Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility (22 page)

So when our mother had gotten the job in Switzerland, she
chose me to take with her. I was working as a part-time receptionist
at a real-estate brokerage and had set a pattern of forsaking personal relationships in favor of adventure and other pursuits, like college.
In fact, I'd just gotten my degree in writing from an expensive private university. ("This will come in handy when you get that job selling Xerox copiers," the professor had told me as he handed me my
diploma.) And my mother wanted to make sure I didn't shit it away.
"Live with me for a year and you can write articles and get published
in magazines," she implored, so I did and I did. Today I am able to
cobble together a burgeoning career as a writer while my airline is
going bankrupt, and Cheryl is the dubiously thrilled proprietor of a
Central American bar she runs with Wayne, who I have not seen sober
since they moved there almost five years ago.

The fish, by the way, was the best thing I ever tasted.

"I knew it," Cheryl said, her voice taking a softer tone.

Sometimes I wonder how it would have turned out if Cheryl had
gone to Switzerland instead of me, how she might have fared if she'd
been able to utilize that gift I'd been bestowed during that time. Often
I long to talk to her about this, but I never do. Instead, with heavy
head, I turn away and remain silent.

S L.).

SOMETIMES I FEEL BAD ABOUT ABANDONING Cheryl at the Vancouver
airport, but mostly I just think Vancouver is a hell of a great place to be
abandoned in and she can damn well deal with it. I'd even warned her.
"If there's a single seat on that plane home and it's a choice between
you and me, I am grabbing it. I'll be waving to you from the window
as we take off, I swear I will."

I didn't have time to dick around on the way home like I did on
the way there, a journey that took us three days, two hotel rooms, and
a rental car. I hadn't meant to come to Vancouver, but I promised my
brother-in-law Eddie that for his birthday I'd take Cheryl far away. I
heard they have moose in Canada, and I thought it would be fun for us
to see a real one for the first time, as opposed to the fake one she shipped
air freight at a cost equivalent to the purchase of a whole herd. Her visit
with Eddie and Kim had been going on for four months, which made
me marvel at their patience. Cheryl hardly drinks at all anymore, so at
least there's that huge improvement, but still there's the other things,
the little things, the collection of idiosyncrasies our sister possesses that
makes hosting her over a long period of time fairly maddening.

For one, she doesn't seem capable of speaking in normal tones, only
in excitable bursts, and after a while it gets a little exhausting to be in the
presence of a person whose excitement level constantly has the intensity
of a crowd of people miraculously healed at a religious revival.

Then there is the fact that, since she moved to a third-world country just five years ago, her brain seems to have been sucked clean of any memory of modern convenience. For example, I know she knew
there was such a thing as computers before she left to live in Central
America, and I even know there are lots and lots of computers actually
existing in Granada as we speak, as I've been there and seen themthere's an Internet cafe across the street from the tavern she owns, for
chrissakes-but still Cheryl looks at my laptop like it's a shiny object
she wants to break open against a rock to see what's inside.

And how do you live on Planet Earth and not know how to use
an ATM? Cheryl has had a bank account since she was fourteen; I've
seen her use an ATM many times. But now she'll approach one and
say, with panic rising in her voice, "It says `enter your PIN number.'
What's a PIN number? What does it mean, enter? Is there an opening
where you put it?"

It's the little things like this that send me over the edge. Sometimes I wonder if she knows.

On the way to Canada, it was supposed to have been one simple fivehour flight, but we were flying standby on my friend's airline-employee
buddy passes, which is a surefire way to fuck up your plans if you're fool
enough to make any. If you've ever flown on a buddy pass, then I don't
have to tell you your best bet is to simply appear at the airport with a
bull's-eye painted on the back of your pants and tell the ticket agent to
direct you to the tarmac where, if you're extremely lucky, you might get a
few planes to ass-ram you within a day's driving distance of your destination. I had warned Cheryl about this, but she was undeterred.

"I've got time," she said wistfully. She was always being wistful about
things I felt were fairly serious, like how she'd up and moved to Central America one day. But as long as she'd been warned that she could get
stuck in any number of cities from here to the Pacific, I felt I'd done my
job as the fun-sucking sister, and we could commence our meandering
adventure. No need to fret over Cheryl, I thought. She knows.

But when it came time to fly home, I was under pressure to get
back because I am an actual mother, and my girl was returning from
vacation with the big Italian part of her family in New Jersey. Sometimes I'm self-conscious about the fact that most of my own extended
family is either dead or doesn't know I exist, which I guess is how my
mother wanted it when she decided to cut off communication with
them when I was little. Sometimes I wish I had uncles and stuff, but
those moments are pretty fleeting and almost entirely isolated to when
my daughter returns from vacation in New Jersey spouting stuff like,
"My whole family is Italian!" And I have to remind her that I am her
mother, which makes me part of her family, and I am not Italian.

But admittedly, when you look at Milly-with her caramel skin
and hair and huge brown eyes-you would never know her whole
family is not Italian. In contrast, my own eyes are green and I've been
saturating my hair with bleach since I was nineteen, when the blond I
was born with began to darken. When Milly and I are together, no one
ever remarks at our resemblance, which makes me worry sometimes
that after these trips away I'll have to remind Milly I'm her mother
when we're together again. But that thought dissolves the instant she
runs into my arms. She knows.

Cheryl's own looks favor our father. She has his dimples and mischievous eyes, back before his became rheumy with booze and then dulled with heart disease. I patted her on the shoulder before abandoning her in Vancouver to get back to my girl. As I predicted, the
plane had exactly one open seat on it, and true to my word, I grabbed
it. It was the very last seat in the cabin, which meant I'd have to spend
the flight averting my gaze from all the eye-level crotches standing in
line for the lavatory, but I was happy to be aboard.

Once I got situated, I looked up to see that the gate agent had
let my sister on board as well, and I got elated there for a while, until
I realized she'd talked them into doing a walk-through in case they'd
overlooked an empty spot. When they realized they hadn't, they
turned her around and escorted her off the plane. As I saw my sister
go, in her stained raincoat and hapless rucksack, I suddenly got all
overcome. "Christ, am I crying?" I thought. "I can't believe this." Lord
Jesus God, I realized, I damn-ass better see Cheryl again, because if
the last sight I ever have of my sister is of her being left behind, I seriously don't think I could bear it.

After the plane took off, the flight attendant came back to laugh
at Cheryl's antics on the Jetway before they closed the door, which
didn't surprise me. Cheryl is one of those super maniacally contagiously smiley kinda people, and there were probably a hundred passengers on that plane at that moment that this flight attendant would
have happily left on the Jetway instead. The flight attendant recounted
how she extended her sincere regrets to my sister as we were leaving,
and offered to deliver me a message if she wanted. At that, the flight
attendant told me, Cheryl just grinned as the door was closing and
said, "She knows."

9 1#L i~~ ~.~z £tL ,cam.

RUMOR HAS IT THAT CHERYL MADE IT BACK to Nicaragua. We don't
know for absolute certain, but Kim reports that Cheryl's bank account
shows there was a withdrawal last week from an ATM machine (ha!
I knew she knew how to use one!) in Granada, and we figure it must
have been made by our sister, since she is the only other person who
knows the password, and she wouldn't give it out even if someone
threatened to chop off her arms. We know this because that exact
threat was made by the last person who tried to rob Cheryl. It was
eighteen years ago, and that man is still icing down his balls to this
day, probably.

"Cher first paid a two-dollar fee to inquire about her balance,"
Kim observed, "then she spent another two dollars to make the withdrawal." We found that funny because it was so in keeping with the
fact that, no matter what her efforts are to keep from wasting money,
Cheryl never fails to waste money. Take last month. It would have
cost her $895 for a full-fare ticket to Vancouver, but instead she paid
$250 to fly standby. In the end, after reroute fees, hotel rooms for
those nights stranded in strange cities on the way to her destination,
two rental cars, and one train ticket, she ended up spending close to
$1,200 to get there and back. But on that last leg of her trip, when
she had to rent a car to get from Cincinnati to her final destination of
Kim's house in Dayton, the rental-car clerk, out of the goodness of his
heart, upgraded Cheryl to a convertible Mustang at the last minute
for no additional fee.

"Yeeeeehaaaawww!" Cheryl hooted into her cell phone as she
hurled down the freeway with the wind tossing her hot-pink streaked
hair into a tiny tornado above her head. "This car normally cost $150
a day! This makes it all worth it."

"You're missing it," Kim said, and tried to explain further about
how it would have been cheaper if Cheryl had just paid the full ticket
price. But by then Cheryl had accidentally tossed her cell phone onto
the back floorboard while waving to a trucker. She arrived in Dayton
an hour later, ready to roost herself in Kim's life for a few more weeks
before attempting to travel back to Central America, where we think
she made it, based on her bank receipts.

"I missed my flight and I'm stuck in Miami," her last phone message said. "I might make it out tomorrow."

I suppose if anything serious is amiss, we'll hear about it, like if
Cheryl really is missing or if she finally killed her husband like she
should; and most likely we'll hear about it from Cheryl herself afterward, though Kim always complains that Cheryl never offers any
details in her e-mail updates ("I'm leaving Wayne, see you Wednesday!"). But I consider these detail-free missives a definite plus. We
don't need to know why Cheryl left her husband, just that it was high
time she did. Same for when she went back to him six months later.

Kim, though, needs more details. She has always been that way ...
wanting to know what was on the menu before we decided on a restaurant, what the terms were on the lease before we signed the rental
agreement, what was in the syringe before the Guatemalan doctor
injected us with it. She is so damn picky. I remember when we took our last family trip to Vegas that my mother had finagled through
some time-share Ponzi schemers or something. All we kids had to do
to qualify for free hotel rooms-not to mention cocktails-was sit
through a three-hour sales presentation in a convention room next to
the lobby. Kim was only fifteen, but still she questioned the equity of
trading three hours of our time being assaulted by high-pressure salesmen in exchange for a free hotel room when hotel rooms were going
for just $25 that weekend anyway. "Not to mention that cocktails in
Vegas are already free," she pointed out.

But Cheryl and I were too busy trying to suck down as many
tequila sunrises as we could before we had to admit we were underage and not legally liable for anything we signed, at which point my
brother became the main morsel of rotting meat for the vultures to
peck. To this day he complains that that free hotel room cost him
thousands of dollars in useless dues until the time-share profiteering
company finally collapsed and couldn't afford to pay their attorneys to
extort money from their members anymore.