Flesh and Blood

  “So long, girls,” Trancas's mother called cheerfully from the colored twilight. Television light changed and changed in her glass of Scotch. She'd decided to think of herself and Trancas as sisters, two young criminal girls with everything ahead of them.

  Zoe understood about Trancas's mother. She'd left the curtains and the shelf paper, gone to live in the wild. She wanted to look at her human life through an animal's eyes, to see where the mistakes were buried.

  “Fuck off,” Trancas muttered.

  Zoe pinched Trancas's arm, which was hard and fat as a sausage. Zoe loved Trancas's mother. She respected her exhausted and ironic hope for rebirth.

  “Have fun,” Trancas's mother said. She looked at the television screen through her Scotch. It would have looked like a kaleidoscope, Zoe thought. Trancas's mother was skinny and precise as an ancient ballerina, grandly slovenly as an insane queen. She wore an Indian blouse embroidered with flowers and furtive glintings of mirror. She put out a wan, unsteady light that matched the light of the television. She could have been a figure from the television, projected into the room.

  “Good night, Mrs. Harris,” Zoe said. Trancas pushed her out the door, closed it as if she were shutting in deadly radiation. Trancas pitied and feared her mother with an ardor more potent than romance.

  “Fuck off,” Trancas said again, louder, to the scarred, thickly painted wood of the door.

  “Don't be so hard on her,” Zoe said.

  “You're not her daughter,” Trancas answered. “You go back to Garden City tomorrow.”

  “You hate Garden City.”

  “She burned up a chair last night,” Trancas said. “With one of her cigarettes. I came out of my bedroom and there she was, fast asleep, with smoke all over the place and this little lick of fire right next to her ass.”

  “She should be more careful,” Zoe said, but she understood even the desire to burn. Trancas's mother had probably dreamed about sitting on a chair of fire, going up with the smoke and looking down at the old business of the world.

  “Damn right,” Trancas said. “If she wants to kill herself, okay. Just don't take me and half the building along with her.”

  “She's depressed.”

  “She's a fucking lunatic, is what she is. Come on, let's get out of here.”

  Trancas and Zoe walked down Jane Street together, under the night shimmer of the trees. Trancas had been Zoe's best friend since they were both nine years old, and now Trancas had left the old world of rules and girlish hungers. Zoe visited on weekends. She kept other clothes in Trancas's closet: a black miniskirt, a translucent blouse the color of strong coffee. In New York, some men treated her as if she were beautiful.

  “Tomorrow,” Trancas said, “I want to go look at a motorcycle.”

  “What kind of motorcycle?”

  Trancas pulled a scrap of newspaper from her back pocket. “Somebody on West Tenth is selling an old Harley for three hundred dollars,” she said.

  “You don't have three hundred dollars. You don't have any money at all.”

  “If I like this bike well enough, I'll get the three hundred.”

  Trancas was trying out a new heedlessness, a big mean-spirited freedom that never worried. She was planning her own escape. Lately she'd been packing on weight, pushing her jaw out to make her face look squarer and less kind. She talked about buying a motorcycle, a leather jacket, a pearl-handled knife. Zoe was still her best friend and, in some obscure new way, the bride of her new ideas. They walked the streets like lovers.

  “Where could you get three hundred dollars?” Zoe asked.

  “You can do it,” Trancas said. “There are ways.”

  She was cultivating secrets. When she and Zoe met, Trancas had been tall and intelligent, clumsy, undesired. She'd lived in bulky, slow-moving confusion among her own chaos of mistakes and hopes. Now she was taking on size. She was talking about California.

  “Maybe your mother would buy it for you,” Zoe said.

  “Right,” Trancas answered.

  “You could ask her.”

  “She doesn't have any money.”

  “Your father must send her some.”

  “She won't cash his checks. She wiped her ass with the last one and sent it back to him.”

  Trancas had fallen in love with her mother's bad behavior. Some of the stories were true.

  “Why don't you ask your father, then?” Zoe said.

  “For money for a motorcycle? He wants to buy me ballet shoes. He keeps telling me it's not too late to start.”

  Zoe took her friend's hand as they crossed Hudson Street. The night sky was filled with tight little fists of cloud, bright gray against the red-black.

  They went to one of the bars Trancas liked, over in the East Village. The bar burned a damp blue light inside its own stale darkness. Men danced in leather cowboy clothes, and no one ever seemed to notice or care that Zoe and Trancas were sixteen. It was the kind of bar you could walk into with a snake draped over your shoulders. On the jukebox, James Brown sang “Super Bad.”

  Trancas and Zoe sat on the broken sofa at the back, near the pool table and the reek of the bathrooms. Trancas lit up a joint, passed it to Zoe.

  “Crowded in here tonight,” Trancas said.

  “Mm-hm.”

  “Look at that guy with the tattoos.”

  “Where?”

  “Right there. Playing pool.”

  A sinewy, feline-faced man leaned into the puddle of brighter light that fell onto the pool table, took aim at the seven ball. His arms swarmed with hearts and daggers and grinning skulls, the snaky bodies and alert, hungry faces of dragons.

  “Cool,” Trancas said.

  “Mm-hm.”

  “I'm getting a tattoo.”

  “What kind?”

  “Maybe a rose,” Trancas said. “On my ass.”

  “You'd have it forever,” Zoe told her.

  “I'd like to know I was going to have something forever. Wouldn't you?”

  “Well. Yes, I guess I would.”

  They smoked the joint, listened to the music. Time didn't pass in the bar, there was just music and different kinds of dark. Zoe was afraid and she liked it. She liked night in the city in bars like this, all the little dangers and promises. It was like going to live in the woods. Back in Garden City, the food stood on the shelves in alphabetical order.

  “Maybe a lightning bolt,” Trancas said.

  “What?” Zoe was getting stoned. She could feel the music moving in her. She could see that the worn brown plush of the sofa arm was a world unto itself.

  “A lightning bolt instead of a rose,” Trancas said. “I think maybe a rose'd be too, you know. A rose.”

  “I like roses,” Zoe said.

  “Then you should get one.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  “You can get a rose, and I'll get a lightning bolt. Or a dragon. I like the one dragon that guy's got on his arm.”

  “You can get a lightning bolt and a dragon,” Zoe said.

  “I will. I just have to decide which I want first.”

  Trancas took out another joint and then a man was sitting on the arm of the sofa. Zoe hadn't seen him sit down. She wondered if he'd been there all along. No, a few minutes ago she'd been staring at the bare brown plush.

  “Hey,” the man said. He smiled. He was haloed with hair. He had a brittle storm of black hair on his head and he had prickly black sideburns and an electric little V of beard. He was dark and blurred, like a tattoo.

  “Hi,” Zoe said. She got a buzz from him right away, this compact smiling man ablaze with hair. Dope made her languid and prone to sex.

  “What's up?”

  “Nothing. Sitting here.”

  She offered him the joint and he took a hit. His face pulled in cartoonishly around the joint, eyes squeezed shut and lips puckered. Zoe laughed.

  “What's so funny?” he asked, handing back the joint.

  She shook her head, took another hit. There was something sexy
about this sweet little cartoon man. There was something alert and lost, canine. He wore black motorcycle boots, a black velvet shirt. He could have been a figure who popped out of a black cuckoo clock to announce the hour.

  “You're very pretty,” he said. “Do you mind me telling you that?”

  “I'm not really pretty,” she said. “I wish I was.”

  “You are.”

  “No. Maybe I look pretty in this light because I want to, I mean you're probably not seeing me, you're just seeing how much I'd like to be a pretty girl sitting on a sofa in a bar.”

  She laughed again. It was good dope.

  “What was that?” he said.

  “I don't know. I don't have any idea what I just said.”

  “You're a weird girl, huh?”

  “Yes. I'm a weird girl.”

  “That's good. I like weird. You're a girl, ain't you?”

  “What?”

  “You're not a boy.”

  “No. I'm not a boy.”

  “Good,” he said. “Hey, I like boys, but I like to know what's what. You understand what I'm saying?”

  “I guess so. No. Not really.”

  “A lot of the girls who come in this place ain't really girls.”

  “I know that,” she said. Did she know? She was losing track.

  “I can tell you are, though. You've got this thing they can't fake, it's like a glow. You know what I'm saying?”

  “You're saying I glow.”

  “Uh-huh. My name is Ted.”

  “Hi, Ted. I'm Zoe. This is my friend Trancas.”

  “Pleased to meet you. Listen, you two want to do a few lines?” he asked.

  “Okay. Sure.”

  “I got a gram or two up at my place. I live right across the street there, how'd you two like to run over there with me and do a few quick lines?”

  Zoe looked at Trancas, who shrugged. Trancas refused to say no. She wasn't turning into the kind of person who'd use that word.

  “Okay,” Zoe said.

  “Come on.”

  The man stood up and Zoe and Trancas were standing up, too, when a voice said, “Girls, don't go with that one.”

  Zoe saw his shoes first, red sling-back pumps with a five-inch heel. She thought, My mother has a pair like that, but not so high. The rest of him was army fatigues, a ruffled off-the-shoulder blouse, a platinum wig that fell with a bright chemical crackle to his shoulders. He stood with his hands on his hips, emitting a faint, powdery light. His face was sharp and narrow, full of brash indignant complications.

  “Fuck off, Cassandra,” Ted said.

  “That one is bad news, ladies,” the man in the wig said. “Don't mess with him unless you like it rough and I mean rough.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “He had a girl in the hospital last month, and I told him if he started working this bar again I would hound his ass. You think I was bluffing, Nick, honey?”

  “Actually, his name is Ted,” Zoe said.

  The man said to Zoe and Trancas, “This bar pulls scum in off the street like shit pulls in flies. Come on.”

  “Up to you, ladies,” the man in the wig said. “As long as you know what you're getting yourselves into.”

  Zoe paused, half standing. She knew Trancas wouldn't change her mind. She couldn't; any show of fear or common sense would push her backward toward the tall unloved nervous girl she'd resolved to stop being. Zoe looked at the cartoon man, scowling now, and she looked at the man in the wig, who stood like a crazy goddess of propriety and delusion, his sharp face jutting out from between the silver curtains of his wig and piles of colored bracelets winking on his arms. Zoe thought of Alice on the far side of the looking glass, an innocent and sensible girl. What Alice brought to Wonderland was her calm good sense, her Englishness. She saved herself by being correct, by listening seriously to talking animals and crazy people.

  Zoe decided. She said to Ted or Nick, “Maybe we'll just stay here.” To Trancas she added, “Unless you want to go.”

  Trancas, relieved, shook her head. “I'll stay with you,” she said. “Hey, girl, I can't leave you alone in a place like this.”

  The man said, “You're going to let yourselves get scared off by this sleazeball? You're joking. You're playing a joke on me, right?”

  “No,” Zoe said. “We're going to stay. Thanks, anyway.”

  His face puckered in on itself. He might have been trying to make his head smaller. “Right,” he said. “Listen to bag ladies, listen to bums, they know what they're talking about. Listen to drag queens that were locked up in Bellevue a week ago.”

  “Not true,” the wigged man said to Zoe. His voice was full of a dowager's conviction, a drawling and leisurely grandness. “I've never been to Bellevue or any other institution for the criminally insane. I don't deny that I've done a little time for shoplifting, but, honey, it didn't in any way compromise my ability to know a pervert when I see one.”

  “A pervert,” the man said. “Right. You’re calling me a pervert.”

  “A pervert,” said the man in the wig, “is somebody who does things to other people they don’t want done to them. Period.”

  “Come on,” the man said to Zoe. “I don’t want to look at this fucker’s ugly face anymore.”

  “We’re not going,” Zoe told him. “Really.”

  He shook his head. “Stupid bitch,” he said.

  The man in the wig raised his hands and waggled his fingers. “Be gone,” he said. “You have no power here.”

  And Nick or Ted was gone, whispering insults, scattering them like little poison roses.

  “You made the right choice, girls,” the man in the wig said. “Believe me.”

  Zoe was filled with gratitude and fear, a slippery respect. She’d seen drag queens in the bar before but it had never occurred to her that she was visible to them.

  “My name is Trancas,” Trancas said eagerly, “and this is my friend Zoe. What’s your name?” Trancas wanted to live a bar life, to know all the drag queens by their names.

  “Cassandra,” the man said. “Charmed, I’m sure.” Now that Nick or Ted had gone, Cassandra appeared to have lost interest. He glanced around, preparing to leave. He glittered in the heavy air like a school of fish.

  “I like your earrings,” Zoe said. One of Cassandra’s earrings was a silver rocket ship, the other a copper moon with an irritable, unsettled face.

  Trancas said, “Yeah, they’re great.”

  Cassandra touched his earrings. “Oh, the rocket and the moon,” he said. “Fabulous, aren’t they? You want ‘em?”

  “Oh, no,” Zoe said.

  “I insist.” Cassandra pulled the moon out of his ear. Its tiny copper face darkened in the bar light.

  “No, really, please,” Zoe said. “I couldn’t.”

  “Is it a question of sanitation?” Cassandra asked.

  “No. I just—”

  “Let’s split them,” he said. “You take the moon, I’ll keep the rocket.” He dangled the moon, the size of a penny, before her face.

  “Really?” Zoe said. “I mean, you don’t know me.”

  “Honey,” Cassandra told her, “I am a Christmas tree. I drop a little tinsel here, a little there. There is always, always more stuff. Trust me. It’s a great big world and it is just made of stuff. Besides, I stole this trash, I can always steal more.”

  Zoe reached for the earring. Trancas helped her run the post through her earlobe. “This is a great little thing,” Trancas said. “This is a treasure, here.”

  “Now we’re earring sisters,” Cassandra said. “Bound together for life.”

  “Thank you,” Zoe said.

  “You’re welcome,” Cassandra said. “Now excuse me, will you, girls?” He walked away, expert in his heels. His platinum wig sizzled with artificial light.

  “Wow,” Trancas said. “Now that’s a character.”

  “I wonder if he saved our lives,” Zoe said.

  “Probably. He’s our fairy fucking godmother, is wh
at he is.”

  Trancas and Zoe went back to smoking dope on the sofa, but now only less could happen. They finished the joint and left the bar. They went to a few other places, smoked another joint, danced together and watched the men. When they got back to Trancas’s apartment they found her mother snoring in front of the television. Zoe checked for the first stirrings of fire. Trancas put her finger to her mother’s sleeping head. She said, “Bang.” Her mother smiled over a dream, and did not awaken.

  Momma said, “I wish you’d stay home this weekend. What’s so endlessly fascinating about New York?”

  “Trancas is lonely up there,” Zoe said. “She needs me to come.”

  Momma wore red tennis shoes. She put her shadow over the tiny beans and lettuces, the darker, more confident unfurling of the squash. Momma stood in a swarm of little hungers. When the beans were ready she’d pull them off the vines, toss them in boiling water.

  “Trancas,” she said, “can probably manage on her own for a weekend or two.”

  “I miss her,” Zoe said. “I’m lonely here, too.”

  She wore Cassandra’s copper moon in her ear. She wore the clothes of her household life, patched jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt. She squatted among the labeled rows, pulling weeds. The dirt threw up its own shade, something cool and slumbering it pulled from deep inside.

  “Let her go, Mary,” Poppa said. He carried a flat of marigolds so bright it seemed they must put out heat. Poppa himself had a hot brightness, a sorrow keen as fire.

  “I just think it’s getting to be a bit much,” Momma said. “Every single weekend.”

  Poppa came and stood beside Zoe. He touched her hair. When they were in the garden together, he defended her right to do everything she wanted. Outside the garden, he lost track of her. His love still held but he couldn’t hold on to the idea of her without a language of roots and topsoil; the shared, legible ambition to encourage growth.

  “This is her best friend,” he said. “And hey, it ain’t like there’s much happening here on Long Island on a Saturday night. Am I right, Zo?”