What I Had Before I Had You (5 page)

“Let's check the shops,” I say to Carrie, and we dash madly from one to the next, making little bells ring as we shove open doors, elbowing to the front of order lines to ask,
Have you seen a little boy?
We agree to each take every other, so I find myself alone in an arcade, angling at little boys of Daniel's build, rapt little faces lit blue and red by the flashing screens, before I realize that this is
my
arcade. My ears ring with beeping and gunfire and boys yelling in triumph and defeat. Here is the same old Asteroids machine, vintage now, the original operating instructions worn away by a million greasy hands and replaced by a taped-on laminated card. The lights strobe over me, and they don't go away when I close my eyes. The noise pounds from inside my skull. My mother says, “Olivia, five more minutes.” Kandy laughs and leans on the machine, sticks her ass out.

I run out into the light and smack into Carrie. We stand, scanning, thinking. Where would I have chosen to hide? I am eight, I am twelve, I am fifteen. I storm the streets with my friends. We know everyone, we know everything. Blanche runs at my heel, my sisters appear and disappear on all the benches, smiling, egging me on. The town opens up to me, the buildings hinging into cross section.

I look north. Beyond the rides is the old town—the naked concrete foundations, the empty littered lots, and, still decaying in peace, the Emerald Hotel. Through the loops and arcs of the metal coaster, the Emerald seems to loom. I see Jake leaning over me, I see Kandy laid out on a chaise, her hair like a sun. Some of the Emerald's windows are boarded up, and some gape dark. The building calls out sadly, it invites me. I take Carrie's hand and pull her north toward the end of the boardwalk. I half-recognize that this is a strange decision; I am now making strange decisions.

As we approach the Emerald, I look at my daughter sidelong and feel curious. How unlikely it is that this person came out of my body, how unlikely that I bore a son who is now missing. How did all this time slip past me? Who put me in charge? Here, with the ocean in my ears, it seems more reasonable to think that I am the one who is missing, making my way boldly through the dark town, accepting my first invitation into the rule-breaking world.

 

4

F
RIDAY NIGHT. THE
Emerald Hotel is condemned, full of asbestos and rats. Whoever owns the building long ago stopped taping up the cracks in the windows and scrubbing the graffiti off the brick walls. I have never been inside. Everyone said it might collapse at any moment, and I was a practical child. Now, though, I feel invited to transform: I am a real teenager, a devil-may-care trespasser. So let the building collapse.

The Emerald is a relic of our town's optimistic beginnings, built for a more elegant crowd than ever graced its faded, gilt-stenciled hallways. Ocean Vista was a fishing town until the early twenties, when it caught the eye of a young speculator just back from a summer on the French Riviera. He bought most of the town dirt-cheap, tore down the fisheries, and built luxurious seaside medical clinics and hotels on the European model, as well as the original boardwalk, which rotted through and was replaced long ago. His enthusiasm was just promising to pay off when the country was plunged into the Great Depression, and nobody could afford that kind of luxury. People went instead to Coney Island or Ocean City, where hot dogs and beer were cheap, and rooms could be rented by the hour. Our town benefactor went into enormous debt and disappeared. Most of his buildings stood empty until condemned, and many of the condemned, like the Emerald, still wait in financial limbo for demolition. Around them, the town grew into the thing it is now: not an American Riviera but a tasteless playground for the middle class. Most people who live in Ocean Vista work in the service industries, as nail techs, store clerks, waiters. There is a certain respect between year-rounders that does not extend to the summer people. We live in this ruin, we know the secrets, we hold the keys.

The windows are dark as I make my way through the littered crabgrass field at the rear of the hotel. I picture betrayal: empty rooms, a thick-armed groundskeeper, “gullible” written on the ceiling. I find a stairwell leading down to a basement door that stands slightly ajar. At the bottom of the stairs, wet leaves swim in muck, plastering themselves to my feet inside my sandals. Moving through the dark basement toward a fuzzy area of light, I hear noises above me—a crash and laughter, faint music cut by the slam of a door. I climb stairs, trailing my fingertips across the green-and-gilt diamonds of the wallpaper, mold blooming from the cracks. The chairs on the landings are mildewed and mouse-nested, and the brass of the lamp sconces is mottled green.

I follow the sounds up to the top floor and gather myself for a moment before I push open the double doors marked
Honeymoon Suite.
Inside, rooms full of kids and music—the Smiths—games of cards going on, one girl down to her bra. Gas lanterns hiss on tables and in corners. The walls glisten with paint, gunked on so thick in some places that plastic soldiers and the front halves of My Little Ponies hold fast, as if they are jumping through. The ratty boys are here, hitting a Hacky Sack back and forth with tennis rackets over a sofa where two short-haired kids of indeterminate gender are making out. This exists? Everyone else has been doing this while I festered in my little house, playing Monopoly with Mom? I pick my way through. “Get off my foot,” says someone on the ground, and snaps a leg up behind my knee so I buckle and go down.

From this closer vantage point, I notice that the floor is entirely tiled over with dirt-blackened circles of chewed gum. When I turn my head, I can see between ankles and chair legs to the corner of the room, where the colors remain undirtied: cinnamon red, ice blue, wintergreen. I snap a photo. Then there is running and laughter, and Pam is lifting me up. She smiles at me, tucks her frizzy curls behind her ears, and leads me over to a couch in the bedroom where Kandy reclines like Marie Antoinette. She is talking to, or at, Jake, who sits on the floor with his hands laced together over his knees. He acknowledges me only with a cool glance. I wonder if he is ashamed to have been outclimbed.

“Told you,” Pam says to Kandy, who sticks out her tongue.

“What?” I scan the room for my sisters. The relief I felt when I developed the pictures has dissipated. The photographs prove
something,
but what? That others can see them, too? People see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast. All day I have been vacillating between faith that these are my ghostly sisters presenting themselves to me, and terror that I believe this, that I have taken photographs of girls I know are dead.

Kandy rolls her head toward me. “I didn't think you'd come. But Pam had this, like, deep feeling that you were meant to chill with us.”

“Look, I already did you.” Pam points to a mural that stretches across the wall where a bed once stood, the light shadow of a carved wooden headboard preserved in a black paint outline. The mural is a landscape from a dream, full of halfway logic, buildings rising from lakes that double as the eyes of a huge fish, a volcano erupting, lava spilling down a mountainside toward an impervious hovering town. Parts of the painting are clumsy and other parts exquisite. I look where Pam is pointing, at the edge of the hovering town, and there I am, rendered excellently, a tiny figure standing on top of a tiny white roller coaster, my hair dark blue and flying out wild.

“Like it?” Pam asks. She can't know how well her welcome fits me. To be included, not only invited but
included
in this way, in an image. I am bowled over by this gift. Maybe it's through Pam, but I know it comes from my sisters. The room is warm from bodies and lanterns, and I am in the picture. Kandy widens her eyes at me from the couch. “Do. You. Like. It.”

“It's amazing,” I say, and Pam rocks back on her heels, pleased. She points herself out, right by the corner, wearing a suit of armor, holding out a gigantic paintbrush like a sword. “And Kandy,” she says, giggling, “is there.” She points toward the ceiling, where a tiny Kandy sits Indian-style in a cloud, draped in gold, with many snakey arms and an elephant's trunk. “She wanted to be a goddess.”

“Fuck you, Pam,” says Kandy lovingly, with the intonation of “thank you.” She flicks her gaze back to me. “You're the ninety-first on the wall, baby doll. But most of these kids are gone now.” She swings her leg down to tickle Jake's side with her toes, red-vinyl polish on her toenails. “Show her Jake.” Jake watches as Pam pulls me across the room to the other side of the mural. Paint Jake is flying, arms out to his sides, over the ocean.

Kandy picks up a beer from the floor and swills it. “See, you can climb, but he can fly.” She smiles at me for a long moment and then scrambles down from the couch, lighting candles on the floor. “We're going to have a séance,” she says. “For the new girl.” Through the window, I can see the lights of boats far out on the water.

Pam sits down, tugging me down next to her. “So, your mom? Is she a fake? It's okay if she is. Most of them are.”

“No, she's not fake,” I say. “But she's crazy.” The word hangs in the air. I am bragging, intuiting that these kids will be impressed, but once I say it out loud, it feels dirty. I've never called her that before.

Kandy groans. “Everybody's crazy. Crazy how?”

I think of my mother staring into an empty crib. I think of the three crisscrossed ballet-slipper ornaments that hang in our front hall, and my sisters' faces bobbing above the shifting surface of the ocean. “She's a pathological liar,” I lie. “And she thinks that time travelers are controlling the government.”

“No. Way,” Kandy says. “That's pure gold. You better get the address of your next of kin, 'cause when that shit blows, it's gonna be messy.” She mimes a lobotomy with her index finger. “Join hands,” she says, grabbing for Jake and Pam. “Who has a question?”

Pam giggles. “I don't think that's how a séance works.”

The ratty boys are talking in the next room. They were with my sisters. I could ask them questions.

“Whatever,” said Kandy. “Shut up.” The Talking Heads' “Psycho Killer” is playing, and some kids are dancing.

Jake stands up, gives his shoulders a little shake as if to get free of something, and wanders off. When he is out of view, Kandy flops back onto the floor and yells, “GOD!” Pam hands me a warm beer that tastes like pumpernickel bread. I drink it fast and take another.

How many of my mother's rules am I breaking? I settle on about half. The rules have never been enumerated, but I know them very well, since, as the only living child, I have nobody else to mitigate my mother's scrutiny of my every act. My sisters are perfectly obedient. They do not make mistakes, and they do not change. They are an impossible ideal beside which I appear to flail. I am supposed to be strong and brave and self-sufficient. I am supposed to live unencumbered by the shackles of social conformity. This is freedom. I am not to associate with, befriend, or desire persons of the male gender (this one is deeply implied, if not stated outright). I am not to stay out after ten, because that's when such persons roam New Jersey, ruining women. I am not to dress provocatively or try to look older than I am. I am not to use substances that could make me a desirable or limber rape subject.

Further, I am not to neglect the nursery or the carpets, to let pretzel crumbs embed themselves in the weave of the sofa cover or soap scum snake across the bathroom tile. When I was ten, my mother turned off the vacuum cleaner one day and let it smack to the floor. “I'm done,” she said, and went to bed midafternoon. A month later, the kitchen table gluey with old cheese gratings, the bathtub brown with grit, I checked the divine-energies chart to see how long it would be before she swung back up. The chart showed colored lines climbing from a point weeks earlier; it was just a hopeful guess, like a weather report on the news. The house was wrecked enough that even I could see that a stray teacher or social worker would be justified in making an officious phone call.

I remember the bounce of the screen door that day when I came home to find her slumped on the rank kitchen table, her head pillowed by a smooshed Kleenex box, a brown mouse nosing at crumbs by her toes. Her eyes were round and glassy, like the eyes of a doll. She didn't move when I laid my hand on her shoulder or when I said her name. I put my face up close to hers and sang a little; sometimes this brought her up from what she called a deep-thinking state.
The water is wide, I cannot get o'er. And neither have I wings to fly . . .
The house cringed at my small flat voice, accustomed as it was to her room-filling alto. I thought maybe she was dead, but a spoon in front of her lips fogged and fogged, so I called 911 and watched men in uniforms like spacesuits carry her away on a stretcher. I told them that my daddy would be home soon, and they believed me and let me be.

When they were gone, I went to the closet and pulled out the dusty vacuum cleaner. I slapped a Beatles album onto the record player and taught myself how to clean the house. As I worked, a bitterness hatched in my stomach. For the first time, I thought of girls I knew from school who threw fits when given the wrong doll for Christmas, who complained about having to make their own beds, and I felt jealous of them, where before I had felt only scorn. A few days later, my mother blustered back in, as usual, with bags of groceries, and made no comment on the immaculate surfaces or the soft, clean carpet. It embarrassed her to need my help, especially at times like these, and so she never thanked me.

I AM DRUNK.
It is wonderful. I feel like a brand-new Olivia, life of the party, mystic powerhouse, lit from the inside. The sky is gray and purple, and I have no idea what time it is. One of the ratty boys is looking bored on a sofa. I walk over to him.

“Do you remember,” I ask him, “last week at the Ocean Spirit, those girls you were hanging out with, Laura and Courtney?”

He shrugs and assesses my chest. “No.”

“You were talking to Courtney by the roller coaster, and you told her she had pretty feet. Remember?”

“Lot of girls have pretty feet,” he says, and breaks into a grin. “I bet you have pretty feet.” He dives for my sneakers, trying to unlace them. I shuffle to get free, but he clamps on to my ankles, and for the second time tonight, I fall. We tangle awkwardly on the floor.

“I'm serious.” I try to catch my breath. “Do you remember her? Do you know her?”

“Babe,” he says, “there's no other girl in my heart but you, babe.”

And he kisses me. I am not ready for it. It is my first kiss, and how terrible. His tongue is chill as lunch meat. Kandy howls somewhere behind me. His hand is on my back under my T-shirt—how did he get it there?—and I feel the muscles in his lips, the hard-on against my leg, the vacuum of his beery mouth on mine. I push hard at his chest, but the suction holds, so I use my hand to shove his face off of mine. My hand is stress-fisted, though, so really, I punch him in the face, mid-kiss. He curses as he falls away.