Rose of No Man's Land (4 page)

Donnie’s car is a Maverick, deep green, the color of the bushy part of a stick of frozen broccoli. I think trashy old cars like that are back in style the same sick way that mullet hairdos are. Like it’s wicked cool and funny to be a stupid moron with bad taste and no money. I’ve gathered this from my limited watching of television and my observations of people at the mall, and I tried for a minute to get
into it, having lived my entire life among stupid morons with bad taste and no money: like, maybe my whole life is actually completely cool and I myself am too authentically cool to have realized it. Donnie practically has a mullet hairdo and here he is tooling around in this muscly car. It all fell pretty flat, though. I don’t care how much the world loves the
That ’70s Show
, that era is over and the only people still living it are too broke or retarded to move on and get with the more contemporary era. People like Donnie, who in real life are not so cool.

In my lawless house, where teenaged children are free to imbibe liquor and slag about without any purpose whatsoever, Kristy is not allowed to take Donnie’s car to the mall alone. I am required to chaperone, plopped in the passenger seat. This is the only real time me and Kristy hang out anymore. We used to hang out a lot but then she became upwardly mobile, what with her plans to look good and make friends with certain people and get into the cosmo shop at the Voke so she could eventually be a hairdresser to the stars — after she becomes a star herself by getting on
The Real World
, of course. The supposed reason for Donnie’s car law is that it’s somehow safer, as if my presence ups Kristy’s driving skills to a NASCAR level, but it’s just a way for Donnie to get us out of the house at the same time so him and Ma can get romantic in front of the television. In real life it is actually so much more dangerous to have me in the car with my sister, feeling bullied into running her errand, resentment building and cresting into a slap-fight that sends the car careening off the road. Which only happened once and we didn’t actually crash,
but still it was scary to feel the general mutual annoyance and frustration sharpen into something that felt so angry and crazy that we’d start slapping each other in a moving vehicle. It was seriously a pretty deep experience. I had told Kristy she looks like our father. I could hardly remember what he looked like, he left so long ago and Ma tore his face out of all the old photos in our thin photo album, but I had some memories and in most of them his hair is too long and needs a shampoo, and his face is sleepy, his skin gummy and slumped on his cheekbones, from the drugs he was on, I guess. Telling Kristy she looked like him was the big-gun insult I always held inside my mouth until she really, really pissed me off. It bothered her more than anything, because she’s so vain and because our father was such a jerk and also not too attractive and really most of all because it’s true: Kristy does look like him, but in that strange way that really good-looking people can sort of resemble somebody very homely. Our father is a ghost that haunts her face. She doesn’t always look like him but his genes flash to her skin’s surface often enough that she knows it is true when I say it and it enrages her. So she swung at me with her thin hand wide open and then I got to tell her she looks like dad but she’s crazy like Ma and then she swung again, wildly, one hand on the wheel, the other flailing out for my face, but I’m part of this family too, I’m part of the whole sick churn and clench of it, so of course I grabbed her hand, and, having two to work with, slapped her back. And I made it, I got her right in her cheek and the car veered off the road.

The whole thing was very disturbing and we sat there
in the car for a while, hazards on, Kristy trying hard not to cry, her whole body tense and vibrating with the effort and only because I was there beside her and she didn’t want to crack like that in front of me. I wanted to apologize and ask her if she was okay, maybe cry also, but I didn’t want to soften toward her. What if she stayed hard and took another swipe at me? So I just stayed quiet and swallowed a bunch and waited for her breathing to regulate. Eventually the tears in her eyes dried up and she was able to blink without them rolling down her face. She was able to push her hair back and pull some air into her lungs and get the car back onto the road. While I waited for Kristy to get it together I ruminated on some pretty unpleasant thoughts, thoughts about DNA and about being Ma’s daughters. Daughters. There’s a word. Daughters. It sounds like a deep-fried pastry. Something not too good for you, nuts stuck to it with sugar thick as paste. Something stuffed with soggy fruit.

Ma’s never hit either of us — she’s way too tired for that — it’s the DNA of her mental illness I worry about. If it’s been passed down to me and Kristy, some little viral strand of it. Not her exact brand of crazy, hypochondria, but something else, some tendency toward negativity and brooding and wanting to whap my sister while she’s behind the wheel of a moving vehicle.

At the mall, in the food court, I watched Kristy as she walked out from the long, fluorescent-lit hallway that leads to the public bathrooms. The bad lighting flattened her out like a greenish paper doll and it was so weird to see Kristy
— who, it is generally agreed, is wicked pretty — looking crappy that my stomach startled me by clenching in worry for her future. I guess I am invested in Kristy and her
Real World
plans, even though the complete self-obsession surrounding it can get on my nerves. I don’t actually get any happiness out of seeing my sister fail, seeing her stuck here instead of on the television where she longs to live. Watching Kristy swish skinnily down the fluorescent tube, I thought, Fuck, I hope Kristy’s not turning to bulimia or some other tired-ass grasp at beauty-at-any-cost, ’cause her coloring looked a lot like my own does after I pound too many beers in too short a time period. I mean, she looked ill, like she just vomited. But as she exited the weird, tunnelish hallway, the red and purple and electric orange glow from the food court neon lights warmed her back up and she looked pretty again. Her hair was long and smooth and the highlights her cosmo partner gave her didn’t look totally phony, her hair wasn’t flying up with electrocution static even though I’m sure she was just in front of the dull metal mirror in the girls’ room going at it with a hundred brushes. The way she runs her eyeliner pencil over the inside of her lids made her eyes look bright and shiny. She got Ma’s special eyes, the green ones, they look like jewelry her face wears. I just can’t do that with eyeliner, because no matter how much I concentrate and steady my hand and tell myself calming words, my eye thinks it’s going to be stabbed and it blinks itself shut like a clam. A couple tries of this and my eyes become teary and totally useless. I tried to draw the black pencil along the outside instead but it just made my face look clownish and dirty so I gave up. I
don’t like makeup very much anyway so it’s no big whoop, though it really bothers Kristy, who is practically a spokesperson for makeup, being a cosmetology graduate and all. She acts like my choice not to wear lip gloss is some sort of sociopathic break from civilization, as if I’ve decided to never again wear a tampon and just bleed all over everything instead.

Fresh from the bathroom, Kristy stood before me, smiling with her glossed-out lips. It’s aimed at me but it’s really for her, a wide, together smile that was a summons for her inner troops to gather and prepare to charge. That smile was a bugle call, da-da-da-da-da-DA!
Ready, sister?
she chirped. Honestly, I didn’t think that having your makeup-less, super-nonglamorous, actually rather awkward sister trail you into a job interview with a video camera was a great idea, but that’s Kristy’s way. I almost admire it. It’s her strategy to stand out so much that she can’t be ignored. Kristy will be the only potential employee who brings a camera crew to the interview, and this, combined with the natural spectacularness of her personality, will get her the job. Plus, we were getting really crucial, really real footage for her
Real World
application. Kristy already had way more video of her unamazing life than
The Real World
would ever need. She’d already made a veritable documentary of herself. I feared that the camera was adding an obsessive focus to her normal narcissism and now she’d never stop talking about herself. It would go on and on and the tapes would pile up, the audition deadline long past. We would forget that there was a time when Kristy was
not
accompanied by the whirring machine. The video project
would slowly be revealed as a mental illness, the magnitude of which our family has never seen.

Get it ready
, she instructed me as we moved away from the food court and toward the leafy entrance of Jungle Unisex. Kristy’s shoes made a sharp clack-clack-clack on the mall floor. My flip-flops made a flatter, slappy noise. I pulled the video camera up to my eye and this great thing happened. It was like I wasn’t really there, not anymore. Voom, I’d become the camera. I hadn’t wanted to make a big deal out of it, but I was sort of dreading going into Jungle Unisex. It’s just not the sort of place I feel comfortable. I appreciate all the big green plants and the stuffed carnival tigers mounted on the walls and the flashy zebra wrapping paper they tacked up like wallpaper — I’m not totally uptight. It is definitely a wild place to walk into, but then you have to deal with all the girls who work there. They’ve got their hair all done up and when they move their hands it’s all flash, a blur of silver scissors and shiny nail polish nails shooting light. They look like comic book superheros casting some sort of power from their palms. They’ve got full command of the space. I’ve walked into the place from the relative calm of the mall, suddenly in some bizarre tropical clubhouse that is really not my scene. The girls looked me up and down. I could just feel them giving me a makeover. Immediately I could feel the exact place that a greasy lock of my very unstyled hair brushed against my cheek, the faint friction summoning a zit from the skin there. My skin suddenly felt like it had a weird film over it, like the skin of a dirty pond. My clothes felt soft against my body in that way that only really dirty clothes feel, like the
dirtiness is wearing the fabric thin. This is how I like my clothes to feel, but on the inside of Jungle Unisex it stopped feeling comfortable and started feeling hampery. Needless to say, I do not have a pedicure. I may instead have athlete’s foot, and I’m always in my flops, my peely toes all hanging out. Ta-daa. But, with Kristy’s stolen video camera pressed to my face, it all felt unreal. It was like something I was watching on TV, which was perhaps a good omen for Kristy. An older lady with brown hair, the bangs sprayed up in a thin fan said,
Can I help you?
She cocked her head and her hair fixture sort of wobbled with the movement, but didn’t fall. She had makeup welling in the creases of her face, maybe a couple shades too dark, triple-pierced ears hung with gold hoops, and a few rows of gold around her neck. She must be loaded, I thought. I made out a charm in the shape of a blow-dryer hanging off one thin chain.

Hello, I’m Kristy Driscoll
, Kristy chirped. Her hand shot out toward the woman, who backed away from it before realizing that Kristy was trying to shake her hand and not steal her jewelry. Kristy pumped the woman’s hand while gesturing to me with her free one. I moved in close, making sure I got both of them in the frame. Without that camera I’d have been staring at my flops, but now I was able to really inspect the woman’s face, I could look straight at her. It made me a little giddy and I even hit the slidey zoom lens close-up button till the top of her peacock hairdo got chopped out of the picture. Now she should be on a television show. Who even looks like that? Actually, tons of people around here look like that, but nobody on television does. Which is even more of a reason this fan-haired
woman should have her own show.
This is my little sister, Patricia
, Kristy jabbered on.
She’s videotaping me because I’m auditioning for
The Real World,
do you know that show?
The woman paused and turned toward me. The frame became filled with her suspicious expression. She took a breath and held her hand up toward the camera the way that actual celebrities do when the paparazzi charge at them as they’re leaving the yoga studio. Kristy jumped in,
It’s a great show, and if I get picked I get to go and live on MTV in another town, and it would be really wonderful for Mogsfield and for the whole region to have a local person on a national TV show, talking about local issues.
Kristy nodded, as if the movement of her head could somehow hypnotize the woman into nodding her own head.
The producers just want to know what my life is like here in Mogsfield, so my sister is following me around with a camera, would that be all right?
Her head was still bobbing but now her face was scrunched too, in that way girls scrunch when they need something. I don’t use those tactics. Or maybe I have never needed anything that bad.

The woman got her hand back from Kristy’s polite grip of death and was fiddling nervously with herself, first touching one of the thin gold necklaces resting on her tan sternum, tweaking a charm, then patting the stiff crest of hair on her crown.
I wasn’t ready to be on television
, she admitted a bit shyly.

Oh, this won’t be on television
, Kristy assured her.
This is just for the producers to see. But who knows, if I get picked maybe I could get MTV to come here for haircuts!

The woman smiled.
That’d be something
, she said.
All
right. It’s pretty weird, you know, but I’m a flexible person. I’m Mercedes, by the way.
She turned and looked deeply into the camera.
Mercedes Patron
, she said intensely. Her delivery gave me a little shiver. Who knew I would actually enjoy helping Kristy, ever?

We followed Mercedes Patron and her excellent name through the salon and into a tiny back room. Along the way I trailed the camera across the incredible jungleness of the place, and got a swipe or two at some ladies getting their hair chopped. For the first time ever in my limited history of visits to Jungle Unisex, the hairdressers smiled at me. Of course they were smiling at the camera, but it was my eye that caught them.