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I pull myself together, because I made this choice and need to make it okay. I need it not to be a mistake. I love Warren, and he loves me. I’m scared, but it’s only because nothing is familiar; I don’t even know where the nearest grocery store is located. I had always expected my mother to pull herself together and just do what needed to be done, and she could never manage it. I have to do at least that much better if I ever want my life to be worth something. It is nobody else's fault. I remember Rob telling me that the choices I make now are going to shape my life, and I begin to understand a little of what he meant. I can’t blame Warren for bringing me here. I had agreed. I had wanted to come.
All of last year, I was so mad at Mom for being such a mess, I just couldn’t figure out why it was so hard for her to just put away the booze and all the drugs that she was getting from Cal. “Just be an adult!” I had yelled one night when I came home, and she was already two-thirds in the bottle. “Just act like a grown up.” I had stormed off down the hall and into my room, leaving her and her friends playing strip poker, her bra dangling off her shoulder. They laughed and mocked me long after I had closed the door of my room. I’d been humiliated because they hadn’t even bothered to close the window curtains, and I could see her from outside when Mr. Billups had dropped me off. I don't know if he had noticed; if he did, he never mentioned it to me.
That is the point, though, isn’t it? To act like a grown up, to behave the way a grown up is supposed to behave. I want to. I want to so badly that I stole a Good Housekeeping magazine from the laundromat, hoping it would give me some pointers. It showed me how to make a centerpiece for a festive table, but it didn’t have a checklist for being an adult. I just don’t understand what I’m supposed to do. I am the biggest fraud in Greenville. Playing house all day while Warren is out working at the PET factory, because the money from the band is split four ways and is nowhere near enough.
Most nights when he comes home, we order pizza or I heat up hot dogs in a pan of water. I should be putting together meals. I want to do that, but I don’t even know how to start planning to do that. Mom used to say you needed different colors on a plate; you never wanted the plate to be all yellow. Why not? I don’t find anything in any of the magazines at the laundromat that answers that question. I finally came up with an idea yesterday, and went to the grocery store with money Warren had given me. I came back with frozen dinners. They were on sale and already had the right colors arranged for me. I didn’t even think about the fact that all those boxes take space and that our freezer is not that big. A lot of those frozen meals are going to be wasted, I thought, because I can’t get them in the freezer. Stupid.
I thought living with Warren would be easy. But it isn’t. It’s confusing, and lonely sometimes. He came home while I was melting down, trying to get just one more of those frozen dinner boxes into the freezer. I was crying and cussing and really acting like an idiot. I hadn’t heard him come in, over all the noise I was making, and didn’t know I wasn’t alone.
“Hey,” he had said, taking my elbow and pulling me back from the freezer.
“What?” I snapped, angry and annoyed, embarrassed, like I had been caught peeing in the sink. I wasted so much of his money, and I just wanted them to fit. Dammit. I just wanted to do something right.
“So, I wonder if you don’t need to be out of the apartment a little, you know, to see people?” He kept trying to pull me into him, and I kept pulling away, trying to reach the freezer again. I felt certain that if I just turned that one box a slightly different way, another box would fit. Or, I could take all the dinners out of their boxes. That would work, wouldn't it? “Maybe it’s time to get a job,” he suggested.
“I don’t want a job.” I wanted to fix those frozen dinners into the freezer.
“I think you need a job.” He chuckled, a low resonate sound and some of my heat ebbed.
Billups Hardware is a long way away, and that’s the only job I’m prepared to do.
“Where am I supposed to get a job?” I considered going to work with him out at the factory, but when I suggested it he was quick to tell me they weren’t hiring anybody right then. I got the feeling he didn’t want me there.
“They need somebody at the cleaners downstairs. She’s our landlord. If you work for her, maybe she’ll cut us a discount.”
He ate three of those frozen dinners last night, and I ate one, and after that, the freezer closed just fine. Nobody can ever tell me Warren is not a good man. Nobody else would have eaten meatloaf, Salisbury steak and chicken ’n’ dumplings in one night so I wouldn’t feel like a total dumbass. He had said he was just so hungry and kept shoveling the microwaved food into his mouth. Afterwards, he had to lay down on the mattress and digest, his pants unbuttoned over his distended stomach. He looked a little green, and I think I may never have loved him more than I did right then. He did that for me, because he loves me.
So now, the day after the freezer adventure, I am sitting downstairs at the dry-cleaners, listening to the burping of the machines behind the counter, waiting for the woman working back there to come to me. There is a small bell over the door, and it had tinkled when I came through, and another bell on the counter that has a small sheet of paper taped in front of it, “Ring for Service.” There are two folding chairs in this small entryway to the shop. Warren is right, of course; I need a job.
Lola, the lady back there working, pulling a wad of clothes from a washing machine and moving them over into a cart, had nodded at me when I came in, so she knows I am here. I just have to wait, until she is finished with what she is doing and can come to talk to me. Just as Warren said, there is a sign in the front window saying “Help Wanted.” I chew on the raw skin of my fingernail while I wait, peeling off a strip and causing a wheel of blood to rise. I am about one bloody finger away from standing up and leaving to look for a job somewhere else, when Lola finally pushes some buttons on a machine and wipes her hands on the apron spread across her hips. She turns and makes her way to me, and I yank my fingers away from my mouth.
“You want to talk to me?” she asks, a broad accent dripping from her mouth, something far south.
I jump to my feet and knock over the chair in the process. “Shit,” I say, my face flushing red, and I set the chair back up, realizing I just cursed in front of her; there is no way she is going to give me a job. “Sorry. Sorry. I’m nervous.”
Her eyes rake over me, from my jeans and t-shirt to the sloppy knot holding my hair up. “What you want?”
“Your sign says you’re hiring.” I try to sound more together than I am.
“You want a job?” she asks, and the tone of her voice says that she is not impressed.
“I live upstairs,” I say, trying to make her like me, “I would never be late.”
“You the chit living up in my apartment?”
I don’t know what a “chit” is, but she has cocked her hip and one hand splays across her waistline. The stance tells me that she doesn’t have any respect for a “chit.”
“Yes,” I say, slow and hesitant, ready to turn tail and run, wishing I had just stayed in Charleston. I wish I had gone back to school and just dealt with everybody’s whispers. That would have been better than having these dark, fathomless eyes crawling through the underbelly of my secret self.
“I rented that as a single,” she says, and I don’t know what that means either.
“Okay.” My voice falters.
“Warren wasn’t telling me there would be a chit livin’ there, in my place.”
“Oh.” The floor drops out, and I wish like everything that I had just gone on down the street and tried to get a job anywhere else.
“How old is you?”
“Eighteen,” I say, not wanting to explain that I’m an emancipated minor.
“You don’t look no eighteen.” Those eyes bore into me, and I will myself not to look away. I’m as good as eighteen.
“I can work,” I say. She laughs, a deep chuckle.
“I doubt that you can work.” She laughs again. “I reckon we’ll find out, though.” She sticks out her hand, roughened and calloused and discolored with the chemicals she uses. I hesitate, not wanting to touch her, not wanting to feel her rough skin. I reach out and take her hand, forcing myself. “You ready to start now?”
I want to say no, I have something to do, but her measure of me has come up lacking, and I know if I say no she will dismiss me and never give me another chance. Then, she will probably raise our rent, since she rented it as a single and we are clearly a double. And Warren thought I was going to be able to swing a discount. “Sure. I can start now.” I swallow hard and square my shoulders. Be an adult, I hiss inside my head. Do the things you don’t want to do because that’s what it means to be an adult. She lifts a slab of counter to allow me passage into the realm of dry-cleaning.
She gives me the easy job today—sheathing already cleaned clothes in plastic, matching the tags with the owners’ names and putting them onto a rod that rotates in a long oval. It isn’t hard, certainly not rocket science, but within the first half hour, the muscles in my arms are screaming and the meat between my neck and shoulder is nearly twitching. Every time I finish a group, I stop and shake my arms, trying to release the muscles. At one point Lola sees me flailing, and she cackles, dragging a wad of clothes out of the dry-cleaning tub, the fumes coming out in waves. She cackles and coughs and cackles some more, and I start to chuckle too. She looks so funny, with tears streaming down her cheeks, dumping the freshly cleaned wads of clothing into a basket, that I figure it is better to laugh with her than to let her see how awkward I am.
“How long have you been doing this?” I ask, because my stack has gone down and my arms need to do something that doesn’t require me to lift them. Lola shows me how to use the industrial press. We work together for a bit in silence, her coughing every now and then until she finally clears whatever it is that had wracked her.
“I been doing this since I was ’bout your age, I reckon. Started out in a shop in downtown St. Louis. I grew up there.”
So, the accent is not as far south as I had thought. “What brought you here?” I ask.
“I like the trees.” She says it simply. I remember the green tree on the sign announcing Greenville—didn’t it say “City of Trees” as the town motto? I have never been to St. Louis, or any big city before, but the fact that somebody would leave because there weren’t enough trees seems a little crazy. I like trees, but they’re just trees.