I wanted Hurricane Mavis to bear down on North Carolina, yet Friday dawned an ordinary day. High thin clouds licked at the edges of a clear sky. The radio said Mavis was gaining strength off the coast of Florida. It wasn’t enough. I needed more. I needed that day to be different. I was different. A piece of my flesh had been burned out with a piece of hot wire. Some spotting and a few abdominal twinges just weren’t enough. I needed gushing blood and excruciating pain.
I needed to keep track of Mavis. She was important, not the cancer. Before I settled into my cubicle for the day, I slipped into Garlic Breath’s cubicle. He kept an extra monitor under his desk so he could watch sports instead of working. I set it up on a file box beside my desk so I could track the storms progression on the NOAA website while I compiled data and built flowcharts on how shipping routes, fishing, and tourism would be affected by a direct hit to Charleston, versus Wilmington.
Just before lunchtime, Garlic Breath stood up and bellowed over our joint cubicle wall. “Hey, that’s my monitor. Give it back!”
I glanced up at him while I pointed to the company logo on the side of the monitor. He had muffin crumbs in his short beard. “It’s not yours. It says right here, ‘property of Bettel Occidental.’”
“It’s mine.”
“No, it’s not,” Letitia said from the passageway. She had crept up on us without a sound. She held a frappuccino in one hand and a golf umbrella in the other. “What’s going on over here?”
“Blaine stole my monitor.”
I stood up to face my accuser. “I didn’t steal anything. It’s not his personal property.”
“Calm down, Lara. He’s not really accusing you of stealing.” She hooked the umbrella over the top of my cubicle and took a sip of her drink. “What’s with the radar maps?”
“If the hurricane hits Charleston, shipping lanes will be shut down for at least a day or so. But, if the storm swings north, Virginia Beach—“
“Okay, okay, okay. I don’t need the details right now. Type that all up and I’ll look at it later.” Letitia turned to Garlic Breath with a rapacious smile. “It appears that Blaine over here is using the extra monitor to do actual work. You will just will have to watch the Marlins game on your phone.”
“The game was cancelled,” I mumbled as I sat back down at my desk. “Heavy rains over Florida and Georgia.”
“But,” Garlic Breath protested, “she keeps hogging all the supplies around here. Look at all the file boxes she uses.” He gestured to the stacks of color-coded, neatly labeled file boxes stacked along the wall outside my cubicle.
Letitia picked up her umbrella and started to walk away. “You know the deal. Blaine took this funky cubicle at the end so she can have more storage space. If you want a place to store your projects while they’re in progress, I suggest you actually work on some projects.” Letitia stalked away on her tiny stiletto heels and disappeared into the elevator. When she was gone, Garlic Breath kicked over the closest stack of boxes. My notes on bauxite futures mingled with my notes on tea crop projections. I left them on the floor; I needed to concentrate on the hurricane.
I secured my hair on top of my head with a sharpened pencil and prepared to immerse myself in the world of shipping until I realized I would need Pathetic Dog Owner’s help with the data on crude oil tankers. Letitia had hired him because he was an expert on the price of crude oil. Like me, he had degrees in both geology and finance; unlike me, the guy couldn’t string a sentence together. I had to rewrite his reports every month before I could aggregate them with the rest of the department’s. Our similar backgrounds made Letitia compare him to me even more than the rest of the people on the eighth floor. Pathetic Dog Owner came up lacking every time. I guess he resented me for that. He always skipped over my cubicle when he walked around hawking Girl Scout cookies and made snide comments to Garlic Breath about how I was too much of a skinny bitch to enjoy a good cookie. He somehow managed to make eating Thin Mints feel tawdry.
As much as I didn’t want to talk to him, I needed Pathetic Dog Owner’s information. He was talking on the phone with his back to me when I walked across the office to his cube. The pictures of a shaggy German shephard seemed to have multiplied on the cubicle walls since I had last looked in. A scratched dog crate crouched under the desk. Pathetic Dog Owner had his work calendar open on his laptop and flipped through another calendar on his phone as he seemed to be scheduling a series of appointments. I craned my neck to see if a sick dog was napping in the carrier.
“Can I help you?” Pathetic Dog Owner demanded as he hung up.
I pointed to the carrier. “Is your dog in there?”
“She’s at the vet today, as if it’s any business of yours.” He pushed the carrier further under the desk with his toe and tossed a Diet Pepsi can into the trashcan.
“That should be recycled.”
“What do you want?”
“I need to know how many tankers are off the southeast coast right now,” I said as I pulled three cans out of the trash and held them against my chest.
“I don’t know,” Pathetic Dog Owner barked. He gestured to the teetering piles of file folders and printouts scattered across the desk. “I have enough on my plate today without you wanting me to help you. Go away.”
I dropped the cans in the tall blue container next to the restroom and slunk back to my desk. That was a colossal waste of time. These people all hate me. It took me four hours, but I managed to get a handle on what I needed to know. When I finally looked up, the hurricane had gained speed, the office had fallen quiet, and I was late for spin class.
I rushed into the lobby of Silver Star Fitness and groaned when I saw the class was already in full swing. A Stepford wife in red bike shorts pedaled my favorite stationary bike on the other side of the glass wall.
“You’re too late,” the bouncy babe behind the counter blathered. “There’s a storm coming. Everyone from the Saturday morning class came tonight.”
“But it’s Friday night,” I said as I signed in. “I always take spin class on Fridays.”
“Sorry,” Bouncy Babe replied. “There’s a Zumba class in a few minutes.”
Yeah, that’s gonna happen. My mind raced as I turned toward the locker room. It was a Friday, I was supposed to be riding to nowhere beside a room full of people unable to communicate over the loud music and barking instructor. My body shuddered with pent-up energy. Spin class or no spin class, I needed a workout. Once in my bike shorts and oversized T-shirt, I slipped into the cardio room. If I could find an open stationary bike, I could maintain a shadow of my routine.
There were no open stationary bikes. I wasn’t about to stand there and wait until one opened up; someone might try to talk to me. There was an open treadmill in the center of the room. Thursday was treadmill day, but it would have to do. I stepped onto the treadmill and ran at a moderate pace to warm up. It felt good to move my muscles after being folded up at my desk all day. The digital display said I had run two miles when the man to my left finished his workout and a woman a few years younger than me took his place. She placed her trendy imported water bottle down between the machines and popped a set of ear buds in her ears.
She’s probably not even listening to music. I bet she just puts those on to look cute. Look at that smirk. I bet she’s making fun of me in her head right now. She’s just like the people at work, always mocking me. They all hate me.
I had to run faster to outrun my thoughts. I increased the speed and incline on the machine and turned my head to watch the hurricane coverage on the large television hanging from the ceiling. A blast of sweat and cheap cologne hit me as if I’d run through a patch of skunk cabbage. The middle-aged man haphazardly jogging on the next treadmill grinned like a hyena watching a springbuck at the watering hole. I knew that look; I had seen it on Dale’s face far too many times. I glared at him, but the man looked right through me. He was looking at the girl bobbing along in her tiny spandex shorts and red jog bra.
What a pig! That girl is young enough to be his daughter.
I adjusted my pace to block his view. The man stepped back to the end of his treadmill to see around me. I stepped back too. “Hey!” The man said with a shake of his head. A drop of sweat flew into my face. The people on the treadmills around us stopped watching the hurricane swirling on the Weather Channel to watch us.
I stepped off the treadmill belt and blurted out, “Stop staring at her!” Spandex Girl slipped her ear buds out of her ears. I whirled around and yelled, “Yeah, I’m talking about you. I caught this creep watching you bounce.”
The girl shot me a confused look, jumped off her machine, and stormed off in disgust. Before she disappeared into the locker room, she winked coquettishly at the man over her shoulder. The man punched the controls of his treadmill and the machine thumped to a stop.
“See what you did?” the man yelled, wiping his forehead with his already drenched T-shirt. Rivulets of sweat stuck the hair on his stomach to his skin. “Why don’t you mind your own business? She didn’t seem offended.” The people around us all stopped their machines to hear what was going on. “Why would she wear that get up if she wasn’t asking for guys to look at her?”
“Oh yeah?” My heartbeat was pounding in my ears. “She was asking for it, huh? Right!”
I was so done being a sexual object. Men, and sex, had given me cancer. Before my brain could catch up with what my body was doing, I vaulted off the treadmill. Every time my stepfather said I was “asking for it” by being young and pretty came back to me. That memory was behind each punch to the man’s fleshy face. I kept yelling, “Oh yeah? Oh yeah?” as another gym member pulled me off him. “Get off me!” I yelled.
I fought against the hands holding me while another man grabbed my legs and they pushed me through the locker room doors. I fell on the floor in a heap.
Felicity, the manager, ran in behind me. “What the hell is going on? Someone said you punched Ronny?” My breath hitched in my chest. I couldn’t form words for a moment. Pointing at the young woman still standing there naked despite the small crowd forming in the locker room, I stammered, “Her… He was watching that girl run!”
The gym manager draped a towel over the naked girl. “Look, Ronny may be a dirty old man but you can’t just haul off and punch the guy.” She waved the remaining people out of the locker room while saying, “Okay, okay, show’s over.” She handed me a towel to wipe my face and sat down on a bench. “Look, we have really strict rules about violence in the gym. I don’t have a choice. I’m going to have to revoke your membership.”
I was stunned. Ronny had acted like a pig and I was the one getting kicked out? Felicity left me sitting on the locker room floor. “Just get your stuff and go. Hopefully he won’t press charges.” I wandered out to my car in a daze without even picking up my food from Lucky Lee’s.
I’ve spent every weeknight for the last six years in that gym. Where am I going to go now?
***
A crash jolted me awake. I had fallen asleep, still in my workout clothes, face down on the couch. Heavy rain and hail lashed the windows but the power was still on. Blue light from the television bathed the room. I squinted at the whirling clouds on the screen. The Weather Channel showed the eye of the hurricane passing over Goldsboro, NC. But where did it come ashore? Did I miss it? Was there damage?
I lifted my head. Something wasn’t right. A yellow glow shone from the kitchen. Did I leave the refrigerator open? When did I even open the refrigerator? I hadn’t eaten anything when I came in from the gym. My stomach, empty since a few bites of peanut butter and jelly sandwich at lunch, grumbled to be satisfied. I stood up and walked toward the kitchen just as a particularly strong gust of rain slapped against the transom windows above the television.
My sweaty T-shirt had dried while I slept. It made a ripping sound as I peeled it off like a bandage. In the kitchen, the refrigerator was secure. The yellow light came from a halogen streetlight shining through the sliding glass door leading out to my postage stamp of a back yard. A section of the twelve-foot stockade fence that separated my yard from the neighbor’s had blown down.
Another gust of wind blew a child’s plastic chair through the gap in the fence. I slid the door open and jumped through the sheet of water tumbling over the edge of the gutter. I was instantly soaked. Tiny pellets of hail stung my skin as I rescued the tiny chair. I had seen, but never spoken to, my neighbor on the other side of the fence. I knew he was older than me, somewhere in his early forties, with a ponytail and a motorcycle. He played video games late into the night and had a little girl with a red jacket that spent weekends in the front bedroom. The toys littering the backyard obviously belonged to her.
I reached through the opening and picked up a Barbie doll that had blown under a bush. I pulled a piece of mulch from the doll’s hair and straightened the muddy ball gown. I tried to remember if I had ever owned such a doll. The various church daycare centers I attended as a little girl had bald, naked Barbies and a few armless Skippers, but I didn’t remember having one of my own.
Then, I did remember. The girlie-pink room Mama set up at the back of Dale’s sprawling farmhouse had a shelf of Barbie dolls in spangled gowns as if a bunch of little girl’s toys could make up for Dale stealing my childhood. With a force that rivaled the storm, I threw the doll and the tiny chair back through the gap with a massive yawp.
***
After the first night Dale came into my room, I lay naked on the floor in shock. My knees and hips had rug burns from when I tried to get away from him. My throat was raw from screaming and my ears still rang from Dale slamming my head against the canopy bedpost. My jaw ached from where he had punched me when I bit his shoulder. Depleted, I waited to hear Dale snoring from the TV room before wiping the blood off my thighs. I pulled on a pair of jeans, gathered a few books in a suitcase, and crept into the master bedroom.
“Mama!” I whispered. “We’ve got to go!”
Mama sat up against the velvet-upholstered headboard in a black satin robe. “Hush up, girl!” She pushed me off the bed. “And stop that caterwauling. You want to wake up Dale?”
“Mama,” I cried. “Mama, he… he…”
“Shut up!” Mama shoved a pillow into my face. “You think I’m deaf? I could hear what was going on back there.”
“You heard?” I gulped in the perfumed air trying to stop crying. “But…”
“You shouldn’t fight so much. You’ll get your pretty face all ruined. You’re gonna be all black and blue tomorrow.”
“Why didn’t you stop him?” I started to sob in earnest. It had been horrific enough to be beaten and raped but I had been able to hang on thinking we would escape by morning. Some of my mother’s ex-boyfriends had tried to touch me in the past and Mama had always kicked them out the next day.
Mama slapped me across the face with the television remote. I saw stars. “You stop that bawling. Look, it isn’t easy landing a man like Dale when you’ve got a kid. Especially one like you. Now Dale has fixed us up pretty nice here. Don’t you like your new room?” Mama whined. “All you got to do is be nice to old Dale every once in a while and everything’ll be fine. You’ve got a pretty face and nice little bod, so I suggest you use it and get as much as you can out of him. If you play your cards right, I bet he’d buy you a car for your birthday.”
Mama pulled at the skin around her eyes. “‘Cause let me tell you, baby, it won’t last. I was a real looker when I ran away to Nashville. Look at me now. My boobs are sagging. My face is gone. I didn’t have two pennies to rub together before I met Dale. Now we have more money than God. So keep your little trap shut.”
Mama had never been an ideal mother—far from it. She had disappeared for days at a time leaving me alone with no food. She refused to buy me a winter coat until I was “done growing”. She dragged me from place to place, but I never expected her to blithely sacrifice me for a little financial security. My childhood, as grim as it had been, ended that night. I went back to my room and tore the pink sheets off the bed. The dotted swiss curtains made a satisfying ripping sound as I pulled them off the windows. I ripped the fabric into shreds until I was spent and tossed the pile of rags in the closet. The next morning I spackled foundation over my bruises and went to school as usual. I was trapped. I had no money, nowhere to go, and no one that loved me.
I didn’t speak to my mother in any real way after that night. From then on, my mother supplied me with food and water like she did the other livestock. It was clear to me that she had sold me, her only child, to Dale like a good milking cow.