Yeah. That does it.
I take off my apron, fold it, and hand it to Callie, who’s practically wetting her pants. I walk out of the Lucky Penny through the back door so I don’t have to see what’s-her-boobs.
The crazy part is that when I’m driving home, instead of thinking about how I’ve lost my job and been called a slut from a family of sluts, I think of those dirty blades of ice cream. You never think about the clean-up when you’re eating those big chunks of Oreo, but you would if someone didn’t do it. And that’s the thing about cleaning things up—it sucks to do it and it sucks if you don’t.
9
Mounted Specimen:
A stuffed bird skin that people hang on their walls because it looks pretty but doesn’t make a mess.
There are two kinds of jobs in Landon:
(1) Rotten.
(2) Less rotten, unless you’re a dentist like Erik’s dad, which actually I don’t think is all that great except the money, no matter what I told Erik.
And there are two kinds of people in this town:
(1) Losers: We work for the other kind of people.
(2) Winners: There aren’t many of these types. They move.
Of course there are variations. You can be a First Lieutenant Loser, like Howard, or an Assistant to the Winners, like my dad. He is an engineer for the copper mine. Or like my mom, who has a loser job cleaning offices until late at night, but thinks it’s okay because it makes it so she can be home in the daytime with Danny. But if you are a high school senior with no skills but baby busting, food flipping, and cleaning crew, you probably shouldn’t quit your job because your boss and your ex-boyfriend are jerks. That really limits where you can work around here.
So when I go home early my parents are less than thrilled. I give them the overview minus the specifics of Howard calling my sister and me sluts. When I finish, my dad, the engineer, wants to hear the story again.
“What do you mean?” he says when I get to the part where I walked to the front so I could get the receipt.
“I didn’t do it.”
“Erik deserves a swift kick in the butt, but you quit in the middle of a shift? What happened to everyone else when you left?”
“What happens to
you
without a job?” says Mom. “How are you going to pay for dental assistant school?”
“I don’t know.”
Dad says, “Maybe you should have thought of that before you let your temper get the better of you. This is exactly what that little puke wanted you to do.”
Maybe it was what
I
wanted me to do,
is what I want to say. But what comes out is, “I know.”
Sitting at the kitchen table with bills and a checkbook stacked in front of her, Mom looks as tired as I feel. In her jagged voice she says, “We just can’t do it all, Myra. Now that we have to pay for an uninsured baby there is no way we can pay for your dental hygiene class. What are you going to do without that job?”
No matter how bad I feel, my parents can always make me feel worse. “I’ll start looking tomorrow after school.”
“I guess you heard Melyssa is moving home?”
“Yeah, I know,” I say with more frustration than I mean to.
My mom leans backward, away from her pile of bills, and sticks her pen in her gray-streaked ponytail. “Well, I guess you know everything then,” she says.
Dad looks at me and Mom and sighs. I bet he wishes he could stay at work. Where everything is logical, and there are a lot less women. If only everything could be as beautiful and tidy as a smelter the height of the Empire State Building.
“I don’t think you will have trouble getting another job, actually,” says Dad.
I didn’t see that coming.
“No, I don’t,” he says. “You’re capable. You take care of a lot around here. I’ve seen you hustle around that ice-cream parlor. You’re a hard worker. You work a lot harder than plenty of people I pay union wage.”
I say, “Thanks, Dad.” Maybe there are some things I don’t know.
“But,” he says, putting his finger to his nose like he does when he’s measuring something, “you have to get that money for school. So you’ll just have to go out there and find a new job tomorrow. Or your mom will make you pour the cement with us.”
“I still need you here after school until your dad gets home,” she says.
“I’ll work it out,” I say.
I guess this isn’t the time to tell them that I want the money to go as far away from this place as I can imagine.
10
Homing:
When a bird comes home after getting lost.
Up until Melyssa graduated a year and a half ago we shared a room, sort of. She’s a night-person-talks-in-her-sleep slob and I’m a crack-of-dawn neatness freak. We survived because she was never home once she hit ninth grade. Now that she’s back, pregnant and miserable with nothing to do but be high maintenance, it’s likely we are going to kill each other.
It’s Friday afternoon, I’ve had the week from Hades, and Mel’s junk is everywhere.
Mel says, “So you told Old Howie to stick it, huh?”
“I didn’t say anything. I just quit.”
“I’ll bet you folded up your apron and walked out politely.”
I really hate it when she pegs me.
She says, “At least you quit, right? That’s good.”
“It would be good—if I had a job.”
“Oh, you can get one of those. You’re like a poster girl for all those waitress-nanny jobs. I mean look at you. You’re like Domestic Goddess Barbie.”
I sit down on the floor to put my things in stacks so I can figure out a way to put them away in half as much space. I want to very neatly die of sadness. Normally I would let Mel say whatever, but everything hurts too much right now already. “I do other things besides mop the floor and babysit.”
Melyssa rolls around on her bed like a pill bug. She’s not even big yet, but she acts like she weighs four hundred pounds. She sighs. “I’m not knocking it. Martha Stewart is totally smart.”
“I’m not Martha Stewart.”
“You iron your money and put it in order in your wallet.”
Carson runs into the room. He still thinks it’s like Christmas because Melyssa’s home. “Mel, come see what Myra made under my bed. It has a lake made out of a milk jug and mountains out of egg cartons with little wire plants and everything.”
Melyssa raises her eyebrows. “Little wire plants? Good job, Martha.”
I don’t answer. Thankfully they both leave so I can shove my underwear into storage baggies without being psychoanalyzed. When Melyssa comes back she says, “Maybe you could get a job making little wire plants. That’s a unique skill.”
I say, “Are you going to go back to school after you have the baby?”
She lies back down on the bed and pats her bulging stomach. “Don’t worry. I’m not staying in this room for the rest of my life. What are
you
going to do after graduation?”
I shrug my shoulders. Right now I’m concentrating on getting through the morning.
“I heard Mom say you want to be a dental assistant.”
“That was Erik’s idea. But Mom and Dad are all set on it. I said I was thinking about it, but I’m not now.” It’s surprising to hear the words out loud.
“No?” She looks over at me. “You have something else in mind?”
“I don’t know.”
“You can tell Big Sis.”
“Big Sis, would it be possible for you to put your socks inside your drawer?”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“What subject?”
“Are you going to be a topless dancer? Chimp trainer? Politician? What?”
“I don’t know, really. This guy came to biology and talked about a scholarship contest where you can go on a trip that sounds . . . you know, far away.”
“Science, huh. I can see that. You could kill things, sterilize them, and then organize them. That’s perfect for you.”
“I don’t care about science. I want to get out of town. But for me to go they’d have to pick my proposal out of all the others written by the genius kids applying and I have to raise money. A lot of money.”
“Where do they go?” She’s sitting up now.
“It doesn’t matter. I’d have to raise a thousand dollars by May.”
She whistles through her teeth. “Spill it.”
“The Galápagos Islands.” I’m sorry the moment the words fall out of my mouth.
“No way.”
“I’d have to write a research proposal that’s better than Erik’s.”
“You’d be competing against Prince Charming?” She laughs and then she laughs again. “Now, that’s perfect.”
I pair my socks. Telling Melyssa is proof of my stupidity.
She says, “Wow. Do you want to do it?”
“No.”
Melyssa adjusts one of my favorite pillows under her rear end. “You only go around once. And the ride ends sooner than you think.”
I want to get a ride out of this room. I want to be with Erik and tell him how crazy Melyssa makes me, except I can’t because I’m a dumped space-sucker. I say, “I’m not you, Mel. I can’t just be brilliant on command.”
Mel adjusts the pillow again and then takes it out from under her and throws it at the wall. “No. You aren’t me. But you know what the real difference is?”
The list of the ways that Melyssa and I are different could fill my journal, and has pretty regularly, since I was old enough to feel inadequate. She won so many awards and trophies in high school, Dad built her a special shelf. When she left I filled it with a vase of dried flowers and a picture of me with Erik at the state fair. I stare at the mound of socks on the floor. Most of them are white but none of them matches. How can I have so many abandoned socks? How does this happen?
Mel says, “The difference is that I go after things. Even when I make a mess, at least I go after what I want.”
The irony is painful. Unless Mel’s big dream has always been to be pregnant, not go to school, and live in her old bedroom and not speak to her baby’s father.
She says, “You should do it, Myra. You’d look great in a bikini and a headlamp. You could be Biology Barbie. Plus it would completely piss off Prince Charming.”
“I’m not trying to make Erik mad. I just want to go somewhere.
Do
something.”
My sister sits up slowly on the bed and crosses her legs under her. Her eyes are lit up like the old Mel, the one who cut my hair off with dull scissors when we were four and six. She says, “You can’t go at this like a kindergarten teacher, Myra. If you do this, you need to win. Make him sorry for every broken promise he ever made to you. Can you do that?”
“Probably not,” I say.
“Come on, Myra!” she says, her voice suddenly hard. “Don’t end up like me and Mom.”
I look up out of my cloud of self-pity. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
She stands up and starts putting away her stuff.
I wait. “Mel?”
“What?” she says.
I wait. Mel can’t stand silence.
She keeps her hunched back to me. She says, “I thought you knew.”
“I’m not going to guess about this.”
“Haven’t you ever wondered about my birthday?”
I stand up alongside Mel. I am six inches taller than she is now. It’s like talking to one of the boys. I say, “I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about your birthday.”
She puts her hands in her pockets. “I mean, have you ever wondered about that story Mom and Dad tell about how I was premature?”
I say, “Why would I wonder about that? Mom miscarries if you look at her wrong.”
“Because I wasn’t seven weeks early.”
It takes a second for this to sink in. Then I say, “You’re kidding, right?” Mel doesn’t laugh. I sit back down on the floor in between all my unmatched socks. Mel sits down next to me.
Mel lowers her voice and puts her head close to mine. “Mom told me when I was fourteen. She wanted to scare me. I thought she’d tell you too.”
“Mom was pregnant when they got married? Are you sure?”
“I don’t think she’d lie about it,” she says.
I pick up a sock in my hand and squeeze it. Moms aren’t supposed to start off their families by getting knocked up. At least not my mom. She gets mad if I wear my swimming suit to the city pool without a tank top. And what about my dad? The engineer who never does anything illogical, immoral, or embarrassing?
There is too much in my head to fit it all.