She stripped it off and handed it to me. It smelled of her heavy perfume. Obsession. When I took off my clothes, she looked at my body closely, like she was trying to decide if she wanted to buy it or not. My underwear was torn. "You'd better start wearing a bra, missy. Thirteen years old, I should say. I had my first bra in the fourth grade. You don't want 'em hanging to your knees when you're thirty, do you?"
Thirteen? The shock of it made me drop a stack of clothes off the hook. I thought back through the past year. My mother's trial, all the sessions and questions, medication and caseworkers, Sometime in there I'd turned thirteen. I had crossed a frontier in my sleep, and nobody had woken me to stamp my passport. Thirteen. The idea so stunned me I didn't even argue when Starr insisted on buying me the pink dress to wear to church, and two bras so they wouldn't hang down to my knees when I was thirty, and a package of panties, some other things.
We went next door to Payless for shoes. Starr took a sample red high heel down from the display and put it on without a sock, stood on it, smoothed her shorts over her hips, cocked her head to one side, made a face, and put it back on the stand. "I mean, I really thought like that. Who cares if I stick my tits in some stranger's face? It's nobody's business but mine."
Carolee whispered, "Mother, please shut up. People are staring."
Starr handed me a pair of pink high heels that would match my dress. I tried them on. They made my feet look like Daisy Duck's, but Starr loved them and pressed them on me.
"She could really use some goddamn sneakers or something," Carolee said. "All she's got are those thongs."
I decided on a pair of hiking boots, hoping they weren't too expensive. Starr looked pained when I showed them to her. "They're not very . .. flattering."
But snakes rarely struck above the ankle.
ON SUNDAY MORNING, Carolee was up early. I was surprised. On Saturday she'd slept until noon. But here she was, up at eight, dressed, her little backpack on her back. "Where are you going?"
She brushed her sandy hair. "Are you kidding? I'm not going to spend my day listening to Reverend Creephead talk about the Blood of the Lamb." She put her brush down and rushed out of the room. "Sayonara." I heard the screen door slam.
I took the hint from Carolee and pretended I was sick. Starr looked at me hard, and said, "Next week, missy." She wore a short white skirt and a peach blouse and four-inch spike heels. I could smell a big waft of Obsession. "No excuses."
It was only when I heard Starr's Torino heave itself onto the road that I dared dress and come out, make myself some breakfast. It was nice being alone, the boys hiding somewhere down in the wash, the distant whine of dirt bikes. I was just eating when Starr's hippie boyfriend came out of the bedroom, barefoot in jeans, pulled a T-shirt over his head. His chest was lean and hairy, sandy threaded with gray, his shaggy hair out of its usual ponytail. He staggered down the hall. I could hear the sound of his piss, the water coming on. Splashing, flushing. He came into the main room and found a cigarette in a pack on the table, lit it. The hand that held the cigarette was missing one ringer and the fingertip of the next.
He smiled when he saw me looking at it. "You ever see a carpenter get a table in a restaurant? Table for three, please." He held up his damaged hand.
At least he wasn't sensitive about it. I kind of liked him, though it embarrassed me that he was the one causing the "Christ almighties" through the wall. He was a plain man, lean-faced, sad-eyed, long graying hair. We were supposed to call him Uncle Ray. He opened the refrigerator, pulled out a beer. Shhhhht, it sighed when he popped the top.
"You're missing the Jesus show." He didn't drink his beer so much as pour it down his throat.
"So are you," I said.
"I'd rather be shot," he said. "Here's my theory. If there's a God, he's so fucked up he doesn't deserve to be prayed to." He belched loudly and smiled.
I'd never thought much about God. We had the Twilight of the Gods, we had the world tree. We had Olympus and its scandals, Ariadne and Bacchus, the rape of Danae. I knew about Shiva and Parvati and Kali, and Pele the volcano goddess, but my mother had banned the least mention of Christ. She wouldn t even come to the Christmas pageant at school. She made me beg a ride off some other kid.
The nearest I'd come to feeling anything like God was the plain blue cloudless sky and a certain silence, but how do you pray to that?
Uncle Ray leaned up against the doorjamb, smoking, looking out at the big pepper tree and his pickup truck in the yard. He sipped his beer, which he held in the same hand as the cigarette, dexterous for a person missing two fingers. He crinkled his eyes against the smoke as he exhaled out the screen. "He just wants to ball her. Pretty soon he's gonna tell her to get rid of me, that s when I get my thirty-eight, teach him a fucking thing or two. Then you'll see a little Blood of the Lamb."
I picked the marshmallows out of my cereal, arranged them on the rim of the bowl, purple moons, green clovers. "It's not a sin if you're married," I said. I didn't think he'd hear me but he did.
"I'm already married," he said, looking out the screen toward the pepper tree, its boughs blowing like a woman's long hair. He shot a grin back over his shoulder. "I got the virus big time."
I alternated the moons and clovers, eating the ones that fell in the bowl. "Where's your wife? "
"I don't know. Haven't seen her in two, three years."
He seemed so calm about it, that someone was walking around with his name and his history and he didn't even know where she was. It made me feel dizzy, like I wanted to grab hold of something heavy and hang on. This was the life I was going to be living, everybody separated from everybody else; hanging on for a moment, only to be washed away. I could grow up and drift away too. My mother might never know where I was, and in a few years, if someone asked her about me, she might shrug like this and say, "Haven't seen her in two, three years."
It hit me, like a punch in the stomach. I could go for years and never see her again. Just like this. People losing each other, their hands slipping loose in a crowd. I might never see her again. Those dull eyes behind the dry aquarium, the shape of her back. My God, how could I have avoided knowing this all these months? I wanted my mother, I wanted something to hold on to me, not let me slip away.
"Hey, what's all this?" Uncle Ray came over and sat next to me at the table. He stuck his cigarette in his beer can and took my hands in his. "Don't cry, kid. What's wrong? You can tell Uncle Ray."
All I could do was shake my head, raw sobs like razors.
"You miss your mom?"
I nodded. My throat felt like there were two hands wrapped around it, squeezing, forcing water out of my eyes. Snot ran from my nose. Ray scooted his chair so he could put his arm around me, handed me a napkin off the table. I buried my face in his chest, and let my tears and snot wet the front of his T-shirt. It felt good to be held. I breathed in his smell, cigarettes and stale body and beer and fresh-cut wood, something green.
He held me, he was solid, he wouldn't let me drift away. Talking to me, telling me nobody was going to hurt me, I was a great kid, nothing was going to happen. After a while he wiped my cheeks with the back of his hand, lifting my chin so he could look at me, pushing my hair out of my eyes. "You really miss her, huh. Tell me, is she as pretty as you?"
I smiled a little, his eyes were so sad and kind. "I have a picture." I ran down to my room, brought back a copy of my mother's last book, Dust. I gently stroked my hand over her picture on the back cover, on the beach at Big Sur. Huge rocks in the water, driftwood. She wore a fisherman sweater, her hair swept back by the wind. She looked like a Lorelei, cause of shipwreck. Odysseus would have had to lash himself to the mast. "You're going to be prettier," he said.
I wiped my nose on the short sleeve of my T-shirt, smiled. My mother was a woman people stopped in the market to wonder at. Not like Starr, but just at the sheer beauty. They seemed startled she had to shop and eat like anyone else. I couldn't imagine owning beauty like my mother's. I wouldn't dare. It would be too scary. "No way."
"Hey, way. You're just a different type. You're the sweetheart type. Your mother looks like she could take a bite out of ya — not that I'd mind, I can take it rough too, but you know what I mean. For you, they'll just fall down like flies." He peered into my lowered face with his kind eyes, speaking so gently. "You hear me? You're going to have to push the bodies out of the way if you want to go down the street."
Nobody had ever said anything like that to me before. Even if he was just lying to make me feel better, who bothered to do that now?
He flipped through some of the pages, reading. "Look, this one's about you."
I snatched it away, my face flaming. I knew the poem.
Shhh
Astrid's sleeping
Pink well of her wordless mouth
One long leg trails off the bed
Like an unfinished sentence
Fine freckles hold a constellation of second chances
Her cowrie shell
Where the unopened woman whispers . . .
She used to recite it at poetry readings. I would sit drawing at my table as if I didn't hear her, as if it weren't me she was talking about, my body, my childish girl parts. I hated that poem. What did she think, I didn't know what she was talking about? I didn't care who she read it to? No, she thought because I was her daughter that I belonged to her, that she could do anything she wanted with me. Make me into poetry, expose my chicken bones and my cowrie shell, my unopened woman.
"What happened to her?" he asked.
"She killed her boyfriend," I said, looking down at her photo, her profile a spear under my ribs, piercing my liver, my right lung. A tear ran off my eyelash and fell on her picture. I wiped it off. "She's in prison."
He shrugged. As if that was something people did. Not good, but not shocking.