What I Had Before I Had You (12 page)

Jake is aware of Kandy's affection and of what would happen if she felt herself betrayed, so our connection grows in secret, in glances and trysts. We go to the beach or drive on the lonely back roads, going nowhere, making plans. When we leave this town, we say, we'll go to Brazil and win a samba competition, get filthy rich, and buy a bungalow dripping with trumpet-blossom flowers. Or we'll hijack an airplane and land it in Las Vegas, where we will become notorious casino robbers, making our escapes by air. But, I stipulate practically, why not just kidnap a pilot? Why take the hostages at all? Jake says it would be easier to hijack a passenger plane on the way to Vegas, security-wise. He smiles and plants his fingers in my hair at the nape of my neck, drawing me toward him. “Don't worry, baby,” he says, “we'll give the passengers parachutes and let them jump into the Grand Canyon, and they will see such beauty on their way down that their lives will change, and they will thank us.” This is how Jake thinks. I can get lost in it.

Sometimes I risk discovery by an Emerald spy to steer Jake to the bike rack in front of the grocery store, where I know my mother can see me through the glass windows from her checkout counter, and I hook my thumbs through his belt loops and kiss him hard. There it is, love, that tightening stomach feeling. Maybe only one person can love me at a time, I consider, and my mother has had the job too long. Jake must feel it, too, for he locks his arms around my waist and holds me tighter. How perfectly sinful all of this must look to my furious jailer mother as she scans cans of soup and hurls them clinking into a pile at the end of the moving belt.

FOR A FEW
days after I broke through the wall, my mother ceased to see me. I turned ghost. We spoke sometimes like strangers, asking each other the time or where something lost might be. Now she has begun to acknowledge me again with her body and her face. When she thinks I am distracted, she watches me closely, a scientist tending a failed experiment. When she puts her hand on her hip, waiting for my answer to a question she has asked, she looks like such a normal American mom, in socks that come from the Hanes catalog. It makes me furious, how she can look so normal.

We drop the formalities and traditions, each, perhaps, afraid that to make Sunday-morning pancakes or to tend together to the roof garden might ruin these things forever, might ruin even the memories of them. We shed the layers of our family life, and as we approach August, there seems to be very little between us but this new animosity, this inarticulate anger that has become our food, that powers our appliances, that keeps us strong and separate.

Small tortures: I will not take her messages. I give her messages that do not exist, like,
Danielle from the pharmacy said you dropped some cash when you bought that Tylenol—she has it at the register.
Sometimes I throw in a real one to keep her guessing. She does not invite the boyfriends over to witness my betrayal. She goes out. She leaves my meals on the table at six o'clock sharp even when I am not there, instead of refrigerating them, a punishment for poor attendance. Once I eat a fly with my mashed potatoes. I leave the toilet seat up. I think this will bother her somehow, the illogic of it.

My mother is spending more time in the nursery. I thought at first that she was back to cleaning; I have stopped entirely. Tumbleweeds of dust and dog hair float across my bare toes, and in the kitchen, cockroaches die happy deaths, mired in ketchup on old plates. One night she doesn't come home after her shift, and as a joke, I make a stir-fry and leave a bowl of it on the table in her place. When I come in at two
A.M.,
I find her eating it stone cold.

IT IS A
sweltering afternoon, and my friends and I are moving in a pack. We have heard that some city kids ganged up on one of the ratty boys' little brothers and broke his nose last night, and we are ready for a fight. Jake is into it, calling us the Townie Army, and I am amped up on the drama. Pam has made me promise that I will find a way to let Kandy down about Jake this week, but I have no idea how to do it, and I don't see myself trying to figure it out. Jake and I communicate by glance and by an energy that seems tangible to me: gossamer threads growing between us, connecting us. Even with my back turned, I can tell where he is. Kandy walks beside me in lace gloves, with war paint on her tan cheeks, enjoying the hunt. Oblivious.

As our war party rages down Second Street, making mothers hurry their children into stores, eliciting clucks of displeasure from old ladies at the bus stop, I see my mother. She is on her hands and knees, reaching behind a pile of garbage bags and broken-down boxes in the mouth of a long alley that winds behind a row of restaurants, nail salons, and real estate offices. The alley is sheltered by these buildings' wide eaves, and at night it is the best place to sleep if you have to sleep outside. All summer it is a dormitory for runaways and bums, raided occasionally and halfheartedly by the cops. Beside my mother is a bulging canvas beach bag.

I fall back, hoping that nobody will notice, and duck into the alley. My mother is dressed beautifully in crisp black pants and a fuchsia blouse with a tie neck—expensive old clothes from her New York life. Long dark ovals of sweat stretch beneath her armpits. Her hair is ribboned neatly back, as she wears it for holidays. Her elbows move as if she is doing some work with her hands, obscured by the trash pile.

“What are you doing?” I ask over her shoulder, and she jumps.

“Jesus Christ!”

“Nope, just me.”

“Help me with this. I can't reach the thing.” I peer behind the trash bags, and it still doesn't make sense. She is positioning a gift box in the open mouth of a drainpipe. The box is wrapped in shiny red paper and tied with curled white ribbons. This has always been her gift-wrapping style; she taught me how to rough the scissor blade across the ridged ribbon and watch it curl.

“What are you doing?” I ask again, loudly. I move to the other side of the trash pile, by the building, and grab the box. “What is this?” A glimpse of red catches my eye, and I focus on her canvas bag, full of these boxes.

She stands up, wincing as her knees crackle. “Olivia Reed, put that back.”

Kandy's voice, behind me: “Hey, what's she doing?”

“Charity,” says my mother, and smiles broadly. She hasn't smiled like that all week; she is on to something bigger than our feud, and that is bad.

I rip the red paper off the box as my mother advances on me, incanting, “Don't you dare don't you dare don't you dare
Olivia
!”

Inside the box is a tiny purple flower in a moist peat pot, a Russell Stover chocolate assortment, and a small sealed envelope on which my mother has written in her elegant looping script,
To give you joy.
It's almost exactly what Jake said to me when he gave me the pink pill on our last night at the Emerald; did she find that phrase in my mind? I rip open the envelope as my mother snatches the box back, and I pull out a hundred-dollar bill. I picture, fleetingly, my mother robbing the grocery store in a stocking cap, with a fake gun (the kind with the flag that says BANG
!
) But then I understand. Our savings. She is giving away our savings.

This is not the first time my mother has felt generous. It's the reason she keeps our balance low and the bulk of our savings tied up in two-year CDs, so it won't be too hard to spring back from a generous mood. I count back, and a dead feeling blossoms in the pit of my stomach—the anticipation of hunger. Her last investment must have matured. The timing is just that wrong.

Kandy edges forward, curious, and I realize that Pam is here, too, and the public school girl. A few bums sit on milk crates, talking, a ways down the alley. At their feet are shreds of red wrapping paper.

“What's that?” Kandy asks harmlessly.

My mother's eyes travel back and forth as if she is reading a print version of Kandy's motives scrolling across her face. She drops the ripped box into Kandy's hands.“It's a joy box. A person who finds one will have the best day of his or her life.”
His or her
. How she wrestles with language in a mood like this one.

“Mom? How many people are going to have the best day of their lives today?”

She bares her teeth at me. It's almost a smile, but it's not. “Full of deceit,” she says. “You are full of snakes today.”

“A hundred dollars!” I yell. “What if the garbageman took it?”

“Then bully for him, that's the whole idea!”

“I mean, with the trash? And it got compacted?”

“God will guide it to its right person, and maybe it's the garbageman.”

Pam, Kandy, and the public school girl have moved to stand behind me, whether consciously or by instinct. I appeal hopefully to the logic buried somewhere deep within my mother; I rattle off a list of things for which we need money: food, clothing, bills, the final two years of mortgage on our house. My school tuition. When I mention tuition, her forehead furrows.

“Maybe I should go to public school,” I say. “With boys.”

“Slut,” my mother hisses. The one word. The pure meanness of it
.
I have been her sweet pea, her puppy-face, her daughterling, her tiny bunny rabbit
.
I can feel the part in my hair growing pink and tender. I don't realize how upset I'm getting until I'm almost overcome.

I thrust the bill I'm holding into my pocket. I dash down the alley and grab the little envelope out of an old man's hands, hands that cannot hold on. One of the other bums tries to swipe at me. I skin a knee on the asphalt getting away, but then I am up. I hold the envelope up to the light and see the dark bill inside. Two retrieved. The bums call after me, “You bitch, you thief. You mean, mean little girl.”

My mother grabs me by the back of my T-shirt and spins me around. Her hand flies up and she slaps my face: a hot rush, a bee sting. Then she weeps there in the open, my friends looking on, and I feel tears coming, too, only I won't share this with her, not even this. I could kill her. I imagine it. With my hands.

I turn and walk away as fast as I can until I am around a corner, and then I run. In my head, my sisters whisper:
Get away, get away, get away.
I forget where I am going and sit down on the sidewalk and close my eyes, and I don't open them until Pam is beside me, rubbing her hand in circles on my back.

“Sweetheart,” she says, “you're panicking. It's okay.” She sits beside me and says that over and over, “It's okay, it's okay, it's okay,” until there is nothing but her and the sidewalk and a tuft of grass, and an ant making a long trek toward that tuft of grass, and the coolness of the places my shadow touches on the concrete, and the burn of the places in the sun.

WHEN I RETURN
to myself, I am parched and it's six o'clock, the shadows lengthening. Pam buys me a Coke slushie, and it is the nectar of the gods. Kandy had the presence of mind to grab the canvas bag, which I dump to find three wrapped boxes amid the detritus of the project: the ends of ribbon, the extra peat pots.

I go to the pay phone behind West Coast Video and call James. He says to stay by the phone, and I do, though I can hardly sit still, while Kandy rallies the Townie Army to our greater cause. They have found their quarry anyway, and are satisfied. James calls back to say my mother isn't at the house, and then he shows up in the West Coast Video parking lot, hands in his pockets. We split up and fan out, hunting for red boxes. I know a few of these kids will pocket the cash, but what can I do?

Jake comes with me as I hunt breathlessly, following my mother's logic. She wants to give joy to sad people—where do sad people go? I check dumpsters and alleys, I head south toward the crack houses and littered lots of the poorest part of town. It is a terrible Easter-egg hunt. I spot something red wedged in the mouth of a storm drain. When I get close enough, I see that it is just the wrapping paper and the box, ripped apart. The money is long gone. The plant, too, which softens me momentarily.

Jake points out a joy box on a windowsill across the street. We sprint. The window is open, and as we swipe the box, we see a fat woman sleeping on a low couch, an oxygen tank, tubes, an IV drip. We continue to hunt, fruitlessly, for I don't know how long until Jake says he is going to get us some pizza and meet me at the boardwalk ramp in twenty. It is twilight, and the boardwalk crowd is changing: couples and prowling sunburned men and fearful little gangs of women in short denim skirts. I go to the ramp and hunt as I wait, peering in trash cans and kneeling to see between the boards and scan the undersides of benches, when the night veers off in another direction altogether.

My sisters emerge from a turnstile and turn onto the boardwalk, talking, holding beach bags. This time they don't see me. They won't know to run.

I will learn where they go. Jake will wonder where I've gone, but I don't care. There isn't time to wait for him.

I continue as before, only the hunt has changed character. My sisters stroll down the boardwalk, stopping once for Courtney to buy a box of saltwater taffy. I idle on a bench twenty feet away. Kids from Ocean Vista don't eat taffy. Sometimes we spit gum into the giant taffy vats in the novelty stores, where mechanical paddles move in figure eights, twisting the candy, keeping it supple and warm.

My sisters walk a block west, then north on Allison Street. The streets in this section of town are alphabetical and female: Allison, Bettina, Catherine, Delia. Allison is a dusty little street where families from Pennsylvania and Connecticut rent tiny clapboard beach homes with outdoor showers. My sisters kick their way through the dust in flip-flops and I amble behind them, keeping my head down. I keep my head down for a moment too long; I lose them and worry—will they be standing around a corner with a baseball bat, waiting to confront me? No, there. A flash of red through a prickly hedge, and then, rising step by step above the hedge, those two auburn heads. I take in the house: a pink-trimmed white beach house with a small screened-in porch containing a clutter of chairs and tables, beach towels laid out to dry, packs of cards, left-out glasses. Old lemon slices in the glasses, sweating sticky juice, bees that have found passage through the screen.