Cherries In The Snow (19 page)

‘Why did you do that?'

‘I show people photos of Montana on my camera phone all the time.'

‘I understand.'

‘And … it might work between us. Or it might not. I don't want you to worry about them.'

Suddenly, I want desperately for him to keep the pictures.

Marley has a big meeting with a design firm on Monday. They want a mural in their conference room (word, I guess, has spread about ours). How amazing to coopt the underground to that extent. They are paying him big money to deface their property.

‘I used to get arrested for this,' he marvels.

‘What are you going to paint?'

‘I'd like to do a mural about corporate greed' – he grins – ‘but they're paying me, so I'll do whatever they want!'

Montana's around and her mother is busy, so I take her to work with me again, quite sure that this is not a good idea. Take your boyfriend's daughter who mostly hates you to work day. I pick her up from his house and he gives me a quick kiss while she's playing with her hair in the mirror. A sixth sense makes her whip around, but she isn't fast enough to catch us.

He gives her a big hug, which she wriggles out of, then Marley walks us to the subway. Montana is not happy about riding the subway, but she only makes this known once her father has left.

‘Dumb, dumb, smelly, dumb.'

‘Do you want to hold your card?'

‘Why?'

‘I don't know.'

So she can be in charge, have something of her own,
although to suggest that she is not in charge and does not own everything in the world is not something her parents have allowed to cross her mind. She clings to me, tight, inching so close to me that her hair is in my mouth. Blond tastes different. Real blond. It tastes like wheat. She has a bunny rabbit hat on and a pink velour tracksuit. People keep saying she is cute and I can see what a drag it is. ‘Little girl, you are just too darling.' Which makes no sense. Too rich, too thin, too darling. Not possible. It is making her crosser and crosser.

‘Take off that damn bunny rabbit hat.'

A loon comes over and sings in our face. He has no front teeth. ‘The Martians took my teeth! The Martians took my teeth!'

‘Yeah? What'd you get for them?'

Montana smacks me. ‘Don't talk to him.' He looms in front of her. ‘No smacking your sister, little girl.'

‘She's not my sister.' She says. ‘Smelly no tooth!' as he exits at the next stop, and I turn to her.

‘That's not nice. Think of all you have and how little he has.'

‘I know.' She clings to me. ‘I'm sad for the man with no teeth. Can we find him?'

‘No. He'll be okay. You just have to be kind in New York, every day, all the time. California is bigger. You don't have to see humans so often, humans who have nothing and humans who are frightening or make you sad.'

‘I see them, but we drive past them.'

‘Yeah.'

‘My daddy helps them. My daddy helps everyone.'

I have a drawerful of Reese's Pieces in my desk, waiting as patiently as geishas to be consumed. But in deference to Marley's rule that no unrefined sugar be allowed to enter the
holy temple of his child's body, and after the last disaster, Vicki has gone to the health-food store on Broadway to buy organic animal crackers. Vicki is the most unorganic person I know. Every single thing she does is planned, everything is a fucking concept. Today she is wearing red Victorian lace-up boots, with hundreds of hooks and eyes on the sides. How a person could think their way into that concept, I don't know. It would take hours. But she has managed it and keeps prancing around the room and resting her feet on her desk so that we can all celebrate her achievement.

Holly and Ivy go home early because they have a White Stripes show to attend. Holly was sent VIP tickets and I wonder if Jack White knows that. A CEO of a makeup company asked for and received free tickets. Was that his big plan back in Detroit?

I yearn to be in the office alone – although Montana is being so well behaved that she doesn't impinge on my concentration in any way. I keep trying to get Vicki to leave, but she keeps waving dolls at Montana, insisting on being ‘good with children' the way men insist on being ‘good in bed.' Oh, Jesus, I used to think with Isaac, I guess he's planning on being good in bed tonight. He'd ostentatiously go down on me, dribbling all over my thighs until I thought I was going to be sick, the worst part being when he'd pause to look up at me, eyes hooded in faux lust as though to say, ‘Look at me. I am going down on you.' It was like Lifetime TV movies, where mothers whose children have been killed in a bike accident scream, as they survey the carnage, ‘Whyyy? Why did my baby have to be killed in a bike accident?'

Yes, I know, you're going down on me, you big spastic. I'll get the medal ready.

Vicki continues to skip around the office while I am trying to think, but now, when I look up, I see she has finger puppets
on both her hands and is using the tiny felt jaws of a miniature alligator to feed herself animal crackers. It is appalling to see the alligator drop the organic rhinoceros into her pink mouth. Cannibalism, I think, my stomach turning.

‘Yummy yum yum. I yuv deeze cookies,' she coos.

Montana has on a hell of a scowl, her lips curled inside out as though preparing for a war dance, and eventually Vicki gets the message and leaves. I can tell that Vicki is devastated, and will be pondering for days her failure to delight a child.

Once Vicki is gone, Montana feeds me animal crackers while I work, not saying a word, just peering over my shoulder. At one point she leans on me – I think she is tired – and wraps her arms around my neck. It makes me gasp the same way I did when her father first touched me and I hide it the same way too, swallowing my delight like an oyster. She is a hell of a good kid and I am a stunted, jealous freak, an affront to feminism. As I ponder my hostility to a younger woman, I wonder how people would feel if I named the next line of lipsticks after feminists. Friedan. Greer. Steinem. I could write to them, ask them to collaborate on colors for International Women's Day and we could sell them for charity. As I am hatching my plan, Montana plops herself in my lap and surveys the makeup samples spread across my desk.

‘Can I touch this one?' she asks, pointing at a concealer-combination pencil I have named White Lies.

‘Sure.'

‘Can I touch this one?' she says, picking up a peach blush from the last collection.

‘Absolutely.'

‘These?' she asks, eyeing the batch Holly deposited with me before she hurried off to watch Jack White masturbate with his guitar.

‘Ah, no. Those are the ones we need to present to the client on Monday.'

She sniffs, reverting from her real voice to the Miss Manners tone she had affected when I first met her. ‘Those. I want to play with those.'

‘But those are the only ones I can't let you … you can have all of these, any of these you like.'

She removes herself from my lap and begins to sob for her father, as though I was a department-store Santa who had gotten an erection.

‘I want to go home! I want to go home!'

‘Okay. Okay, we'll go home.' I shut down the computer. I am ready to leave. I am tired.

‘Why do you cry all the time?'

She dries her eyes on the sleeve of her pink velour tracksuit. It is amazing: her eyes dry instantly, the same way Superman is able to heal his own wounds. ‘Why do
you
cry all the time?'

Ignoring her query, I put on my coat and zip her into hers. She lets me but turns her head away from me as I do it.

I am too tired to ride the subway, so we hail a cab on Lafayette. Montana buckles herself in, which is good because I would have forgotten to. Instinctively, I check our driver's name on his license. ‘Samuel Jean.' I like it when I get a Haitian cabdriver because usually they are listening to the BBC World Service and I can practice my French. I started learning French when I was four, although it's almost all gone now. I understand every word they say but can speak very little. I feel that's the tragedy of my life: I understand everything and can communicate nothing.

But Samuel Jean, instead of being tuned to the BBC World Service, is listening to Fox News. The topic is George Bush's surprise visit to Iraq. The caller currently on the line to talk
radio says he hasn't felt so proud to be an American since the days of Ronald Reagan. Instantly, I begin to cry. Montana was right.

The cab pulls up at Marley's front door, and wiping my face with the back of my hand, I take her dejectedly back to him. ‘Hi, baby.' He beams. He is covered in paint. She goes straight up to her room.

‘What happened?'

‘I'm not sure. I wouldn't let her play with some of the makeup we needed. It wasn't her shade anyway. She got really upset.'

‘Ah, no big deal, that's kids. Contrary.'

‘That's kids? That's what they're like?'

‘That's what humans are like. Adults just have better volume control.'

‘Really.'

‘Well, not you.'

‘I don't?'

‘No. You have no volume control at all. I love it.'

‘How could you love it?'

‘Because it's truthful.'

I love him so much I want to bite his eyelashes – velvet black and long, asking for it really – but instead I say, ‘Let's run away to Hawaii.'

I could lie out in the sun and just be as much of a jerk as I want and it would all be telling the truth.

‘If I didn't have a daughter, we'd run away tonight. But this is my life.'

The velvet imagining of his lashes catch in my throat.

‘These are your lives. They don't touch.'

I remember, when I was eight or nine, having a phobia about my food touching. The mashed potatoes couldn't touch the peas. I loved them both, but I had to eat them separately. I
wonder if I am potatoes or peas to him. Mashed potatoes, I hope, chewing the inside of my cheek as though it were gum, at least let him find me comforting. And in his comfort he won't realize how fattening I am, and soon enough no other woman will want him.

His smile is as weak as diner coffee. ‘Sometimes I feel like I'm a conduit for you to grow and change, and then you'll grow and change and be gone.'

‘We could get married.'

‘That's so childish.'

‘Why? We could. Anyway, you just said—'

‘Hey.' He pulls me to him and I let him, but as he holds me I lean into his chest and think about my father dying one day, my mother too, me all alone with my lipsticks. As if he hears me, Marley says, ‘Listen, I've been thinking about something. You need to get an accountant, okay? You've got to get your finances in order. You'll feel a lot better, a lot calmer. You don't have to want to make mad cash. But you should want to be on top of what you do have.'

‘You're so responsible.'

He taps a framed photo of Montana.

‘But I don't have one of those,' I say.

He taps my chest.

‘Okay, I get it. I'll call an accountant, I promise. I'm tired. I'm gonna head home.'

‘You okay?'

‘Yeah.'

But I don't want to leave. I don't want to have sex. I just want to crawl into Montana's bed with the stars on the ceiling and go to sleep. Montana is leaving the next day, so I decide to let them be alone. ‘Let me pee and I'll head out.'

Montana's pink toothbrush is by the sink. The herbal non-fluoride toothpaste that I know will leave her with cavities by
the time she is twenty sits, oozing uselessness, beside it. Marley's wash bag is open, so I riffle through it. Chapstick. Tea tree oil. A razor. And samples of Cool Yoga bath products from Jolene: little squares of soap wrapped in paper and labeled Joy, Inspiration, and Karma. What stupid things to wish for via bath products. Who uses facial scrub as a messenger? Jolene is probably one of those Buddhists who prays for a new dishwasher. The Karma smells of grapefruit, so I take it.

That night I wash with Jolene's Karma. To wash with stolen Karma seems, on reflection, not the greatest idea. The grapefruit smell, instead of soothing me into sleep, has me wide awake. I listen to CDs. I look at my bills, thinking it would be a good time to get through them. Then I look at my computer thinking I might get some work done on my novel. Then I try on my hats, which I have hung on the wall above my bed. I put on a different song for each hat. A fedora is the appropriate thing to wear when listening to David Bowie. Then I read old issues of
Rolling Stone
I have saved from high school. I don't know why I keep them because they make me unbearably sad: seeing artists hailed on the cover as the next big thing and knowing that their second album flopped. I have seen the future and it does not include Neneh Cherry. I cry for a while, then I write her a letter: