Forged in Grace (6 page)

“
Who fucking cares,” she says, and struts directly toward a crowd of people.

“
How can you tell who anyone is?” I ask.

“
It doesn’t matter,” she says. “So long as they know who you are.”

The crowd parts to let her in, and then to let me in. And there’s dark-eyed Gabriel Diaz who will later put his fingers into my underwear, smother me in weed-scented kisses, before insulting me when I don’t put out.

I suppose I should remember that night with shame or misery. It was the night Marly told me they’d be moving soon, the night the boy I liked rejected me. But tonight it comes into my mind viscerally, bringing the brine of ocean and the tang of beer, the smell of my own arousal, the feeling of possibility, of something magic hidden around a bend in the road if I’m only brave enough to go that far.

II

Chapter Six

Las Vegas 

I watch the earth recede as we lift into the sky, feeling the anxious swoop of sudden buoyancy.
The last time I flew out of Oakland International Airport, I was ten, on our way to visit Ma’s dying father in New York. My one and only encounter with my grandfather. Now, I stuff a pillow to the right of me, to ward off any accidental contact of Marly’s and my knees.

We have barely made it past the unfasten seatbelts sign when Marly
’s face pinches and she tears the items out of the seat pocket ahead of her, grasping onto a paper rectangle. She holds it to her mouth, eyes squeezed shut. I look away as she retches, trying not to gag.

She wipes her mouth and turns to the man across the aisle who has watched the whole event, mouth open with accusations he seems to be on the verge of delivering.
“It’s not the plague, okay? I’m pregnant,” Marly says, sighing theatrically.

The flight attendant comes and takes away the signs of Marly
’s morning sickness but I am left with the horrible realization that there is much I don’t know about Marly, least of all this.

“
Pregnant?” I ask, as if this might be either miscommunication, or one of Marly’s outspoken attempts to get attention. Marly’s flat stomach does not match the rotund images of pregnant women who comprise nearly half of Adam’s business—always frowning and moaning, pressing their hands to their lower backs. A pinch of guilt follows my thought: what if her condition impinges upon our fun?

“
It’s new to me, too.” She leans back into her seat and exhales. “Which is why I didn’t say anything.” Her hair is in a messy pile atop her head, though it still manages to look artful, on purpose, but it also reveals vulnerably exposed ears and neck.

“
Are you undecided?”

She folds and unfolds a tissue in her hands.
“There’s something insanely hopeful about a child, right? Fresh start, the sweet smell of baby skin, a person who loves you more than anyone else on the planet.” She closes her eyes.

I can
’t contribute much to a conversation about children. I’ve only spent time with them at a distance, at parks, learned to avoid close contact with them. They’re pointedly honest, their clothes always smeared in food and dirt. “I think Ma’s big hope is that I’ll find a husband so I can have children that will look the way I used to,” I say.

Marly doesn
’t respond, and I’m left feeling like I used to in school when I spoke the answer before all the other kids.

“
Where’s the father?” I prompt.

She shakes her head, her long silver earrings shimmying.
“It’s not about
where
he is. He’s not father material. A long story. Don’t want to bore you with it. Frankly, I’d rather do it by myself.”

Not boring, I want to say, more like important tourist information in the village of Marly, where I am about to reside for two weeks. But she
’s already pulled out her iPod. “You don’t mind if I tune out for awhile? Flying is making me feel super sick.”

Even if I do mind, I realize as she pops in her earbuds, the question was rhetorical.

We touch down in Las Vegas at just after 1:00 p.m. I’m quickly shucking off layers from clammy Drake’s Bay; the air is temperate and dry here, even for February. “I can’t believe that!” I say, pointing to a middle-aged man playing a slot right past the baggage claim, a look of urgency in his red-rimmed eyes.

“
Lady Luck might be anywhere,” Marly says with a silvery tone. “First time I came here I swear I felt it in the air, this heady anticipation of things to come.”

“
And now?” I ask. “Do you still feel it?”

Marly pats her belly and shoots me a smile.

After we fetch my luggage Marly walks us expertly to a line of travelers standing with their suitcases on the street—as we get closer I see they are girls, young women really, wearing short dresses and sandals, ponytails, and dripping with dime-store jewelry like previous incarnations of Marly. One of them gives me the quick head snap glance that tries to say she didn’t even notice anything unusual. I hunker behind Marly, grateful for her height.

Marly
’s smile is amused as she looks at me crouching behind her, perched on the top of my suitcase, and for a second there’s a clutch of annoyance at my breastbone that she doesn’t have to think about which way to stand facing people.

“
Don’t mind them, Grace,” she says. “All those girls care about is booze and hooking up with hot guys who won’t remember their names at the end of the weekend.” Her words are laced with the acid of experience.

The girls crowd into cabs three-deep, and though I know Marly is right, a part of me envies them for the ability to sit so close to each other without consequences.

When it’s finally our turn, sweat drips inside my pants, sweater, and boots. I’m relieved to sit in the dank smelling cab. Outside is a dry, dusty terrain that does not allow any secrets.

Marly tells the cab driver her address, adding,
“Take us down The Strip, avoid the tunnel, please.”

The airport rolls away until, before long, The Strip rears up like an acid trip, revealing a lit Roman dome and a fancy version of the Eiffel tower. A giant globe outside Bally
’s looms over everything, promising to glow moon-like at night.

“
Wow. You’d think Vegas was a scheme a rich person dreamed up to compensate for their lost childhood.”

“
Isn’t it?” Marly shrugs. “It’s a place where people get to re-live their lost childhoods, too,” she says, then too quickly adds, “Do you know there are show girls and casino employees that work all night and sleep all day for years? They literally don’t ever see the sun. Have to get fake tans and take Vitamin D in a jar.”

“
That sounds awful.”

“
Oh no, Grace, it’s exciting. Think of life lived during the stretch of time when most of us are asleep—it’s the witching hour all the time.”

Though I know we
’ll return, The Strip passes too fast—I want to run after it like a child after a train.

It takes twenty minutes more to reach Marly
’s apartment, a tiny glass rectangle glimmering above us in an enormous gray column of condominiums. I can barely make out the little planter boxes of red geraniums she tells me to look for on her balcony. Twenty-third floor.

I roll my suitcase behind me through the lobby, which is decorated in gold and green that still sings of the seventies, into the elevator that
’s mirrored on all sides. As Marly presses in a code, then hits “23” I don’t know where to look because I don’t want to stare at myself for so many floors. As we start to ascend, Marly fidgets next to me.

The elevator is so hot that beads of perspiration perch on Marly
’s brow and nose. “You okay?”

“
I don’t know.” She shrugs and holds her shoulders up at her ears for a moment. “I thought I was going to find closure in California and come back here feeling…renewed.”

“
But you don’t?”

“
Well, I found
you
, but…I’m knocked up, my only relative worth giving a shit about is dead, and I have to figure out how to get
le sperm donor
off my back. I’m just glad to be home.”

Home. Hard to attach that word to this mysterious place of desert rock and fairytale oases.
“You really don’t have any connection to Drake’s Bay anymore? You never miss it?”

“
Grace, I don’t know how to explain this to you. I know it’s still your home. But for me, it’s like the past is stored in the redwoods, grouted into the sidewalks when I walk around town. I feel memories jumping into my body like parasites.” She clutches herself as if suddenly cold. “When I’m away, it’s like someone just cut the strings to a thousand weights hanging from my body, and none of it has to live in me.”

Not having been away from home long enough to experience what she
’s describing, I do like the way the Vegas air seems to fill my lungs, to shake out the old, stale air of Ma’s heavy corners.

I look away from her only to catch my own nervous face in the mirrored walls. It is one thing to look at Marly, a whole and perfect creation. But to see us standing together, my bald head poking out of my sweater like a Q-tip, is like looking at a goblin come to collect on his favor from a queen. I close my eyes.

I try to think of something I can say that will improve her mood, but then Marly shakes her head and claps her hands together as the elevator dings at floor twenty-three. “Quit your bitching Marlboro,” she instructs herself, then turns to me. “I’ve got you!”

“
You call yourself Marlboro?”

She shrugs.
“I was a chain smoker for awhile. It stuck.”

I remember her, years ago, pulling out a glass jar full of cheap cigarettes from the bush outside her bedroom window—the harsh tobacco scent exciting, dangerous. Its promise of a
“powerful buzz” always dissolved into coughing and nausea for me, but Marly could take long, deep drags and then lean back as though the smoke changed her into something more than human.

My suitcase clacks behind me as I follow her down a long burnt orange hallway, past a row of identical orange doors. Marly has only a small carry-on bag with her. She stops in front of lucky number thirteen. The hand that holds her key out is suddenly shaking, and it takes me a second to figure out why. The door is already open, cracked a few inches wide.

“Oh fuck,” she says, low and husky. “Wait here Grace.”

My hand hovers at the edge of her elbow, to pull her back, but I can
’t. “No, you don’t know who’s in there! It could be a robber or something.”

Marly
’s shake of the head is like a lion tossing back its mane before a meal. “You can’t break into this building. You have to know the code on the elevator to get it to go up and have a key.

“
Well then, I’ll go in first,” I say, more bravely than I feel. I came here to have adventure, after all.

“
No, together, at least.”

Side by side, we step into her apartment. Whatever I may have expected—a colorful palette like her grandmother
’s house, a riot of collaged magazine pictures like her teenage room—I am not prepared for this: just about every piece of furniture is upside down or on its side: lamps, couches, dining room table, chairs, etc. This vandalism was not done in a fit of passion, but rather with calculated care, items laid on their sides just so. No perpetrator waits in sight.

More alarming to me is the blinding whiteness. All of it is white—the walls, carpet, bookshelves, sofa and matching loveseat, picture frames, her Formica table and its chairs, the few dishes set in the dish drainer, as if someone came in with a big air gun of white paint and sprayed everything at once. I feel like I
’ve entered a set for an existential play. “So…white,” I say.

“
Helps keep my head un-crowded,” she whispers.

Un-crowded?
On tip-toe I shadow her through the living room, past the kitchen. “Why would someone do this?”

“
I told him I’m knocked up,” Marly whispers, craning her head around the corner. “I just didn’t confirm that the baby is his. This is his answer to me. I guess he’s planning to turn my life upside down. So original, fucker.”