My mother’s voice dashes into me like the prism-blue water in the picture, that beautiful picture painted on the rounded belly of my grandmother’s figure-8 clock. “Oh, fucking Jesus, I thought I took care of this. Amy Sue, are you at it again?”
I blink. Pulling my gaze away from the blue and the green and the warm white house with the yellow door is like lifting my body, cooled and wet, my limbs heavy with the hug of the resisting water, onto the pebble beach. I don’t want to leave, but I look at my mother. She stands in the doorway of the living room, her hip cocked, a cigarette lit and dangling from her lower lip. I tug my sleeves down to my wrists, check the tiny buttons, just in case.
My mother sucks smoke, then crosses over and grabs the clock off the mantel. I wince as she jams it under her arm, the way she used to carry my cat when he tossed another hairball. She always threw him outside until he never came back and I reach out to rescue the clock as she walks by. It only takes a second for her cigarette to touch the back of my hand. I jerk away.
Trailing her into the kitchen, I press my lips against the burned skin, cooling it. “I was just putting the clock back on the mantel,” I say, muffled. She ignores me so I put my hand behind my back and speak more clearly. “What was it doing in the kitchen anyway?”
She sets the clock on the counter by the back door. “I’m sick of you mooning over it, talking to yourself like a fucking looney. It’s going out in the trash tonight.”
“What?” I take a step toward the clock and she instantly gets between me and the counter. No matter which way I move, she’s there, blowing smoke in my face, making my eyes water. The ash from her cigarette drops and we both look down, but I’m wearing shoes this time. She jolts forward, aiming for my cheek, but I duck away. “The clock’s outta here,” she says. “And your looney tunes are over.” She laughs.
I don’t find it funny. I don’t find anything she says funny. “Mom, you can’t get rid of that clock! It was Grandma’s! It might even be worth something.”
“This old piece of junk?” She turns and nudges it closer to the edge and I cringe, waiting for a crash of shattered glass and chimes. “Nah, nothing your grandma had was worth much. Not a damn thing.” The clock teeters, but my mother stops and steps away. Then she brushes her hands together, like she’s cleaning them or she’s done a good job at something. “What are you doing down here anyway? Get your little blonde ass upstairs and do your homework.” She starts digging through the fridge.
I look at the clock and long to just shove my mother out of the way, grab it and run, but I know that won’t work. She’d catch me and break it and break me too. But there’s no way that clock’s going out in the garbage. I try to toss it a promise and then I run upstairs to my room.
I have no homework and even if I did, I wouldn’t do it. Not now. I turn on my computer and glare at the monitor, willing it to boot up faster. Eventually, it goes through its color contortions and dings and rings and then I’m on the net and looking for his email and it’s there and before I even finish reading it, his Instant Message box flies open to me on the screen and his welcome shouts all the way across the country.
“{{{{{AMY SUE!!!!!}}}}}”
Those little brackets mean the world and I accept my online hug as if it was his own arms around me, wrapping me so tight, I can’t breathe, and I pound in my return message, adding kisses which I picture as a wet twisting of tongues and lips:
“******{{{{{{MARCUS!!!!}}}}}*****”
“Howzzit goin, girlfriend?” he asks.
“Terrible,” I answer, then fill him in on my mother’s latest. “That clock wz my grandmother’s,” I type. “And I luv it. Gramma and I told stories about its picture. But she died and it’s MINE.”
“It’ll B OK, baby,” he says. “Really. I’ll get u another 1. I’ll look on eBay.”
I smile. Marcus is so sweet. I’ve known him for about six months now and he’s the closest thing to a boyfriend I’ve ever had. He says he loves me and I know I love him. He’s from Vermont, out in the middle of nowhere, he says. I tell him he’s never been to What Cheer, Iowa.
“BRB,” Marcus says, “thirsty.”
“K,” I type, then read his email. He writes like poetry and there’s three paragraphs of nothing but I love you’s, in all caps, in bold, in italics, in six different kinds of fonts. Rolled and scrolled together like a thought that never leaves his mind. And he says by next week, he should be able to buy himself a bus ticket. I close my eyes and pray it’s one way so he never leaves me once he’s really here and his brackets turn to real live hugs in his real live arms. I set my computer to printing. I want to read his email again tonight before I fall asleep.
Under the sheets, in the dark, I’ll wonder if he’ll do the things he says he’s going to do.
“BAK!” he announces and I type in a smiley face. Then he says, “Could u use sum luvin? Make u feel better? Cuz I’m burnin 4 u, girl.”
“Wait,” I answer, then go stand by my doorway. I can smell supper and there’s clattering going on in the kitchen, so I figure I’m safe. I shut my door as quietly as possible and push the little button that locks it. I hope the click doesn’t echo over the pots and pans, bringing my mother banging at my door, demanding what I’m doing in my very own room. It’s my room, I always want to tell her. I’ll do as I please here. But I know I can’t, it’s her roof I’m under and no place is truly mine.
Then I sit back down at the computer. “K,” I type. I unbutton my jeans and slip my hand inside.
A few weeks ago, Marcus suggested cybersex. I laughed at first, told him I was a virgin, online and live, inside and out, and he told me how perfect that made me, how that made me his and nobody else’s. He told me to sit back and touch myself, like he somehow knew I did in my room at night, and he would type things that he wanted to do to me and I should read them and see if they made me feel real good. And they did. Now I watch the words continually scroll across my monitor and I think about his tongue and his fingers and his dick and my own hand moves faster and then for a moment, I have to shut my eyes, shut out his words, and just fall into the throb and the heat of it. Then I lean forward and type, interrupting his stream, and I say, “Marcus, O, Marcus, get here soon!”
“Cumming,” he answers.
U
nder my blanket that night, I read Marcus’ email and count the I love you’s. I keep coming up with 648. I count until almost two o’clock, knowing my parents are usually unconscious by then. I heard my father take out the trash at about ten and I cried, thinking of that clock all crunched together with my mom’s cigarette butts and their bottles and cans and what was left of our supper.
Slipping out of bed, I carefully open the door to my room. The hallway is dark and there’s no light in the crack under my parents’ door. I sneak by and down, then let myself out the back. Running to the end of our alley, I start digging through our trash. The clock is at the bottom of the nastiest heap and I scoop it out, give it a quick hug, then carefully retie and replace the garbage bag.
Back up in my room, I turn on my bedside light. The clock isn’t too bad, I just grab some tissues and wipe it off. Then I pull a box out from under my bed. It’s full of all the things I’ve kept from school, rescued from my mother, artwork and journals and papers with good grades. I dump all of it into my backpack and then carefully place the clock inside the box.
Trailing my fingers over the picture of the lake and the long stringy hair of the willow tree, I half-shut my eyes. “You sit under the tree, reading poetry,” I say. “It’s spring and it smells warm and there’s just a little bit of a breeze blowing through your hair.” I touch the little red boat on the lake. “Then Marcus comes in his boat. He sails to you and you smile and put down your book. He steps through the cat tails and the sun is in his brown hair and you know he’s smiling just for you. He comes over and takes your book away. He kisses you, leaning you back until you’re flat on the grass. Then he tells you it’s time to come home, to that little white house in the woods, it’s time to come home to him.”
I pat the face of the clock before shutting the lid and carefully sliding the box under my bed. It’s safe now and I know I can sleep.
T
he next day after school, I sit on the floor of my room and sift through all the emails I’ve received from Marcus. My computer hums quietly, the screen sending shivers of rainbow light over my printed pages. Marcus isn’t on, but I know he has a basketball game today and so he’ll be late.
My clock barely peeks out from under my bed, just enough so that I can see the little picture. If my mother comes up, I can shove the box under before she sees it. She’s downstairs, like usual, and I was able to sneak by without her noticing. Her music blasts from the stereo, some loud hard rock junk that I just can’t stand. She still uses record albums, her groups are so old. I know without looking that she’s lying on the couch, one hand thrown over her eyes, the other dangling her cigarette over all the scorch marks in the carpet, and she’s “singing” along with the noise. Sometimes she nabs me and makes me sit and listen, as if I’ll learn something from those lyrics. Sometimes she kneels in front of me and spits the words right in my face, as if she’s trying to pound inside my head whatever it is she wants me to learn.
And sometimes, she does just that.
I always cross my fingers and wish on the way home. I wish she’s gone. I wish she was killed in a car crash, burning every inch of skin on her body with spots of scorch like the spots of a leopard, and I wish she didn’t die immediately. And I wish for my dad to be there too, all folded up in the glove compartment.
I shudder and look at the clock. I hate when I think things like that.
Concentrating on the picture, I say, “You’re sitting on the porch of the house.” For a moment, I wonder if my mother would be different on a porch like this one. It’s wooden and white and I imagine wicker rockers and tall glasses of lemonade or iced tea. But that would need a mom in an apron, or at least with a smile, and that’s not my mom. It would mean a mom who loves me and she’s not that either.
She says when she found out she was pregnant with me, the doctor said she had to quit smoking and drinking. Low birth weight, he said, birth defects. My dad never makes my mom do anything, but somehow he made her quit for those nine months and she says it was the worst hell of her life. And that when I was born, I made the hell stay. No sleep, she said, have to change the baby, feed the baby, shake rattles in its face. Dress it right, send it to school, go to parent-teacher conferences. Always something for the baby.
My mom still smokes and drinks now, she always has, so I don’t keep her from that anymore. But she says I keep her from herself. Even though I don’t want her. I don’t want her at all.
I shake my head and refocus on the picture. The white wooden porch with no mom at all, just me. “It’s fall and the leaves are beginning to come down. You look at them and think of the colors, naming them out loud. Burnt orange and cinnamon, honey gold and deep, deep russet. And you think about how the world outside this house is like a poem or a picture you’d like to paint. The lake is still blue, but a cloudier blue with the coming of fall, as if it’s preparing for the frozen white surface of winter. The willow leaves are yellow, a yellow like sunshine, reminding you of afternoons under the curtain of soft branches in the highest heat of the summer.” I glance up at the computer, in case I missed Marcus’ arrival, but he’s still not there. “And inside, sitting at a rolltop desk that he built himself, is Marcus, working on a poem just for you. For a book he’s writing, a book about you, another book for the bestseller list.” I stop and smile.
I only recently included Marcus in my clock world, the world my grandmother introduced me to. First, it was my grandmother and me, then it was just me, but it was still perfect, the silence and the lake, the spring and summer winds through the willow branches, the little boat where I lay back and studied the sky full of stars on long fall nights. But after Marcus and I became lovers, I decided I didn’t want to be alone there. It was even more perfect with him. He would spend his days writing and I would spend mine painting. And the nights were just for each other.
“You wish you could paint everything you see this afternoon,” I say and my fingers twitch. I think about taking an art class. I can take one elective next year when I start high school.
Sorting through Marcus’ emails, I find one of his first, where he described himself to me. “I’m just under 6 ft,” he wrote, “so I’m not very tall. Not as tall as girls usually like anyway, but I’m tall enough 2 play a decent game of b-ball. I play pretty much every day and my team’s not 2 bad, especially 4 freshmen. I’ve got brown hair and I wear it long, usually pulled back in a ponytail. Brown eyes 2. I’m in pretty good shape, since I’m an athlete. I luv poetry. Maybe I’ll write u a poem someday. A luv poem. I know I already feel something 4 u.”
I met Marcus in a chatroom for fans of boy bands. I loved being in that chatroom because I was like everyone else and it felt like no matter what I did, I had friends who were like me. And then Marcus showed up and he was the only boy there and at first, none of us knew what to do. But he seemed to really like music and he knew a lot about it too. He started emailing me and then IMing and then he just became a part of my life.
My computer creaks like a door and when I look up, there’s Marcus. Quickly, I put his emails into my clock box and gently put it back under my bed. Then I run to the computer just as his IM floods my screen.
“{{{{{Amy Sue!!!!!}}}}}”
I notice his use of lower case instead of all caps and I respond in kind.
“******{{{{{{Marcus!!!!}}}}}*****”
Sometimes, he’s a little low-key, a little serious, and I’m afraid I’m not smart enough for a poet. I wonder why he never includes kisses in his greetings, but then I push it out of my mind. He kisses me often enough when we’re making love.
“Guess what, baby?” he writes. “I bought my bus tickets! C u this weekend!”
I stop and I stare and then I read those words again. I’ve been waiting for them, waiting forever, but now that they’re here, I can hardly believe what I see in Marcus’ italicized gothic font. I tap the screen to make sure it’s real, the way I pinch myself sometimes to stay awake in school. “Wow, that’s GR8!” I type. “Now I just have 2 figure out how 2 c u.”