Trailer Park Noir (2 page)

“Well, that’s good to know. He sure wasn’t nice to you at first.”

“He said he was sorry.”

“That was nice of him.”

Kendra’s eyebrows rose high as she said, “Well, I had to forgive him, right? ‘Cause that’s what Jesus would have done.”

“That’s right, that’s exactly what Jesus would have done.”

Vacation Bible School had been Anna’s mother’s idea. It proved that not all of her ideas were from outer space. Anna wanted Kendra to have a Christian upbringing. She couldn’t afford to send her to private school, but took her to Sunday school every weekend, and every summer, she went to Vacation Bible School. Anna did this even though she had problems with the church herself. Even in this day and age, she found there were still people whose faces puckered up with disapproval when they learned she was a single mother – not a divorcee or a widow, but a mother who never had married. To some people, it still smacked of scandal. So Anna did not go to church herself – she didn’t like the stares and whispers. She dropped Kendra off for Sunday school, then picked her up ninety minutes later.

She envied Kendra her faith. Kendra believed everything told her by her teachers, and her faith that there was a loving god was solid and unshakeable. Kendra was lucky – she would never reach a point in her life when she would be faced with serious questions and doubts about the faith of her youth.

Sometimes, Anna found it difficult to believe that god was there, and if he was, it seemed he wasn’t paying any attention to her anymore. Of course, she could hardly blame him – it had been a long time since she had uttered a prayer. She didn’t see the point. When she prayed, nothing happened. Bills piled up, but money failed to come in to keep up with them. If it weren’t for her night job, she feared she and Kendra would be living on the street. She thought that night job was probably part of the reason she’d stopped praying – thanks to that job, she was too ashamed to go before god and ask for anything.

She was signed up at a temp agency, which occasionally brought her some work, but it was always temporary. She had to be ready to drop everything at a moment’s notice when the temp agency called. She had to run Kendra over to her sister’s. Rose watched Kendra often and Anna was grateful that she was always so available and willing. Then she had to locate her temporary assignment. Being an outsider, she never fit in with the tight-knit group already installed at the businesses where she temped. They were all the same – they didn’t welcome outsiders with open arms, and Anna was always on her own. Like in life.

At night, she did something else, something she wanted to keep from Kendra at all costs, and something her sister Rose disapproved of deeply. It was a topic they avoided, but somehow it was always there, whether they talked about it or not.

“How would you like it if Kendra did that?” Rose had said one day. “God knows she’s got the looks and body for it. She should be on a calendar in a bikini.”

“Rose! What kind of thing is that to say?”

“Well, it’s
true
. Just
look
at her – she’s drop-dead gorgeous. You’re going to have to come to grips with something, Anna. Sooner or later – and probably sooner – Kendra is going to discover her own beauty, and she’s going to start noticing men’s reaction to it. She’s going to put two and two together and behave the way she knows men
want
 her to behave, and she’s going to get herself into big trouble. Now, you need to have a good talk with her. You should have a few years ago. You don’t want her to find out the way we did, do you?” She laughed and ran a hand back through her short dark hair. “Can you imagine Mom or Dad having a sex talk with us? I don’t think either of them would get through it. We’d have to call an ambulance, they’d have to be hospitalized.”

Anna tipped her head back and laughed. “I don’t think anybody ever explained sex to
them
. We were accidents, no doubt about it.”

They laughed together some more.

“I’ve talked to Ramona, and Frank talked to Bobby,” Rose said. Ramona was her teenage daughter, Bobby her ten-year-old son, and Frank her husband. “We talked to them early, and made them feel free to ask questions. It’s not a forbidden topic in our house, so it’s not the big huge deal it is to so many kids. So far, it seems to be working.”

“I know, I need to talk to her,” Anna said. “I’ve been putting it off. I mean, who am
I
to talk to her about sex? With
my
background?”

“You can’t think of it that way. She looks to you for answers, she sees you as being full of knowledge. Remember, she’s a teenager, but really, she’s still just a little girl.”

“Yeah? Well, sometimes I feel like
I’m
still a little girl,” Anna muttered.

“Get over it, you’re not, and neither am I. Kendra doesn’t need you to be a little girl, she needs you to be her mother. Even though Mom and Dad still
treat
you like a little girl.”

“Oh, don’t start with me, Rose.”

“Who’s starting anything? I’m just saying something that’s already obvious.”

It devolved into an argument, as usual, and Rose ended up leaving in anger, as usual; Anna called her a little later, as she always did, and sure enough, Rose was crying, and they went through the apologies and the declarations of love. Happened every time.

The truth was that, even with the two jobs – actually a job and a half, because more often than not, the temp job didn’t deliver – Anna still had plenty of difficulty making ends meet. She had to juggle bills and do a lot of tap dancing every month. Sometimes it was exhausting, and sometimes – like when she was forced to borrow money from Rose (her parents had stopped loaning her money) – it was humiliating. There were times when she felt she couldn’t go on with it, couldn’t keep it up. But she had no choice. That was why she’d taken the job dancing at the Mt. Shasta Gentlemen’s Club, and why sometimes, when things were especially tight, she took a little extra money from men for private favors. She tried not to think about it, even when she was doing it – it brought her too much shame, too much pain, and worst of all, too much self-hatred.

It was Anna’s hope to save up enough money so that someday she and Kendra could find a little house somewhere to live instead of this dump of a trailer park. The only problem was, she didn’t make enough money to save any. They lived hand-to-mouth. Except for the occasional temp job, the tips at night were the only money she made, and she had to pay a percentage of those tips to Rocky, the owner of the club. Just when she thought she might be able to put some money aside, something came up that prevented it – car problems, a trip to the walk-in clinic, and now the swamp cooler was making strange sounds and needed either to be fixed or replaced. That little house seemed so far, far away, like nothing more than a long-ago dream.

The trailer was stiflingly hot inside, even with the swamp cooler on. Something inside the cooler rattled loudly. It was mounted in the window over the kitchen table. The kitchen was just to the left of the front door as you came inside, the living room to the right. Through the kitchen was the hallway that led to the bathroom and bedrooms.

Anna felt perspiration trickle down her back and sides and she kept wiping her forehead before it dripped into her eyes. She saw beads of sweat roll down Kendra’s temples, saw it glisten on her neck.

“Mommy?” Kendra said as they ate.

“What, honey?” Anna sounded tired, distracted.

“If everybody knows Jesus is coming back soon, why are they so mean to each other?”

Anna released a small, weary laugh. “Boy. If I’d known you were going to ask such deep questions, I would’ve gone to college. I don’t know, honey. People have a long history of being mean to each other. It’s part of what we do.”
 

“But why?”

“Nobody knows. If we knew, then maybe we wouldn’t do it anymore.”

“Well ... I wish we’d hurry up and figure it out. Is anybody working on that?”

“I don’t
know
, Kendra,” Anna said, an edge to her voice.

Kendra was chewing on a fish stick and her chewing slowed as she looked across the table at her mother with suddenly widened eyes. “You okay, Mommy?”

“Yes, I’m okay. Sorry for snapping at you. I’m just ... distracted. Why did you ask that, honey? Is someone being mean to you?”

Kendra put a clump of macaroni and cheese in her mouth and chewed slowly. She did not respond for a long time, then shrugged one shoulder. When she finished chewing, she said, “Everybody’s mean. In one way or another.”

“Oh, surely that’s not true, sweetheart,” Anna said, leaning forward over her meal.

“They don’t mean to be most of the time, but ... after they talk to me a little ... after they see what I’m like ... the way they look at me sometimes ... the way they talk to me. Or stare at me.
Especially
stare at me. Most of that’s just accidental somehow. But the ones who are mean on purpose ... there’s something missing from their eyes.”

Anna sighed as she watched her daughter eat.

The umbilical cord had wrapped around Kendra’s neck. She had been deprived of oxygen just long enough to do some damage. They didn’t know how much damage for a while. Later, the doctor told Anna that Kendra would never develop mentally beyond the age of eleven or twelve.

When he learned that there was something wrong with Kendra, Jack had skipped out, not only on Kendra, but on Anna, too. Anna had tried to explain to him exactly what had happened to Kendra, what had caused the problem, but all Jack knew was that she was “mentally deficient” – his words – and he refused to believe that she had come from his loins. He wanted nothing to do with either of them and he’d disappeared very quickly, leaving Anna and Kendra to fend for themselves. When she thought about Jack, Anna could not understand what had gotten into her – besides alcohol. She’d only been with him twice. Two times too many. Once would have been excusable, but
twice
? It probably had been the second time that took.

Anna closed her eyes a moment when she felt a pang of guilt for thinking such a thought – as if she regretted having Kendra. Kendra was the best thing that had ever happened to her in her miserable life. She didn’t
deserve
Kendra. She thought of the life she’d led, and Kendra was an accidental godsend, a gift from heaven. She only hoped she could somehow make herself worthy of having her. She didn’t feel she had so far.

Now, looking at Kendra, thinking about what she had just said, Anna thought,
She’s supposed to be
retarded
?
Sometimes Kendra seemed a whole world smarter than Anna ever could hope to be. Sometimes she would casually say something that made Anna’s jaw drop, or made goose pimples break out over her shoulders and neck. And then, in a moment, Kendra was a simple little girl again. She was a little girl with the incredibly voluptuous curves of a beautiful young woman.

She had no friends to speak of. She went to school when it was in session; the bus – the “short bus,” others called it derisively, and it was – picked her up in the morning and dropped her off in the afternoon, and she came straight to the trailer. She had no friends asking her to come over to visit after school. She attended no school functions. There were some younger children in the park with whom she played at times, but that was all.

Kendra wore a red halter top and a pair of denim cutoffs that had been cut off pretty high on her firm thighs.

“Kendra, those shorts you’re wearing today are too short,” Anna said. “You’ve outgrown them. Change them.”

“But they’re
shorts
– how can they be
too
short?”

Anna sighed heavily. “Honey, we need to talk about sex.”

Kendra put a hand over her mouth and giggled.

“What’s funny?”

“It just sounds funny hearing you say it.”

Anna smiled. “Does it? Well, I’m trying to be serious.”

“I already know where babies come from, if that’s what you mean.”

“Where did you learn that?”

“I wanted to know, so I did what I do whenever I want to know something. I looked it up on the Internet.”

A cold explosion of fear in Anna’s chest made her gasp. Her mind flashed harshly on the kind of smut she imagined Kendra seeing on her monitor. “On the
internet
? What have you been looking at on the Internet?
Where
did you find out where babies come from?”

“From my online encyclopedia. I ask it lots of questions, and it always tells me about things.”

Anna realized how tense she’d become and allowed herself to relax, at least a little. “An online encyclopedia,” she said with a relieved smile. “I knew there was a reason I got you online.”

“Can we go up on the roof and watch the sunset tonight?” Kendra said.

Anna smiled wearily. She envied the way Kendra could blithely hop from one topic to the next. Anna wished she could do that, just drop things from her mind and move on to something else, something pleasant. She could skirt past the worries that ate at her, the fears that dogged her and made sleep slow to come at night as she lay in bed staring into the dark, wondering if she’d be able to pay the next batch of bills, or worst of all, the rent.

“Sure we can, if you’d like,” Anna said. “Is dinner good?”