Someone I Wanted to Be (25 page)

“I’m going over to Kristy’s.”

“You girls have a wonderful time. Be safe. Give Connie a kiss from me.”

There was a honk in front of the building.

“Oh my God, he’s here. He said he’d honk.” Cindy grabbed her jean jacket, rushed across the room, and pulled a red cowboy hat out of a shopping bag. She carefully put the hat on her head without squashing her curls.

“Does this hat look stupid? It does, doesn’t it? Oh, well! It’s cute.” She slung her red leather purse over her shoulder, took a big breath, and strolled out of the apartment.

She rattled her keys and tried to lock the door. “Screw it. Have a lovely evening, sweetie!” she called from the hallway.

Her voice floated down from the street. “Well, howdy, partner.” Then the clonk of a car door. The engine faded away. I was alone.

I sat down on the edge of the sofa and ran my foot over the faded green carpet. The apartment felt unpleasantly still, like a heart that wasn’t beating. I thought about how lucky I was that Cindy was never able to maintain a punishment of any kind for more than six hours. Corinne’s and Kristy’s parents were very strict — if they said you were grounded, you were grounded. Of course, Corinne’s mom allowed her to smoke. Cindy technically did not allow me to smoke, though she had never commented on the fact that I always stank like cigarettes. When she found smoke in the bathroom and a butt swirling in the toilet, she yelled, “No smoking in the goddamn apartment, or we’ll get a huge cleaning fee when they kick us out!” “I choose my battles,” I’d heard her tell her sister Linda over the phone. Now I’d quit smoking and she’d never even told me to stop.

I was unable to find an expression to put on my face. It felt like my face might slide right off onto the carpet.

My knee ached. All of my bones ached. It was an ache that started in my leg and radiated toward my stomach. Maybe I had bone cancer. I’d seen on TV once that bone cancer could be triggered by a sharp blow. I rolled up the leg of my jeans and looked at the blue bruises and the scab from when I’d tripped on Corinne’s walkway. I stood up and went into Cindy’s room.

I sat on the edge of her bed and ran my finger over the velveteen bedspread. I lay back and looked up at the leaves and flowers burnt into the maple headboard. When I was a little girl, I’d lie on the bed and stare at the headboard while Cindy got ready for work. I pretended that the headboard was a door to another world, and that was the world where my dad lived. It was full of flowers and leaves, but they only turned from orange to all the colors once you stepped inside.

The bed frame was the first piece of furniture that Cindy and Paul bought together. The story Cindy always told was that they were on a country drive and saw a sign for handmade furniture. They drove down a gravel road past a field full of sunflowers to a pole barn where a rancher was selling chairs, rocking horses, magazine racks, and bed frames.

We’d dragged the bed from apartment to apartment. On moving day, Cindy would get one of her coworkers’ boyfriends to help us move with his truck. She’d make brownies, buy a case of beer, put on eyeliner, and tell the sad story of Paul, and how he’d died two years to the day, almost, from when they bought the bed. Besides our pathetic little Christmases, the moving-day ritual was our only family tradition. The guys always listened to Cindy’s story with blank faces while they drank all the beer.

It suddenly occurred to me that the burnt flowers and the shellacked orange wood were hideous. I could have drawn better flowers when I was six. The bed was the ugliest piece of furniture I had ever seen. Paul and Cindy had chosen an extremely ugly bed. That made me so sad I almost started crying. I rolled off the bed onto the carpet.

I lay there for a while thinking about how strange and giant things look when you lie on the floor, then got up and went to the dresser where Cindy kept her makeup, creams, and hair appliances laid out like surgical supplies on a lacy blue cloth. I pulled out the wand of her mascara, twisted out her lipsticks, sprayed perfume on my wrists and behind my ears. I rubbed seaweed moisturizer that smelled bad onto my arm. I opened her jewelry box with the little gold key and lifted the lid just enough for the theme song from
The Princess Bride
movie to leak out.

I pushed in the plastic folding door of Cindy’s walk-in closet. Her shirts, sweaters, and dresses hung on blue hangers spaced two inches apart. Hanging against the wall was the peacoat with big plastic buttons that Cindy had worn for ten years. It was dingy and faded and covered with fabric pills. One of the buttons hung by a thread. “I’ll never get rid of that coat. It reminds me of what I’ve been through. I worked three part-time jobs for an entire decade to give you new shoes and school supplies,” she’d say. Then she’d stare at me and take a big swig of wine.

Her shoes were lined up beneath the coat and dresses and work uniforms. Besides her white work shoes, she had a pair of black pumps and a pair of high-heeled sandals, both ready for a big day, though the strappy sandals were sagging to the side as if they were tired of waiting. Hideous brown leather slip-ons with tassels “just for casual.” The white walking shoes for the power walks she and a friend took for two weeks before they quit. There were fur-lined snow boots with blue laces that she’d owned my entire life but never worn once. And now a pair of bright-red sandals could join Cindy’s collection of shoes.

On the shelf above the closet pole was the faded blue-and-white shoe box that held my baby pictures. I dropped onto the floor of the closet with the box.

My baby pictures slid around the bottom of the dusty old shoe box. The photos of me stopped at age two, when Paul died. Other than pictures taken by my friends, the only pictures taken of me since had been school pictures. We had bought the cheapest package twice, so I knew how chubby I’d been in third and fifth grade. The pictures my friends took of me with their phones always got deleted.

I was a fat but beautiful — no exaggeration — baby with fuzzy dark hair and huge saggy cheeks. Whenever I looked at the pictures, I fell into a trance. We looked so happy. I was the happiest-looking baby I’d ever seen.

I looked happier than Jimmy ever was, maybe because I was an only child, though Paul and Cindy had wanted another one. I turned the picture over — Cindy had written in her tight neat handwriting:
One year, three months, and five days old.
I was asleep on Paul’s chest.

Paul had curly hair so short that it was just a ruffle on top of his head. His ears were so flat against his skull, he looked earless. He had huge dark eyes like mine. His brushy eyebrows grew together over his nose. I was glad I hadn’t inherited his unibrow, though I could have waxed it. He had long cheeks and a small mouth with full lips. That was my mouth. It was weird to see a picture of someone who looked like me. No one else in the whole wide world did, as far as I knew. He didn’t seem embarrassed to have a baby asleep on his chest. I was sleeping with my mouth open, with a little drop of drool on my lip, my head tipped back and tucked under his chin. He looked like a hands-on dad, though Cindy had said many times that he’d changed my diaper “exactly once.”

In the next picture, Cindy and Paul stood together with me squeezed between them. Their hair blew in a long-ago wind, and fat clouds puffed across a long-ago blue sky. Cindy and Paul looked young and proud, as if they believed they were the lucky ones. I’d always wondered who took their picture. Probably a stranger who forgot about them five minutes later.

When I looked at his picture, I tried out the names.
Dad. Daddy. Pop.
None of them worked. Only Paul. He was antimatter dad, the black hole that had sucked love and money and happiness out of our lives. Maybe I’d end up drunk on a couch and never be a doctor because Paul was my father.

The few times I’d asked about him, Cindy said, “Your father was a sweet guy, but a drinker. That’s all I have to say.” I first heard the story by accident when I was eight. Cindy and her friend were drinking wine in the kitchen at the apartment in Tallahassee. I was pretending to be asleep, with my eyes squeezed shut and my hand between my cheek and the scratchy couch.

He was supposed to be at work, but instead he went to a bar and drank a lot of beer and tequila. On the way home, he drove his truck into a telephone pole. Cindy started crying and said, “The poor, dumb bastard!” I’d thought she said “custard.”

Sometimes at night, when I couldn’t sleep, I tried to picture it. I wondered if he was alive for a few minutes, all alone in the broken glass and torn metal. Did he struggle to breathe? Did he think someone would come any minute and save him? Did a vision of a chubby toddler with dark hair flash through his mind before he died?

I was outside waiting by the street when Kristy pulled up. She didn’t say hi, but she turned off the music even though, or maybe because, Corinne was singing along. She bumped up over the curb as she did a U-turn.

When we got to Kristy’s house, Pastor Steve was leaving. He was wearing a baby-blue polo and khakis belted a little high over his flat stomach. He was tan, and his short blond hair stuck straight up with static.

Pastor Steve hugged and rocked Kristy while she chewed gum against his shoulder. “Kristy, how are you holding up during this difficult time? Is there any way that I can be of service to you?” Then he took Corinne’s hand in his left hand and mine in his right, and furrowed his forehead like he was worried about our souls. “So glad to meet you girls.”

Everything at Kristy’s house was just the same, except that there were daisies in the clay jug. The light of the late sun shone through the smudged windows and lit up the crumpled beige carpet. Kristy’s dad puffed as he leaned over to untie his shoes. He collapsed back into his easy chair. His toes, in faded black socks, pointed straight up at the ceiling. He looked over at me with his sad eyes. “How’s my girl?”

Kristy’s mom sat on the couch wrapped in the orange-and-brown blanket decorated with pom-poms. “Hello, girls. We’ve just been praying with Pastor Steve. It’s such a comfort to me. Look at what the ladies from church brought me. It’s so beautiful and warm.”

Corinne and I looked at the blanket, even though we’d first seen it weeks before. “Neat,” said Corinne. Kristy’s mom let the blanket fall off her shoulder, put her hand on the arm of the couch, and tried to push up.

“You don’t have to get up, Connie,” said Kristy’s dad.

“Mom, please,” said Kristy.

“Well, hell’s bells, I can stand up if I want to.” Everyone tensely watched as she rose from the couch and stood wobbling next to it.

“Girls,” she said, “it’s so good to see you. Thank you for coming to keep Kristy company. It’s so dreary for her at home. . . . All she hears is
sick, sick, sick. Mom, Mom, Mom . . .
Corinne and Leah, come over here and give me a kiss.”

I said, “I can’t come near you, Mrs. Baker. I’ve got a sore throat.”

“You call me Mom, Leah! Sorry you’re not feeling so good.” She kissed Corinne’s dimpled cheek. “What’s new with you, sweetheart?”

“I’m thinking of going to the culinary institute in Denver. To become a chef.”

“How wonderful for you!”

Kristy rolled her eyes. She snapped her fingers and swayed as if she heard a song inside her head.

“Kristy, Dad bought loads of groceries. He’s going to make his special sloppy joes for you girls tonight. Maybe you can give him a few pointers, Corinne.” She started to teeter. Corinne held her elbow, and Mrs. Baker sank back down onto the couch.

“Mom, we’re going to Hilton Days. We’re eating out,” said Kristy. She jerked her head, signaling for us to head to her bedroom.

“Kristy, are you going to the pie auction?” Kristy’s mom called in a faint voice as we headed down the hallway. “I heard Mrs. Jameson — Charlie’s mom — made some fabulous peach pies.”

Corinne’s backpack was clinking. She’d snuck into her mom and stepdad’s wet bar and stolen a liter of vodka and a bottle of crème de menthe.

“We’re not going to the pie auction, Mom!” Kristy yelled, and shut the door.

Corinne unscrewed the cap on the crème de menthe. She took a slug. “The coach called my mom and talked to her for an hour. Then Mom and Derrick discussed it, but Derrick said no.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and took another swig.

Kristy sneered and kicked back on her bed. “Keep that crap away from me. I hate it. It makes me want to throw up.” She scooted back against the headboard and glared at Corinne as though she couldn’t believe the idiot she’d let into her house.

Corinne put the bottle back into her backpack and zipped it up. She slowly got to her feet. “Sucks, though. I could get a softball scholarship to Western University. They have a really good culinary institute.”

“Would you shut up about the stupid culinary institute?” Kristy jammed little foam pads between her long bony toes. She unscrewed a bottle of polish.

That afternoon, Cindy had come back from Walgreens with the same kind of foam pads. She showed them to me in their plastic packaging. “Lookie! I just need to pamper myself once in a while!” I’d wanted to scream,
Cindy, don’t use the word “lookie.” Get a life!
Just like I wanted to scream,
You are trying to destroy me!
when she brought out the waxing kit and said, “You may not be able to see it, but in direct sunlight the hair is quite visible. When I can afford it, I’m going to get you a laser treatment.” She’d shake her hope jar. “You’ve got to plan, Leah!” She didn’t mean any harm. That was the worst part. She loved me. That was love.