She was washing a dish when she saw the crack. A good plate, one from her mother’s black Depression set, like a lightning strike—a fine bolt with tines that randomly forked. Her life was like this, a blunt mistake followed by a series of driftless decisions. Every day, on a faint loop beneath her habits, was the soft dream of a sudden escape.
She enjoyed walking through bean fields and often wandered through the fields beyond the house with her hair teased out like the nest of a large, neurotic bird. The wild construction encircled her petite skull and each time the wind blew, the bangs flapped like a battered wing over her heavily made-up eyes. She wore her stone-washed jeans so tight she could hardly fit a dollar in the pocket, and when she walked she played Cher’s nineteenth studio release, Heart of Stone, at maximum volume on her Sony Walkman. She’d recently purchased this album on sale at Walmart and found it touched a place so deep inside her it was beyond the grasp of most things in her life. She sang along to every track, and was fond of performing “If I Could Turn Back Time” a cappella, in the bathroom, so long as the house was empty, such as when the children were at school. It was 1989—The Year of the Snake according to a laminated place mat she’d stolen from China Palace. On her little walks alone she liked to observe: the gray cement of the heavy sky, the anemic farmhouses and the phallic coal silos, the giant grasshoppers that took useless attempts at flight from among the endless bean rows. Occasionally she’d remove her headphones to listen at the insects’ alien chatter. Their language struck her as murderous and aroused. She walked nearly every day, always until she came to the same place at the very edge of the woods where someone had abandoned an old, wooden raccoon trap. It was a weathered box with a fall-down trapdoor propped up by a petrified stick. When peering into the trap, Pam witnessed other realities: the silver-lit mouths of caves on unreachable mountainsides, sacred garments sewn from the feathers of prehistoric birds, men with manes of hair expertly braided into hammocks that hung down their mighty backs. Also mansions with glass elevators. Also long sterling earrings like the ones Cher wore on the album cover of Heart of Stone. There were even miniature replicas of rooms in the box that Pam had occupied as a young girl. Once she looked inside and saw the child-Pam on her hands and knees, rubbing her bottom against the leg of an antique Pembroke—she had a habit back then of rubbing herself against things, like a dog. She’d been a frail and horny child. Her mother had always made a joke of this to cousins over the phone, as if it proved something—that Pam was untamed? Or developmentally impaired?
How difficult the years had been for Pammy’s mommy. Poor Mommy! Often it was implied that Pam was the primary agent of Mommy’s fabulous misery. Even Mommy’s death, which may or may not have been a suicide, was inevitably pinned on Pam.
Deeper into the shadowy woods, beyond the spot occupied by the little wooden trap, everything remained motionless and quiet.
At home she vacuumed. Or else watched MTV. Or read articles in her women’s magazines: “What He Wishes You Were Doing in the Bedroom!” “Vaginas, How Does Yours Compare?” Wouldn’t it be nice, she thought, if her husband returned from work to find she had a more perfect vagina, or to surprise him one evening with a new oral skill. She kept her Walkman on while she bleached the toilets. Before mopping she flung a palmful of talcum powder into the air and let the cloud waft while she lip-synced “Just Like Jesse James” before the pristine face of the bathroom mirror.
The smell of bleach in the house gave her a reckless feeling. She turned the Walkman off when she heard someone calling her name from another room. Except no one was there. They were all still at work and school. She returned to the bathroom and raised the window in order to partake in one of the secret cigarettes she kept above the medicine chest. Outside, on the ledge, a wasp sat, furiously grooming itself.
It wasn’t youth, necessarily, that she coveted as she approached these middle years. She wasn’t interested in reentering her vapid, bloodthirsty teenage dreams. But it was something like youth—access, maybe, to a world where one’s identity remained fluid, and naturally lubricated? A place where the possibilities still burned like barn fires in every direction.
One was not tethered, as a teenager, Pam thought later while vacuuming out the closets. One was expected to transform, almost daily, as a teen.
The children rolled in after sundown, sweaty from their after-school activities, calling out for clean underwear and food items that weren’t in the house. The stench they carried with them was a musky, hormonal combination of perfumes that made Pam feel affectionate and repelled. She wanted to pay more attention to the children, really, she did. But instead she would yell, “Go build something! Go dream!” in a shrill, dead tone from the La-Z-Boy.
Motherhood was a mysterious hole in a wall she’d entered, wetly, on a stifling evening in 1973, drunk on orange schnapps and too hot to say no to unprotected sex. Of course she had no idea she was saying yes to anything except the darting nightbirds, to the beads of sweat gliding down the inverted arch of her spine as her head hung out the car’s rear window, to her own hair wrapped around her throat as Richard’s massive prick filled her up like a bathtub.
She was just now beginning her exit from that mysterious hole, all these years later, to the sight of expensive furniture dramatically positioned around her living room. She was waking up and her children were growing armpit hair. The whole house, in fact, was growing hairier and hungrier and where had she been exactly? Some outer space? Another distant dimension tucked thin as skin beneath the obvious realm?
The house had become a giant puzzle in which the pieces continued to multiply. She watched TV and made sure all the bills were paid on time. She allowed Janice and Brock and Richard their daily orbits while the unoccupied space of the house diminished, filling with all the discounted items Richard brought home each week. “Very deep discounts,” he liked to say, punctuated by his smutty wink: Guess jeans by Marciano, seasonal wall art, compact stereos, monogrammed thermoses, crystal carafes, gimmicky exercise equipment, a programmable coffee maker, Calvin Klein underwear, lotions containing rare minerals, her Sony Walkman. Richard was the manager of a large department store and had full access to all items on clearance. Regularly he purchased discount designer suits that he had tailored to fit snugly at the inseam. No surprise most of his employees called him Dick.
And somehow. Just beneath the visible world—that twisted-up other domain into which she slipped so smoothly—may as well have been on the deserted beach of some hazy, subterranean lake, lounging like a drunk with her dead mother.
After the supper dishes were cleared, Pam stared through a breach in the drapes, observing the manner in which darkness obscured the textures of the lawn. Cher was everywhere—a flickering hologram. In the diseased rose hedge. In the even carpet of the grass. In the ditch by the road where the weeds grew high enough to hide a body. Behind her, even, in the living room, Cher lay spread-eagle on the sofa. Just as she began to feel herself flush at the thought, maybe even become a little turned-on, the porch light of the farmhouse across the road came on, illuminating two terra-cotta buffalo heads on each side of the huge front door. Each pot contained a single erotically shaped cactus. They had not been there the day before. The giant farmhouse had been on the market since 1985. No one came to view it anymore. The cross-eyed widow that owned it did her giddy disclosure too many times, saying, “There’s a dozen underground rivers beneath here. Old coal land! All the mine shafts flood every time it rains! What the coal company ought to do is buy up the place, pay me a bucket of money and let the mutated fish take it over.” The coal company had actually made an offer to Richard and Pam. They’d turned it down, holding out for more money, same as the widow. They were the last two remaining residents out this far.
Pam could see the front door was freshly painted: a creamy, pale shade of orange. It was a full-on renovation. The door’s three clear windows had been replaced with frosted blue panes. Obviously the new owners were trying to compensate for something.
Richard summoned Pam into the bathroom, requesting another can of beer be brought to him in the shower. She didn’t begrudge him. She smoked in there, using the drain as an ashtray.
In the morning, after the school bus pulled away, Richard brought out the vibrator. He liked to watch her use it on herself while he shoved his prick so aggressively down her throat it brought tears to her eyes. Why they did this after making the bed was anyone’s guess. The bedroom possessed a stagey neatness that contradicted their rough sex. Or brandished it? As was the case in the more tastefully produced pornos Richard brought back from Video Emporium. In these films women were typically splayed across pink satin bedspreads, bent over wicker ottomans in beachfront town houses void of all personal effects. Occasionally Richard would pull her hair while attempting to control the vibrator himself. He was not graceful. He longed to execute too many fantasies at once. His hands were impatient. She was never excited by the arrangement, but complied because, truly, it meant so much to him. She could see the gratitude twisting like a summer storm in his tired eyes. He badly wanted to be a manly aggressor. His hostility lacked hunger though. She knew what hunger looked like. And his was a bad reenactment of it. Afterward he pulled her gently to the edge of the bed and continued getting at her, softer now, with the blue toy, until she signaled she’d climaxed too. It was shaped like a dolphin, the toy, and her body lapped rhythmically against the deep diving while Richard whispered “You’re beautiful” and “I love you.”
Regrettably, this was nothing like the celebrity role-playing scenarios she described to him after a few drinks on the patio.
He washed up in the bathroom and with a bottle in each hand misted a veil of cologne that he walked determinedly through, right out the front door, leaving behind the doomed smells of Aramis and Drakkar Noir.
She stood perfectly still at the mouth of the hall, feeling as if she were about to be delivered from the belly of the house. A small pressure could be felt. The whole place was dead quiet. The plastic flower arrangements in their fluted vases were dusty, and she could still smell the base notes of Richard’s cologne. She was thinking of that distant, dusk-lit era right before puberty engulfed her. She’d had a fantasy back then of being a DMV employee: the aseptic office, the cryptic vision-screening machine, the ladies’ glasses dangling from gold, rococo chains. A girl’s life could be filled with moments like this: longings for positions of power and beauty.
The years had passed in crooked, hurtful ways, stranding her like a bored time traveler with Richard and the children.
She decided she’d replace the fake flowers with something more interesting, feathers or shards of broken glass. But not before her walk. She surveyed the neighbor’s house again. Two shirtless hunks were spreading red pebbles down the driveway, like icing on a giant cake, while another, dopier man finagled a leather sectional through the pretentious front door.
She put on her headphones and wandered through the green fields that skirted the sun-flecked woods. The trapdoor, propped up by its stick, made a little awning for the box. Outside, it was black with decay and dappled neon with moss. It was a lovely thing, and more alive today. When she knelt down, hunching a little to clear the awning, she observed a quivering cone of fire. Below the orange fire was a city with spires and slender onyx skyscrapers. At the edge of the city was a steel mill—the same steel mill that had stood like a demon empire at the end of the road she’d grown up on. It was a tangled gathering of scaffolds and pipes that broke through a copper skyline, filling the air around with a bitter smell, like old blood. The version in the box was small enough to fit in her palms. She did not reach out. She leaned in closer to admire it. Her head cast a shadow, throwing the scene into darkness, causing a hundred little lights to blink on at once—the lights defined the shape of every building. There were violent raspings and dense billows of steam no bigger than cotton balls, all of it lit by the glow of the constantly churning flame, dripping like a cracked-open sun over the busy diorama. Near the back she noticed a cluster of sow bugs crawling across the roof of a smaller building. How did she miss this? Lonely and darkened at the edge of a tar-paved road was her very own girlhood home. Every red shingle, every painted-shut window, her own mother even, in her strapless romper, sitting on the lopsided porch, drinking Miller High Life from a microscopic wineglass. A crow the size of a housefly perched atop a thread-thin power line, and a cat in the lot next door stared up suspiciously from a canopy of folded-over weeds. Pam watched for a long time, mesmerized by the delicate movements of the weeds and the bird and her doll-like mother, even the way the light from the burning pyramid in the sky reflected in the little wineglass each time her mother raised it to take a drink. She observed her mother going in and out of the house, tugging at her revealing romper, refilling the glass, until finally the minimother walked down the steps and fell down drunk on the lawn, exposing herself to anyone passing by. Pammy knelt and listened to her mother’s piggish snore. She expected her tiny daddy to come out and carry Mommy inside. But he never did.
Pam backed away from the box to stretch a crick in her neck, causing the little safety lights of the mill to flick off. There was a quick hiss of steam and the cone of fire diminished into a willowy pipe. The whole mill contracted abruptly into itself, like a crude mechanical toy, leaving behind the smell of rust and chlorinated water.
At home she lay about in the recliner watching Top 20 Video Countdown on the jumbo TV. She awoke to the racket of night insects in the flower beds, and her daughter, Janice, saying, “Wake up, Mother. Meet the new neighbor!” Janice and the neighbor girl stood in front of the TV: two silhouettes examining each other’s Swatches before a George Michael video on mute.
“Excuse me?” Pam said, reaching for the lamp. The neighbor girl stood before her in the buttery light, wearing a pink Mickey Mouse T-shirt that stopped directly below the girl’s perfect breasts.
“Hello, Janice’s mother,” the girl said in a flippant, adult voice.
“We want the television,” Janice said.
The girl’s jeans were high and tight, like a designer bandage. Between the T-shirt and denim her skin showed, smooth and tan as a suede coat. The TV flicked between commercials. Somewhere a cat screamed in heat. Pam felt trapped. She’d removed her pants before falling asleep and had nothing on beneath the afghan. “Tia just moved here from New Mexico,” Janice said. “She came over to roll up your car windows. Isn’t that nice? It’s about to storm.”
Pam turned to look out the window. The night was starry and still.
“Honestly, it could change in an instant,” Tia said. “I spotted a strange cloud earlier. Cumulus, or possibly cumulonimbus. It contained a shadow.” She said this dryly, seating herself on the arm of the sofa, gesturing at the window with a bony finger. Her pupils were large, and luminous as varnish, and her lashes grew forth hectically like those of a beautiful horse.
“How did you get here, again?” Pam said.
“We bought the farmhouse across from you,” Tia said, rising to adjust Pam’s blanket, politely concealing a nude thigh. “But I walked over.”
“From Mexico?”
Tia laughed, a bright, orbital laugh that caused Pam to laugh too. “From New Mexico, I flew!” she said.
Pam was not entirely conscious, she realized.
Janice looked to be in agony. She hauled Tia out of the room. “Please put some pants on, Mother. We’re coming back to watch a video in here.”
The girls returned with several empty onion bags. They cut them apart and sewed them back together again with dental floss. In the end they had two matching pairs of mesh gloves.
“Make me ralph. What a skeezer,” Janice said, referring to a girl from school. “He’s a scum. Gross me out,” she said about the handicapped boy up the road.
Tia held out her newly gloved hands. “Tell me about the preps and jocks,” she said, leaning into Janice, angling to inhale deeply from her hair. She appeared pleased by the scent, smiling intensely at Pam as she took another deep breath. The girl’s grin revealed a gold-capped canine. The tooth was shocking. Her teeth were otherwise orderly inside her stunning mouth, but the dental work was wrong. The tooth pointed down sharply, like a shiny metal fang.
The teen language was exhausting. Janice sounded like a bad actress—a young woman practicing to be a grown bitch. Tia sipped her Diet Coke and thoughtfully observed Debbie Gibson’s live performance of “Electric Youth.” Debbie was wearing an off-the-shoulder lace top.
“I find that so sexy!” Pam said.
“So do I!” Tia said, as if grateful to Pam for mentioning it.
“Mother! Go away!” Janice squalled.
“And don’t you just love all those little belts?” Tia continued, employing again her buoyant adult tone.
“So what do your parents do, Tia?” Pam asked.
Tia tapped her upper lip and sighed. “Mostly? They travel in Europe and Asia.”
Pam waited before realizing this was all the girl was offering. “Why is that, exactly?” she asked.
“The lecture circuit,” she said. “Native American culture and history. The atrocities! Other countries seem to have a greater interest in the modern Indian. Less guilt, Daddy always says. Plus they love judging the failures of Americans.”
“Don’t we all?” Pam said, not entirely certain what she meant.
It was cut off, Tia’s Mickey Mouse T-shirt—with dull scissors it looked like. When the girl reached for her soda, Pam could see the slick undercurve of her tiny brown tits.
Richard came home from work with a mustache. Pam squirmed at the sight of it. It had a severe effect on his face. The TV-detective look, the greasy porn star of it. This, and the dramatic tailoring of his pants, was a too-obvious metaphor for the pervert that lurked below Richard’s funny face.
“You look like a skeezer,” Pam said.
“A skeezer? Is that a scum?” he asked.
Brock, their son, entered too. The whole family had swarmed like sharks to a bait bucket. “What the hell? Is this family hour?” Brock asked. He stared arrogantly. “I’m hungry,” he announced, looking at Tia. His voice pitched down abruptly, like a cassette tape played too many times.
“Take a picture,” Janice called to him, “because that’s all you’re going to get.”
“I would,” Brock said, “if my camera wasn’t so fucking hard right now.” With this he fondled at his crotch through the loose folds of his fluorescent parachute pants.
“Son!” Richard said, in a tone of scolding alarm and pride.
“This is too much,” Pam said.
“You’re a scum, Brock!” Janice said.
Tia lifted her hair off her shoulders, flinging it gently back so that it fell again around her face like a rippling curtain.
“Tia, honey?” Pam said. “Did you happen to see that recent television interview with Cher, the one where she discussed the struggles of her biracial heritage? I’ve often wondered if she’s an icon in your community?”
“Oh, hell,” Brock muttered.
“Mother, stop!” Janice said.
“Doesn’t she have the bravest outlook on life?” Tia said, with a sincerity that reordered the sharp pitch hanging over the room. “She’s Armenian, though, right? My dad always said Cher has about as much Cherokee in her as a box of dirt from our backyard. Which isn’t much, because we lived in New Mexico. It’s mostly Apache and Pueblo. Maybe around here there’d be more? Except they’re mainly a southern tribe. You’re a fan? Of Cher?”
“I am,” Pam said. “She had a whole song about it! About being trapped in both worlds, between her Cherokee and white heritage? Was she lying?” Pam’s voice broke. Her hands were shaking, her forehead suddenly clammy. Out of nowhere she found herself desperate for someone’s approval. It was a feeling she’d been missing in her life for far too long.
“Two words,” Richard later said, after Tia left, “illegal immigrant. From Mexico. Most likely a prostitute.”
“Wouldn’t you just love that,” Pam said. “And that was more than two words.”
Janice hid her face in the decorative sofa pillows, her shoddy gloves already falling apart across her palms. Tia had abandoned hers between the cushions. “Her family moved here from the rez in New Mexico, Daddy!”
“More like Old Mexico!” Richard said.
After everyone was asleep, Pam went back into the living room to search for Tia’s gloves. She dug them from the sofa and slipped them on. She was delighted to find they were a perfect fit.
The girl’s hair was as lustrous and dark as used motor oil. It flung off a suggestive sheen each time she turned her head. Pam wanted hair like that. She drifted unevenly, limply, back to the nights she had played the 45 of Cher’s “Half-Breed” in her bedroom as if it were the soundtrack to another, imaginary life. It hurt to hear someone call Cher a liar. But maybe, for all these years, Pam had taken the song too seriously?
During her afternoon nap, Pam dreamed of wearing Tia’s hair around like a wig. Attempting to explain this to Richard over dinner, she realized her dream implied a traditional scalping.
She recalled hearing of a case in high school, back in Indiana, of a Cuban girl who’d claimed to be Native American in an attempt to avoid deportation. What ever had happened to that girl? Pam hoped she’d married, and was still in the country, living out some titillating American dream.
Pam observed Tia waiting for the bus. She was perched on the freshly massacred stump of an ancient elm that had been sawed from the yard the afternoon before. Not a very Pueblo thing to do, Pam thought. Ritually, dumbly, Pam had stared across the street into its woven branches for over a decade, admiring its peacefully bowed head of tear-shaped leaves. Now the girl sat on the smooth pedestal of its corpse, organizing her backpack and teasing her bangs with a pink comb until the hair looked like ruffled plumage. Tia blasted the bangs with hair spray, then tucked the massive can into her purse. Pam could not make out the label, but was curious as to which brand was being used.
The front door was the ugliest affair. In the upstairs window, an enormous fuchsia dream catcher swung back and forth in perfect measures like a pendulum on its string. Perhaps a ceiling fan was on?
“You’re losing it, Mother,” Janice said, surprising Pam during an impromptu buffalo dance she was attempting in the kitchen. Pam turned the Walkman down and smiled, careful not to reveal any embarrassment, lest her daughter think she was ashamed of private joy.
During the most transcendent part of her dance Pam had encountered a muscular shaman with a crown of braided hair that extended into tightly laced pigtails across his glistening chest. Beside a yellow fire inside a grass-covered wigwam, he’d presented Pam with a sacred agate and turquoise belt so heavy and complicated her arms still ached with the thought of its power. They’d walked along a dirt path that Pam assumed was the Trail of Tears. Miles they traveled, until they’d arrived in her own backyard near the tree line of the woods. Her recliner was there, waiting for her like a cheap throne beside the trap.
“I feel Debbie Gibson has too small of a face,” Pam said to Janice. “I wonder how I’d look as a blond?”
“No,” Janice said. “You’d look like shit. You’re more of a Cher anyway.” This was in no way a compliment, and it injured Pam. Janice didn’t appreciate Cher. She didn’t understand the brazen bewitchment—Cher’s ability to conjure rolling fog and animal power and black leather, to stroke with her voice the tired heart like a shy hostage about to be set free.
To be fair, Pam mostly pretended to appreciate the children. It wasn’t something she was proud of. When she was visibly overwhelmed, Richard would say, “Kids are people too, Pammy. They just want to know you’re on their side.” But Pam wasn’t so sure. Most people she knew didn’t stomp out of supermarkets when they couldn’t purchase the expensive shampoo. Kids were always demanding more. Sneaking all the chips and dip before Pam got any herself. She badly desired a thing spared of their animal greed.
After lying around all afternoon on account of a headache, Pam hid in the bathroom, enjoying one of her secret cigarettes, blowing smoke into the exhaust. She had to shade her eyes even inside the house. Her allergies were severe and there was a whine like a distress signal happening in her inner ear. Janice had sliced her thumb on the new shards of glass Pam installed in the vases around the dining area—fat, brutal-looking pieces procured from a crate of broken frames that had once contained the children’s most asinine school photos. The effect of these glass bouquets was that of frozen crystal fires. Pam was entranced. Her daughter’s dramatic whining, and the gross gash, sent everyone running. Brock was holed up in his room with the door locked, blaring Run-D.M.C., ignoring all requests to lower the volume. After a couple of drags Pam extinguished the cigarette into an empty beer can Richard had left on the soap tray. Outside, in the drive, Richard was screwing on his new license plates. Pam could see him through the bathroom window. His sneakers were as white as the clouds above the bean fields—whiter, even. His new license plate, she could see, said 2themax. He’d already fastened hers on. 3themax, it said.
Richard really could be such a dick.
She snuck out the back door. The bean plants flicked their fuzzy leaves. Through the noise-canceling headphones Cher sang about wishing for a heart of stone. Pam did wish this, frequently. The drumbeat was a hand smacking a paper bag. Cher’s voice trembled like hot rubber. The sunlit stage of the trap sat neatly along the viny edge of the woods. Pam’s pulse roared. The kudzu tangled. At the back of the box, curled in a corner, was a tiny hairless donkey. Its skin was blue, nearly transparent, slick and shiny as plastic wrap. She could have counted each bone in the cage of its ribs. The donkey was no bigger than a fist. She was sure it was dead. Always there had been a certainty that whatever appeared in the box arrived through a weak slit in reality, like a wound that had rotted through to the invisible world. This emaciated, bald animal, though, could have walked from somewhere. It could have gone inside for shelter and died. It had to be the tiniest donkey ever—with darling, folded ears, a ropy tail, stunted horse head, and the most unsettling part, a long, kinky head of hair, just like Cher. Just as Pam thought she would reach in and scoop it up, its frail hindquarters twitched in a hypnic jerk. It took a spasmed breath. His bony chest rose, and a whistled rasp escaped his wet nostrils, the breath jostling the gorgeous curly locks that fell before its face. The precious little ass was alive and dreaming. She had never put her hands in the box. It was a decision she’d made at the beginning. The contents were untouchable. She feared the consequences, despite any desire to interact. Before she could touch it though, the thin-skinned little ass brayed, causing a chartreuse ball of fire to pop from its lanky mouth. The donkey blinked at the fireball, then brayed again, releasing a second, bigger blaze that rushed forth, blackening the wall of the box before bouncing off in an audible backdraft that engulfed the shivering creature, burning the baby to a crisp, leaving only its charred skeleton wrapped in steaming skin. The whole abrupt scene was made even more terrible by the goofy horror of the donkey’s two teeth jutting from its scorched jaw. Somehow the wig was unharmed, plopped crookedly atop the sizzling bag of bones.
She ran home. The grasshoppers popped around her ankles like a hundred booby traps. She could still hear Cher rattling from the headphones as she opened the front door. The whole family was there, drooling nearly, over Tia, whose arms were flailing in what appeared to be the dramatic telling of a story. She was on the arm of the sofa again, smiling like a stripper with those bangs like hands clawing at something just above her head. Richard was sitting at the end of the sofa too, with Tia’s tiny bare feet resting neatly on his thigh. Tia rushed to Pam. “There you are,” she said, “finally!” She embraced Pam so freely, Pam thought she’d never been held like this by anyone. It was the affection of someone who valued her. “Look what I made you!” Tia said, pulling from the pocket of her pleated shorts a pair of earrings. Within the huge hoops were two black-and-white photos of Cher, held in place by red string woven in crisscrosses, suspending Cher’s face and body in skimpy crimson webs. “I worked on them all night because I just couldn’t stop thinking of what you’d said, about Cher being trapped between the old traditions of her ancestors and the whitewashed world of pop culture.” Had Pam said this? She wanted to have said this. She could feel the teardrops ruining her expensive mascara.
“Oh, honey,” she said, “I love them.”
“I just worry about you!” Tia said, holding the earrings up to Pam’s face. “In one of Daddy’s best talks, he says the Europeans were terrified of the Natives. Isn’t that crazy? I hope you’re not scared of me! He says it wasn’t because they thought we’d eat their eyeballs or build tipis from their bones. But because they thought we were smarter than them. They couldn’t understand why we weren’t obsessed with wealth. We could run, we could climb trees, we watched the sky for symbols of things to come, and we didn’t need to go out and conquer anything. Being civilized, to the white man, meant working until you owned everything you could see. Being civilized, to the Indian, meant not beating your horse to death when it got too old to be useful. They were terrified we had it right and they’d traveled all this way for the wrong reasons. So we had to be extinguished. I hope you don’t mind me saying that.”
Pam realized Tia was holding her hand, gripping it tightly. The family sat on the sofa, fidgety and stunned. From across the room, Richard’s crotch appeared swollen and alive. Tia stopped speaking but the sound of her voice hung in the air like the last echoes of a bell that had been ringing for an incredibly long time. Pam hoped Richard and the kids weren’t too jealous of the attention she was getting.
Pam spent a long time viewing herself in the mirror. The jewelry transformed her, lying neatly in the ratted nest of her hair, cradling her face like a small, pale egg.
The earrings brought back a memory of her mother screaming into the telephone. Her mother had torn the phone from the wall but was drunk and failed to realize how knotted she was in the cord. Her eyes were wasted cuts in her bloated face. The cord twisted inside an earring, tearing it from the lobe, flicking bloody droplets onto the wall and Pam, in her footed pajamas. After the blood dried, it gave the impression of little brown polka dots. How could she have forgotten the look Mother gave her, like Pam had caused the whole thing? “Go and wash it off, for God sakes! You look like you just killed something!”
Mother’s booze-ravaged face was so often contorted into a generator of enduring shame.
Everywhere she looked she could see the finest pricks of light like aspirated paint drifting across the horizon—the slow burn of another allergy headache, or maybe just the world quietly disassembling.
Janice and Tia were affixed to each other. They were mining each other’s depths. It wasn’t hard to do—they were still young and shallow enough to hit bottom. The world was made for teenage girls. Those tiny bodies. Those tiny tits. Early in the morning, at the end of the drive, doing jumping jacks in their leggings and scrunch socks, Janice and Tia were packed into their bodies. They were still in their unripe stages, on the cusp of revealing to the world their hidden meanings. Everywhere, Pam thought, men were waiting to explore them like unreachable caves, while she was left feeling like a condemned flophouse a cop might suspiciously shine a spotlight on in the dark.
“Janice is so strong, isn’t she, Pamela?” Tia said, annihilating a slice of the cherry pie she’d baked and brought to the family that afternoon.
“Shouldn’t we have baked for you?” Janice said.
“Since when do you bake anything?” Pam asked.
“I would, for Tia!” Janice whined. “Tia is the only one who gets me,” she said, shoveling in the pie, turning her nose up at Pam.
“Oh, Janice,” Tia said, extending the hand that wasn’t destroying the dessert. The girls locked arms and kissed each other primly on the cheek.
“How do I look in these jeans?” Pam asked. “They’re Guess! Do they flatter me?”
“Your ass looks like a sack of russet potatoes,” Janice said, her mouth half-full.
“Janice, sweetheart!” Tia said, tenderly chiding her. “Elegance, please.”
“Sorry,” Janice said to Tia. “Forgive me, Mommy,” she said to Pam.
“Tia, may I ask what brand of hair spray you use?” Pam asked.
Janice frowned.
Brock rolled his eyes from across the room. “Whores,” he said.
“Scum!” Pam said.
“I’m leaving,” Brock said.
“Listen, everyone, please. Close your eyes. All of you,” Tia said, affectionately stroking the black assembly of leather cords around her tenuous throat. “Listen to the wind. Can’t you hear it?”
They listened, or Pam did, at least—as if it weren’t there before and suddenly it was. She knew this was only because she hadn’t been paying attention. It rustled the trees, clattered a distant chime, pushed small dry things across the concrete patio.
“Let’s all have a family night!” Tia said, clasping her hands together.
Pam was only ever good at making plans and then pretending to be upset when she broke them. This was how she knew she was a decent mother—the attempts.
“I’m going to the community center,” Brock said. “It’s my night.”
Brock and his friends had turntables. The sounds they made were shocking. It filled Pam up, briefly.
“Let’s crimp each other’s hair in my bedroom,” Janice said to Tia.
“I’ll come too!” Pam said.
“I seriously doubt it, Mother,” Janice said.
“Are you doing any new remixes?” Pam asked Brock.
“Fuck off, Mother,” Brock said.
“Brock is working on his own original tracks,” Tia said. “Aren’t you, Brock?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Nothing’s for sure.”
“Go then! I give both of my children over to the world. I set you free!” Pam said.
“Oh, family,” Tia said, “I want to heal you.”
Pam waited for the children to execute their typical disgust, but they only sat there in silence, relishing the pie, waiting, it seemed, for Tia to follow through. Pam thought she should be furious, but instead she continued studying the dark wreath of necklaces, wondering where Tia had acquired them.
Pam spent the rest of the day eating gummy bears, listening again for the voice of the wind, hoping to hear something crucial. It was hard to hear anything though, over her relentless chewing and the girls’ melodious laughter and Brock’s record player, which seemed to be going in reverse as he ominously accompanied on an old keyboard he brought down from the attic after deciding to stay in. There was Richard too, counting irately and breathlessly as he jumped rope like a maniac on the front lawn.
“We need to go out shopping,” Pam said to Richard, sliding her fingers into the mesh gloves. “There are many new things I’m longing for. I’m desperate for a new look, something fresh.”
“You spend too much time alone,” Richard said.
“I stay occupied,” she said, thinking fondly of the trees and the kind box.
“Tia’s been telling the children you need help.”
“Help with what? The dishes? Isn’t that sweet of her. She seems very engaged with what’s going on around her.”
“No, Pam. Like, mental help. This might prove her point. The children and I don’t necessarily disagree. You could talk to someone again. What about Charlie? You loved Charlie. He really seemed to help after Daddy passed.”
“Charlie was a dirty old man! I couldn’t stand him. It was Linda I loved.”
“I thought he helped you. You seemed better after those talks.”
“He helped me out of my clothes once while he had me under deep hypnosis! That’s about it.”
“That never happened, Pam. Please don’t.”
“What is this? A witch hunt? What happened to Tia, the Mexican prostitute? Suddenly she’s a mental health professional and a spiritual guru?”
“What about that listening-to-the-wind stuff? You said that was nice.”
“You should put this on,” she said, tossing him a baseball cap.
Richard looked confused. Suddenly he was claiming he only wanted to be himself in the bedroom. She didn’t buy it. He wasn’t himself even out of the bedroom. Who was he anyway? And why wouldn’t he be Marky Mark for an evening, and she Debbie Gibson? Last time she’d allowed him to choose! That was ages ago. She was Alyssa Milano and he was the R & B sensation Luther Vandross. When Richard was Luther, he said things like “Rock my world, lover girl,” and “Do it to me, teen queen. Yes, yes, ivory princess!” It hadn’t worked. Richard’s Luther was a joke. And he would never pick a specific member of New Kids on the Block. When asked to take turns being all of them, in the manner of a classic gang bang, Richard had gone limp in her hands. Possibly her desires were too interior for him to fathom.
“New Kids on the Block would be so jealous, Marky Mark!” she said, pleading. “They could only dream of conquering this electric, youthful body!” She went on like this until he conceded. He put on his Calvin Klein underwear and the baseball cap. Pam situated the wig on her head—a ratty, blond shag from the Halloween trunk. “Can you hear all those fans chanting outside the walls of our mansion?” Pam asked. “They’re cheering for us!”
Richard was posing aggressively at the foot of the bed. “Yeah,” he said. “Now see if you can’t drown out their screams with the sound of your sucking.”
“All those young girls out there,” Pam whispered, stretching out the neck of her nightshirt to expose a shoulder. “They only wish they were me!” She was crawling toward him on all fours across the mattress. “They wanna wear my skin like a bodysuit.”
“Is that so?” Richard said, staring down at her, erect and dismal.
Afterward, swapping out their sweaty pillowcases, Pam said, “Love’s wings are broken too soon, Richard.” This was a Cher song. It made Pam feel good, to pull these flaming symbols from the air and expound them, daringly, like Cher. “You think you’ll knock me off my feet until I’m flat on the floor? Until my heart is crying Indian and I’m begging for more? Come on, baby! Show me what that loaded gun is for! I’m gonna shoot you down, Jesse James.”
“Whatever you want, Pammy,” Richard said, turning to face the wall.
She lay her head down next to his, feeling dizzy. It was sexy, and exalting, being someone else. She only wished he thought so too. She pressed her palms against her temples, making the fingertips touch over her eyes like a pliant steeple.
The angry fire had blasted above the asymmetry of the mysterious configurations of the steel mill, where she’d grown up. In that forgotten part of town one wasn’t inclined to walk the streets after dark. Every week while her father played his music in the basement, her mother toppled down the steps and slept like a homeless person on the lawn. How luxurious, Pam thought, to indulge in one’s bad ideas until you disintegrated back into molecules, drifted again through the lucent atmosphere like an isolated shower of black blood, heading nowhere.
The things Pam had the longest were the things she loved the most. Her yellow oven mitts. Her stainless steel ice bucket. Her 45 of “Half-Breed.” The garbage disposal, for some reason. She loved how it whirred like a little helicopter taking in a bowl of old food, mutilating leftovers into the plumbing. Where did they go? What happened to them after they got there? When the children were smaller they would run from the bus and into the woods behind the house. They’d run until they fell down in the leaf piles. This was how she’d discovered the box. It was just sitting there. Waiting for her. The children would dig toadstools from the undergrowth and hide them in their pockets. She’d find the flattened mushrooms days later while sorting the laundry. She would allow the kids to burn the piles of leaves in the yard, sending out smoke signals over the neighborhood. What other mother allowed her children to play with fire? With the cracked half of an old kiddie pool, they’d fan the smoke. “Don’t get too close!” she’d call from behind a magazine. Back then, she only had to say it once.
It wasn’t too many years later, they had taken the children to Garden of the Gods Wilderness and Wildlife Refuge. The massive, rust-colored bluffs jutted over a forest just beginning to bud. The children hurried past the sights, both of them listless and overdressed. She and Richard were on a narrow path, wedged between the million-year-old rock formations, when he turned to her. “Are we Menudo or New Kids on the Block?” he’d asked.
“NKOTB, all the way,” she’d said.
They kissed hard, and stretched all around, for miles, the tree limbs were bare and pocked with tiny green sprouts. To be young, she had thought, and in love. And now, to be neither.
“You’ve got to dry up, Mother!” her father always said. Her mother hated this. “I’m already dry as a bone, Bill. Take me out of the fire. I’m done!” Pam understood even then that it was meant to be ironic, when they found Mother’s bloated body in the bathtub, the beer cans precisely lined along the ledge. The steel mill had been shut down, not long after, and Mother was being lobbed like a rocket toward the deepest quadrants of eternity. Pam wondered how long it took to get there—centuries, perhaps, spent burning off the fuel of one’s dumbest dreams until you reached the center of forever.
On the day Mother was removed from the house, Daddy had rolled cigarettes on the porch. “You hungry?” he’d said. He worked the tobacco into a tube. Pam studied his thumbs, the way they deftly spun the fragile paper.
“No, I’m not,” she’d lied.
“I did it for you,” he’d said. “It was basically your idea.” Had he meant pressuring Mommy to dry up, or drowning her? She hadn’t asked. Did it matter? Mother would have boozed herself to death all on her own. But perhaps it was a kindness, on both their parts? Either way, they were in it together now. Behind them on the porch, dozens of Japanese beetles swarmed the windows, the sound of their hard bodies hitting the screen like the ticking of a sad clock.
She walked down the drive to get the mail before heading through the harvested field to commune with the box. In the center of the open trap the tiny flame was back, spraying down like an inverted fountain. She would burn that outrageously, she thought, someday. She would conquer, like this assertive fire. Or she would stand at the end of the driveway wearing all of her turquoise bracelets at once, holding her utility bills, watching the crazed squirrels scatter across the lip of the gutters. Her past had come to meet her. She had been leashed like a dog to her parents’ worst deeds, smelted from their blackest shit. Without even meaning to, she’d taken up the torch of all their pointless traditions.
The windows on the neighbor’s front door were like little blue lockets she wanted to crack open. Inside, the neighbors were probably smoking their peace pipes. She’d never seen the parents, but surely they were in there doing Native American things. The dream catcher still swung in the window. And the rest—what she couldn’t see—she could feel: Arrowheads being sharpened. The spirits of wild animals worshipped. Immense blankets woven from the hair of their ancestors. They were in there singing about the buffalo, the quail, the bald eagle. They were breathing one another’s sweet, wise breaths back and forth between them. Pam stood, trapped in the heat of every possibility, and then a movement, a shadow inside the locket, and the giant castle door opening up.
Tia stepped out—sashayed, really—wearing a massive feather headdress nearly twice the size of her head. It had two raccoon tails that hung down either side of her tan face. Pam caught a glimpse inside the huge house before Tia slammed the door. It was nearly empty, the walls blank, only the extravagant leather sofa sat in the center of the otherwise vacant room. Tia’s crown of white and red feathers stabbed out like shiny spears. She went over and mounted the stump, raised her hands above her head, ran her fingers back and forth through the air as if gathering it up. She cupped her hands and brought them to her mouth, taking in a huge breath, then blowing it back out slowly in every direction, as if putting out some invisible fire all around her.
Finally she acknowledged Pam standing alone in the field. Tia bowed gracefully, holding on to the headdress to keep it from toppling. She dismounted the stump and walked over. “This was my father’s headdress,” she called from across the road. “It’s vintage! Basically a sacred artifact.”
Up close it looked cheap and ragged, like an old gas station tchotchke. Pam reached out to pet one of the tails. The two women stood watching each other calmly. A hard breeze surfaced, disturbing the feathers, beating the raccoon tails against Tia’s cheeks, flipping Pam’s huge hair too, like a stiff weed.
“I’d like to show you something,” Pam said, immediately surprised she’d said it.
“I thought you’d never ask,” Tia said, flinging the shabby feathers off her forehead.
They were almost to the edge of the woods when Tia stopped. “Life happens to be the sum of many small, barely conscious decisions,” she said. “You should keep that in mind, moving forward.”
“Don’t I know it!” Pam replied. “But why, is the real question?”
Tia stood militantly, her head craned to observe the many cardinals flicking erratically among the highest branches. She walked directly up to the little box and, with all her strength, shoved it backward a few feet toward the trees.
“What are you doing?” Pam cried out, except the box had produced an earsplitting squeal, like the sound of many metal gears grinding beneath the earth. The trap was attached to something. Pam could feel the mechanism rumbling below her feet. As it rolled through the leaves and dirt, the wooden walls of the box folded down until it was completely flattened out, making a perfect platform in front of a small hole where the trap had always sat. The two women stood over the opening in awe, peering down.
“How did you know?” Pam asked, her entire body throbbing.
“It was a hunch,” Tia said. “Obviously the box was put there to hide something. Like most inconspicuous things.”
“My God,” Pam said, moving into a better position, allowing the sun to illuminate the dark cavern below.
“It’s enormous down there. It must be an old mine shaft,” Tia said. “Down where all those old Indian bones transform into coal. Shall we go in?”
“Down inside?” asked Pam.
“Don’t you want to?” asked Tia.
Tia put her hands on Pam’s shoulders and pulled her away from the hole. Tia lifted a muscular leg and stomped around the opening. Stones and the earth tumbled down, clacking musically at the faraway bottom, echoing after they hit.
“You’ll fit perfectly now,” Tia said.
“Is this it?” Pam said. “Are we really doing this?”
“I just figure friends should help friends, Pam. Woman to woman. You know?”
“Are we friends?” Pam asked.
“Of course! More than friends, I’d say.” Tia patted Pam gently on the back.
Pam wasn’t sure. A faint trickling of water could be heard inside the cave. The underground magnified it, causing even the dripping to take on an infinite quality.
Tia knelt down. “Hello!” she called. The cave caught her voice and held it for a moment before flinging it in a dozen directions.
“Time is different down there,” Pam said.
“Undoubtedly,” Tia said, taking Pam’s hand. “You first?”
There was a rocky ledge right below the platform of the trap, and other stones like steps that led into the blackness, making the descent seem irresistible.
Pam had her Walkman. She put it on after finding the first landing. Cher’s voice scored the dank air so finely it was as if she were down there with Pam, singing to her from inside a thousand moist hallways. There was the silver light in the distance, mirrored by the glistening deposits of coal that ran in bent seams through every corridor.
After a minute, Pam swore she heard her mother’s slurred, raspy alto, attempting to harmonize with Cher. She picked the most obvious hallway and stepped inside. Maybe Tia had come to help her after all, she thought. Pam felt different, smaller. The hallway she’d chosen widened into another, larger cavern. There was a placid pool at her feet where dangerous fish darted in the murk, disturbing the sparkling sediment. Reflected in the water she could see a fire, and an ugly shaman behind her, descending in a glass elevator. She didn’t even notice when Tia slid the box back, hiding the opening again. She could hardly hear the elaborate gears grinding overhead, their rusty teeth firmly catching as the trap locked into place.