Uses for Boys (8 page)

I tell her that I love her and Josh loves me and that this is the best thing for everyone.
I tell her that I’ll get a job. That I’ll work.

“I’m sixteen,” I say. “I’m not a child.”

I want to tell her about Josh and me. How it is between us. How he’s my family now.
How we’ll live together and paint the walls of his apartment and how I’ll hang pale
blue curtains and cover the bed with my big down comforter. I’ll take care of Josh
and he’ll take care of me, I want to say. Then I want to tell her my story. I had
no mother, I had no father. Then Josh came along and everything changed.

“Everything’s changed,” I tell her. She doesn’t ask about school, but I tell her anyway.
I have a plan for that. “Kids leave all the time,” I say. “I’ll get a GED. That’s
what Josh did,” I say. “And Angel.” And when I say that she makes a noise.

“You’ll be a dropout,” she says. And then she hangs up.

A few minutes later she calls back. “Fine,” she says. “Do what you want.”

the city

Get out of the suburbs as fast as you can, I tell Toy.

I’m electric.

Does she see it? I want her to want what I have. I’m going to live in the city. The
city! I look at her sideways.

I pack. I look at every thing I own and imagine it in Josh’s apartment. I make piles.
I pace around my room. In this echoing house, I think, there’s nothing I’ll miss.
And my mom’s gone again. Gone on the days I pack, missing on the day I move.

But Toy’s here, sitting on the side of my mattress, burning matches, scraping my bowl
and smoking a bit of resin, not saying much. I’m leaving her, that’s what she thinks.

I sit down next to her with a shoe box. Even sitting, she’s so much taller than I
am, angular and awkward. She wears long blue gloves, up to her elbow, but takes them
off to scrape the pipe. I sit close, our thighs touching. She’s intent on the pipe.
I take the gloves in my hands and stroke the thin shiny fabric.

“Josh got me a fake ID,” I say. But she’s silent. In the shoe box are pictures of
us from last year, taken with a Polaroid camera the stepfather left behind. In one,
we’re laughing on the back porch of an empty house in my neighborhood. We were drunk
and dressed in taffeta party dresses from the fifties. Mine’s green and I wear it
with black Converse; hers is pink and she wears brown cowboy boots. We’d ratted our
hair with a fine-tooth comb. Behind us the sun was setting, shifting and changing.
Toy held my hand and toasted. To best friends, she’d said.

“Who needs boys?” I’d asked.

In another picture from the same night, she hangs over the railing like on a jungle
gym, her face just visible between the bars. Her feet, in the battered cowboy boots,
kick up, causing the taffeta to blossom around her legs. Even upside down she’s arresting,
with narrow eyes and a knowing mouth. She looks beyond the camera, beyond me, and
if I turn the picture upside down, like I do now, it’s like she’s falling out of the
sky. Just falling, right out of the sky.

She ignores the pictures and looks around the room, my bedroom that used to be the
family room. “I’ll miss it here,” she says.

I look around at what used to be the stepbrother’s room. And I think about the house
like an architectural drawing, bisected so I can look into every empty room, all at
once.

“I won’t,” I say and put the pictures back in the cardboard box.

josh

Josh borrows a car to move me. It’s the first time he’s been to my house. He wanders
from room to room with me trailing behind, our boots leave diminishing muddy footprints
from the damp street outside.

With the pads of his fingers, he brushes the backs of the furniture, the glass vases,
the framed pictures and I see, using his eyes, how everything is new and clean. How
the glass objects, the bowls and balls, are free of dust. He sure didn’t grow up in
a house like this, he says. Am I sure I want to leave?

He stops in the upstairs bedroom, my old bedroom, the one from when I was a little
girl. Nothing has changed. It’s as though I still live there and I’m going to return
home any minute and start playing with dolls.

Neat rows of stuffed animals are arranged along the wall. Music boxes queue up, on
a high shelf, out of a child’s reach. Josh walks over and stands in front of them.
He’s giant against the child-sized bureau. He fondles each music box in turn, holding
them in his beautiful hands, turning them upside down to peer into their clockwork
hearts. He turns a worn key in one and we listen.

My old bed is covered in a yellow comforter with a violet pattern. I sit down on it
and Josh sits next to me. He puts his hand under my shirt and under my bra and holds
my breast in the small of his hand. We sit like this, listening to the music box until
it winds down.

it’s always romantic in the beginning

I drop out of school. It’s easy. I get a paper and sign it. I leave it on the kitchen
table for my mom to sign. The school signs it. School’s over. I pass Nancy Baxter
on my way out of the front doors and she’s hurrying to class but turns to look at
me. Bye, Nancy Baxter, I think. And then I think: she doesn’t mean anything to me
anymore.

I call Toy. “I did it,” I say. “Don’t you want to do it too?”

*   *   *

I get a job in a cafe. I make espressos, cappuccinos, lattes. I make nine dollars
an hour and tips in a jar. Nobody asks about my parents. Nobody says, why aren’t you
in school? Nobody says, where’s your mother? Nobody ever says, where’s your father?
But I rehearse the conversation. “There are no fathers in this story,” I’ll say. I
think it’s a very good line.

But I look for him. My useless father. I look for him at the cafe. On the street.

*   *   *

I move my boxes into Josh’s apartment. I put my comforter on his bed. I lie spread
out on top of the bed, fully dressed breathing in and out through my mouth with my
eyes wide open staring at the ceiling. Now I’m here and I live here and even though
my boxes of things don’t seem to make much of a difference and the apartment is still
artless and bare, I’m here. And when I breathe here it’s different. I stretch my arms
wide open and take it all in.

“Hug me,” I say.

“Kiss me,” I say. And Josh tells me about all the things he’s done and I sit across
from him in one of his two big chairs and I listen. We put on our coats and walk around
the neighborhood. We walk out to the river, past the empty warehouses and the old
rubber factory. We walk up the hill to where the rich houses are and steal a stone
statue of a cherub out of someone’s garden. We put it next to our bed. I love you,
I tell Josh. I’ve always loved you, he tells me.

I call Toy and tell her how romantic it is. “I say I love you and he says I always
loved you.” She doesn’t say anything. “Isn’t that romantic?” I ask.

She doesn’t answer. She’s distracted. I can hear her at the stove and know that she’s
scrambling eggs for her mom. She gets scared, I know, because her mom doesn’t eat.

“I want you to meet him,” I say.

“There’s a lot going on for me,” Toy says.

“Your mom.”

“No.” She sounds sharp and I can hear her mom in the background. “It’s Seth,” she
says. “He has something special planned.” Even with my new apartment, Toy’s life sounds
more romantic than mine. I miss her. I turn everything I see into a story to tell
her.

“I miss you,” I say. I’ve lived with Josh for two weeks and she hasn’t visited at
all.

I call Angel then, and walk up to her apartment. It’s small and she’s painted the
walls red—she’ll never get her deposit back, she says—and admire the row of antique
dresses that separates the sitting area from her bed. I run my hands along the paper-thin
silk, too delicate to wear.

I’m wearing my uniform, a long men’s cardigan with my favorite faded T-shirt and gray
jeans with Converse sneakers. I can see a sliver of my reflection in Angel’s mirror
and I look like the girl I imagined I’d be. I want to call Toy again and tell her.

Angel asks me about Josh and I tell her that he likes it when I fall asleep with my
head on his chest. I tell her how he keeps me wrapped up in his arms all night. How
romantic it is, how he’s loved me forever.

She knows how it is with boys. “It’s always romantic in the beginning,” she says.

winter

Josh wakes me up in the middle of the night to have sex. Sometimes he kneels over
me and holds my wrists above my head. Sometimes he pulls me on top and I rock back
and forth until he comes. I get up early to go to work. The apartment is so cold that
I have to kneel in front of the space heater to get dressed. It’s winter. It isn’t
the apartment I’d imagined it would be.

My fake ID belongs to a girl named Elizabeth Ray Clark. She lives in Seattle and kind
of looks like me. In her picture she has gray-blue eyes that look like mine. She squints
through her eyelashes. I pretend to be her. I go by Liz, Lizzie. Lizbeth if you know
me really well. My family calls me Beth. I live in my own apartment in Seattle with
exposed brick walls and big windows, high ceilings and hardwood floors. I have sheer
yellow curtains that bathe the room in warm colored light. I have a best friend who
comes over and hangs out with me and a bicycle that I ride around the city. It has
a basket. And I have a boyfriend. He’s funny and kind and he likes to write little
notes and leave them around the apartment.

Josh doesn’t write little notes. He was out of work when we met but now he has a job
painting houses. He’s tired all the time. He’s nineteen. He’s pale and skinny and
he doesn’t seem to want anything more than this.

“I work too,” I say, but he says it’s not the same. He says I’m a spoiled rich kid
who doesn’t know what it’s like in the real world. He says I’m just playing at it.
I’m slumming.

“I don’t want to spend my one day off painting,” he says when I ask if we can paint
the apartment.

The apartment is desolate. It swallows up all the pretty things I brought. I miss
Toy. We’re in the tunnel of winter now and it’s always cold. Too cold to sit in the
big chairs and talk. Instead we drink. We meet at the bar after we get off work. Josh
teaches me to say what’s on tap, and how to choose the best of the cheap beers, and
how, when I want to get drunk faster, to order tequila and drink it with lime and
salt. He rests both elbows on the bar, head hanging between, like something collapsed.

Josh’s stories loop so that now, after only a few months, I’ve heard them all. It
gets dark early. We avoid the apartment and stay at the bar. We eat cheap takeout.
Or we make macaroni and cheese from a box. I hang the dresses that Toy and I bought
at thrift stores—the blue velvet one, the black one with the rhinestones, the solid
ones and the ones with stripes. They make the prettiest spot in the apartment. I rest
my eyes there. Toy never comes to visit.

I call from the pay phone after work. Her mom answers. She never answers. She slurs
a word that sounds like hello and then she laughs. She makes another noise, like a
protest, and then Toy comes on the line. It sounds like her mom is crying in the background.

“Toy? Are you OK?” I say.

“Anna,” she says, her voice changing, and then she’s quiet. When she talks again,
she sounds dreamy. “I met a boy,” she says. “He has the most beautiful green eyes
you ever saw.”

“You said you’d come visit,” I say, but she goes on about the boy. He’s seventeen,
a senior in her high school.

“You could both come,” I say. But he’s busy, planning a trip. He’s going to hostel
through Europe and he’s invited her along, she says. They’ll start in Berlin and then
travel north to Sweden, he has family in Stockholm, and then back south to lie on
the beach. Italy, Spain, Portugal. They’ll leave next summer when school is out. She
has no idea what she’ll wear.

“That’s a long time from now,” I say, but she ignores me. He’s the most romantic boy
I could ever imagine, she says. And so thoughtful. In the middle of the night he comes
over and sneaks into her bedroom. They kiss for hours, she says. He brings her things,
jewelry, and lingerie. He buys her dresses.

“You should see the dress he bought me,” she says.

“Come show me,” I say, but she can’t. “Then I’ll come over to you,” I say.

“No,” she says. She’s busy.

I’m wearing heavy boots and a pale blue dress with a thick gray sweater and my heavy
coat. I leave the pay phone. I storm through the streets, up to Fourteenth, across
to Pettygrove, down to Third and Kearney. I’m not like Josh. I do want more. I pace
up and down the alphabet. Even when it’s not raining, the trees drip water. I end
up at Paranoia Park where I smoke dope under the bushes with some people I know there
and we look out at the businessmen crossing stiffly through the park. We smoke each
other’s pot. It’s Thursday and I’m supposed to have dinner with my mom. I’m late.

“Have you been smoking pot?” she asks, narrowing her eyes and looking into mine. I
tell her that I like her coat, that it looks pretty on her. The hostess shows us to
a table. I’m wearing my military coat and I know that she doesn’t think much of it,
but I like the way it buttons tightly around my chest and it’s long, longer than my
dress and it flaps between my legs when I walk.

We sit down and she orders a glass of wine. “Have you had enough?” she asks, before
I know what she’s talking about. Then, “Are you ready to come home?”

I look at the menu. “No,” I say.

the apartment

Josh isn’t home when I get back and the apartment’s cold. So cold I can see my breath.
I feel around in the dark because we haven’t replaced the overhead bulb and I make
my way over to the old ceramic lamp sitting on the floor. It doesn’t light the room,
just a bright circle at its base, so I sit next to it and empty out my tips like I
do every night: count the change, save the quarters for laundry, face the bills the
same way. I have forty-six dollars.