Rose of No Man's Land (16 page)

So tell me all about it
, he lifted the can to his wet mouth and slurped at the opening. I could smell the thin and tinny stink of the beer and I wanted one. I figured I’d simply swipe one from the fridge and then I noticed that Donnie had stashed the whole six-pack in the shade beneath his sagging lawn chair.

Oh, It Was All Right, I said vaguely. I Made Friends With This Girl, We’re Going To Hang Out Tonight.

How’s the work?
he asked.
Easy, hard? They treat you all right?

I nodded. Can I Have One Of Those? I pointed down at the splintery wood of the porch, wiggled my fingertip in the direction of the beer.

Kid, you work now, you gotta buy your own refreshments
, he shook his head and grimaced, like he was cluing me in to some sort of difficult life lesson and it pained him to do it.

Donnie I Can’t, I reminded him. I’m Fourteen, They Won’t Sell To Me.

Well you can chip in a bit, howbout? Toss me a few dollars? You’re probably making more money than I am.
He jammed the can into the crotch of his cutoffs and held his hand out like I was going to slap some cash down on his palm.

I could not hide the sourness, it creeped across my face like a bad smell. Sure, Donnie, I said. I pulled a phony good-kid grin up over my sourpuss. Once I Get My First Paycheck I’ll Kick Down, Okay?

Donnie emitted a sound like someone was letting the air out of him.
Listen, I’m taking up some space in your room. Just a little corner. Just ’til the weekend.
With a grunt he bent down and yanked a beer loose from the plastic rings.
We’ll consider this a rental fee.
He tossed it to me but I wasn’t ready, so it sort of hit me in the chest and rolled across the porch. Pieces of glitter from the
Baby
T-shirt stuck to the can.

Great
, Donnie quipped.
Nice going. Good catch. That’s gonna blow up when you open it now. Don’t ask me for another one.

A Rental Fee? I asked in a crabby voice. I hated the thought of Donnie in my room, getting his vibes on my things. I scrambled across the porch for my rollaway can of beer.

Some batteries fell off the back of a truck.
He shot me an awkward wink, like a mosquito buzzed into his eyeball.

How’s Ma? I asked him.

See for yourself
, he invited, and gestured toward the door. Then he tipped his can way back, sucking the dregs, and with a flick of his wrist tossed the empty out into the street with a clatter.
Score!
he chortled. A wide smile ate his face. It’s always a happy day when stuff falls off a truck.

Ma sat in the dim living room, her nightgown rumpled and her hair tangled and still pretty despite it all. Still plump and perfect, rolling with woman-ness, wrapped in
peach. The couch was draped in a faded floral sheet ’cause in the summer the old woolliness of it makes you itch and feel gross. The living room was dim, the sun kept off the television screen and also out of Ma’s eyes. The sun gave her headaches. The shades were drawn, Donnie’s silhouette out there on the chair like an alcoholic puppet show, his can lifting and descending. The television was on, always on, always turned to talk shows or news, something real, no chipper family sitcoms or emergency room dramas, only the real dramas of real living, everything going wrong all the time, everywhere. And yet I see very little on TV about how creepy men are in the streets or about the basic daily obstacle course a female is forced to run through. About how you can be walking along absolutely not thinking about your
pussy
your
ass
your
tits
, but then, wham, thanks to the drooly curbside dude, now you are. Now your mind is consumed with the idea, the reality of your
pussy, ass, tits;
the possibility of
blow jobs
, of
getting fucked.
I wish more attention would be paid to this phenomenon. That there would be long-term psychological studies on the mental effects of this, the changes in brain waves it produces in girl-brains. I can go days without leaving my room and never think of my boobs once. Then I leave the house and it’s all anyone wants to talk about.

From what I gather, all Ma watches on TV are reports of the new big scares, terrorism and ebola and gun-toting six-year-olds and how the Bible or Nostradamus or the ancient Aztecs predicted the world is going to end next year. The glow of the television flickered over Ma, who was sipping tea from a cup and watching a talk show. It was like
a burning log in a stately fireplace, casting its warm light around the room. On the screen a lady in a tight lady-suit bustled all over the studio audience, clutching a microphone. She dipped into the rows of civilians, the opinionated people. Ma said,
Opinions are like assholes, everybody’s got one.
A heavily made-up woman with a short, bleached hairdo asked a question, her voice shaky with the weight of the cameras upon them. The camera swung around to the stage, where a heavyset lady daubed the damp corners of her eyes with a wad of toilet paper. Then it happened. I looked for too long at the television and it stole my soul. It turned me to stone, like some terrible myth. That was why I avoided this room. It wasn’t only because Ma is depressing and Donnie annoying, it’s the frigging television. I glanced at it and suddenly I was interested in something you couldn’t give two shits about, say, the health of that crying woman on the talk show, and before I knew it hours have gone by and I’ve become an expert on, like, carpal tunnel syndrome. Who cares. It’s probably why Ma hasn’t been able to really get off the couch in so long. She’s frozen there, held in the malevolent shine of the TV. She craned her neck around to see me there, all decked out in Kristy’s skanky clothes. It’s strange how the same clothes that make Kristy look like a normal, well-adjusted teenaged female make me look like a hooker.

I have autism
, Ma informed me. She turned back to the screen and rested against the sheet draped like a toga over the back of the couch.
It’s very interesting. I’m learning all about it. Want to watch some with me?
She patted the cool, worn-away sheet bunched next to her.

I Got To Get Out Of Kristy’s Clothes. I said this to Ma but my face was hitched to the television. Television is like a great gooey snare, the light shining off it clingy spiderweb vibrations. I didn’t even care about this emotional woman on the TV but then I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I guess she had autism too, just like my mom. The beer I had begged off Donnie was growing warm in my sweaty hand, in the dead, dense air of the house. I wondered if it was still too shook-up to open it, thought it could be refreshing perhaps to feel the tickly bubble-spray over my body, soaking the stupid
Baby
shirt in sticky beer.

Trisha
, Ma continued. She had a little offended catch in her voice.
I would think you’d be happy to hear this. I thought it was maybe ADD but now, I really think I should be tested for this new kind of autism.

I Don’t Know, Ma, I said skeptically. Usually I just nod and say something vacant, but every now and then her claims are so out-there, like when she got on a Tourette’s kick. She had seen some
20/20
episode about Tourette’s syndrome and decided that was her problem all this time. I was like, But Ma, You Don’t Walk Around Screaming Swear Words, and her answer to that was,
But I always want to.
Huh. Then I guess I had Tourette’s too, right? Who doesn’t feel on the verge of screaming
fuck
or
shit
or
fucking shit
half the time? That’s not a disease, that’s like the opposite of having a disease. Ma dropped the Tourette’s story line after a week of halfhearted mumbling, of swearing a bit more than usual. It was so forced. Now autism. I thought autism was little kids rocking back and forth in their playroom or hitting their toddler heads against the wall.

Ma, You’re Not Autistic, I told her firmly. It was too hot out for this shit. You’re Too Functional To Be Autistic. Believe It Or Not.

It’s very interesting
, she repeated, ignoring me.
There’s many different sorts of autism, actually. Some people are highly functional, highly intelligent really. They just had this woman on
, she nodded her chin at the screen.
She was brilliant. Some sort of scientist.

Uh-huh, I grumbled. The woman on the television was giving a brave, tight smile, the camera pulled close to her face. I wondered what that was like, working a camera for a talk show. Crouched behind the tall black equipment, zooming here and there, spinning around, listening to crazy people all day. I bet I’d like it. I took a stab at my beer can. I cracked it gently and foam fizzed out of the split.

And — you’re not gonna like this, Trish — they think lots of Alzheimer’s cases are really mad cow disease. How you like that?

Not So Much, I said. I licked the froth from the top of the can.

Don’t do that
, Ma scolded. She doesn’t miss a trick.
Those cans sit in warehouses. Mice shit on them. I tell Donnie, you should wash those first.

Okay, I said. I started to leave the room. My First Day At Work Was Fabulous, I told her. In Case You Cared. I Was Promoted. I Got A Raise. I Got Employee Of The Day.

I knew you could do it!
Ma shouted at my back.

In my room I found a small sculpture of car batteries. Hard bulks of machinery shrink-wrapped in heavy, puckered plastic. There were about fifteen of them. Donnie had
done an okay job of backing them into the corner, they weren’t much in the way. Still, they were ugly and stolen. When I was younger I thought that trucks were the most shabby and unreliable vehicles of all, things always tumbling from their backsides. I imagined the rear doors of semis crushing open beneath a tide of food processors, hair dryers, computer printers. I fantasized about the epic traffic jam, the excited carloads of people scooping booty into their trunks. Then Kristy told me the goods were actually stolen. She was really upset about it. This was when she was about twelve and going through a Jesus phase. She was going to a church around the block and making friends with nuns and other old ladies. She told me the stuff Donnie stashed in our bedrooms was ripped-off and illegal, and at the very least he was going to hell for it. She wasn’t sure about the rest of us, but she was worried. She said it didn’t look good. Ma and Donnie started getting nervous that she was going to confess to a priest or something, so she got grounded and wasn’t allowed to go to church anymore. She had to stay in the living room with Ma watching talk shows where women recount all the horrible things that happened to them in foster homes.
You want that?
Ma would wave the remote at the screen.
You want the state to take you away? Just because of some boxes in your room? Put them under your bed if you don’t like looking at them.
Donnie brought her a truck-fallen curling iron, then a boom box. She chilled out. I never minded the piles of loot occasionally materializing in my bedroom. They had an outlaw sheen, and Donnie tended to be a bit more ass-kissy when he needed to use our rooms for stashing.

I stripped off Kristy’s stupid clothes. I threw them — balled up and reeking of my brief time backstage at Clown in the Box, stained with the gritty sugar drool of my BabyMuffin — onto her bedroom floor. The force of my hurl created a wind that fluttered the rows of supermodels hung by drying tape from the walls. At least that was over. No more dressing in Kristy’s clothes. Back in my room I grabbed a pair of sweats and then a pair of scissors and I went to work chopping them into new summertime shorts. It wasn’t so easy, the scissors being wicked dull and the sweatpants material being pretty good quality, actually. I’d got them for Christmas. Every winter I get a brand-new pair of sweats and every summer I chop them into shorts. So autumn, for me, is a sweatsless season. I had to cut and cut the sweats with little chops, so the end result was pretty Frankenstein. Then I did the next leg and it was equally jagged but in a totally different manner. I pulled them on and then that Weight-Watchers T-shirt. I wondered what it meant that I went to work in a T-shirt that said
BABY
and after work put on a T-shirt that said
I’M A LOSER
.
In the mirror above my dresser I looked at myself. I saw my darkish hair done up in that hairdo, and I dismantled it. It was scrunchy and stiff with product. I mussed it all up hard with my finger tips, and then I came at it with the dull blades of the scissors, chopping off an inch and then another inch and then another. I didn’t have much of a plan, it was an intuitive haircutting. I chopped at it until it was too short for Kristy to strangle it into a french braid or lasso it into some Audrey Hepburnish little cupcake of hair on the top of my skull, all anchored in place with a squad
of clippies. My new hair swung thickly into my face at about chin level, jagged like my sweats. I thought that perhaps at a certain angle I might resemble a young prince from a children’s book. Or, like a girl forced by the circumstances of her time to take on the appearance of a young prince in order to carry out certain adventures. My face under my hair was the same. I didn’t much love it but there’s nothing to be done about a face. Kristy of course would argue with that but we’re of different persuasions when it comes to cosmetology. My eyes are sort of squinty and my cheeks a bit chubby. I guess my nose is okay. It harbors blackheads but the shape is fine. Same with my chin. It’s not an ugly face, just kind of boring.

With my new haircut and my new sweats, I felt pretty excellent. The can of beer had finally settled and I peeled the shiny tab away and took a hearty gulp. Maybe Ma was autistic. What did I know? Maybe there’s a type of autistic hypochondria she is in the midst of. I lay on my back in my bed, crunching upward to slurp at my beer, thinking about Ma’s health and feeling an excited trembling in my stomach, an anticipation of my coming hours with Rose plus the result of eating candy and shit that had had any nutritional value boiled away into a vat of oil. I thought about Rose at her home, wherever that was, somehow funneling power into Kim Porciatti’s cellular phone, sparking it alive, juicing it up. I tried to think about people in other places who I could call, but came up empty. Supposedly my Dad was in Louisiana, but there was no point in asking Ma about it. Maybe she threw his number away or maybe he had never left it with her. There was even a chance that he
didn’t actually exist, that he was some lie she’d dreamed up and placed in the muggy South. And then there was the possibility that he was dead. People who shoot drugs die all the time. It seems like they either die or they stop, and if he’d stopped, wouldn’t the first thing he’d want to do be to find his family? I sat up on my bed, in my dreamy state I knocked a slug of beer out the window. It rained down in a pissy stream, sizzling on the hot concrete below, evaporating into the day. That’s For You, Dad, I said out loud. Then I sucked the rest of the can empty and flung the tin out the window too. Thinking of Dad could get me a little sad, but the beer made me feel light, pleasant, and full, my stomach settled. I felt ready. There was a rap at my sticky bedroom door, and then the pressure of what I figured was Kristy’s physique behind it. The door opened with a sucking pop. I burped a gust of beery breath into the air.