A Room on Lorelei Street (13 page)

Filthy money, Murray calls it.

across the counter, the echoes of dozens of yes ma'ams, yes sirs, my pleasure ma'am, groaning arches, smiles on cue, extra mayo, no mayo, orders that beg to be confused but aren't, anything elses, and come back agains…they follow the money like ghosts, make it more than money, and she can't describe it as dirty because

“Forty-five,” the clerk says. “Here's your receipt. We'll send a copy to your coach so he knows you're clear on your transportation fee.”

Another bill checked off. Accomplished. Done. Day by day.

It's working.

It was close. After the Food Star groceries, one pack of cigarettes, and a single gallon of gas to top off the fumes she's been driving on for two days, she only has five cents left from her Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday tips combined. But close is good enough, and the satisfaction of a paid bill spreads over her like new paint on a dingy wall. No excuses. No talk. Just done.

And no crawling back.

“Something else?” the clerk asks.

Zoe realizes she has used the clerk's counter and time to wade through her thoughts while a line grows behind her. “No, nothing,” she says. Her victory is her own, solitary and unnoticed.

She starts to turn away and feels each elbow being caught up.

“So when were you going to tell us?”

“You got a secret to share?”

Reid pulls on one side. Carly on the other. Monica and Jorge squeeze close by. Their attention doesn't lift Zoe. They know. It cuts her open. Her world is not theirs. It never has been. A brittle shade separates them—or did. But now the dirty secrets of her life are bared, and embarrassment laps in. How did they find out?
Please, not Mama. I hope they didn't talk to Mama.
She is stupid. Of course they would call eventually. Now appearances, even thin ones, are gone.

“What I want to know is how you can afford it.”

“It's called a job, Monica,” Jorge says.

“Shut up, shit-for-brains. I wasn't asking you. Besides, I have a job, and I could never afford an apartment.”

“It's not an apartment,” Zoe says.

“Well, what is it then? A house?” Jorge asks.

“I—”

Reid stops and spins her to face him. “Did you rent a whole fucking house?”

Carly breaks in. “No. She bought it. She bought a whole house, you idiot. Would you let her talk!”

“It's a room,” Zoe says, “on Lorelei Street.” Her words are like a stamp. A final approval. Or maybe more like full disclosure. No going back.

“Where's that?”

They guide her to the parking lot, and during the ten minutes they have before the bell rings, they share a smoke between cars while she answers their questions. “It's off of Carmichael about six blocks from the diner.”

“How big is it?” Carly asks.

“I told you. It's a room. That's all. And a bathroom. And sort of a kitchen in one corner. A sink, a hot plate, and a refrigerator.” She leans against the car that hides them and takes the shared cigarette from Reid's fingers. Their enthusiasm cinches her up, edges away the embarrassment. She squints and wants to have some fun. She inhales and blows a long dramatic trail out. Effect for Reid. Pause. Timing. It all matters. “Came with a dog, too. I share the room with a bulldog. A big, fat-ass bulldog.”

“No way!” Reid says. She knows he is more impressed with her delivery than the dog. Monica and Carly both laugh and scream “What?” at the same time. Jorge maintains control. He is not interested in the dog. “What about a Jacuzzi?” he asks.

Zoe and Monica exchange a look. The question goes unanswered. The warning bell rings, Zoe passes the cigarette to Carly for a last puff, and they walk to class. At the 200 wing the group splits—Zoe goes with Carly, and Reid, Monica, and Jorge head off in another direction.

“How'd you find out?” Zoe asks. “You called the house?”

“Yeah,” Carly answers.

Zoe feels a stiffening to her cheeks. A bracing to keep the turn of her lips and the tilt of her chin just so. “So you talked to my mom,” she says.

“No. I talked to your grandma. She's the one who answered.”

Grandma?
Her room was revealed by Grandma? A corner is stolen. A patchwork pillow. A star. A bulldog. A fingerprint smudge.
Damn you, Zoe. Why didn't you tell them first?
The careful bracing is gone. “What did she say?”

“Just that you moved out. Gave me the address and then said something about secrets that I didn't get.”

Secrets.

Carly's voice becomes careful. Delicate. “She…sounded a little…funny. Just said you moved out because you were tired of secrets. Kind of leaned heavy on that word. What'd she mean?”

She meant for you to tell me, that's what she meant,
Zoe thinks.
She wanted to steal a piece of my day. My life. Make her thoughts my thoughts. To throw my words back in my face
.
She meant to control me without ever speaking to me.
But Zoe says none of those things to Carly.

“I don't know,” she answers in a voice that even Reid would have believed.

Zoe stares at the whiteboard, watches Mr. Crain scrawl numbers across it, but the white, the glare, the white that seems to wrap around her and hold her, white that squeezes her, glimmers, white that shines like water, like porcelain,

Shimmering white that holds water and secrets. Grandma knows. She tosses the word
secret
to Carly, knowing she will toss it to Zoe, like a key that will let Grandma in. Let Grandma control her. The porcelain white that she sees every day of her life. Mr. Crain dissolves away. She only sees a glimmering white tub, and her mind travels around and through every shiny inch of it.

Is it possible for a grown man to drown in sixteen inches of water? To be so drunk that when he slips beneath the surface he can't find his way up again, so that up mixes with down, dry mixes with wet, air mixes with liquid, until all is blackness and he is gone? Was it possible for Daddy to be so stinking drunk he could slide beneath the water and not know it? To breathe in the warm, gray water and think it is air? Not even convulse automatically upward for a breath? Can anyone be that drunk? The investigators said maybe, yes, probably, and then they saw that the overflow was clogged. A few extra inches in the tub. How could that make a difference? Maybe. It could. But then again. But Grandma hollered and wailed, and the insurance company settled. A few extra inches and Daddy being drunk didn't matter anymore. He drowned in their tub because of a clogged overflow. But there was more they didn't know. Would never know. Only she, Grandma, and Mama knew.

They knew more about that night he drank himself into oblivion in a tub full of water. Some secrets were worth money. Some secrets were worth silence. And now Grandma throws it in her face. The night Daddy died and the bath he never should have taken. The suspicion. The night and the wondering that can never be answered because Daddy is gone. The wondering that eats. Daddy is gone because he couldn't face staying.

The official story is it was an accident. The investigators said so. The insurance company said so. Grandma said so. It probably was. But Mama never said a word. She just cried. The secret was not mentioned. Couldn't be mentioned.

Daddy never took baths.

The bell rings, and words and numbers appear on the whiteboard. Numbers that have no place in her secret white world. Zoe closes her book. She doesn't write down the homework assignment. It doesn't seem to matter.

Two points for Grandma.

Reid holds her arm. “Well? Tonight, okay?”

“Reid, I'm going to be late!”

He holds on, waiting for an answer. She managed to maneuver away at lunch. She can pull distractions from thin air. But Reid has caught on. He holds her so distractions can't slip in, not even being late to class.

“You mean all of you?” Zoe asks. She doesn't have to emphasize the “all,” she knows he will catch it. Words and delivery are his life.

Reid squints. “Yeah.” He pauses, nods. “All of us.”

She knows that may not have been his plan. Not
all
of them. But so what. Life sucks. Get over it. “Sure,” she says. “Nine or so. I gotta—”

The bell rings.

“—go.”
Shit.
She is only three steps from Mrs. Garrett's door. Three lousy steps, but it might as well be three miles. She slips in the door, her breath tucked in. The room is seated. Silent. Mrs. Garrett does not look up from her lectern; her eyes are fixed on the folder she is fingering, penciling with marks. Two seconds. Three. It is a breath, a pause, a big fat nothing, before she is in her seat. She barely slices the silence. So what?

Mrs. Garrett looks up, stares at the bug Zoe has become. She sweeps her eyes across Zoe, slowly, like the effort barely interests her.
It's three fucking seconds
.
Three.
But it's more than that. Zoe knows. More than three seconds, more than the word
fuck
spoken aloud in a classroom on the first day of school, more than a mispronounced name.

It's being. Wanting to be. More than. Less than. Something. Anything. She can feel it. It pushes against her ribs; it is heavy in her stomach. She holds it in. Pins it away to a secret part of her soul. Mrs. Garrett thinks Zoe will break. In what reality? She has said it before. She tells herself again.
Mrs. Garrett is a cakewalk
. She opens her book and prepares to enter her invisible world for the next hour. She is getting used to it. Cake. Walk. I. Am. Not. A.

Bug.

A paper is returned at the end of class.

Zoe barely glances at the grade scrawled across the top before she slides it into her notebook. She can't let on that it matters. It's all about maneuvers. Her face is blank. But the B-minus pushes at the corner of her mouth. She is making it. Zoe Beth Buckman. Zoe, who can hold it in. Zoe, fourth on the tennis team and moving up. Zoe, who pays her bills on time. Zoe, a B student. Zoe, having friends over to her room. Her own room at 373 Lorelei Street. The room that is working. Cakewalk. Yeah.

The usual afternoon breezes vanish. Heat wells in layers, one pressing on another. The black asphalt surrounding trailer 10A shimmers like tar, like the late summer heat has melted it back into ooze. Zoe is melting, too. But still, she would rather be on the courts getting in more practice than sitting in an air-conditioned trailer with Mr. K. She has a match today. Practice matters.

The ramp pings and warps as she walks up, but this time she doesn't care if he knows she is coming. It is her third meeting, and she understands Mr. K now. She knows his game. Waitressing has been good for her in that respect at least. If you hope to make decent tips, you have to know what people want. Not just food. Food is nothing. It's more than that. It's when to be quiet, when to be chatty, when to smile, when to fade away. Mr. K wants chat. She can give him that without revealing a thing, and in return she might get an early release from this tin prison. Leaving early will mean catching the bus to the match, and that means saving gas. Like practice, gas matters. It all works together to keep the room.

The door swings and barely cool air hits her face. It smells of dusty carpet, stale popcorn, and body odors that should be reserved for second grade.
Thank you, Mr. K
, but in her next cool breath she knows it is not Mr. K who must be thanked.

“Come in. Here. Come.” A twitchy, hawk-nosed man motions to where she sat last week. She doesn't move. He is nervous. Sweaty. Why? He swings his angled body toward her and holds out his hand.
Cripes! Who is this geek?
“Mr. Beltzer. I'm filling in for Mr. Kowalashosky. From the district office.”

She doesn't like him. His eyes move too fast. His skin is waxy and colorless. And he does strange things with his upper lip. It crinkles and smacks like something is wedged in his front tooth. This was not part of the deal. Suddenly she wants Mr. K. She wants his calmness, his rounded belly, his slow, smooth movements. Suddenly she thinks she did want to talk to Mr. K after all. She wanted him to listen. She wanted to think thoughts aloud and have his quiet way make sense of it all.

“Where's Mr. K?” she asks.

“Out.” He twitches, smacks, and sits down. “Looks to be a while. He's in the hospital, something to do with his back.” He shuffles through papers, avoiding Zoe's stare. “Traction, I think.”

Traction. Zoe sits. She thinks of Mr. K's rounded belly, tight against his white shirt, pulling, pulling against his back, pulling to slide out a vertebra, and then one thing, one small thing finally does it. Maybe a jelly bean. Did one little jelly bean make everything tumble out of line? Make everything fall apart? Even Mr. K, who listens and thinks and knows, could not have known one little jelly bean could make everything come undone. One little jelly bean and his spine careers out of control like a car wreck.

“It will take me just a few minutes,” Mr. Beltzer says as he shuffles through a file. “I need to familiarize myself with a few things.” He looks up and does the crinkle and smack with his upper lip. “And then we'll talk, all right?”

Zoe wonders if a piece of lettuce is stuck between his gum and lip. It could be. She sees it all the time at Murray's. The liver, piled with slimy gum-sucking onions, does it every time. The “lip boogie” they call it. She could make him smile to find out, say something outrageous to expose his upper gum, but he's not really worth the effort. They won't be talking. She shrugs. “Take your time.”

He does. She senses he wishes he could spend the whole hour reading through his files. He twitches, glances. His eyes shift around the room. He gets up twice to adjust the air. What about her makes him uncomfortable?

After fifteen minutes he sets aside the file. There are more twitches, smacks, and eyes that flash past hers, in-a-hurry eyes, don't-speak-to-me eyes, and then finally, comes the obligatory question. “What would you like to talk about?” He smacks again, and it cracks through her head like a bat. Two months ago. Maybe three. Smacks. Giggles. A pinched breast. A good night. And Mama stumbling through the door. She can't be sure. She didn't see his face.

But there are so many. Odds are he was one.

“Why don't we both just give it a rest?” she says. “I won't tell if you won't.”

He doesn't answer. He straightens files and smooths his hand across his mouth like it will straighten out the twitching. “If that's the way you want it,” he finally says, and they spend the remaining forty minutes in silence.

The bell rings and Zoe stands. Mr. Beltzer waves her back down. “Key Club needs this room for their activities on Fridays, so starting next week Group will meet on Wednesdays.”

“I'll be sure to spread the word to the rest of the ‘Group,'” she says. He doesn't look up.

“I think next time Mrs. Farantino will be filling in, and hopefully the week after that, Mr. Kowalashosky will be back. If not, we'll be sure to have someone else here for you.”

“Great,” she answers. “These sessions have been
so
helpful. Thanks, Mr. Belfry.”

“Beltzer.”

“Right.” She stands again, but she can't leave. Yet. “Tell Mr. K hi for me—and tell him to watch out for those jelly beans. The innocent little pink ones can be the worst.” She holds his stare. Plays with it. A pause. A long, spacious pause so he feels its weight.

So he knows, she knows.

But as she walks out, her disgust is more for Mama. How could she? How could anything be so important that you would press your lips against waxy, twitching skin? Is there anything Mama wouldn't do for another drink? What happened to Mama?
What happened? That
is the question she would like to ask Mr. Belwhatever. But it's a question she can't ask and will never ask. Because no one knows except Mama and maybe Grandma. And they won't tell. They won't even think of the question. Some things drift down, drift away, where they should be. Drift away because it's better there. That place of no answers.

She grips the doorknob. No room for Zoe. No counselor for Zoe. Next week, Mrs. Farantino. Maybe. She slivers open the door and slips through its crack.