The Girls (6 page)

The man my mother liked best was a gold miner. Or that's how Frank introduced himself, laughing, a scud of spit in the corner of his mouth.

“Pleased to meet you, darlin',” he said the first night, his big arm reining me toward him in a clumsy hug. My mother was giddy and a little drunk, as if life were a world where nuggets of gold were hidden in streambeds or clustered at cliff bases, picked off as easily as peaches.

I had heard my mother tell Sal that Frank was still married but wouldn't be for long. I didn't know if that was true. Frank didn't seem the type to leave his family. He wore a shirt with creamy buttons, peonies embroidered in raised red thread on the shoulders. My mother was acting nervous, touching her hair, slipping her fingernail between her front teeth. She looked from me to Frank. “Evie's a very smart girl,” she said. She was talking too loud. Still, it was nice to hear her say it. “She'll really blossom at Catalina.” This was the boarding school I'd attend, though September seemed years away.

“Big brains,” Frank boomed. “Can't go wrong there, can you?”

I didn't know if he was joking or not, and my mother didn't seem to know either.

We ate a casserole in silence in the dining room, and I picked out the blats of tofu and built a pile on my plate. I watched my mother decide not to say anything.

Frank was good-looking, even if his shirt was strange, too fussy and feminine, and he made my mother laugh. He was not as handsome as my father, but still. She kept reaching out to touch his arm with her fingertips.

“Fourteen years old, huh?” Frank said. “Bet you have a ton of boyfriends.”

Adults always teased me about having boyfriends, but there was an age where it was no longer a joke, the idea that boys might actually want you.

“Oh, heaps,” I said, and my mother perked to attention, hearing the coldness in my voice. Frank didn't seem to notice, smiling widely at my mother, patting her hand. She was smiling, too, in a masklike way, her eyes bouncing from me to him across the table.

Frank had gold mines in Mexico. “No regulations down there,” he said. “Cheap labor. It's pretty much a sure thing.”

“How much gold have you found?” I asked. “So far, I mean.”

“Well, once all the equipment is in place, I'll be finding a ton.” He drank from a wineglass, his fingers leaving ghosts of grease. My mother went soft, in his glance; her shoulders relaxing, her lips parting. She was young looking that night. I had a queer twinge of motherly feeling for her, and the discomfort of it made me wince.

“Maybe I'll take you down there,” Frank said. “Both of you. Little trip to Mexico. Flowers in your hair.” He burped under his breath, swallowing it, and my mother blushed, wine moving in her glass.

My mother liked this man. Did her stupid exercises so she would look beautiful to him without any clothes on. She was groomed and oiled, her face eager for love. It was a painful thought, my mother needing anything, and I looked over at her, wanting to smile, to show her how we were fine, the two of us. But she wasn't watching me. She was alert to Frank instead, waiting to receive whatever he wanted to give her. I balled my hands tight under the table.

“What about your wife?” I asked.

“Evie,” my mother hissed.

“That's all right,” Frank said, holding up his hands. “That's a fair question.” He rubbed his eyes hard, then put down his fork. “It's complicated stuff.”

“It's not that complicated,” I said.

“You're a rude girl,” my mother said. Frank put his hand on her shoulder, but she'd already stood up to clear the plates, a grim busyness fixed on her face, and Frank handed over his plate with a concerned smile. Wiping his dry hands on his jeans. I didn't look at her or him. I was picking at the skin around my fingernail, tugging until there was a satisfying tear.

When my mother left the room, Frank cleared his throat.

“You shouldn't make your mom so mad,” he said. “She's a nice lady.”

“None of your business.” My cuticle was bleeding a little: I pressed to feel the sting.

“Hey,” he said, his voice easy, like he was trying to be my friend. “I get it. You wanna be out of the house. Tired of living with ol' mom, huh?”

“Pathetic,” I mouthed.

He didn't understand what I had said, only that I hadn't responded how he wanted. “Biting your nails is an ugly habit,” he said hotly. “An ugly, dirty habit for dirty people. Are you an ugly person?”

My mother reappeared in the doorway. I was sure she had overheard, and now she knew that Frank wasn't a nice man. She would be disappointed, but I resolved to be kinder, to help more around the house.

But my mother just wrinkled her face. “What's happening?”

“I was just telling Evie she shouldn't bite her nails.”

“I tell her that, too,” my mother said. Her voice rattled, her lips twitching. “She could get sick, ingesting germs.”

I cycled through the possibilities. My mother was simply stalling. She was taking a moment to figure out how best to drive Frank from our lives, to tell him I was no one else's business. But when she sat down and allowed Frank to rub her arm, even leaning toward him, I understood how it would go.

When Frank went to the bathroom, I figured there would be some kind of an apology from her.

“That shirt is too tight,” she whispered harshly. “It's inappropriate, at your age.”

I opened my mouth to speak.

“We'll talk tomorrow,” she said. “You better believe we'll talk.” When she heard Frank's footsteps returning, she gave me one last look, then rose to meet him. They left me alone at the table. The overhead light on my arms and hands was severe and unlovely.

They went on the porch to sit, my mother keeping her cigarette butts in a mermaid tin. From my bedroom I heard their staggered talk late into the night, my mother's laugh, simple and thoughtless. The smoke from their cigarettes drifting through the screen. The night boiled inside me. My mother thought life was as easy as picking gold from the ground, as if things could be that way for her. There was no Connie to temper my upset, just the suffocating constancy of my own self, that numb and desperate company.

There are ways I made sense of my mother later. How fifteen years with my father had left great blanks in her life that she was learning to fill, like those stroke victims relearning the words for car and table and pencil. The shy way she looked at herself in the oracle of the mirror, as critical and hopeful as an adolescent. Sucking in her stomach to zip her new jeans.

In the morning, I came into the kitchen and found my mother at the table, her bowl of tea already drained, sediment flecking the bottom. Her lips were tight, her eyes wounded. I walked past her without speaking, opening a bag of ground coffee, purple and heady, my mother's replacement for the Sanka that my father liked.

“What was that about?” She was trying to be calm, I could tell, but the words were rushed.

I shook the grounds into the maker, turned on the burner. Keeping a Buddhist calm on my face as I went about my tasks, untroubled. This was my best weapon, and I could feel her getting agitated.

“Well, now you're quiet,” she said. “You were very rude to Frank last night.”

I didn't respond.

“You want me to be unhappy?” She got to her feet. “I'm talking to you,” she said, reaching to snap the stove off.

“Hey,” I said, but her face made me shut up.

“Why can't you let me have anything?” she said. “Just one little thing.”

“He's not going to leave her.” The intensity of my feeling startled me. “He's never going to be with you.”

“You don't know anything about his life,” she said. “Not anything. You think you know so much.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Gold. Right. Big success there. Just like Dad. I bet he asked you for money.”

My mother flinched.

“I try with you,” she said. “I've always tried, but you aren't trying at all. Look at yourself. Doing nothing.” She shook her head, tightening her robe. “You'll see. Life will come up on you so fast, and guess what, you'll be stuck with the person you are. No ambition, no drive. You have a real chance at Catalina, but you have to try. You know what my mother was doing at your age?”

“You never did anything!” Something tipped over inside me. “All you did was take care of Dad. And he left.” My face was burning. “I'm sorry I disappoint you. I'm sorry I'm so awful. I should pay people to tell me I'm great, like you do. Why did Dad leave if you're so fucking great?”

She reached forward and slapped me, not hard, but hard enough so there was an audible sound. I smiled, like a crazed person, showing too many teeth.

“Get out.” Her neck was mottled with hives, her wrists thin. “Get out,” she hissed again, weakly, and I darted away.

I took the bicycle down the dirt road. My heart thudding, the tightness of pressure behind my eyes. I liked feeling the sting of my mother's slap, the aura of goodness she had so carefully cultivated for the last month—the tea, the bare feet—curdled in an instant. Good. Let her be ashamed. All her classes and cleanses and readings had done nothing. She was the same weak person as always. I pedaled faster, a flurry in my throat. I could go to the Flying A and buy a bag of chocolate stars. I could see what was playing at the movie theater or walk along the brothy soup of the river. My hair lifted a little in the dry heat. I felt hatred hardening in me, and it was almost nice, how big it was, how pure and intense.

My furious pedaling went abruptly slack: the chain slipped its bearings. The bike was slowing. I lurched to a stop in the dirt by the fire road. My armpits were sweating, the backs of my knees. The sun hot through the cutwork lattice of a live oak. I was trying not to cry. I crouched on the ground to realign the chain, tears skimming off my eyes in the sting of the breeze, my fingers slippery with grease. It was too hard to grip, the chain falling away.

“Fuck,” I said, then said it louder. I wanted to kick the bicycle, silence something, but that would be too pitiful, the theater of upset performed for no one. I tried one more time to hook the chain onto the spoke, but it wouldn't catch, snapping loose. I let the bike drop into the dirt and sank down beside it. The front wheel spun a little, then slowed to a stop. I stared at the bike, splayed and useless: the frame was “Campus Green,” a color that had conjured, in the store, a hale college boy walking you home from an evening class. A prissy fantasy, a stupid bike, and I let the string of disappointments grow until they looped into a dirge of mediocrity. Connie was probably with May Lopes. Peter and Pamela buying houseplants for an Oregon apartment and soaking lentils for supper. What did I have? The tears dripped off my chin into the dirt, pleasing proof of my suffering. This absence in me that I could curl around like an animal.

I heard it before I saw it: the black bus lumbering heavily up the road, dust rising behind the wheels. The windows were pocked and gray, the blurred shapes of people within. Painted on the hood was a crude heart, crowned with drippy lashes, like an eye.

A girl wearing a man's shirt and knitted vest stepped down from the bus, shaking back her flat orange hair. I could hear other voices, a flurry at the windows. A moony face appeared: watching me.

The girl's voice was singsongy. “What's wrong?” she said.

“The bike,” I said, “the chain's messed up.” The girl toed the wheel with her sandaled foot. Before I could ask who she was, Suzanne came down the steps, and my heart surged. I got to my feet, trying to brush the dirt from my knees. Suzanne smiled but seemed distracted. I realized I had to remind her of my name.

“From the store on East Washington,” I said. “The other day?”

“Oh yeah.”

I expected her to say something about the bizarre luck of encountering each other again, but she looked a little bored. I kept glancing at her. I wanted to remind her of our conversation, how she'd said I was thoughtful. But she wouldn't exactly meet my eye.

“We saw you sitting there and thought, Oh shit, poor thing,” the redhead said. This was Donna, I was to learn. She had a touched look, her eyebrows invisible so her face took on an alien blankness. She squatted to study my bike. “Suzanne said she knew you.”

The three of us worked together to get the chain back on. The smell of their sweat as we propped the bike on its stand. I'd bent the gears somehow when the bike fell, and the teeth wouldn't line up with the spokes.

“Fuck.” Suzanne sighed. “This is all messed up.”

“You need pliers or something,” Donna said. “You aren't gonna fix it now. Stick it in the bus, come hang with us for a while.”

“Let's just give her a ride into town,” Suzanne said.

She spoke briskly, like I was a mess that needed to be cleaned up. Even so, I was glad. I was used to thinking about people who never thought about me.

“We're having a solstice party,” Donna said.

I didn't want to go back to my mother, to the forlorn guardianship of my own self. I had the sense that if I let Suzanne go, I would not see her again.

“Evie wants to come,” Donna said. “I can tell she's up for it. You like to have fun, don't you?”

“Come on,” Suzanne said. “She's a kid.”

I surged with shame. “I'm sixteen,” I lied.

“She's
sixteen,
” Donna repeated. “Don't you think Russell would want us to be hospitable? I think he'd be upset if I told him we weren't being hospitable.”

I didn't read any threat in Donna's voice, only teasing.

Suzanne's mouth was tight; she finally smiled.

“Okay,” she said. “Put the bike in the back.”

I saw that the bus had been emptied and rebuilt, the interior cruddy and overworked in the way things were back then—the floor gridded with Oriental carpets, grayed with dust, the drained tufts of thrift store cushions. The stink of a joss stick in the air, prisms ticking against the windows. Cardboard scrawled with dopey phrases.