Thirteen

It’s Marissa’s birthday on Saturday, so even though I shouldn’t spend the money, I take us to a movie. A real movie, a big summer blockbuster starring that guy who looks like someone took a frying pan to his face but manages to be hot anyway.

We never see first-run movies usually. We wait until they’re in the cheap theaters and do our best to avoid the reviews in the meantime. The showing I take Marissa to isn’t even a matinee. I buy a tub of popcorn to split—the big one—and we gorge ourselves on it, big salty, buttery handfuls, washed down with tingly sweet bubbles of soda.

It’s an action movie that hits all the right notes, more or less, and it ends with soaring music and a rising sun behind the burned-out husk of a car, the skeleton corpse of the villain lying broken out the driver’s side window, with the frying-pan-face hot guy kissing the too-gorgeous-to-be-real wife, and everyone knows that as soon as the credits run he’s going to bang the shit out of her.

Marissa loves the whole thing, and I can’t help but buy into it a little too, even though I know better. It’s another fairy tale, just with a higher body count. I see how they do it—the music, how it builds and breaks like an orgasm, the tint of orangey-pink sky, the angle of the kiss that makes our chests expand with that feeling you get when you know everything’s going to be all right.

It’s dark when we leave the theater. We’ve abandoned the popcorn bucket on the floor of the theater, along with the soda cup. (“Job security for the service sector,” Marissa tells me. “We’re helping the fuckers.”)

I ask her if she wants to crash at my place, because Mom will be spending the night downstairs with Jordan. Neither one of them has to work tomorrow, and she was silly, giddy this morning about the idea of sleeping in with him, not being in a rush for once. I smiled and nodded like it didn’t bother me, and either she bought it or wanted to buy it enough to ignore the stiffness of my mouth.

But Marissa says she can’t, Sal’s promised to make her dessert, and she’s kept him waiting long enough, so we hug and I say “Happy birthday” one more time and then set my skateboard down and head toward home.

I know as soon as I get to our building that something’s wrong. The door to Jordan’s apartment is swung open, and I can hear shouting from the street. Mick and Shilo, the two gay kids who live in apartment C, are kind of lurking outside of Jordan’s door as if they’re trying to hear what’s going on but don’t really want to get personally involved. I push past them into the apartment. I carry the skateboard across my body like a weapon, and I mentally recheck if I remembered to put the new pepper spray in the pocket of my hoodie—I did.

If anyone’s fucking with my mother, I’m ready to go to war.

But I stumble to a stop just inside the apartment, because what I’m seeing doesn’t quite make sense. There’s my mother on the futon, her copper hair spilled forward over her shoulders, long enough to cover her breasts but splitting around her right nipple. Jordan is on his feet in front of her, holding a brown throw pillow in front of his crotch, and there’s someone else—another woman, someone I’ve never met before. She’s the kind of woman who must own stock in Avon or something, the makeup’s caked on so thick. She’s dressed in maroon slacks and this shirt with a ridiculous bow at the neck, like she’s a present, though I can’t imagine who would want to unwrap that. She’s, like, fifteen years older than my mom, and her whole demeanor is so tightly wound that she practically sizzles, but not in a good way. The words that stream out of her mouth would be considered “bad” in any company, but since she’s directing them at my mom, they’re fucking blasphemous.

“Cradle-robbing whore,” she says. It seems to be the end of what must have been a crescendo of profanity because she’s breathing heavily as if she’s been yelling for a while.

Jordan looks dumbstruck and ridiculous clutching that little limp pillow in front of his dick, and my mom has tears down her cheeks, but she looks first to Jordan to see what he’s going to do.

A moment passes—too long for my mom’s taste, I can tell, and I watch emotions flicker across her face—disappointment first, then sadness, and then something else I can’t name. Then she steels herself and rises.

Next to Jordan—and with both of them naked—my mom’s age is more apparent than it’s ever been. Her breasts are softer than mine and heavier, and the tips of her nipples are stretched a little.

I did that.

The triangle of her pubic hair is a shade darker than the tendrils that drape across her shoulders, and circling her hips is the silvery starburst of stretch marks etched into her skin.

I made those.

She takes two steps—one next to Jordan and another past him. She stares for a minute at the woman—I still have no idea what the fuck is happening, but my skateboard has drooped a little in my arms. My mom kind of towers over the other woman, even though my mom’s barefoot and naked. There’s an energy radiating off of Mom, a strength, and though the woman tries to hold her gaze, she can’t do it, and her eyes drop to the floor.

Then my mother looks at me. Her façade is beginning to crack, and I know her well enough to see that more tears are coming, so I grab her hand and pull her out of the apartment, past open-mouthed Mick and Shilo, and we go upstairs.

She disappears into the bathroom first thing, and I hear her crank on the shower. I hear her crying in there, too, and I stand outside the bathroom door, trying to decide whether to stay or to go back downstairs and kick the shit out of the pantsuit lady.

Then I figure out who she must be, and I’m kind of paralyzed.

***

I see the whole situation again, from Jordan’s mom’s point of view: She heads over to her kid’s apartment—who knows why, to drop off some laundry or a casserole, something like that, and she knocks and turns the doorknob at the same time, just as she always does—probably always has since he was a kid. Except this time when she pushes open the door she finds her baby son between the legs of this female, this woman, her coppery hair shimmering like flames engulfing them both, the scent of her in the humid air.

Or maybe she found him kneeling as if in prayer, face buried deep in the ocean of my mother.

Or maybe she found her baby boy, my goddess mother atop him, clutching him to her breast and breathing her sweet breath into his mouth, replacing his mortality with ecstasy.

And did Jordan’s mother’s words echo in my mother’s ears like a distorted playback of her own mother’s disowning curse? Did her heart break at seeing me there, in the doorway, witness to her pain?

I don’t know. I can imagine. And imagine. And imagine.

A myth is not in the telling but in the endless retelling.

***

The apartment has grown quiet and dark. Mom has shut off the shower. I go to her room and find her favorite yoga pants, one of her tank tops, a pair of panties. I wait in the gloom of our living room, holding her clothes. When she opens the bathroom door, her shadow precedes her, distorted and unfamiliar. When my eyes adjust, I see her hair is knotted at her neck and her face is swollen from crying. She smiles at me anyway and takes the clothes, shuts the door again. Darkness again.

Mom didn’t used to believe in a shut door. She’d leave it open while she showered, while she peed, while she dressed. She liked to talk and listen all the time.

“No closed doors,” she used to tell me. “The door between us is always open.”

But tonight she shuts it, and I know I’ve been shutting doors lately too—the door between us, the one that was never supposed to close. I remember I’d asked her once, “Why even have a door if we never close it?”

She said, “Because that way we know that we choose to keep it open.”

***

I can’t stay there, in the apartment, looking at one side of a closed door. I head down to my studio and stare at my notebook for a while, flipping the pages back and forth until one tears. I feel like pacing, but my shitty storage room workspace is too small and I don’t want to leave. I want to stay here, close to my mom upstairs, so I take a deep breath and count to ten before shining a light on the sculpture that’s been my summer project, my newest baby pie.

I look at the wall, at the shadow I’ve created—a wolf head and neck curved inward, a blank white eye and sharp teeth, too many of them. A scruff under the chin. Two ears pointed backward.

I take a picture—not of the sculpture, which isn’t the main point anyway, but of its shadow. My breaths are even now. The work calms me, and I let myself disappear into it as I load the image to my laptop, as I sharpen the lines, amp up the contrast. Then I sit back and look at it.

It’s good, but something is missing. A paradox. Something that circles back on itself, like so many things seem to do: a word that speaks of not speaking. From my box full of scraps I dig out a couple of deformed coat hangers. I’ve got a pair of rusty pliers somewhere, and I scrounge around until I find it. I want to make a word. This is new to me, so I’m slow and not very good at it, and I puncture my hands again and again with the wire hangers and the pliers both. It hurts and I bleed and wonder briefly about tetanus, but I finish it, at last, the word made of wire and propped between the wall and the lamp. I flick the lamp’s switch:

INFANDOUS.

I don’t even stop to wipe the blood from my fingers before I’ve got it photographed and into Photoshop with the wolf head. I sit back and look at the screen. Separated from the baby pie, the shadow has become its own thing. The proportions are different than if I’d drawn it; the ratio of white space to black looks off, the placement and size of the letters beneath the image is wonky and slippery. It’s imperfect, and ugly. I curve a line around the image to frame it and hit save.

Then I copy it onto a memory stick. The sun is rising. The myth is not in the telling but the constant retelling. This is my story. I want to tell it, not once, not just to myself, but over and over again.

It’s time for a field trip.

***

So it costs about five bucks to print one sheet of stickers. If you buy five sheets at this one place I know, you get the sixth sheet free. Unless you’re friends with Kai, the redheaded kid who works the early shift there. Then all six sheets are free.

As I paddle my skateboard down the long, broken stretch of sidewalk, money is on my mind. The mermaid tail of my mother, crafted from brand-new pennies. My crappy little paychecks from Riley Wilson. Naomi and Bobby’s wealth, the beautiful bounty of it, how everything they own shines new and smart. The easy purchase of my cobalt blue bikini, the extra-large sweet teas versus my poor man’s lemonade.

The sun has risen and the day will be hot, but it’s early still and the streets are quiet. A couple of bums are rolling up their sleeping mats and loading up their grocery carts for another day. There’s a young couple, my age probably, tucked into each other near the entrance to my favorite thrift shop. They’re still sleeping, tangled dreads exactly the same shade of brown. Their bed is a broken-open cardboard box.

I paddle by the House of Ink and the Venice Beach Freakshow, both still closed. The Freakshow claims to have the world’s largest collection of two-headed animals. I’ve never been inside, so I’ll have to take their word for it, but the whole idea of displaying monstrosities for money reminds me of the Gods and Lovers display and, in a way, of my own art too.

Art and money and wealth and poverty and what is fair and what isn’t. Casseroles and throw pillows and cloud-soft white duvets.

I think about the trades we make, what we sell and what we give away, and the secrets we keep—both good and not so good—close to our own hearts. The things that can have a price and the things that should not.

On the boardwalk, vendors are rolling up the steel grate doors that protect their goods at night. They rattle and clank as they retract, leaving doorways yawning open beneath them. You’ve got to do that—you’ve got to expose your goods if you want people to see them.

I twist the star ring on my finger. Part of the cost of doing business—of living, even, is that sometimes people will steal your shit.

My art, I decide, and my stories, these things are mine. Fuck, so is my body, my hair, and my touch. I own these things—all of them—and I can sell them or trade them or give them away.

***

I’m due at Riley’s at ten. I continue my slow skate down the boardwalk, stopping once at Carson’s café for a mocha and again near the art wall to drink it. Even this early, surfers are out in the water, and nearby at the skate park, the clatter of wheels on concrete sets the rhythm for the day. Not many tourists are out this early, so for now Venice belongs to us—the locals.

I nod hello to a few people I know, dopey-eyed skaters and wet-haired surfers, their skin dusted white with ocean salt.

I zip open my backpack and peel one round sticker from the first sheet. I smooth it onto the art wall, pressing hard to make it stick against the concrete. The wolf winks up at me.

Retelling.

***

At exactly ten a.m. I push through the turquoise Dutch door. There’s no sign of Jordan, even though we’re not supposed to leave the front of the store unattended—that’s kind of the whole point of my getting this job, so that Jordan can spend more time in the back, but he’s supposed to stay up front during the morning hours until I cruise in.

I ditch my bag at the counter and head to the back of the shop. When I get close to the door of the shaping room, I hear something, but not the rhythmic scraping of the sandpaper or the whirring of the power planer. And the omnipresent reggae that Jordan’s been semi-obsessed with since he started seeing my mother isn’t playing, either.

It’s Jordan’s muffled voice, and he’s talking to himself. “Such a fucktard,” he mumbles, and I hear a sound like he’s punched something and then something else like he’s slid to the floor.

I listen with grim satisfaction, like, Good, you should be sorry, you sack of shit. But after a minute the satisfaction wears off, and then there’s just the grimness left, miserly tightness in my chest and shame in being glad he’s suffering too, the way I know my mom is suffering, the way her sadness makes me suffer.

I push open the door. There he is, slumped on the ground, his back against the leg of the shaping table. He’s cradling his hand, and there’s a starburst dent in the wall across from him.

It’s winter in that room, white foam banked up in the corners like snow, a dusting of it on everything—the table, the shaping tools, the beat-up old stereo, the bar-sized fridge in the corner where we stash our drinks. It’s in Jordan’s hair too, snowflakes of it stuck in his dark-blond waves. Everything is sleeping here, quieted under the foam snow, everything except Jordan’s misery.

That’s blazing hot and wide awake.

He looks up at me and doesn’t try to hide that he’s been crying. Tear streaks stain his cheeks, and he swipes at his nose with the back of his hand. He looks like a lost little boy.

“Hey, Seph,” he says. “How’s your mom?”

I shrug. “Better than you.”

“She’s better than anyone I know,” he mumbles.

I don’t agree or disagree. It doesn’t matter if she is the best or the worst. She is the heart of me, regardless. It floats there between us, like another flake of snow, or surfboard foam, the question that both of us are asking him—why didn’t he say anything? Why did he just stand there, limply ineffective, and let his mother say those terrible things? Why did he let my mom walk away?

After a while I say, “Well, I’ll let you know if anyone needs anything,” and he nods, and I turn away and close the door, take my place behind the counter.

A minute later, music floats up from the back room, and I recognize it instantly since my mom’s been humming it for the last month, ever since the night of their first date—it’s a song by that reggae group they went to hear.

“Oh, Mama,” croons the singer to his lover over the beat of the snare drum, “You are my goddess. You are my Lover. Let me be your manna …”

I trace a finger along the edge of one of my wolf stickers.