Chloe Doe (3 page)

“You know I love you, —————,” our mother says. “You know I’d hate it if I never saw you again. It would be the worst thing in the world that could happen to me.”

Our mother cries as easily as the women in the movies.

The sun is hotter here than at our other house, the one where we lived with Henrik; our mother needed a new beginning so we moved with only two months left of the school year. It’s a big problem for me. Camille is good at making friends; she has one already and another that’s a possibility. She says if I didn’t read so much I would have more friends, too.

Camille and I are weeding the flower beds for some extra money. We want to buy
Teen People
and mint chocolate chip ice cream at the store later.

We’re all wearing sun hats and Coppertone and wraps over our swimsuits. Camille is wearing an old pair of our mother’s Polaroid sunglasses. They’re prescription and scratched and Camille has to feel the ground to find the weeds.

“I don’t want wrinkles,” she says. “You get them from looking into the sun.”

“What’s a Romeo,” I ask again, low so our mother doesn’t hear.

“It means he brought her flowers and other things. Gifts, you know. Like he was always thinking about her, even when he wasn’t with her.”

“Oh,” I say, and then, my mind made up, “I’d have married him if he wasn’t my father.”

“He’d be too old for you, stupid,” Camille says.

“I mean if he was the same age. If we went to the same school.”

“He wouldn’t marry
you,
” my sister says.

“He wouldn’t marry you, either.”

“Yes, he would. He liked redheads.”

Our mother’s a redhead. So was the woman he left us for.

The front yard of our house on Myrtle Street is small. Our mother calls it a matchbox. It has a metal fence around it, waist-high, like the people before us had a dog. My sister says they had a schnauzer; the yard is dug up, like snake holes, and that’s what schnauzers do.

All the houses on our block look the same: peeling paint, windows with lace curtains, and lawns burnt brown and yellow from the sun. Everyone is fenced in and
BEWARE OF THE DOG
signs are posted on every gate, though Camille and I have found only one dog so far, a Doberman that belongs to the Ramirezes, two doors down. Our mother says the signs are for protection.

The boys who go to our school are
cholos.
They’re wicked. They follow us home saying,

“Will you touch our pee-pee?”

“We want to see your ta-tas.”

“We want to kiss you with our tongues.”

They wear blue suit pants from Kmart and skip rocks off the pavement that hit us in the shins and leave knots and purple bruises. Once they hit Camille in the neck and she dropped like in a dead faint. They ran home thinking they killed her:

“Is she dead? Is she dead?”

Camille stays in the road, even though a car is coming. She keeps her eyes closed. She holds her breath.

When it’s getting dark they come to our house and lean against the fence, calling our names.

“What do you want?” I ask.

“Your sister OK?”

“She’s dead,” I tell them. Camille told me to, and I agreed.

“We didn’t see no hearse.”

“She’s in the bedroom,” I say. “You want to come in and light a candle?”

One of them starts to cry. I’m ready then to tell them the truth, but Camille is hiding behind the door, digging her sharp nails into my hand.

The next day, Camille pretends to be sick and stays home from school. “This will teach those dirty boys.

“I hate living here,” she says.

Men come around looking for our mother. She keeps them on the porch, but offers them beer. They drink it fast and belch afterward.

They come in pairs. They speak Spanish among themselves, say hello and good evening to me and Camille in English. In the dark, their teeth flash like lightning.

Camille says they’re attracted to our mother the way moths are attracted to flame. She says it’s because we’re
gringas.
Because our skin glows in the dark. Because, underneath it all, we’re still American and they’re not.

“Hey,
gringas
! Hey,
blancas
!” Laughing men call to us when we walk home from the market with milk and sour whips and our mother’s change tinkling in our pockets.

Camille says not to run, but I do anyway. Every time. Their voices sound sweaty and close and getting closer. I run all the way home and wait for Camille by the gate.

She says they’re men who have nothing better to do with their time. But they’re harmless.

One day I come home from school early because I have a fever and our house is only two blocks away. Our mother was not at work when they called.

We have a working mother. The teachers know that the girls with the white names among the Marisols and Esperanzas and Mercedes can mind themselves. The girls with pancake batter for skin, who wear outlet clothes, they can walk themselves home. Our mother wrote a note saying so. The school nurse finds it in a file and after I dig up my house key and show it to her, she lets me go.

Our mother is in the house with the one Camille and I call Gordo because he’s so big. He’s sitting on the couch wearing a white T-shirt and nothing else. His stomach rolls out and underneath, his pink worm hangs like a lazy hand.

“¡Ave María! ¡Jesús, Jesús!”
He grabs his pants off the floor and balls them up in his lap. He calls my mother.

I hear the water shut off in the kitchen.

“Is Chloe, eh?” he says to me.

I nod.

“Chloe!
¡Aquí! ¡Aquí!
” he yells to the kitchen.

My mother is wearing her slippers. I hear them scrape on the floor as she comes down the hall. She’s in her bathrobe. Her makeup is worn off.

“I have a fever,” I say.

She stands in the entry and looks at me for a long time without saying anything. Gordo stands up and leans over himself as he pulls his pants on.

“You’re flushed,” my mother says.

Gordo heads for the door and opens it.

“Adiós.”

My mother doesn’t answer him, and Gordo walks quietly out the door, barely making a noise when he shuts it.

“You want to get in your pajamas?” she asks. “I’ll get you some aspirin.”

When she comes into my room she says, “I hope it’s not the chicken pox.”

I tell Camille about finding Gordo naked on our living room sofa, and she says, “That’s what you get for playing sick.” Even though I really do have the chicken pox.

I’m out of school for two weeks. My mother stays home with me the first day. She feeds me broth and crackers and helps me with my homework. After that, the neighbor checks on me twice a day. Gordo even comes by with flowers for my room, daisies and azaleas from his garden.

My mother thinks the neighbor brought them, but I tell Camille they’re from Gordo. Of all our mother’s Mexican friends, we like him the best. He smiles more, and we’ve never seen him drink until he’s falling down, like the others.

But Camille says she doesn’t want to look at them. She says he’s trying to cover up.

“What for?”

“He doesn’t want you to tell the police.”

“What would I tell the police?”

“It’s to keep you quiet,” she says.

When I don’t say anything back, she says, “You like him, don’t you?” Then slams the door shut on her way out.

The Joker

T
here’s no desk in here. No couch and no window. The room is so small I begin to feel like I’ve been shut inside a refrigerator. Except it’s hot, even wearing the tissue-paper top and pants they gave me my first day in. No street clothes, no shoes allowed the first seventy-two hours. We have slippers that pull on like socks. I asked, but so far no girl has made it to freedom tying the slippers together and dangling from her second-story window.

I’m sitting in one of the four chairs in the library. There are few books. The girls have stolen them, ripped the pages, written obscenities where there were none and exaggerated them where there are. Now if we want a book, we have to earn it. They have a list of appropriate behavior and the points you get for each. Saying “please” and “thank you” adds up. At five points a day a girl can get a toothbrush and shampoo by the end of the week. But what does she do before then?

The library is a multipurpose room. Today, there is a handwritten sign on the door that reads:
PRIVATE THERAPY, PLEASE KNOCK.
Each of us
muchachas
get a shrink from the outside. They come in once a week for one-on-one and every Monday to listen to us talk in a group. There are points for that, too.

I’ve moved the other chairs into a tight half-circle and have taken the throne for myself. Dr. Queerborn will sit quietly or he’ll make a fuss. Maybe he’ll say something smart about role reversals. I only know what the others have said about him. Tina and some of the other girls who have sat with him behind closed doors. Who have listened like their lives depended on it. They say he is as wired as a wet cat. That he’s tall and skinny and that his dick is probably the same. Some say they would marry him. Tina, who has been here the longest, says what she’ll miss the most when she leaves is having someone who nails her without even touching her.

So maybe he’s got something, and maybe not.

This is not my first time in a place like this. The state has been trying to change my ways for years. I’ve been in foster homes, in special schools, in programs they were sure would fix what’s wrong with me. Thing is, not one of the places I’ve been has matched me up with someone smarter than myself. Someone with more common sense than book smarts. Who’s lived a little, and not all of it was storybook.

The nurses bring in magazines with the address labels cut out, so that we have to guess who subscribes to
Glamour
and who to
National Geographic.
We don’t want their addresses like they think; they’re the last people we’ll visit when we get out.

I’m reading
Cosmo: The Sex Issue.
Someone underlined the words penis, ejaculation, and burgeoning in an article about male sterility. When the door opens I begin to read aloud, “‘Sterility, though it certainly affects a man’s sexuality, is a medical disorder . . .’”

I catch glimpses of him as he walks from the door to the chair across from mine and sits down: khaki pants; long, thin hands; and glasses.

“‘Bottom line,’” I read, “‘the penis ceases to function as desired. This will lead to anxiety. And here, ladies, is where you can help. . . .’”

“How do you like that?” I ask, and look over the top of the magazine. “I’m in the helping profession.”

He’s smiling. His skin is thin enough I can see through it. So I know he’s happy to see me. Or he’s happy with himself — he managed to fold up his body and fit it into the space of one chair pulled very close. Our knees almost touch. Either way he’s happy and not afraid to show it, and I begin to feel like I’m sitting in a tub of broken glass.

“We have something in common,” he says.

His hands are folded in his lap. He looks at me for a long time without blinking.

“I can do that, too,” I say. “I won the school staring contest in the fourth grade.”

He tells me, “You’re not what I expected.”

“Maybe you can return me. Exchange me for another
señorita.
We come in a lot of colors.”

He shakes his head and waves a manila folder in front of me. “Your file,” he says. “You don’t look like you’ve been on the street this long.”

I pull my shirt over my head. I’m not wearing a bra — no bra and no belt the first seventy-two hours of my stay, for my protection as well as theirs. I never heard of a girl hanging herself with her bra, or strangling her captors with it, but they say it can be done.

I’m a 36B and as I move my arms, my breasts wave at him. The doctor’s face shuts down. It’s like a magic wand passed over him. He stops what he was going to say and his ears, the part that light can almost pass through, turn pink. Before he can call for staff, I turn my back and show him the scar. It’s a capital C that begins at the top of my shoulder blade and stops at my eleventh vertebrae.

“That was from a knife. I stood on the wrong corner. I was still new then.” I put my shirt back on and pull up my pant leg. “See that? It’s a bruise that never goes away.” It’s faded to brown now but is as big as the day I got it. “From a boot,” I tell him. “It’s got to be a year old.” I straighten my pants and sit back. “You ever been in a fight, Doc?”

“Not since grade school.”

“You have any scars?”

He wants to know if surgery counts. The best he can do, he says, is a scar he got when they put a pin in his elbow. He doesn’t show it to me and says instead, “We all have scars.”

“Maybe you fell walking up the steps of your slum apartment in the
barrio.
”

No, he says. He got it skiing. “My elbow clipped a tree. I’m Dr. Dearborn.”

He puts a hand in front of me. His fingers are long and square and the nails are clean. “Good hygiene,” I tell him. “That’s important to a girl in my business.”

I make like I’m going to shake his hand but instead I use my index finger to stroke his palm. Goose bumps rise on the back of his hand and he pulls it away, closed now like a clamshell.

He tells me he’s sorry he kept me waiting and wants to know, am I comfortable?

“Like you’re someone I can tell my secrets to?” I ask him.

“Is it a secret if you’re comfortable? Or just if you’re not?”

I know how to play this game. The person who answers the fewest questions wins.

I shift in my seat and our knees bump. He’s as cool as rain. He doesn’t even flinch. “Excuse me,” he says, and pushes his chair back two inches.