I sit down at Cherylanne’s dresser, barely make out the outline of my head in the mirror. I put my hand out, search for a bottle of her perfume, find one, put some on my wrist. It’s the one that smells like baby powder and has an exclamation after its name, it is so happy about itself. I find her brush, pull it through my hair, see the beautiful blue sparks of electricity fly out. Cherylanne has a pink plastic lipstick holder, swirled with white like marble. It is filled with six tubes of lipstick, all in order according to shade. Barely There is the first one. I feel for the middle one, put some on. I cross one leg over the other, swing it, rub my lips together good. Her jewelry box is on the far right, with her many necklaces and rings and bracelets and pins. I start to reach for the jewelry box, then stop. I am me and I live next door.
I want suddenly to be in my own room, with my faded blue sheets, with my cigar box full of dried flowers and horse chestnuts and the fragile bird’s nest I found at the base of a tree. A cat was hanging over that nest, evil coming out its eyes like headlights. I think about writing a note to Cherylanne, but it is too dark and, anyway, what would I say? She will forgive this; we were done with the best part of the sleep-over.
I tiptoe down the stairs, close the door quietly behind me. The key to our house is under the mat, and I slide it noiselessly into place, let myself in. I feel like a new person in my own living room. Say I were a thief, I think: what would I take? I would want the grandfather clock, the rocking chair. I would want the pillows on the sofa and the sofa, too. I would want the coffee table, the magazines on it, the sweet potato plant my mother started on the kitchen windowsill that now has overtaken the table at the side of the sofa. I would want the curtains, the air conditioner, the radio next to my father’s chair. I would want the floors, the ceiling, the pattern of the shadows made by the setting sun. The Egyptians had a good idea—take it with you. Get buried with all you can, just in case.
I sit on the sofa, breathe in deep. I am not tired at all. I believe I will stay up all night, something I have never done but have always wanted to do. At some point, day and night are exactly equal. I want to see when it is neither one.
I do fall asleep, though, because a noise outside wakes me. I sit up straight and extra-alive. There is the screen door, then a slight creak as the front door opens. This is a real thief, and here I am sitting right in his aim. I swallow, bite my lips. “Don’t think about taking anything,” I will say. “I am right here, with a gun.” Then I will yell for my father, loud. I am a little worried about this part. In dreams, whenever I need to yell, nothing comes out.
But it is only Diane. She is on tiptoe, moving slowly toward the staircase. “Hey, Diane,” I whisper.
She stops in her tracks, grabs her chest, spins around. “What are you doing?” she asks. “What are you doing?”
“Shhhhhh!” I say.
“Never mind! You scared me to death!”
I shrug. “Sorry.”
“What are you doing down here?” she whispers.
“What are you doing?”
She comes closer, sits down beside me. “Well, what do you think?” She sighs, shakes off the last of her scare. The clock strikes three.
“I guess you’re sneaking in again,” I say. “You haven’t gotten caught one time.” Three o’clock in the morning, and she’s coming home! You can’t help but admire Diane.
She leans her head back, undoes her ponytail holder, shakes out her hair, and then looks at me, thinking something over. Then, “I’m just here to pack. I’m leaving again, Katie. I’m not coming back this time.”
I start to laugh. This is too familiar. And it doesn’t work. “You can’t.”
“We’re leaving right now for Mexico. Dickie went to get his things. He’ll be back in about twenty minutes.” Her whisper is so quiet but it seems to me to echo around the room.
“Oh,” I say. And then, “I won’t tell.”
“I know you won’t.” She pushes my hair back from my face. “Will you be all right?”
“Yeah!” It is too quick. We have both heard it.
“Why don’t you come?” she asks. “Go pack some things; I’ll take you with me. I’ll take care of you. I’m going to get a job down there. It’s cheap to live. Come on, you can come.”
“I can’t,” I say.
“Yes, you can.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well,” she says, “I’m going. I’ve got to pack.”
I watch her go upstairs, and then I go up to pack, too. Sometimes these things happen. You are walking along with only your legs saying where to go.
I creep into my room, turn on the light, find my suitcase at the back of my closet. I put it on my bed, open it. Then I stand still, listen. How can he sleep?
I put in some underwear, a clean pair of jeans, three tops. What else? I put in my toothbrush, a hairbrush, some barrettes, my mother’s perfume, my poetry notebook, and the book I am reading. But then, since it is from the library, I take it out.
Mexico! I believe it is orange and yellow there, the good smell of corn in the air. We will live in a house made of stone, with multicolored rugs and a fireplace stove. We will have lots of silver bracelets. Dickie will work and Diane will keep the house and I will go to school and speak Spanish. Whenever our Mexican phone rings, it will be a fresh new friend.
I hear Diane leaving her room, and come out into the hall to meet her. “I’m coming,” I whisper. She puts her finger to her lips, nods, points downstairs. Yes. I will meet her there. We are experts now at something we’ve never done. I go into my room to close my suitcase, then turn out my light. I feel a kind of excitement in me that seems false, like scary-movie excitement, when your heart is crying out and your brain is saying this is just fake so why don’t you relax. I think, this is the last time I will be in this room, forever. I think, I didn’t tell Cherylanne goodbye. Then I think, again, how can he sleep? I pick up my suitcase, go to stand beside his open bedroom door. “Dad?” I whisper. The shades are drawn; his room is purple black. “Good-bye,” I whisper. And then, “It’s all right.”
Dickie is waiting outside, and he is surprised to see me, I can tell, though he is trying to make his face mainly polite. “Hey, look who’s coming,” he says, and then, to Diane, “Is she?” Diane nods, hoists my suitcase, then hers into the back of his truck. “Go ahead, get in,” she tells me, and I guess that I am to sit in the middle, just like I imagined. Everything they say to each other will have to pass over me. I can stay quiet as can be and still be in the conversation. I get in, Diane gets behind the wheel, and Dickie goes to the back of the truck. At first I think he is walking away, giving us the truck. But then Diane shifts into neutral, nods at him, and he begins to push. A silent leave-taking. This must be how they’ve done it before. I hold my breath until we are a good block away. Then Diane stops the truck and hops out to move to the other side. Dickie gets in and starts the engine. We are going. And in his bed, he is sleeping.
Once I got into bed with him and my mother. I was sick, full of longing for the feel of someone else’s normal flesh, and so I crawled in beside her. She awakened instantly, felt my forehead, and got up to get me something. “Don’t wake your father,” she said.
I lay still and listened to him breathe. There was a smell to him that I felt in my nose and in my throat. He was wearing a T-shirt on top; I didn’t know what on the bottom. I took in a ragged breath, closed my eyes, opened them. I could see the green glow of their alarm clock, hear a muffled, rapid tick. Where was my mother? He stirred then, reached out, and lay a heavy arm across me. I jumped, thinking he’d been going to hit me, and the movement must have awakened him. “What are you doing here?” he said. “What happened?”
“I’m sick,” I said, and then, “Mom said to wait here.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
He felt my forehead. “You have a fever.”
“Yes.”
“Does anything hurt??
??
“Just my throat. And my ears. And some in my stomach.”
“That’s a lot to hurt.”
“Well, only a little in my stomach.”
“All right.” He turned over, went back to sleep.
He doesn’t like people to talk about pain. Once he had to have an operation on his stomach. He never said anything about it—not before and not during and not after. When we went to the hospital to visit him, I saw him from outside his door before he saw us. His face was like before you have to make a big jump across something deep. Then when he saw Diane, my mother, and me, he changed into normal. He nodded and said to give him his robe, and he sat up and said he was taking us to the hospital cafeteria. And he did, walked slowly beside us in his paper slippers. His face was sick white and he was pushing a pole with a big bottle swaying on it. I got french fries and Diane got an ice cream sandwich and my mother got tea and he said, no, he didn’t want anything, he wasn’t allowed to have anything, but he paid. I was glad to see his same old wallet in his robe. He watched us eat and then he went back to his room and got into bed and told us to go home. Before we left, he called my mother back. “Lock the windows,” he said. “Check the basement before you go to sleep.”
“I love you,” she said, and bent down to kiss his cheek. He stared straight ahead, nodded. After she turned to leave, I saw him pull one hand up slowly over his stomach, then the other. In school the next day, I cried thinking about it. I said it was because I had a headache, and I got to go home. My mother put me on the sofa under the afghan, brought me tomato soup with crackers crumbled on top, and looked at the Sears catalog with me. What I wanted—a red lawn mower, circle-stitch brassieres, a canopied bed—I circled in black. What she wanted—an electric dryer, new carpeting, and a yellow V-necked sweater, she circled in blue. All in all, it was worth it to lie.
For a while when I was younger, I used to pretend-run-away all the time. I would dump my doll out of her suitcase and use it to pack all my underwear in, and go far into a field that was behind the house we lived in then. There I would sit on a big rock and contemplate the distance around me in four directions. I would listen to the buzzing insects, make up ideas for new parents. Mostly they were tall and slender. She had long red hair with a wave over one eye. He had short blond hair and wore a blue blazer with a family crest. They had many kinds of drinking glasses and two servants. “Look at her!” they would say, introducing me to their astonished and jealous friends. “Lost, can you imagine! Turns out she’s real intelligent, too. Why, we just took her right in! Of course it helps that we’re millionaires, but we would have taken her even if we didn’t have one red cent.” I’d heard that phrase, “one red cent,” and it appealed to me. I used it whenever I could.
I never went any farther than the rock. I would sit for a while and then go home. My mother would give me peaches from the can and then together we would put away my underwear. “I’m so glad you’re home,” she would say. “Shall we read a little?” I knew not to let my father catch me running away, even if it was pretend.
And now it is not pretend. It is so real we have a truck and the driver is drinking coffee. Later I might get scared about what will happen when my father finds out. But now there is wide-open night outside the rolled-up windows, the road passing under the two front tires of the truck and out from under the two rear ones. Imagine if I fell out, I think suddenly, and had to watch the taillights get smaller in the dark. Imagine if I had to be all alone somewhere far from anywhere—Texas is scary vast. But I am in the middle, where I couldn’t fall out without someone taking notice. I close my eyes, listen to the drone of the tires on the pavement. It is a high song, and it can hypnotize you in that way where you just can’t move your eyeballs even though you know you are awake. I like when you know you’re going to fall asleep any second. That is the time for the last thoughts of the day to come into your brain like the tail end of a long parade. It’s colors I think of tonight: the corals you see on seashells, the swirls of white through pink on Cherylanne’s lipstick holder, the shy blue of the sky when the day is coming new.
I wake up to the crunch of gravel. Dickie has pulled into the parking lot of The Welcome Inn. Well, the “W” is off the “Welcome,” but what else could it be? It is light outside, but gray, the clouds hanging low and swollen above us. The motel looks like a shoe box, long and narrow with about twelve doors leading to different rooms. The doors are painted yellow, red, green; yellow, red, green. I hope we get a red one. Diane is sound asleep, her head resting against her window. Dickie smiles at me, whispers, “I’ll be right back,” and heads for the room on the end with a sign saying OFFICE leaning against its window. A motel room! For all of us! In the daytime! Already we are making up our own rules for whatever we want. After we get going again, I’ll bet if I want to stop and look at something, Dickie and Diane will say, “Why certainly. Go ahead.” We could never do that before. My father drove and drove and we couldn’t look at anything even if my mother asked. Once she begged him to let us see a cave only one mile off the road. He was quiet for one terrible moment and then he turned to her and said between his teeth, “I am trying to get there. Could you please make some effort to understand that? I am not interested in side trips. I am interested in getting there.” Her earring jiggled a little from her starting to turn toward him. But then she stopped, just looked down, I’m sorry.
She packed a freezer chest with food for us. We ate ham sandwiches and slices of pie and potato chips and apples. We fought noiselessly, and every time we slept it was like a miracle, because we weren’t tired at all, we were ready to bust out of our skins from plain boredom. But we couldn’t stop, except for every four hours to pee and fill up the gas tank.
I hear the rumble of thunder and think how perfect it will be to sleep now, while it rains. Then I remember how my father never uses an umbrella. “Customs of the service,” he once told me, and showed me in The Officer’s Guide where it said, “There is a long-standing Army taboo against an officer in uniform carrying an umbrella.” I thought that was so queer I learned it by heart right then. My father doesn’t have a single question about it. He never uses an umbrella out of uniform, either. He stands straight up in the rain and lets it have him. Little streams of water slide down his face, into his eyes, down his neck, and under his shirt. Remembering this, something inside me takes an elevator to the next floor down. I don’t know why I get sorry for him this way. All of a sudden, I just do.
Of course he will be all right without us. Nancy Simon can cook him dinner in her own aprons, which probably look stupid. Maybe he will get truly sad sometimes, drop his face in his hands, and say, “Oh, I have gone and lost my children.” But Nancy will lay his roast beef on his plate, saying, “Now, now. What’s done is done,” and kiss him with her greasy lips. She will not do anything right, and I only hope he will notice.
I cannot sleep. For one thing, I am on the floor. It is the fair place; there is only one bed. Dickie volunteered to let Diane and me sleep there, but Diane said no. She said, “You don’t mind the floor, do you?” but it wasn’t really a question. She was a little sorry, but she is shaping her new life and she figured she might as well get going.
The floor is hard, of course, but that is not the problem. One problem is that there is a chemical smell to the carpet, mixed with cigarette smoke, and the combination is about to kill me. I am breathing through my fist over my nose. Also, the air conditioner is leaking. I can hear drops of water, see a fat stain spreading out on the wall. Another problem is that Dickie is snoring so loud that at first I thought he was just kidding around, trying to make me laugh. But he’s not kidding; he’s sound asleep and I guess Diane is, too. I’ve been watching her and she hasn’t moved even to turn over. I guess she stayed awake with him until the end. But I fell asleep almost as soon as we left, and I am done sleeping. Every time I close my eyes my body gets nervous, like I’m making a big mistake and it had better let me know. My eyelids jerk right back open like a La
urel and Hardy windowshade. The day is trying to get around the pulled-shut drapes; the world is in the go position.
I get up and quietly open the desk drawer. If there is some paper, I’ll write a letter to Cherylanne. “Guess where I am!” it will begin. But then I realize I don’t know where I am. There is no paper, anyway. There is only a brown book, with Holy Bible written in gold across the front.
I flip open to a page where Jesus is giving another speech. Everything He says is in red. I used to like Jesus. I thought He knew me. When I took communion, I believed that as long as the wafer was in my mouth, Jesus was in my heart. He was in my heart miniature but whole, with His own heart lit up and exposed and circled with roses and thorns. His arms were outstretched and His eyes were raised upward, which meant he was paying serious attention to me. I could speak with Him one-on-One, for as long as I could make the wafer last. The fact that other people had wafers made no difference: they had other arrangements. I was careful not to move my tongue against the wafer, which was lodged against the roof of my mouth, except for rare times when I really didn’t have much to say. Then I would release Him early. After all, He was busy. People everywhere were calling Him in languages you never heard of, night and day. But I asked Him to let me keep my mother, and He said no, and so I had no more interest in Him.