is more beige than the other beige house. I lived in the white house.”

Our house —
my
house — where I will live alone until I sell it, is painted a color called Aged Pages. It is, I suppose, beiger than the other beige house. I hadn’t really thought of it that way, but then, I hadn’t really thought of the other houses on the cul-de-sac very much at all. There is a white house too, bone white. So he might be right, but I still have no reason to believe that he knows me or that I should listen to what he has to say about the bus.

“You don’t believe me,” he says. “That’s okay; ask the driver of the next bus. That bus will come in half an hour. That’s fifteen minutes after you should expect the bus that used to go to Terra Incognita but doesn’t go there anymore. There is no bus to Terra Incognita.”

I do not look right or left. It is broad daylight. I’m in a bus shelter outside the doors of AllMART. There are people all around me who will, I hope, intervene if this crazy person who insists he knows about me does anything more disturbing than talk about the color of house paint.

What I really hate is that he seems to be right about the bus. The scheduled time comes and goes. AnnaMom’s shoes hurt my feet and her third-best business suit is a sweltering sweatbox. But I look perfect, that’s what AnnaMom said:
You look ready for the world, Zoëkins. It’s all about the clothes. I’m not worried. Twirl around.
I study the bus map to see which bus I might take that will get me as close as possible to home.

“That map’s way out of date.”

I don’t look around. I do not acknowledge him in any way.

“I can give you a ride. I was going to drive back there today anyway — to pick up some stuff.”

The bottoms of my feet hurt. Sweat escapes my bra strap and trickles down, down, down until it soaks into the waistband of the tailored skirt.

“Okay,” I say. It may be that I won’t last one single day on my own in the world. It may be that I have just accepted a ride from a murderous maniac. But it’s a sure thing that I don’t want to stand here in this bus shelter, breathing fumes belched out by buses that are never going to where I want to be.

“Did you interview with AllMART?” The maniac is making small talk. It’s probably a page in the maniac serial killer handbook: Small talk puts your victim at ease. . . .

“And Q-MART,” I say, which is true but is also code for “Lots of people will notice if I go missing”— which isn’t as true.

“Wow. You’re set, then. You get to choose. Choose AllMART. AllMART is the best. He fishes in his back pocket and pulls out an employee ID badge with the distinctive AllMART logo.

“You say that”— I squint at the name on the badge — “
MORT,
because you work there. If you worked at Q-MART, you’d think that was the way to go.”

“Call me Timmer,” he says. “I’m Timmer.”

“Why does your badge say MORT, then?”

“It’s an AllMART thing — there’s a system. At work, I’m MORT. To my friends, I’m Timmer. And to prove I am
your
friend, I’ll tell you two things. First, do not badger the AllMART badger. It’s a bad idea to badger the badger. Second, trust me when I say AllMART is the better choice.”

“Despite the name badge thing . . .”

“Despite a
lot
of things. I’ve been working there for months. I know. I’ve seen.”

“So, you didn’t graduate yesterday?”

“Actually, I did. Just like you, but I’ve been working for a long time. The graveyard shift, mostly — and weekends. I got a family hardship waiver.”

“What’s a family hardship waiver?”

“Things got hard; they waved. Seriously, you know how it goes.”

Yes, I do. When I shut my eyes I can still see my AnnaMom waving her tiny everything-is-normal-and-good wave at me before she looked over the steering wheel and said,
I’m not worried. I’ll call when I get work.
Then she drove away and left me standing by the doors to the employees’ entrance at AllMART.

He parks in front of the white house on Terra Incognita. The door to that house is wide open.

“Thank you.” I’m in a hurry to be gone. I don’t look at MORTimmer, but I listen in case his footsteps follow me while I hurry toward my own house. When I get to my door, I glance back. The door to his house is still gaping open, but I can’t see him anywhere. I do not stop to pick the dead daylilies. I do not stop to collect the junk mail. I just hurry to press the buttons on the lock and shut the door behind me.

Honestly, the house isn’t any emptier today than it was yesterday. The only difference is that today my AnnaMom will not be coming in the door. I am not just alone
now;
I will be alone, maybe, always. I kick off my mom’s shoes, but I do not carry them upstairs to place neatly on the shoe rack in her closet. Doing that would only remind me that these shoes are alone too, because the rest of AnnaMom’s shoes are gone.

I have spent the day in AnnaMom’s shoes, and it sucks.

AllMART is on one side of fourteen lanes of traffic, counting on- and off-ramps. Q-MART is on the other. If the stores were gunfighters, which they aren’t, they would be squinting at each other, waiting for the other one to flinch. There is no flinching in mega-merchandising.

When I interviewed, I had to go from one store to the other.

It would have been easy to go from one store to the other with a car, but AnnaMom and the car were far, far away. After my first interview, I set out across the parking lot. First winding through row after row of parked vehicles, then straight across the shimmering desert of empty parking, and up and up and up to a pedestrian bridge suspended like a spiderweb over the interstate. I felt so tiny, like an ant looking for sugar. Did others like me really build all this? The lanes, the lazy-loop curves of the exit ramps, the stores full of everything we want?

When big trucks with trains of three or four loads swept under the pedestrian bridge, they pushed hot wind up and under my skirt. Commuter cars scooted along bright and light as crumpled candy wrappers.

I remembered being in the car with my AnnaMom and feeling the gusts of passing trucks. We came here to do our shopping every week, but I never noticed the bridge. I never looked up and saw any people marching like ants from the AllMART half of the world to the Q-MART half. I never looked up and saw an ant person like me, creeping along meeting other bedraggled, trudging ants. None of us smiling. All of our faces smudged with sweat and diesel soot, all of our steps made on sore feet.

I wondered if the others considered jumping off, falling into the traffic. I had those thoughts, but it wasn’t even possible. The pedestrian skyway is built inside a wire-mesh tube. The dirty wind and the hot sun can get in, but nothing bigger than a butterfly can come and go as it pleases.

Before my second interview, I wiped my face, straightened my back, and pretended there were no blisters on my feet. After the interview, after I stepped out the door and into the parking lot, I gave up. I cried, with good reason. I had to cross the bridge again. I had to cross the bridge to get to the bus stop.

So I cried. I cried the whole way from one side to the other. And then, when I got to the bus stop, MORTimmer told me there was no bus to Terra Incognita.

I climb the stairs and go into my bathroom. I peel off the third-best suit and drop it on the floor in front of the shower. I skin off my underwear and toss it into the sink.

During both interviews, I was complimented on my professional dress. It expressed maturity and seriousness. Very positive. However. However, the dress code for an entry-level person with my qualifications is not so rigorous. The uniform is black slacks and white polo that has the AllMART/Q-MART logo smack over my heart. Heels aren’t recommended. In fact, they are discouraged — workplace safety, yes?

Oh, yes, health and safety, very important.

They drew blood. First AllMART from my left arm, and then Q-MART from my right arm. I watched the vacu-tainers fill up with me, dark, red, liquid me. The cells inside will whisper about what I ate for dinner and if I have a secret inclination to be diseased. Corporations have the right to know those things about me, just like they have the right to my school records, aptitude test scores, and psychological profile. The little tubes were whisked away. Then gloved hands (lavender at AllMART, green at Q-MART) pressed a cotton ball on the place where my secrets leaked out and patched me up with elastic tape.

The possibility that I wouldn’t be hired for an entry-level job — that was never mentioned. Still, I suppose it might happen. And if it does, I don’t know what comes after that.

These are, again, uncomfortable, shapeless thoughts. I step into the shower, and the pinging needles of water drive them away. My shampoo smells of oranges and ginger, just like it did yesterday and the day before that. And my washcloth still has pink and white stripes.