Veronica (7 page)

The next day, Daphne and I drove to meet our mom at a coffee shop in White Plains. We got there first and waited for her. It was a family place with tiny jukeboxes on the tables. Daphne turned the knob on our box, dully flipping through the selections—“You Are Everything,” “I Had Too Much to Dream,” “Incense and Peppermint,” “Close to You”—each a bit of black print inside a red rectangle. The people behind us picked one: “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.” The singer’s voice was light and gloppy at the same time, like a commercial for pudding. It had been popular when we were in elementary school, and the old recording gave off a dark, enchanted crackle. It made me think of teenage girls in bathing suits, lying in lawn chairs beside the public pool, eyes closed, breasts perfectly and synthetically cupped. Each blue wave sparkled with light. Boys shook water from their hair and looked at them. Daphne ran past, joyfully waving an inflated toy.

A car pulled up to the curb. We glimpsed our mother’s boyfriend as he dropped her off—a dark mass of lust and need who kissed her in the car and drove away. Don’t bring me down, I pray. My mother came in wearing a pantsuit that was too short for her high heels. Her eyes looked like her leaping voice, and

she walked like she was trying to go three ways at once. Here was the jealous, furious one: She was wearing big earrings and lipstick, and when she hugged us, sex came off her like a smell. Her jacket flapped open, showed hide with brisdes on it, then flapped back: Here was the one who lay where she fell, moaning like a cow.

But then she sat down and crisply opened the plastic menu, and here was the true one: Mom, boss of food and treats. Our minds went blank and our bodies remembered when we were little: She was the one who bought us our first milk shakes. She carried them out to the car, holding all four huge shakes squeezed together in her hands. The four of us sat drinking the shakes in deep silence, until we had to get the last bit up from the bottom; then we all slurped together. The warm, close air of the car on our skin, cold sweetness in the mouth: It was a wonderful reversal of warm breast milk and cool air, and this was a breast we could all experience together. Just seeing her open the menu brought that feeling back without us knowing it. You’re just too good to be true. A slim white arm stirred the gold pudding. We went into a trance, staring at the things on the menu.

But then there were the three directions and the bristling hide. As soon as we got our food, she started talking about how hard she knew it was. How hard it had been for her not knowing whether I was alive or dead for weeks on end and getting no support from our father. She ate her rhubarb pie. She had tried her best to understand that things were different now, and she hoped we would, too.

“Do you want a divorce or not?” asked Daphne.

Inside our mother’s eyes, an expression opened like a mouth and then snapped shut while her normal mouth prissily ate the pie. “It takes time to know something like that,” she said. “A relationship of so many years is complicated.” She ate with her prissy mouth. The bristling hide swelled out.

“It’s not fair,” said Daphne.

She sat up. Under the earrings and lipstick, she was a plain woman, and she knew the dignity of plainness. “Do you judge me?” she asked quiedy.

Yes, said Daphne’s face. I judge you and I hate you.

In my mind, I looked over my shoulder and pouted at a camera while the song played. Can't take my eyes off you. Invisible eyes on me were like an endless ribbon of sweet music. I don’t know what my face said.

“No,” said Daphne. “But I want to know if this is permanent, and so does Daddy.”

“So do I,” said our mother. “So do I.” And she looked sad. Her entire body looked sad. Daphne could do nothing against this except be sad herself.

The waitress came by with a sound of rasping and rubbing underclothes. She left the check on the table and disappeared through a swinging door. I glimpsed a busding kitchen of steel tables and orderly movement, sandwiches and dishes laid out. A sharp-eyed litde man in an apron suspiciously returned my look. What would it be like to work there?

Our mother opened her frayed wallet and wondered aloud how I’d make a living while I was writing poems.

“I could work in a restaurant. Or maybe I could be a model.”

“Right.” She sighed, got her wallet out and counted the bills carefully, figuring the tip on her fingers. “That sounds like a beautiful life.”

Inside Daphne, I felt something tremble like it would break, then hold steady.

Then came routine. My father drove Daphne and Sara to school on his way to work. I slept until noon, then got up and drank tea for hours. It was late November and light moved from room to

room with the active silence of a live thing. The cat lifted her head and blinked the deep black slits, the active green of her eyes. I paced from light to shadow, feeling my way back into the fleshy place I’d torn myself from. When I got there, I’d sit in the dining room and study for the GED with the TV on the rerun channel, volume off. I used to watch these shows with my family. The black-and-white people were so full of memory and feeling that they were like pieces of ourselves, stopped in a moment and repeating it again and again, until it became an electronic shadow of the fleshy place. Sunlight ran over the table and onto the floor. I’ve touched you all day, it said, and now I have to go.

Sara would cut school and come home early, then leave. I’d see her outside, kissing some boy who’d slap her ass when he said good-bye. Or whispering to another chunky girl with saucy goblin eyes, who offered her tits to the world in a sequined T-shirt. In the street, boys rode their bikes in slow swooping curves and called to one another. I’d strain to hear them; I was afraid they were jeering at Sara. But she’d come in like a cat, with an air of adventure about her, inwardly hoarding it. She’d get some food and sit in the room with me, watching TV with one big leg slung over the arm of her chair. She didn’t ask questions about anything that had happened while I was away. She looked at me like she already knew and that it was okay. It felt good to be with her.

Once I asked my dad about her nose, and he said, “It’s broken? Are you sure?” He seemed shocked, and then he said, “Are you sure it hasn’t always been that way?” Maybe he felt like everything was broken and he didn’t have time for one more thing. Maybe that’s why Sara was so mad at him. When he would ask her to help Daphne make dinner or clean up, she’d yell, “In a minute!” and then she wouldn’t do it. Or she’d yell, “We’re not your wives, and it’s not our fault if you don’t have one!” Then she’d run upstairs, sobbing with rage, and our dad would stand there like she’d gut-punched him.

Daphne and I hated Sara for acting like this. But it was

hard to hate her all the way. Her rage was like gentleness trapped and driven crazy with sticks. It was flailing and helpless.

It made Daphne’s measured goodness seem somehow mean. Maybe our father felt this, too. He never chased Sara up the stairs to shout back at her. He just stood there in pain. Then later at night, I would walk by his room. He would be lying in his pajamas and Sara would be sitting on a chair at the foot of his bed, rubbing his feet. Even just walking past, I could feel her concentration; it was huge and fleshy, like her yelling. And his feeling for it was huge, too. Once I heard him say, “You have good hands, Sara. You should be a nurse.” And she said, “Thank you,” her voice small, like a child’s.

I didn’t tell them about the modeling contest. I only mentioned it to Daphne while we were driving to the store. She halflistened, because she was mainly concentrating on smoking her cigarette and dropping ash out the window. I lied and said the photographer was a guy I got high with, and it just flew by her as one more piece of sad crap.

I still thought about modeling, but it was like something I’d masturbate over without expecting it to happen: A door opened and I was drowned in images of myself, images strong and crude as sexual ones. They carried me away like a river of electricity. Electricity is complicated, but on direct contact, it doesn’t feel that way. It just knocks you out and fries you. The door would shut and it would be gone, except for a fading rim of electric fire, an afterimage burning a hole in normal life.

But mosdy, I studied, watched TV, helped with dinner, wrote, went for walks with Daphne, saw friends who were still in school. On the weekends, there were beer parties in apartments with older kids. My friend Lucia was beautiful, even though she had bad skin and bleached hair. She was three months pregnant. When she graduated, she was going to get married and work the cash register at a store where we used to steal candy. I didn’t have disdain then, and so when I told her about the contest, I lied to impress her. I said I’d slapped Gregory Carson’s face, and that John had followed me out, begging me to enter the contest. We were sitting on a concrete stoop outside an apartment complex, drinking beers and watching cars drive in and out of a strip mall across the way. She smiled without looking at me, and I knew she could tell I’d lied, and that she forgave me. Music and laughter tumbled from the apartment in a snarl. Headlights flew past Lucia’s face and she gazed into nothing with a contentment that I didn’t understand. I saw it and I fertilized it. For a second, I pictured her eating dirt. Then I went home and half-listened to my father talk about what had gone wrong with the marriage and what might be done to “bring it back together.”

I took the GED in an old elementary school classroom in Hoboken. The desks were gray linoleum; the chairs were wood. The facilitator was a big, proud man with a bulbous, veiny nose, and he held his cheap jacket open to show his stomach. The other test takers were mosdy middle-aged people with bodies curled like snails crossing a road. The only other young person was a girl wearing a skirt that showed the tops of her panty hose. She glanced at me with sullen camaraderie. Then we hunched over our tests. The facilitator watched us cross the road.

When my test scores came back, my father called my mother to tell her how well I’d done. She made her boyfriend drive her over and wait outside in the car while she kissed me. My dad yelled about “that bastard sitting out there where everybody could see,” and Sara ran upstairs and slammed the door. My mother went out and told him to drive around the block. We all sat down and planned a budget for classes. I ordered course descriptions. I made ready to register. Then the letter from the agency crashed into the side of the house.

It has stopped raining. My sneakers are soaked, so I go ahead and walk through the puddles. Silver and black, full | of sky and the solemn upside-down world. The bus shelter glides under my feet like a huge transparent fish. On the side of it is a model in a black sleeveless dress. An ad for perfume: watch OUT, monsieur. She has a neat, exquisite face, deep, dim eyes, and a sensitive, swollen mouth. Her slight body is potent and live, like an eel. I like her. I am on her side to destroy monsieur. She makes me remember Alana, another small eel girl.

I walk through black shadows, across the inverted sky. I met Alana at a benefit show put on to support and celebrate the renovation of an ancient Parisian department store, the first of its kind in that country. I walked into the tiny dressing room and saw her standing naked in heels, picking through gorgeous gowns and yelling how her agent had made her get an enema that afternoon so she wouldn’t look bloated. “Now Matmoi-selle, ve vill unlock ze bowel!” She was cracking everybody up, talking about the crazy German who’d hosed her out. “Everybody” consisted of the seven models, four makeup artists, and fifteen hairdressers packed into a hot, narrow room that was all mirrors and countertop. Getting their faces made up, talking about enemas and shit: passing out in a nightclub and waking

up in ruined panties; diarrhea attack during shoot; farting in boyfriend’s face. The girls giggled hysterically; the hairdressers were getting in on it. They’d probably been up all night and didn’t feel like doing this obscure show. I hesitated at the door' Alana saw me and pounced. “You look like you need an enema ” she snapped. I blushed. The other girls tittered and quieted. Alana flounced into her chair and grabbed a handful of dark red cherries from a plastic bowl next to a mountain of hot hairpieces. Slouching and chewing, she looked absendy at her reflection: precise round forehead, nose, and chin. Hot eyes, dark, violent bloom of a mouth. White pearls in her clean little ears. If they wanted to find something wrong, they’d have to look up her ass. They went up there to serve perfection, and she mocked perfection with the shit that came out.

But—Watch out, monsieur. On the runway, she was a bolt of lightning in a white Chanel dress. She turned and gave a look. Thumping music took you into the lower body, where the valves and pistons were working. You caught a dark whiff of shit, the sweetness of cherries, and the laughter of girls. Like lightning, the contrast cut down the center of the earth: We all eat and shit, screw and die. But here is Beauty in a white dress. Here is the pumping music, grinding her into meat and dirt. Here are the other girls coming in waves to refill Beauty’s slot. And here is litde Alana, shrugging and turning away. Everyone applauded— and no wonder.

I walk past old homeless people huddled together under the dripping awning of a record store—three of them, like bags of potatoes with potato faces looking out of the bag to see what’s going on. They look like they know me. Maybe they do. Alana disappeared almost as fast as I did. If I saw her sitting on the street like this, it wouldn’t surprise me.

“You take the food out of my mouth and I’ll kill you!”

Veronica had screamed that at a homeless guy once. We were walking down the street together and she was talking to me about how she had to hide her HIV from her coworkers. She was eating a bagel and this beggar made as if to grab it from her hand. The rage came up in her like fire; she turned with a scream and hit him in the face. He bolted and she whipped around to me. “They’re trying to take the food from my mouth. Just let them try. Anyway, hon—” Her eyes were still wild with screaming, but she didn’t miss a beat. For her, it was part of the same conversation.