Pale Next to This
I was dressed and ready to go to church when my father plodded down the stairs in his thick navy blue robe, lay down on the couch and said, “We’re done with God, honey.”
He flung his left arm over his eyes and placed his right hand inside the V of his robe as if he were going to pledge allegiance. I sat on the coffee table in front of him in my church clothes, waiting for the low-rumble of his snore. The sleeve of his robe had had fallen open and his elbow stuck out, pointy and dry. Thick veins ran the length of his forearm and the way his wrist flopped, I could see the pulse working to move blood. His open palm was smooth and white. I gently pulled his middle finger, moving his hand back and forth in a half-alive wave. Usually, this time of year, the skin on the back of his hand would be tanned from a month at the beach house. I let go of his finger. I ran my finger along the bottom of his foot. Nothing. This time of year, the hair on his toes and on the bony ridges of his feet should have been bleached blonde. What was supposed to be dark was light, and what was supposed to be light was dark. I went upstairs to my father’s room, found his slippers, brought them downstairs and put them on his feet. I covered him with a pilled Pendleton blanket. He was like that, dead asleep on the couch forsaking church, when somebody rang the doorbell. A new girl had moved in across the street on Friday. Through the peephole, a large eye stared back at me. When I opened the door, this new girl almost fell inside. “Hey,” she said. “I’m Jeannie. You know where I can buy cigarettes?” “I have to get some milk,” I said. “You can walk with me.” “Wholesome,” she said. “Wait out here a minute.” “You gonna change?” she said. “I forgot something.” She plunked down in an Adirondack chair on the front porch. Inside, I ran skipping stairs down to the laundry room. The iron was turned off—and unplugged. Dad’s shirt, hanging there, looked too big to fit him anymore. I saw what a poor job I’d done; I left so many wrinkles. The only laundry I had managed to get done that week was his. His shirts, slacks, and boxer shorts were folded in three neat stacks. I stripped out of my church clothes and pulled on his Notre Dame sweatshirt. I rummaged through the hamper and shimmied into my red leggings, stepped into a pair of flip-flops. I inhaled. A month ago, the smell of bleach in this room choked me. Jeannie had pulled all the dead leaves off the porch plant. “Check the iron?” she said. I exhaled and let my flip flops make extra loud noise going down the porch stairs. “How about the stove?” she said. “I had to get money.” “Is it Taylor or Tyler?” “Taylor.” “You a sophomore too?” I nodded. Walking to the store we discovered we were both only children. We liked horror films, but dolls had always scared us. “You don’t seem easy to scare,” I said. “You moved halfway across the country by yourself.” A week before Jeannie’s arrival, her father had come into our yard, where my father was battling a hedge. I opened my bedroom window to eavesdrop. Jeannie’s father had lived alone for a decade. “But this weekend,” he said, “I’m expecting a package. My daughter is being shipped to me by the Fed Ex.” My father said nothing. “I’m making a joke here,” Jeannie’s father said. “The ex. She’s sending me a teenager. Nice, huh? Any advice?” The snip of the trimming shears cut my father’s reply into distinct single syllables: “Their tears can seem endless.” I backed away from my window, not sure who to feel worse for, me or my father—maybe Jeannie’s dad. His package had arrived—this stranger. “You know the way a doll’s eyes snap open?” Jeannie said. “I hate that.” At the store, Jeannie came up short a dollar. She turned to me with an open palm and I gave her a handful of change. I saw several thin raised white lines on her wrist and she saw me see them, but said nothing. She wanted me to ask questions, so I didn’t. She used three of my quarters, two dimes and a nickel, then pocketed the rest. She winked at the cashier and said, “Got any matches?” Jeannie was a new face on the block, and not an ugly one. The cashier patted his shirt pocket, his pants pocket, and then shot a glance behind him. The owner of the store, Mr. Decker, was in the far corner restocking the Stouffers and the Lean Cuisines. “Check ID on tobacco sales,” he shouted from inside the freezer. Jeannie whipped a hard plastic card out of her back pocket and snapped it onto the counter like a poker player. The cashier grabbed a pink lighter from the display rack. To cover up the sound he made while removing it from its package he shouted, “California driver’s license 1960. Makes her—” He rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “Twenty-three,” Jeannie and Mr. Decker said in unison. The cashier smiled at Jeannie. One of his front teeth was shorter than the other and I couldn’t decide if that added character or meant he couldn’t afford a good dentist. He didn’t look much older than us, but I didn’t recognize him from school. Nobody from Hillcrest would work in a corner store. Kids at Hillcrest didn’t work. “It’s on me,” he whispered. When he gave Jeannie the lighter, his hand touched hers. Then he saw the scars too and pulled his whole body back, like a guy who’s been petting a dog that suddenly bears its teeth. “I’ll get us a six-pack sometime and tell you my life story,” Jeannie said. The guy wasn’t smiling anymore. We left. “So,” she said, lighting a Virginia Slim, “I hear your mom’s dead.” “Okay.” “Mine should be,” she said. I was tempted to ask for a cigarette. Instead, I opened the milk and drank straight from the carton. “You should drink skim.” We stood at the edge of a complex of baseball diamonds, which I wanted to cut across now to get home faster. Two boys were playing catch with their father and a little girl was hula hooping in a batter’s cage. “In another two months she’ll be making snow angels,” I said. “You’re shitting me.” “Winter always comes faster than expected here,” I said. Jeannie’s skin looked too fragile for California sun, too close to the bone for a Minneapolis winter. “You’re not really going to drink beers with that guy,” I said. “Are you?” “Of course not,” Jeannie said. “I quit drinking.” “Quit? Are you an alcoholic?” “Seriously,” she said, positioning herself between me and the diamonds as if reading my mind, as if to say home safe wasn’t a possibility for me anymore. “Look at me.” Her face was the face we all wanted—it was “heart-shaped.” A band of the lightest orange freckles crossed from under one eye, up over her nose and under the other. She was flat as a board. Maybe her ears stuck out a little. “I’m fifteen,” she said. “Just like you.” “I’ll be sixteen in December,” I said. “Sweet sixteen,” she said. “I’ll buy beer for the party.” “I’m not having a party this year. I don’t even like beer.” “I love beer. But I’m on a diet. I used to be a fat whale.” “Yeah, sure.” Jeannie took a drag off her cigarette. I took a swig of milk. The father we were watching had assumed a monkey-in-the-middle position and the boys were fierce with concentration. The little girl joined in, throwing her hula hoop around her daddy. He played her game. “Do you hula hoop?” Jeannie asked. “I play real sports,” I said. “Field hockey. 400-metre hurdles.” I chugged the rest of the milk and threw it in the garbage. Jeannie finished her cigarette, then flicked it. “Let’s go to my house,” she said. “Cool.” A light wind rolled the butt down the sidewalk in front of us and we followed.Walking into Jeannie’s house was like walking into an igloo. It wasn’t cold; it’s just that everything was white. Or caramel. Or taupe. I sought out red, but the apples in the bowl on the kitchen counter were pale yellow, mixed with pears that weren’t even green. At least our house still had a woman’s touch: golden glass vases in windowsills, masks on the walls, a spice rack. “Your house is very soothing,” I said, somehow conjuring a feminine politesse. “Soothing like a padded cell,” Jeannie said. “The old man ordered me princess furniture. Gag me.” I thought the only people that referred to others as “the old man” were working men of my grandfather’s generation, or wives who slept in the same bedroom as their husbands but apart in twin beds. “Come up to my room,” Jeannie said. “I’ll unpack.” Jeannie’s room was smaller than mine. It didn’t have a skylight, either. I liked having a skylight over my bed. When the light was just right, I could see my own reflection the way if you’re on an airplane at night and have a window seat, you can look at yourself. In that little oval window, your face contains constellations of entire cities and satellite towns. Airborne you don’t know the names of each glowing place you pass over, and you’ll never know those perpendicular streets, but you come to know the sky above your house thoroughly. It rains, it snows, the wind whips over your rooftop and your dreams contain puddles, drifts, and gusts. On the airplane, you realize you may never land. If you do land, you may discover it has all been a bad dream—seeing your own house down there in the wrong town with a different family in the front yard. But in your house, in your bed, you have not been dreaming. The dark empty square of night presses on you. You have school tomorrow and hockey practice—which makes you tired, but you don’t sleep. You lie awake staring past your reflection in the skylight above your bed, praying for your mother’s smile to pass across your blurry face. “My parents and I flew over Las Vegas once at night,” I told Jeannie. “It was the Fourth of July. The fireworks looked like a war.” “Your parents gamble?” “We didn’t land there.” Jeannie was pulling dresses out of her suitcase. All of them were black. I started on a box marked “Albums 1 of 12.” “Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables?” I said. “What’s this?” “Put it on,” she said. There was nothing but a mattress, the open suitcase, and boxes of albums in the room. “The record player is downstairs. Crank the volume.” “What if your dad comes home?” “The old man is never home before ten,” Jeannie said. “He’s a professional schmoozer. Crank it.” Later that night, I would tell my father I had listened to a band called The Dead Kennedys. “How disrespectful,” he would say, totally missing the point. Jeannie’s living room floor was vibrating. The walls in the stairwell pumped and the banister shivered. I had never been to a dance club, but this is how I imagined it felt. Sitting on Jeannie’s bedroom floor, I felt plugged in to the carpet. I had to talk loud. “Wasn’t it hard to leave your friends?” I said. I imagined a pack of girls with heart-shaped faces and slick bobs on their way to a misty warehouse—black boots stomping over the stars of Hollywood Boulevard, and cigarette smoke trailing from between their lips into a night sky slatted by palm leaves. “I didn’t have a lot of friends,” she said. “I just got invited to a lot of parties.” “A few people hate me too,” I said. It wasn’t true. A few of the junior and senior girls on the field hockey team were jealous I’d been made captain, but I didn’t even want my friends anymore. It had been ten months since I’d invited anybody over—nine with Mom dying on the couch and one with Dad taking up more or less the same position. “My dad ordered me a guitar,” Jeannie said. “That’ll be a cool hobby for you,” I said. “Like sports for you.”
One Friday, right when I got home from losing a hockey game, Jeannie came over to my house. “I saw your old man leave an hour ago,” she said. “Come in,” I said. “Want a sandwich?” “Don’t go heavy on the mayonnaise.” “We only have mustard.” She threw her cigarettes and fake ID on the kitchen counter. “Got any matches?” she said. “You can’t smoke in here.” “C’mon. We’ll open some windows and put on the stove fan.” “Do you do that in your house?” “No. You’re right. Isn’t your old man always home?” “You know when you say ‘old man’ it makes me feel sweaty,” I said. “Nobody here calls their father ‘old man.’” I was making us turkey sandwiches and was thankful to find a tomato. “I don’t like the seedy stuff,” she said. “It’s like swallowing some guy’s wad.” “Tomato, yes or no?” “Yes, but gut it. Doesn’t he work?” “Computers,” I said. “He works from home.” “Does he make video games?” “Fortran. He teaches computers to talk to each other.” “Far out.” “Not really. It looks like math.” “Maybe to the machines it sounds like music.” I liked Jeannie because she would ask about someone, say your mother or your father, and you’d give her the shortest possible answer and that was good enough. “It’s all about Cal-i-forn-ya,” I heard some of my friends say about Jeannie. “Yeah,” others said, “It’s all about punk rock. It’s all about her.” That’s what I liked about hanging out with Jeannie: it was all about her. I already knew my stories. I knew the girls in-the-locker room’s stories. Have you ever done daily doubles before fall sports season? Ever run the 3200-meter race in the spring? Do you notice any change of mood as you drill and circle, besides the dwindling awakedness of your entire body? Not really. It’s like that sometimes in high school, hearing the same girls tell the same stories. Jeannie didn’t bore me with talk about break-ups and what Linda Evangelista wore down the runway. Jeannie wore black and forgot about it. “We’ve got a weekend project,” she said. “I got purple and cranberry paint. We’ll do my bedroom walls two colors.” “That’s soulful,” I said. “I’m an old soul.” Some people believe the soul has a weight, but I had never heard that it could also have an age. Since Dad and I had given up on God—no, before that—I’d done a lot of thinking on the soul. I watched Jeannie chew the turkey sandwich I’d made her. Was she counting the number of chews? And if she had been a fat whale like she said she’d been, how had she become so skinny. “Did you do drugs in California?” I asked. My knowledge of drugs was limited to what I’d heard in the locker room: Pot makes you doughy and every other drug devours your muscles. Of course, I knew some about prescription drugs because of my mother opting to die at home. I laundered her sheets and blankets. They were damp and tinged with the chemicals that turned each of her cells into little black holes. “Seriously,” Jeannie said. “I look like a fucking junkie to you?” “How would I know? I’ve never known a junkie. Have you?” She opened her mouth really wide around the sandwich, like she wanted more and it wasn’t there. I searched the cabinets for a bag of chips. Before I found and opened a box of pretzels, she’d cleaned her plate. “It wasn’t my fault,” she said. “You want another one? I don’t think we have any more bread.” “Crank,” Jeannie said. “My stepfather, actually my ex-stepfather got me hooked. I disgusted my mother so she kicked me to Carl’s place. A cheap alternative to fat camp.” “What’s crank?” I said. “Poor man’s cocaine,” Jeannie said. “I was at the college parties, snorting and selling it. Dancing too.” “Dancing striptease?” “Fuck no. Parties. Drugs. Dancing with a hundred people. That’s all.” “How could an adult let you do that?” I asked, knowing the look she would give me. “Being a fuckwad doesn’t stop automatically when these people have children,” she said. “Which people?” I said. “Mainly our fathers, or our father-figures anyhow.” “What about your mother?” I said. “She sent you to live with her ex-husband before she sent you to your real dad even.” “I’ve already told you about my mom.” “All you said was ‘She should be dead.’” “You want to hear more?” “Do you have a word for her? Like, is she a ‘fuckwad’?” “Did you have a word for your mom?” Christian. Veterinarian. The more I tried to think of a word to capture my mother—Skier, Deceased—the more I felt how time was going to eventually force me to have nothing but quaint things to say about her. “I can hear the tomato squishing in your mouth,” Jeannie said. Gardener. I kept chewing—slowly. “Can we play on your old man’s computers? “Not allowed.” “Do you know how to turn them on?” “Of course.” “Show me.” Beachcomber. Pianist. Friend. I stood in front of the refrigerator with the door open. We were out of everything. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll show you the computers.” The door to my dad’s office took an extra push, as if he’d been trying to seal off his own little universe. The computer screens glowed green in the dark. “Jesus. How many does he have?” Jeannie said. She leaned into a screen and touched it. The room was static charged. Her orange hair looked black and electric. I turned to another machine and opened up a game of Minesweeper. The sound of the garage door opening and my father’s car horn startled us. “That means groceries,” I said. “Your dad goes food shopping on Friday night? Weird.” I waited for my father to express surprise at seeing me walk into the garage with another teenage girl after almost a year with no company. The first time I’d worn tights with a pattern in them to school, he had stuttered to my mother, “Don’t you think that’s a bit much?” The hockey season prior, at every game he jumped up and down like a madman. It was almost embarrassing. Instead, my father walked past us, his arms full of groceries, and said, “Ladies.” Jeannie looked at me and frowned. “Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto,” she said, impersonating a robot. I shoved two grocery bags into her stiff bent arms. She had skipped a week of school just to watch videos. She told me she was going to create songs that were something between Iron Man and Oh, Mickey. She said she wanted to project the voice and persona of a cheerleader being trampled by the home team. I wanted to tell my father, “This is the girl! The one who is teaching me about the Dead Kennedys and Exene. Exene, Dad. A woman whose tights are torn to pieces.” But it wouldn’t matter. Our feet-tickling days were over. Our family-of-three days were too. “My father was abducted,” I told Jeannie, trying to be funny. “He’s totally sci-fi,” she said. In the kitchen, my dad was stacking the freezer. “Dad,” I said. “This is Jeannie from across the street. She’s been here for almost two months. That’s where I’ve mainly been getting dinner.” “Your father must think we don’t cook,” Dad said. “We don’t cook,” I said. “His name is Rick,” Jeannie said. “Rick Ingram. And I cook. I’ve got the house to myself until ten every night. Rick is clockwork.” “You’re all so independent these days,” my father said. Jeannie opened a cabinet and started filling it with cans of soup and boxes of instant rice. “In California, we get lots of fresh produce,” she said. “Is that right?” My father looked at Jeannie. I tried to imagine what he would have said to her a year ago, back when he was funny. Of course, a year ago we would have had real food in the house and I wouldn’t be seeking out Jeannie, the freak of the school with her California death fashions, slutty musician worship, and health shake concoctions made of grasses and seaweed. “What do you do with all those machines upstairs?” Jeannie asked my father. I lined up the cereal boxes on top of the refrigerator, waiting for: “How many times do I have to tell you not to touch the computers?” He folded one empty grocery sack, then another, then shoved them into a cabinet. “I give the machines language,” he said. “You should crank the volume,” Jeannie said. “I can’t hear a thing they’re saying.” My father laughed. He kept laughing. He was laughing. I turned from the refrigerator to make sure he wasn’t having a heart attack. “Their language is inside,” my father said. “It travels under your feet and over your head almost constantly. You just can’t see the connections.” “I’m a guitarist,” Jeannie said. “I know what you mean. All the songs that have ever been played are out there vibrating eternally through the solar system, but we don’t hear them. Our heads would explode if we did.” “Taylor’s mother and I tried to get her to play the piano for years,” my father said. “I played for years,” I said. “I never should have let her quit. Her mother was too soft with her.” I stared at the spice rack, wondering how long before basil and oregano lost their flavour. “Help yourself to a pizza, ladies,” my father said. “Fifteen minutes at 400 degrees.” Jeannie stared at my father as he walked up the stairs and then she turned to me with the blankest expression I, to this day, have ever seen on a human face. Maybe she wanted to ask questions, but I don’t think even she knew how to form them. “I can’t eat another pizza,” I said.
We walked across the street to Jeannie’s house. The streetlights were buzzing. I pinched at the gut growing above my waistband. “Losing your mother has a lot of consequences,” I said. “I’ll make us a stir fry.” “I’m not hungry.” “A shake then. Replenishing.” In her muted kitchen, Jeannie went to work, throwing sprouts and grasses and bananas into the blender. Yogurt, frozen blueberries, and spinach. The result was the color and consistency of diarrhea, but I drank it. I had never heard the phone ring before at Jeannie’s house. It startled me out of a stupour in which I was imagining all the food in the world mashed into one formless pile on God’s plate. Jeannie was gulping down her shake saying “Yes” and “No” to the person on the other end of the line. She sounded like a seal, half-swallowing, half-talking. She hung up and wiped her mouth with her wrist the way I would after downing a bottle of Gatorade. “Who were you closer to when you were little?” I asked. “Your mother or your father?” She flicked on HBO. “Let’s watch Psycho,” she said. “We’ve watched it three times this month,” I said. “But everything else is comedy.” My mother used to say laughter was the best medicine. “What about animals?” I had asked. “They can’t laugh. Do they die sad?” “They play,” my mom said. I was a child, but knew this wasn’t true. We’d fostered sick animals in their final days and they did not play unless you could pretend their wanting to hide was a plea for us to seek them. I thought about what my father had said about my mother. She wasn’t too soft on me. She made me stare her cancer right in the face. She let me off the hook with the piano because she saw that I couldn’t sit still. I needed to run. When I was young, she couldn’t get me out of my roller skates—the metal adjustable kind that hooked onto the heels and toes of my Chucks. I took hills at airplane speed and my palms and knees were continuously striped with pavement. My mother would tweeze the gravel out, and there was something good in the pain. She dug into me and gave me permission to squeeze her shoulders as hard as I could. After my first big wipeout, I begged her for stitches. I wanted my skin to be sewn up like the belly of the cat we’d just adopted. I wanted pale white criss-crosses on my pink knees. I wanted to wear my scars like war paint and show everyone I was incredibly tough. “These are just scrapes,” my mother told me. “Wrap them,” I said. “Like a mummy’s.” “We’re not even going to band-aid these knees,” my mother said. She said, “Some wounds are meant to be left open.” “Who was that on the phone?” I asked Jeannie. I was squirting dish detergent into the blender, watching the bubbles foam up with their green iridescence. “Band friends.” “Band?” “Not band. My band. I play guitar, remember?” “I thought you meant in the future. Your band.” “No. You think I’m a liar.” “It’s just you’ve done everything under the sun. You move here and make everybody feel boring.” With a dishtowel and a blender in my hand, wearing my plaid kilt from the hockey game, school-coloured barrettes, and striped tube socks, I suddenly worried for my future. “You probably already made an album and are just waiting for me to pull it out of that stack and faint.” “I don’t talk about my music. Talk about what you love and people steal it, try to change it. Destroy it.” “But you know I’m your biggest fan.” “Shut the fuck up,” Jeannie said. “Wait down here.” I sat on the taupe suede couch. Her guitar was purple. She plugged it into a small amplifier. “I wrote this.” She played a short, fast song. I clapped. “That was beyond Too Drunk to Fuck,” I said. “Get it?” she said. “Fuck Rick’s slick dick?” I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to say yes or no. If I said I got it, she might feel the song was too normal. If I said I didn’t get it, she might think I was too normal. “Haven’t you ever thought of having sex with your father?” Jeannie asked me. I laughed. “He’s not my type,” I said. “I fuck my old man. It brings us closer.” So what does happen when you talk about something you love and it’s not the aurora borealis or silent films or feeding stray kittens milk with an eye-dropper? If it was true that Jeannie was having sex with her father, shouldn’t someone judge that, change that, destroy it? Why was she always trying to get me to ask impossible questions? “That’s one way of getting close, I suppose,” I said. “But there are plenty of others.” “Yeah?” she said. “Like what?” I hugged both knees into my chest. I tucked my skirt and crossed my ankles. “How’d you get those scars?” Jeannie said. “I don’t remember,” I said. “Yeah, right.” Jeannie flipped the channels. She settled on MTV. All the VJs had bad perms except Martha, and Martha wasn’t on. “Who’s in your band?” “Jason Cartwright and Matt Young. We’re practicing all weekend.” “I thought we were painting your room.” Devo was on. I hated their flowerpot hats. And what was up with Mӧtley Crüe? Vince Neal was about to burst out of his pants. Billy Squire was not even handsome. “He looks like Kenny Fucking G.” I said. “What the hell is your problem?” Jeannie said. “I’m sick of this noise. I’m going home.”
I stayed in bed all weekend. My father brought me toast and chicken soup and orange juice. He stuck his hand on my forehead and pushed my hair off my face and told me I felt warm. I didn’t feel warm, but I thanked him. “Your friend forgot her things,” he said. “They’re in the basket on the kitchen counter. You know, she could get in real trouble pretending to be twenty-three.” Jeannie had left her ID and cigarettes at our house. I wondered how she was buying more. Probably, she was already sleeping with that guy at the corner store. “I hope this doesn’t mean you are smoking, Taylor.” “Of course not, Dad.” “Because I’m leaving for my conference tomorrow and I need to know I won’t come back Thursday to find the house burnt down.” “I don’t smoke.” “Great. Goodnight.” I could hear my father through my bedroom wall tapping away on his keyboards. I watched night fall over my skylight and thought about what aliens would see looking down into my little lit square, me lying as still as my mother. Then, through the lit square of my father’s office, a man bathed in phosphorescence, determined to conquer all the remaining if-thens. Jeannie did need her ID. When I missed school on Monday, she came ringing the bell. By Tuesday, she was throwing barkdust at my window and calling every fifteen minutes. I turned the ringer off and hoped Dad wouldn’t call, and unable to reach me, have the cops come. I knew of course, that wouldn’t happen. Wednesday, when I heard nothing from Jeannie, I was sure she was figuring out a way to climb onto our roof to look down through my skylight, so I crawled to the laundry room and slept there on a pile of blankets that night. Every night, I listened for Mr. Ingram’s car to pull into their garage. He always came home at ten o’clock on the dot. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to meet him or not, but I was thinking that I had to prove Jeannie wrong—it wasn’t true that if you talked about the things you loved, you would lose them. I mean, we all lose things no matter what. I would keep her secret to keep her near. Jeannie was somehow better off with her father. She was off drugs and working on her talent. Girls at school who had nothing to do had had sex with the entire football team. Was that attempt at love, or desire for attention any more acceptable than what Jeannie was doing? Would those girls be better off when they became women? Maybe I was the only person in the universe who could withhold judgment at that moment in time.
Thursday evening after my father came home I went over to Jeannie’s to return her things. Neither of us spoke about our first fight. I was invited to sit on her toilet and watch her squeeze blackheads. From a distance, you wouldn’t notice a pore on Jeannie’s face, but this close-up, I could see her nose was an oilfield. “Did you know there are two entire periods of history missing in the Grand Canyon,” I said. “Like what, no bones?” “Mr. Brown said there are no traces of sediments. No layers. Everywhere else there’s ash or lava or sandstone. Or fossils.” “Aliens,” Jeannie said. “They don’t leave footprints.” “It’s creepy,” I said. “It’s mind-blowing, is what it is,” Jeannie said. “I mean, I can’t even think about it, it’s so big.” She scrubbed her cheeks furiously, counterclockwise. “Remember you asked me if I ever stripped?” she said. After years of playing sports with some of my girlfriends, I still could barely stand them seeing me in my bra and underwear after practice. “I didn’t plan it,” she said. “But I was wearing these awful nylons. The crank made me hot and thirsty. I was dancing with this boy. He saw me fumbling to get my boots off but I didn’t want him touching the thick of me so I backed up onto the stage these people had in their rec room. Fucking record label parents.” When she was finished squeezing her blackheads she moved on to a pore-tightening facial mask. “Sure you don’t want to do one?” she said. She had a fascinating array of products; I had Ivory soap. “No, thanks,” I said. “This is made of crushed pearls and deep sea fossils,” Jeannie said. “Probably the missing layers of the Grand Canyon. Suit yourself.” She whisked white mud over her face. “So I was on that stage, a fat chick thinking I was invisible. You’re fat, you can sing and dance and leave no trace.” She looked in the mirror. “You drinking skim milk like I told you?” she said. She stretched her mouth to check that her mask was tightening up. My face was tightening up without the mask. When my mother was dying in our living room and our front door opened right on to her death, I learned about invisibility. If she was sleeping, I tiptoed past her. If she was awake but drugged out, I crawled. In those sheets I laundered, the outline of her body in chemical sweat was visceral and I read it—I watched that shape diminish over the months rather than watch the actual woman, who may or may not have been wondering whatever became of her daughter. Where was I? My noisy girlfriends after practice crowding the kitchen and eating oranges and cookies. Me and my 57.65 second 400-metre hurdle record, my mother with her tongue hanging out. Me and my muscles stiff from daily doubles, my mother’s bones turning to gel. How does a bed sheet become a mirror? A disco ball? This fractal dance of not wanting to see, not wanting to be seen, repeat. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I disbelieved it was the real me just as the sweat on the sheet was not my real mother. Jeannie moved her eyebrows up and down. Her mask was starting to crack. She wiped it away. “If you were invisible, how did you get anyone to see you?” I said. “The guy I was dancing with started to help with my nylons. He yelled, ‘It’s like peeling the skin off a sausage!’ and then everyone went wild. He pried those bitches off me. My thighs were slick as snot. My sweater was thick with the body spray my mother used to buy me. She was always telling me fat girls needed to cover their smell. ‘You’ve got all those extra creases,’ she’d say. Pulling that tacky sweet yarn over my head was like bursting from the center of a honeysuckle. Then the cops came and threw a bunch of us in the drunk tank and my mom came. I was with her one night. Then rehab. Now here I am.” “I thought you lived with your ex-stepfather before you moved here.” “Cops throw you to your mother.” Above my head, drying in the shower, hung one of the tank tops Jeannie had made in silk-screening class. It was bubblegum pink, small enough for a child, with the name of her new band, Jesus’ Fetus, printed in bold red across the chest. I looked at Jeannie and could not picture her having a mother. The story about her legs being compared to sausages scared me. The way the female body is built to stretch—from the bones that cradle new life to bones shrinking, leaving skin to sag into sheets—I couldn’t figure out where our mothers ended and where we began. It was a mystery I thought I’d never figure out.
Jeannie didn’t say goodbye. She dropped out of school right before winter break. Matt Young did too and rumours flew that she was pregnant and they’d moved back to LA for the real punks’ life. An underground school newspaper, The Second Coming, was established in their honor. It died before Valentine’s Day, the day I lost my virginity to Paul, the cashier at the corner store. The first time we did it, he asked me about the scars on my knees and I told him everything. We lasted until I graduated and he took off for flight school. Every Sunday for two years, he gave me a free sack of fresh produce. Thanks to him, I got some of what a growing girl needs. That first Christmas without Mom was the loneliest ever. New Year’s Day, I saw Mr. Ingram set Jeannie’s suitcase and a Christmas tree he’d suffocated with tinsel, out with the trash. I had never met him. That night, I snuck across the street and sorted through her things. There were a few wrapped Christmas gifts. I left them. I took a sack of black dresses to Goodwill. I kept one of her bubblegum-pink Jesus’ Fetus tank tops and hid it in my closet. Senior year, I was offered scholarships in field hockey and track. I chose hockey at Penn, but dropped out after the first year. I moved to San Francisco to study acupuncture, to get past thinking of the body as just a machine. I was in Chinatown picking up a carton of needles years later when I saw the flyer pasted to a telephone pole. Jeannie Ingram’s face stuck out as disgruntled as ever, but pretty, amongst a rag-tag collection of tribal-pierced boys. Executioners of Mercy was playing at The Fillmore. That night, I muscled through to the front of the crowd. Jeannie sang like demons were clawing at the inside of her throat. She had tattoos she hadn’t had in high school. Her bob was shaved off and the crowd was ferocious. I had thought girls like Jeannie and me, girls without mothers who were in extra desperate need of their fathers, would never find answers to the questions that plagued us, the questions we hadn’t even known existed because we never heard certain questions asked. Because there are questions only mothers ask and questions only mothers can teach daughters to ask, and if Jeannie and I didn’t harden the missing layers inside us, people could easily scratch the surface and see all we were missing. I stood dead center of the stage in the front row and willed Jeannie’s blood to stop. She opened her eyes and saw me wearing the bubblegum-pink Jesus’ Fetus tank top I had rescued from the trash the night she ran away. With her thick-soled thigh-high lace-up boots, she kicked everything she could onstage and her drummer acted pissed but the show was over. She told the audience to fuck off and go home and they cried, “We love you! You cunt!” Then she offered me her arm and pulled me up onstage and she flashed everyone a piece of ass from beneath her short skirt and we went under all the noise. She grabbed onto me, covered in sweat, black eye make-up and tattoos. I hugged her back. “Let’s go somewhere,” she said. “Don’t you have to—” “I’ve never had to do anything,” Jeannie said. The boys from her band were coming at us, the drummer headed fiercely for Jeannie. She flipped them the bird and we were gone, up on Fillmore, catching a cab. “You’re famous!” I said. She looked fantastic. The shaved head was perfect. All those products she had used made her flawless and shiny. Our cab may as well have been a UFO and she our fearless leader. We headed towards the Tenderloin. The bar was set up in an old theatre and we took a box seat. “So where were we?” she said. “We were in your bathroom. And then you vanished.” “Who vanished?” Our drinks came. I had a martini. Jeannie, a beer. We watched people. People watched us. We must have made an odd pair: wild-hard costumed Jeannie and me with no makeup in a too-small tank top that screamed Wannabe! Jeannie had run back to Los Angeles. She was a single mom, but not from the boy she’d run away with in high school. Her band was now headed for their first European tour. “Are you going to take your daughter with you?” I asked. “God no, she’s tiny. I’d lose her,” Jeannie said. “Lita stays with my mother.” “She’s a better grandmother than a mother, I hope.” “They grow out of being fuckwads after all,” Jeannie said. “It’s a shame isn’t it?” “Not being a fuckwad?” “How becoming whole takes some of us such a long time.” She stretched her arms across the table. Her tattoos were a mix of the word Mercy in twenty languages. She had covered a hundred pressure points on each arm, as well as the scars. “Sorry I didn’t tell you I was bailing,” she said. “All I could think about was myself. I never let you talk about your mother, but you were so fucking tough.” I leaned back into our little round booth. The velvet hit my shoulder blades and I was aware of how when a bone in the body breaks hard, it will pierce the skin, but when a bone disintegrates, it’s a whole other story. “It didn’t snow the winter you left. It was the lousiest Christmas.” “I guess that little girl never got to make her angels.” Smoke swirled into the chandelier above us the way clouds blew across the stars trapped by the skylight above my adolescent bed. I eventually stopped looking to the dark heavens for traces of my mother. But I wish I had understood sooner why my father had pulled away. He knew how much of my mother was in me, and because he could not bear to lose her twice, he held me at arm’s length, never to be brought close again. I could have learned these things faster, could have wasted fewer years seeking filler for the loss of a love that is one-of-a-kind and tenuous when girls reach a certain age—even under the best of circumstances. But like Jeannie said, it takes some of us such a long time.
