Rose of No Man's Land (7 page)

I could feel what Kristy had done to me, and I didn’t want to see it. The makeup felt like a thin, cracking dryness on my face, like the time I used Ma’s clay mask, the way it slowly tightened itself over my skin, a shell. My eyelids felt heavy and fragile and my lips felt smeary. Miniature chandeliers of earrings swayed against my neck. If I looked down I could see my boobs, a part of my body I generally like to pretend does not exist. There they were, curving out from the anxiously low-cut and fluttery fuchsia top Kristy had ordered me to put on. The boobs looked, from my rather aerial point of view, like someone else’s boobage. I resisted the urge to run my fingers over the fleshy domes, just to feel the touch and understand that they were mine. I felt disoriented and flushed. Maybe all the hair spray had
clogged the flow of oxygen to my brain. I slid off the stool I’d been perched on and picked awkwardly at my bottom half — underwear wedged into my crack and a skirt composed of ruffles that barely covered my wedgie. Air pooled and streamed around my excessively bare legs. It felt like an awful lot of exposed skin. Kristy’s pink flip-flops, made of a thicker cut of foam than my regular flops, the straps dotted with shiny circles, were on my feet. I looked at my toenails. They had started all of this, hadn’t they. They had seen it coming.

Woo-hoo!
Donnie cackled in the doorway. He slapped his hairy thigh, making the stringy fringe of his cutoffs waggle. His grody feet were bare and I imagined he was trailing evil foot problems across our linoleum, shedding general ill-foot health along his way.
A transformation!
he continued.
Kristy, you gotta film that! You gotta do a before-and-after. You gotta put that on your resume!

Kristy, who like me does her best to treat Donnie with consistent scorn and disdain, allowed herself a little smile, a quick bask in Donnie’s compliment.
You’re right
, she bobbed her head and snatched at the video camera, flicked the screen open, and hit the button to get it rolling. She scanned me with it, from the tips of my flops to the shellacked braidwork crowning my head. I stared at the camera accusingly, contemplated flipping her off, but instead said People Are Waiting To Hire Me, in a voice dead people would use if dead people spoke.

Donnie blinked.
You’re getting a job?

Yes!
Kristy snapped.

Well, that’s great!
he enthused.
It’d be good to get some
more money rolling in around here. More money for the bills and the groceries.
Kristy glared at him and my stomach sank a little bit, a hot-air balloon that got nipped by a bird and was slowly descending to earth. The idea of having money of my own had begun to grow on me. I’d found myself sliding into quickie daydreams: my own six-pack chilling in the fridge, new flip-flops, maybe a pair of terry cloth wristbands. The thought of having to subsidize Donnie’s ham salad and Ma’s television killed it, gave me a trapped and futile feeling. I thought about how Ma had broken it down for me a while back, how when you work, the government took a bit and then, I don’t know, some other part of the government took another little bit, and then you’ve got your bills and whatever and soon there’s nothing left. It seemed like this was happening already. Already Donnie had his sights on my wages and nobody’d even hired me yet.

Can we take the car?
Kristy asked. Donnie dug into the pocket of his cutoffs for the ring of dangling keys. He tossed them to Kristy with a quick, sharp nod. God, he thinks he’s so cool, it’s really embarrassing. Like, you’re embarrassed for him. He feels no embarrassment, you feel all of it. How’s that for fair? But I guess that’s just one more way losers like Donnie make the world a lousy place for the rest of us.

Back in Donnie’s Maverick we cruised along in the heat. Kristy did scientific calculations regarding wind. Like, would the air blasting in the rolled-down window batter the shape and sleekness out of my carefully sculpted hairdo? Alternately, if we kept the window cranked up tight, would the simmering heat melt the hair pile into a sticky, chemical hairball? We compromised by pulling the window down just a tad, just enough to breathe, to stir the ashes in the Maverick’s ashtray — a busted ashtray, permanently jammed out and piled high with butts and their charred dust. It was so humid inside the car that we fanned the air in front of us, which was better than having the wind gusting in and blowing shit around, causing us to inhale Donnie’s old cigarette ashes. Terrible stuff involving
cigarette ash has happened in the Maverick. One time I was riding in the back and Donnie was smoking like he always does — the car was his safe space for smoking; Ma wouldn’t let him do it in the house ’cause of her self-diagnosed emphysema — and he flicked the edge of his butt out the cracked-down window and
whoompf
, a chunk of ash soared into the backseat and, seriously, right into my mouth. It was hot and it was not soft and powdery like I imagined an ash to be. It was sort of hard and crunchy. I spit as much of it from my mouth as fast as I could, but some of it had just stuck wetly to the inside of my cheek, had dissolved or something, and ugh, it was the most disgusting thing ever to happen to me. My mouth felt burnt and filthy afterward. Thankfully I was in the backseat by myself and nobody saw this humiliation.

Kristy parked the car expertly in a yellow-lined slot in the mall parking lot. We climbed out and examined each other. You Have Ash On Your Shoulder, I informed her, and dusted off the bunched, sky blue cotton of her T-shirt. She squinted her eyes at the top of my head.

Oh no
, she murmured. She moved toward me, her heavily glossed lips puckering into a blowhole. She started huffing fruity-scented puffs onto my head, just up from my forehead. The hair there was pulled tight in a side part, secured with vicious bobby pins, creating a sleek plain for the updo to erupt from. Kristy blew and blew onto this one spot on my head, the blows becoming increasing hard and focused until it felt like a form of torture and her face turned a tomatoey red.

You’re Going To Hyperventilate! I whined. What Is It?

It’s a big ash, it’s really stuck in the hair, it’s stuck in the spray.

Just Leave It, I said. I was already exhausted. I wanted to go home and get out of this outfit. The air was climbing up my bare legs and spiraling around my nude arms, skimming my exposed cleavage. The sun was all over me and I could feel it flushing and stinging my sensitive Irish skin. Kristy shook her head firmly. She’s like the only perfectionist in the history of our family. The whole family, the ancestors, all the way back to Ireland. She’s a mutation, a genetic aberration.

No, Trisha, you don’t go out to get a job with your head looking like an ashtray. Jesus.
Kristy started to do that gross thing that mothers do, though our mother never did it ’cause she was too freaked out about germs. She licked her finger and instead of rubbing a bit of smudge off my cheek she got her finger really lubed up with a whole bunch of spit and brought the shining, slimy thing down on my head. Her face was all crinkled, like it hurt her to do it to me.
I’m so sorry
, she genuinely apologized. I could feel the giant wet drip of her spit plopped onto my head, doing its best to dissolve the ash trapped in my hairdo. This was amazing. This was not a great start to my career in being an employee. If we had belonged to some ancient religion that respected omens I have no doubt we would have known to turn back right then, to clamber into the ashmobile and zoom back back home, perhaps stopping at a packy along the way and persuading an adult with loose morals to buy us a four-pack of weekday wine coolers. Here’s where Kristy’s a hypocrite: she gets all up on my ass about beer,
but she just loves wine coolers and Zimas.

Oh!
Kristy bit down on her bottom lip in pure joy, like the sight of me was so intense it pushed her to self-cannibalism. Her front tooth scraped off a bit of fruity lip gloss. She licked it away and smiled. She rubbed her lips together, smearing more gloss over the little crater the tooth had left. She smacked them together with a suction-cup sound and squealed.
You look great! Great! I have big feelings, Patricia. Big, lucky feelings.
She grabbed my hand and led me in the direction of the side entrance. The many neon bulbs of the sign were no match for the relentless sun above. The sun sucked away all the shine of the lights, blasted everything out with its glare. But I knew they were glowing underneath all the summertime, and when the sun fell down later the lights would rise like a bunch of red moons in the sky above the mall.

Bernice O’Leary ruled Ohmigod! Kristy led me into the store, pointing out the manager like we were in the forest trying to spot deer.
There she is!
Kristy whispered, like we could startle her and cause her to dash off into the communal dressing room. She was partially obscured by a freestanding jewelry rack holding Ohmigod! jewelry. She had at her feet a cardboard box full of plastic-wrapped fake-pearl necklaces from China, and was tearing into bag after bag with the jagged corner of a box cutter and lifting the necklaces into the air like midwifing a child. She held the necklaces so gently, gazed at the shiny plastic beads, and her breath fluttered the fat sateen ribbons meant to bow around a girl’s neck. One by one, slowly, she hung the necklaces onto the hooks in the rack. She draped them over
the prongs and straightened them neatly. Also at her feet was a wire basket she tossed the old, unsold spring jewelry into, carelessly, meanly, like she was pissed at the cheap rhinestone necklaces, the hemp chokers, and faux-bronze crucifixes for being such failures. The chains dashed and twined against each other in the basket, earrings were separated from their partners, plastic disks cracked, paint chipped cheaply from metal. Teensy backings for pairs of iridescent fake-crystal studs were knocked from their posts and rolled out the gaps in the basket’s weave. Bernice was all decked out in Ohmigod! clothes — the capri pants and metallic belt, the sparkly shirt, a pair of fuchsia earrings shaped like stars swinging out from her hair on silver chains. She had the clothes, but somehow, she didn’t have the look. Maybe it was because Ohmigod! caters to seventeen-year-olds and Bernice had to be at least thirty. But I think it was more than that. Bernice O’Leary had put the bright clothes onto her round body the way a worker puts on a unifrom. If she was working at Dark Subject she’d be wrapped in a cobweb with bats flung from her earlobes. She might as well have been wearing a smock. I wondered what Bernice wore on her days off. If all this glitz looked fake on her, I tried to imagine what looked real. All I could come up with were sweatpants.

I watched Bernice at work. The curves of her cheeks were red, like she’d been in the cold or had recently been slapped. She was totally engrossed, practically hypnotized by the pearlescent sheen of the baubles. I could really understand why Ohmigod! has such a huge shoplifting rate. I felt like I could have grabbed an entire rack of rainbow
terry cloth rompers and strolled cooly out of the store, never distracting Bernice from her love affair with the beads. But I was wrong. My hand slunk up to rub the soft terry cloth nubs and tinkle the silver zipper and wham, up shot Bernice’s head, like she had some sort of sick sixth sense reserved for retail managers at busy malls. She arranged her face in an interesting combo of welcoming smile and suspiciously squinting eyeballs.
Hel-lo
, she said to me, clanking a fistful of necklaces in greeting.

Bernice O’Leary, Bernice O’Leary
, Kristy singsonged, her voice like a Disney princess, dripping flower petals and plump, chirping birds. Bernice swung her focus over to my sweetly smiling sister.

Oh, Kristy! Oh, I’d been hoping to see you around here, girl! I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now that your cosmo shop is all closed up for the summer! Look at this!
She brought her fingers up to her bangs, which were fringing into her eyes.
I shoulda had you go shorter with these. They’ve been making me crazy!

Well, you are so lucky I’m here then!
Kristy beamed.
And, I’ll be working at Jungle Unisex starting next week!

Oh.
Bernice’s smile fell a bit, but then she propped it up with some reinforcements.
Well, good for you. I guess that’s what ya went to school for, huh?
She layered the beads, now extra shiny with a scrim of Bernice O’Leary palm sweat, onto an empty hook.

Well, I can’t cut in a shop ’til I take my boards, so I’ll be just doing shampoos and sweeping up over there ’til I pass. But maybe I can bring my shears by the store after you close up or something?

Rattle, rattle. Bernice’s happy fists shook a new handful of jewelry.
Oh, you’re the best, girl! I’m so glad, oh my god, these bangs are about to put my eyes out, you know? And I could come see you at Jungle, I could, but I don’t like that place so much. No offense. The girls are bitches over there. They gave my mother a perm that burnt her scalp, swear to god. I tell her to go to the Voke, but she doesn’t listen. She doesn’t want kids working on her.
Bernice shrugged.

It’s temporary anyway. I’m trying to get on
The Real World.

Yeah? How’s that coming?

Good, good, real good
, Kristy shuffled and flipped her hair. She took a breath and plunged into a vat of lies.
So Bernice, I was wondering, how’s Kim doing? And, how are you doing too? It must be wicked hard, being so close with someone who does something like that. And now you got one less girl working here, and school’s out and there must be a ton of shoplifting to worry about…
Kristy’s eyes went doe-y, all green mush. They seemed as compelling to Bernice as the baubles she’d been stacking. She stared at my sister, her face went sort of slack and then her blotchy red cheeks rippled with a quiver of sadness. I thought, great, fucking Bernice O’Leary is going to cry. I just didn’t feel like I was close enough with the woman to witness something so intimate. And there’s Kristy, drawing it out of her like a slow poison.