Shout Her Lovely Name (15 page)

Her mother allowed fifteen minutes for writing. Girls took up pencils. Elena leaned back in her seat, tapping her eraser on the blank page. Celia drummed her fingers on the desktop, her nails chewed to raw skin. “You’ll only read if there’s a star?” she asked. Ruby said yes, that was so. Then Celia cramped her raggedy fingers around the nub of her pencil and began.

Amid these grown girls, with their scented deodorants, pantyhose scratching each time they shifted in their seats, Nora didn’t know whether to slouch or sit tall, to become as small as she felt or to strive against it. Soon she would matter in a way she didn’t quite matter yet. She was on the cusp of something private and fulfilling. She imagined the girls around her wrote about love, about the searching, sleepy look in men’s eyes after a kiss. She’d seen that look in movies, and in Frank Lessing’s eyes late one night when she got up to pee and surprised him in the bathroom. Staring out from his reflection in the mirror, his bristled cheeks dripping water, Frank’s sleepy eyes seemed to have forgotten who Nora was and why she was in the apartment. He quit humming and asked her how she liked the new TV. She thanked him again, then he dried his face and left to go home to his wife. Once the front door shut, Nora’s mother called her into her bedroom and asked if Frank had said anything. When Nora said not really, Ruby told her to get back in bed.

Ruby had given Nora a picture book about puberty called
What’s Happening to Me?
Along with discussing pimples and sprouting hair and the mechanics of sperm and egg, it described sex as being exhilarating, like jumping rope all afternoon and then eating a double-scoop marble fudge ice cream cone with exhausted and tingling legs.

Nora focused on her composition book. Starting with deodorant, she wrote a list of things she needed: a training bra, feminine hygiene spray. She’d detected an unpleasant odor in her armpits, which she learned in Family Life class was a first sign of puberty. She also learned that odors could happen in other places on her body and it was important to feel fresh. Next she wrote about Lana, who sat next to her in Mr. Marshall’s fifth-grade class and whom Nora was trying to develop as a friend. After three elementary schools, Nora had friend-making skills—a practiced smile, a just friendly enough
Hi,
the ability to compliment—but the fifth-grade girls at her new school already had best friends. She added to her list: headband, Dr Pepper Lip Smacker, a fringe skirt. Lana’s best friend was Kathi W. They wore fringe skirts and everyone treated them like royalty. At recess Nora lingered near their bench, imitating the way Kathi W. stood, with her knees hyperextended and her chest thrust forward, looking like a bent straw. So far, all Nora had managed to do was finesse herself a role as their gopher, delivering notes to the popular boys.

Then, because Nora felt like she had to write something in the journal for her mother, she put a star at the top of the next page and told Ruby how much she loved her visit to Hollenbeck High. She thanked her mom for taking care of the Frigidaire someone dumped behind their apartment building, between the Dumpster and an abandoned sofa. Nora spent her afternoons reading on that sofa as if it was her very own living room. When News Channel Four reported a boy had suffocated inside an abandoned refrigerator, her mother lectured her about climbing inside, as if Nora had no sense. Then she hounded their landlord to haul the Frigidaire away. Finally, Ruby unhinged the door herself and dropped it in the dirt.

“Two more minutes,” her mother announced.

Nora stopped writing. Every
i
on her page was dotted with a perfect tiny circle, as if bubbles floated up from her words. She glanced around to see if anyone was looking at her. In front of Nora, Celia sighed and leaned back in her chair. Her journal was also covered with words, the cursive tiny and precise, each
f
a flourish of curlicues. The entire page was covered with one word, written over and over.
Fuck.

At home, with a game show on the TV, Nora and her mom settled at opposite ends of the sofa. In their apartment the TV was always on, beating back the quiet. Nora rearranged herself, coughed, ate a Ritz cracker, glanced at Monty Hall, who was talking to a man dressed in a giant diaper, and waited for her mom to find Celia’s journal.

“Sit still already.” Ruby balanced a wine spritzer against her chest and held a cigarette between her fingers as she flipped through the journals, counting up the pages. When she came across Nora’s journal she set it on the sofa between them.

Nora didn’t touch it. “You can read it. If you want.”

“Holy shit. Will you look at Elena’s?” Ruby held up a journal. Elena had drawn a star at the top of every single blank page in the book, inviting Ruby to read exactly nothing. “It’s her screw-you gift to me.” Ruby shook her head, and then she wrote,
I’m here if you ever want to talk.
Followed by a red zero.

“Why’d you give her a zero?”

“Listen, Beanie”—she held her drink in front of her mouth—“even though in your life it doesn’t seem like it yet, there are plenty of men to go around. Beautiful women don’t have to hate each other. We don’t have to compete. Elena wrote nothing, she gets no credit.” She sucked ice into her mouth and crunched down hard, like she was chewing rocks. “Holy shit. I could be her friend . . . her mother even, her really young mother.” She tossed Elena’s journal aside.

Nora was uncertain what her mother meant about
men to go around
and what any of it had to do with the blank journal. Was she talking about married Frank Lessing or Nora’s absent dad? As far back as she could remember Ruby had always been focused on getting Nora a dad. Ruby was either dewy in love, angry about an argument, or sad after a breakup. Nora wedged her feet beneath her mother’s legs. “Why don’t you read everything?”

“I want them to trust me, to feel safe enough to write anything at all.”

Ruby stayed true to her word until she sat up and plunked her drink down hard on the coffee table. She’d found it. Celia’s journal was star free but Ruby flipped back and forth through the pages anyway, biting her lip.

“Did Celia say anything to you?”

Nora pretended to think. “She chews her nails.”

Her mother watched a Nice ’n Easy hair dye commercial then stubbed out her cigarette.
The closer he gets . . . the better you look,
the voice from the TV said. Finally Ruby commented, “Celia has no friends,” as if nail biting and friendlessness were linked. She totaled up the pages and circled an eight and two pluses on the cover. Something about that eight hugged by a circle of red ink made Nora happy. It was as if her mother’s decision to honor the girls’ secrets meant that Nora’s future secrets would be safe too—safety by association. She shifted her position on the sofa again, this time resting her head against her mother’s bony shoulder. Ruby set her work aside and wrapped her arms around Nora. They turned up the TV and watched Monty Hall pay a woman twenty bucks for the can opener in her purse. Ruby told Nora to switch to the news, where they followed a story about the hiring of the first-ever women FBI agents.

“Shh.” Ruby held her finger to her lips and then continued to talk right around it. “You are going to have so many choices.”

Spring came so early that by April the volunteer flowers—daffodils, cornflowers, dandelions—out by Nora’s sofa were already withered. For months she’d been sneaking the girls’ updated journals outside, and as a result, she was panicked and enthralled by all that could happen in a teenage life. You just never knew.

Unlike her mother, Nora read all the pages—heady and alarming stories of dates gone bad, overcrowded apartments, broken wrists, calls to God, formal dances, withdrawal method, probation, and VD—whether there was a star or not. After her
fuck
entry, Celia starred all her pages. Her brothers had beaten a boy she spoke to at church. Elena had cut off the end of her braid during science period. Celia found her locker filled with kitty litter. She didn’t trust any of the girls at school. She wanted heels. Her father would not allow her to wear store-bought clothes. She had to wear the shapeless dresses her grandmother sewed for her. Her mother had no say because her mother was dead. Boys and wine were the only things that made Celia happy, so she started sneaking out her bedroom window. Happiness was worth risks, she wrote in one entry.

Nora thought about that for a long time. The statement seemed essential and romantic.

When Celia was caught with a boy, her father, a welder, blackened her eye, then installed bars on her window to keep her in and to keep thieves out. She was miserable, and her brother supplied her with reds. She mentioned suicide. It was so huge, Celia’s isolation, that Ruby had created a contract in the journal.
Next time I want to swallow reds, I will call Miss Hargrove.
In return, Ruby promised discretion. They both signed it, Celia in her flowery cursive,
Celia Delgado.

Elena had written exactly four entries, all marked with stars. She wrote about a boy, Hugo, who was twenty and deluged her with warm kisses. Hugo tattooed her name on his arm twice . . . once was not enough for him, Elena wrote. Next she wrote about sitting by herself in the last row at Our Lady of Solitude, staring at the back of Hugo’s mother’s head, afraid to look inside the casket. Then she wrote to say her family was sending her away indefinitely to visit an aunt in Juárez. Ruby responded to that entry.
I am so sorry. If there is anything I can do to help,
anything
at all, let me know. You have choices.
She’d signed her note
Ms. Hargrove
and then she’d crossed that out and written
Ruby,
along with their address. The fourth entry said only goodbye and thank you.

The journal idea was working. Nora felt glad her mother wanted to aid and comfort the girls. It made her mother seem stronger somehow, as if there was enough of her to go around. Sometimes, late at night, her mother sat alone in their living room, on the brink of something Nora did not understand. The first time Nora felt her mother awake in the apartment, she tiptoed to the threshold of the living room but found the sofa empty. The red glow from her mother’s cigarette was the only point of light in the dim room and once Nora’s eyes grew accustomed to the dark, she found her mother sitting on the floor in front of the door mirror, blowing smoke rings at her reflection. “It’s quiet,” Nora worried out loud. Her voice butted up against a soft thing rising in her throat. “It’s a lonesome night,” her mother murmured back and Nora swallowed hard. Lonesomeness often threatened to descend upon her mother, and when it did, Ruby sometimes couldn’t get out of bed. How could she feel lonesome when Nora was right here, right beside her? A smoke ring hovered between her mother and the mirror but it was her mother who seemed like she might fade away. Nora curled up on the floor next to her that night, one arm hitched over Ruby’s thigh. How could a person feel safe when she never knew anything about anything?

On her couch outside, Nora traced the blue ink with her pinkie —
Ms. Hargrove, Ruby.
Her mother wanted to be a safe place in her girls’ harrowing lives. That had to be good. She stretched out long, wondered what it would be like to be sent away like Elena, to be locked in like Celia, to weep in the dark like her mother. She stared up into the orange-tinged haze that forever clung to Los Angeles. It was all tragic and beautiful. The journals she clutched to her chest grew heavy as the Yellow Pages. She felt tired and imagined dropping them in the dirt. Dead flowers, strange alien light, the faint thrum of traffic helicopters scuttling up and down the freeways bordering her neighborhood, reporting on delays, accidents, and air quality. Then she imagined a sudden rise and swoop, being lifted by the whirring helicopter blades. She imagined looking down upon a never-ending line of brake lights below her, red like the pills Celia’s brother gave her, like the blood in the diagrams from the Family Life filmstrip, like the wine spritzers her mother drank at night with the phone in her other hand. She imagined sweeping down and gathering motherless Celia from her imprisonment, ducking to climb back aboard. Celia’s long hair would fly up dangerously close to the propeller, and Nora would help to gather it together at Celia’s neck. They would hunt the Greyhound bus that carried Elena with her Life Savers–candy–green eyes and the dead boy in her heart. Hugging herself, Nora thought she would like to save Celia but she would like to be Elena, with her amazing tragedy, her name written twice on a dead boy’s arm. Would anyone ever love Nora enough to tattoo her name onto his skin?

“The closer he gets, the better you look,” her mother narrated in a throaty, lilting voice. She was posing before the last-look mirror she’d nailed to the back of the door for giving herself final once-overs before greeting anyone or heading out.

Nora, who had just returned the journals to Ruby’s desk, gazed into the mirror from behind her mother. Her bangs and front teeth were crooked. Beneath her rainbow T-shirt she saw the small soft beginnings of her adult life. There were so many frightening questions she could not ask. The room with its beige walls, heavy tweed rental drapes, and ham-colored sofa felt terribly close. Stiff-looped carpeting caused the soles of her bare feet to itch horribly. Her mother had all the windows shut, and the sun glaring in showed streaks from her attempts at cleaning with newspaper and vinegar. A small oscillating fan whirred on the coffee table, stirring the hot air. Their tiny apartment could not contain all that Nora yearned to know. She wanted to sit her mother down and ask but she had no idea where to begin. Her heart felt gummy and slow in her chest. What she needed to know, what she wanted to ask . . . was happiness worth risks? Does it hurt this much to be in love?

“. . . the better you look. Beanie, would I look better as a redhead?” Ruby raked her fingers through her hair. “Hey.” She squinted at Nora. “What’s wrong with you?”

Nora shook her head and was shocked by the weight, as if a bowling ball had rolled across the floor of her skull.