Chloe Doe (2 page)

Our mother met our father in a café off highway 89. Camille thinks it was romantic and our mother agrees. We’re sitting at the kitchen table, peeling vegetables, when Camille asks to hear the story again. Our mother stops cutting carrots and looks past us, into her memory.

“I got on the train in Kirksey, Kentucky, and got off in Peeples Valley, Arizona. The first thing I did was go into that café.” She stops for a minute, frowning so that the lines spreading out from under her eyes crinkle. “Damn, I wish I could remember the name of that place.”

“Millicent’s Country Café,” Camille says.

“Hell, that’s right.” Our mother taps the table with her fingers. “I’ve always said you have a steel trap for a memory.

“Millicent’s Country Café. It sounds pretty, doesn’t it? I thought at the time it did. I remember standing outside that café and reading that sign and thinking, This is a new beginning. I’m going to start my new life right here.

“I walked inside, sat myself down, and when the waitress came over I asked her what she recommended. Do you know what she said?”

Our mother looks at us for the answer, but we both shake our heads.

“She said, ‘I recommend you get back on that train and choose another stop.’ That’s what she said. She was a wise woman. I wish now I’d listened. Of course, then, I wouldn’t have you two darlings.” Our mother smiles at us briefly, then props her chin on her hands. “Instead, I ordered a cheese blintz and a cup of coffee and while I was eating in walked your father.”

She sits back in her chair; her fingers poke at the ribbons of carrot skins.

“You know, my first look at him I thought I was looking at a movie star. I swear that’s exactly what I thought. He was too skinny, of course. But he was tall and handsome, with eyes that looked right at you and made you melt down to your shoes. I think I fell in love with him then and there.”

“Did he love you right away, too?” Camille asks.

“Oh, I think so.” She shakes the carrot shavings from her fingers. “Maybe not the same minute, but soon after.

“I remember the first thing he said to me: ‘That’s nice of you to say, ma’am.’ I watched him walk into the café and sit down at the breakfast bar. He ordered scrambled eggs and black coffee and his voice was like a song. He had this accent from somewhere far away. I knew it was something European. And I walked up to him and told him how beautiful I thought his voice was.”

She gets lost in her thoughts for a moment, until her smile breaks up and she looks at me and Camille with warning in her eyes.

“Your father was very polite. He was a good man to be in love with.” She looks at us across the table, her eyes filling with sadness. “If I’d known I’d end up with heartbreak, I might’ve gotten back on that train.”

Camille teaches me to walk in heels only after she can do it gracefully, with the sway of a willow tree caught in the wind.

It took her some time to get to this point. At first her hips moved like water in a bath tub, swooshing from side to side, because her ankles wouldn’t stay firm. They turned out, or in, and she lost the shoes trying to right herself.

“I have to exercise them,” she said.

She lay on her stomach on the floor, with her feet under the box spring and mattress of her bed, lifting then dropping them, then lifting them again, dropping them. “You need strong ankles.”

Now her walk is as sassy as our mother’s. And she doesn’t want me left behind. Camille says boys don’t date girls who wear sneakers with their dresses.

“I don’t want a date.”

She rolls her eyes. “You will.”

Our mother says she’s one smart cookie. “It takes more than a body and nice clothes to get your stepfather.”

Henrik worked for the government, building fighter planes for our military. When we moved into our new house, our mother told the neighbors, “Henrik is with the government, but we’ll keep that our secret.” She told everyone who came by to say hello or who brought by something to help with dinner.

Our mother met Henrik right before Christmas last year; they got married on New Year’s Eve, with me and Camille standing beside them and a judge in plain clothes and not even a Bible telling us how lucky we were to find each other.

Before that day, I only talked to Henrik once, when I answered the phone. He said the sound of my voice made him miss his own little girl. I asked him if she had a phone, but he took so long answering I hung up.

I’m not feeling so lucky. Neither is Camille.

A month after the wedding our mother went back to her job at the insurance company because that’s what she was doing when she met Henrik. And because life would be a bore if she didn’t have something to do with herself.

Camille says our mother tried crocheting and took a pottery class, but it didn’t fill the holes.

Our mother went back to work for the interaction. She isn’t the stay-at-home kind of mother. She needs to have interests. She needs to think about more than what’s for dinner and does she have enough chicken. She needs to talk to more than the mailman about additional postage and the grocery clerk about the price of cheese. She needs outside stimulation.

Camille says our mother has to work to help support us because Henrik has his own children from another marriage.

“What’s alimony?” I ask.

“It’s when you get divorced,” Camille says. “It’s when the husband pays the wife so she can go on living like she’s used to.”

Henrik is paying for his wife and children, so our mother was married at the courthouse and they went to Ensenada for their honeymoon. We stayed with a sitter.

“For once I’d like to have a real honeymoon,” I heard our mother say. “I don’t suppose that will ever happen.”

“Ensenada will be nice,” Henrik said. “We can lay on the beach.”

“Not this time of year,” our mother said.

“Sure we can,” Henrik crooned. “It’s warmer down south.”

Camille says Henrik was the best at making our mother happy. “He knew a lot of the right things to say.”

The problem was his first wife appreciated it more than our mother did. Three months after Ensenada, Henrik went back to his family.

Our mother blamed it on the honeymoon; Ensenada wasn’t much better than Borrego Springs. “Any marriage that starts at the jalopy motel is bound for disaster,” our mother says.

Walk of Stars

“
T
ú fea!”
he says, not even looking at me.
You’re ugly.

The little
niño,
playing with his cars and GI Joe, on the floor of my new home.
The Casa de Madeline Parker.

I tell him, You’re breaking my heart, little Romeo.

“Dolor de corazón.”

He shrugs his little-boy shoulders, makes the GI Joe crash into a table leg and fall over dead. The car keeps going, without a driver. Not a thought spared for poor GI spread out on his face.

How I got to Madeline Parker:

We agree on a price. He says, “Come on, how ’bout fifty dollars for the whole package? How ’bout it, baby?”

“I’m not your fairy princess,” I tell him. “That’s half price. What? Is it your birthday?”

“Sixty?” he says.

“You’re wasting my time.” I move down the sidewalk some, with him crawling after me in his white family sedan.

“Seventy-five? Come on, sweetness, that’s all I got.”

It’s a slow night. I tell him eighty dollars will get him whatever he wants, and we’ll take our time.

The Walk of Stars Motel on Sunset is where I do my business. Manny has an arrangement with the clerk. The rooms are old, water-stained, and musty, but I’ve never been caught up by the police there. Necessity’s more important than atmosphere. Most johns aren’t thinking about the wallpaper, anyway. They’re not saying to themselves, This place needs new carpeting. The maid could’ve done a better job cleaning.

The beds are king-size, and that’s all that matters to any of them:

“Oh, a lot of room here.”

“That’s a big playground.”

I get this guy down to his briefs then say to him, “You want to pay me now? When business is taken care of, I can take care of you.”

He says to me, “Sure, baby. Sure, baby. Here’s your money.”

He hands me four twenty-dollar bills. When I’ve got them folded in the palm of my hand, already thinking I’ve made the rent this week, he says to me, “Sorry, honey.”

He pulls out a pair of handcuffs and snaps them on my wrists. “I’m the police,” he says.

“Where do your parents live?”

“The North Pole. They’re Eskimos.”

“Yeah? Where do you live?”

I tell him about my luxury apartment, behind the Wal-Mart and next to the tracks.

“You live on McClintock?” he says. “All by yourself?”

“Sí. Por cierto.”
I wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Who pays your rent? You? Your pimp? Who’s paying the bills?”

“I pay my own way. I’m independent.”

You see, the price of sugar’s gone up again. There’s no problem making the bills when you’re Chloe Doe.

“What are you, fifteen?”

I tell him, Thank you very much. “Nineteen my next birthday.”

“Yeah?” Like he doesn’t believe me. And he’s right. Next year I’ll be able to vote, to serve alcohol, to get a job some-place where the men can look but not touch.

“You have any family? Anyone to help?”

It’s an extended stay at juvie or Madeline Parker hospital for self-afflicting personalities.

Madeline Parker is better than prison. It’s better than the state hospital, where they drug you and tie you to a chair, put you in front of the TV, and turn on
The Price Is Right
. Where you forget what day it is, and even what year.

The decision is out of my hands:

“You want to save this one?”

“You think this one has saving potential?”

Who’s to say I deserve this chance more than another girl? Who’s to say I’ll do more with it?

Sometimes it comes down to a coin toss.

It’s luck, good or bad.

It’s karma catching up with you.

“Tails it’s Madeline Parker.”

Have you done one nice thing in your life? Helped someone when they were needing it?

Yes, I’ve done that much. And more.

The coin falls tails-up.

So I have a little luck this time. I’m worth the taxpayer’s money. They put me in a blue van:
MADELINE PARKER INSTITUTE. (213) 555-1737.

From the outside it doesn’t look like a hospital. It looks like a Spanish hacienda. A spa for the rich and famous. There are red and yellow flowers on the borders and no bars on the windows.

“This is your stop,” the driver says. “Welcome to Madeline Parker.”

He comes around and unlocks my door. “Don’t think of running,” he says.

He’s bigger than a jet and just as quick.

“Where would I go,” I say. “All dressed up and no party?”

He says the orange jumpsuit and the plastic cuffs will come off inside.

In the entrance a little
niño
is sitting on his haunches, playing cars. His
abuelita
is walking circles, waiting for visitor’s hours, waiting to see her daughter-
puta.
Her
ramera.
Her shame.

“Hello, little
niño. ¿Cómo está?”

“¡Tú fea!”
he says.
You’re ugly.

You’re ugly, too.
Cholo.
You’ll grow up ugly.

Cholos

O
ur mother says our father was a Romeo. That’s why she married him.

“What’s a Romeo?” I ask.

“Shut up,” Camille says.

“He swept me off my feet. He was a ladies’ man, and gallant. A knight in shining armor.” Our mother looks up from her
Vogue
magazine and pins us with her eyes. “If nothing else, remember this about your father: He really knew how to treat a lady. Too bad he had no staying power. Commitment means nothing these days.”

Camille and I were not raised on Mother Goose. Our mother read to us her favorite love stories, the ones she discovered in high school and then left home to find for herself. Sometimes she read to us the advice columns from women’s magazines. She said my first word was “sweetie.” That I began to read at age three, the same year my father left. That I often read to her from the newspaper. I remember she tore out wedding announcements and hung them on the refrigerator; I remember better stories of men leaving their wives and women found lifeless with empty pill bottles clutched in their hands.

“You can have your white knight,” she tells us. “Just make sure you stock up on Connoisseurs.” A tarnish remover sold on TV. She goes back to her magazine. The sun glares white off the pages. We’re in the backyard of our new rented house on Myrtle Street in San Ysidro. Very close to the Mexican border, to Larsen Park and all the yellow and orange umbrellas on Front Street.

Our mother is sitting in a lounge chair under the Pacific palm, drinking Cuervo with lime juice because we’re out of fresh limes. She sends us indoors for ice when what she has melts away. Next to her the phone rings and she answers it, sounding breathless, even though all she had to do was lift it from her lap.

Camille listens to our mother’s telephone conversations. Our mother talks to her boyfriends in the evenings, while she makes dinner, and on the weekends, when she can find them. She isn’t allowed to make personal calls from the office. We’re supposed to be outside at this time, even in the dead of winter, when it’s raining and the sky gets dark as early as five o’clock. We come in when we get too cold, or if Camille gets bored. Then Camille sits down in the hall near the kitchen and listens. Today, Camille drops the little shovel she’s using to pry the weeds loose and sits back on her heels. Her back is to our mother; otherwise she’s not even trying to hide the fact that she’s listening.