Damaged (3 page)

“Fucking tourists,” Mom says as she enters the kitchen. I can hear their white car crunching away on the gravel.

“The season's just starting,” I say. “You can't be burned-out already.”

“Like those two even eat berries,” she says. “That bowl is going to end up holding candy or potato chips or whatever it is those pigs eat.”

“Be nice,” I say. Among other things, my mom is a food snob. This is a strange thing to be when you're on food stamps and living in rural western Michigan, where most people's idea of fine cuisine is fried perch or some kind of casserole doused in cream of mushroom soup. She refuses to make anything resembling a casserole. Instead, she experiments with things like massaged kale, toasted quinoa, acai berries, and various other ingredients she has to convince the grocery store in town to order even though she's the only one who will ever buy them. It's been sixteen years since she lived in San Francisco; you'd think she would have gotten over it by now.

“How was school today?” she says in a sarcastic voice. She's not one for parental conventions like caring how your kid's day is. She's standing at her stage behind the kitchen island where she concocts her culinary experiments, like the rest of the room is the audience to her cooking show. The studio is where she makes and displays her pottery, but the kitchen is where she does a different kind of art with food. With all her creativity, it's pretty remarkable that I got none at all. And she never fails to remind me how much this disgusts and disappoints her.

“Fine,” I answer.

“Don't ‘fine' me.”

“Don't ‘how was school today' me.”

She throws some roots and vegetables onto the counter. “I think I'm going to make a stew in the slow cooker. It should be ready in about four hours.”

“I'm working tonight,” I say, drinking the slimy sweet sludge from the bottom of my cereal bowl.

“Do you really need to work this much?”

“Mom, you know I'm saving for next year. I'm going to have expenses.”

“You and your planning,” she sighs, chopping a purple potato from the garden. “You're so stuck in the future all the time. Always preparing for the worst. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, you know? If you expect something bad to happen, it will.”

“Somebody's got to think about the future,” I mumble just loud enough for her to hear. I walk over and put my bowl in the sink. She chops vegetables violently as I walk away.

* * *

It's 4:41 p.m. when I get on my bike to ride to work for my shift that starts at five. I can usually get there in eighteen minutes if I haul ass, with one minute left to put on my apron and wash my hands. Like many things, I have this down to a science.

I ride a few miles through farmland, then a patch of what's left of the forest that used to cover this entire area, hearing nothing but the buzz of bugs and the crunch of my tires on the road. In these moments, with my lungs and legs burning, with nothing and no one in sight but road and trees, I can pretend for a moment that I'm somewhere else, somewhere forested and exotic like the Pacific Northwest or Costa Rica. This road could be leading anywhere. I could be an explorer. I could be on my way to discover something no one's seen before. But then the fantasy is inevitably shattered by the homemade sign for
SHERI'S HAIR STUDIO
tilting precariously in front of a bubblegum-­pink double-wide trailer. Half a mile farther is a sign for
BOB'S COMPUTER REPAIR
at the end of a long weedy driveway. There's nothing exotic in the middle of all these trees, just regular people trying to make a living. Camille and I never had a problem making fun of these roadside businesses and how embarrassingly country they all are, regardless of the fact that my mom's studio and her parents' horse-­boarding business are in the same category. This was the only time Camille would come close to showing any meanness—she loved her parents and she loved horses, but she wanted out, same as me. Neither of us was rich. Neither of us was worldly. We were both country girls who desperately wanted to be something else. When things like pizza delivery, high-speed mass transit, corner stores, or ice cream trucks would show on TV, we'd both get quiet, yearning for these urban things as if the tragic lack of them made our lives incomplete.

Our disdain was always strongest on the way to the beach, when we had to pass through Tourist Hell to get to the part of the lake only the locals know about. We'd hold our breath when we turned right on Lakefront Road, when the forest opened into Sunset Village, which is basically just a string of cheap motels, RV parks, and crappy restaurants lining the shore of Lake Michigan. In Camille's car, we felt at least somewhat impenetrable, but on my bike I have to dodge ATVs and mothers yelling at screaming children running across the road. This strip serves a very different tourist from the ones in town nearly fifteen miles away. Sometimes these tourists wander that way, unaware of the unspoken segregation, but mostly they stay here. Somehow they know town is for a different kind of clientele, people who do not stay in RV parks or overcrowded campgrounds or motels boasting free breakfast buffets. South of here, it is like a completely different lake, with no public beaches for miles. Instead, there are dunes and forest dotted with vacation cottages, either owned by their occupants or rented for hundreds or even thousands of dollars per night. The word “cottage” is a misnomer, a strange part of Midwestern vocabulary that has never made sense to me. “Cottage” makes me think of something tiny and quaint, like a life-size version of a gingerbread house. But here it means any vacation home, ones with satellite dishes and hot tubs and tennis courts and three-car garages, ones that are ten times bigger than the shack I live in and used only on weekends for a third of the year. As soon as the leaves start turning, all those miles are abandoned, all those beautiful houses locked up, empty until the sun shines again.

The tourists in Sunset Village will never own cottages. They are lucky to share this cramped, dirty beach with a bunch of other people who will never own cottages. Instead of fine wine, they drink cheap beer in cans softened by beer cozies that read “Beautiful Lake Michigan,” even though their section of it is muddy, oily with speedboat exhaust and sunscreen, and dotted with the occasional floating Band-Aid or lost toy. Instead of drifting along the coast in private sailboats, they rent dune buggies to take out their aggression on the sand. Instead of golfing on perfectly manicured courses, they play miniature golf at Art's Arcade & Holes. Then, sunburned and beer-tired, they come to my work demanding hot dogs and milk shakes.

As I coast into the parking lot of Gabby's Snack Shack, I feel a momentary shock of guilt for looking down on these ­people. It's my mother's judgmental voice in my head, not mine. For someone who's still technically living with her mother and barely making enough money to feed her daughter, she still manages to be a snob about a lot of things. Whenever the topic of Sunset Village tourists comes up, she always gets a disgusted look on her face. She refers to them as “those people.” When I tell her she's being elitist, she refuses to believe me, as if her liberal beliefs automatically trump her actual behavior. Sometimes she's just as bad as Grandma.

I lock up my bike and fall through the door of Gabby's Snack Shack at exactly 4:56 p.m., a new record. Contrary to the name, there is no Gabby. My boss, Bill, bought the place eight years ago from a guy named Kevin. He didn't know who Gabby was either.

“Ahoy there, matey!” Bill says from the cash register, where he is ringing up a very sunburned family.

“Hi, Bill,” I say. As much as I hate serving tourists, I always feel a strange sense of relief when I hear Bill's welcome. Especially lately, work has become one of the four things I look forward to, besides running, sleeping, and eating. Bill never tries to talk to me about Camille. The tourists don't even know she ever existed. Here, I can be totally anonymous, someone besides the girl whose best friend died. Here, I'm expected to just do my job, eat as much free food as I want, and listen to Bill's bad jokes.

“Don't sweat on the food,” Bill says. The customers don't find it as funny as he does. They follow me with their eyes as I throw my bag under the counter, tie my apron around my waist, and wash my hands.

“How's tricks?” Bill says.

“Meh,” I respond. Bill is one of those jolly old guys who it's impossible not to like. And what's crazier, he genuinely seems to like people,
all
people, even the most demanding and ungrateful and untipping of tourists. It's impossible to not cheer up at least a little when you're around him, which is part of why I actually like my job, despite the horrible clientele, terrible pay, and the fact that I go home smelling like grease after every shift. It's nice to be around someone who always seems so genuinely happy to see me. Sometimes I feel like Bill's the only person in western Michigan who isn't waiting to see me cry.

“Have I got a surprise for you!” Bill says. He often speaks with exclamation points.

“A raise?”

“Even better!” he says, then calls over to the back of the restaurant, “Hey, Jessie, come over here. I want you to meet Kinsey.”

From behind the soft-serve machine emerges a mousy girl I think I recognize from school. “Hi,” she squeaks. She squints as she stares at me. “You're Kinsey Cole.”

“Yes,” I say. “I know.”

“Oh my god!” She covers her mouth with her hands and her eyes grow wide. “Is this Camille Hart's job? Did I take Camille Hart's old job? Oh my god.”

There is nothing I can say to make this not suck. Bill swoops in to save the day. “No, no, honey,” he says. “Camille didn't work here.” He catches my eye and blinks an apology. “In fact,” he continues, his voice so upbeat I can tell this Jessie girl is already forgetting what she was upset about, “it's just been me and Kinsey the last couple years. But this summer's going to be busy, I can feel it! And that's where you come in, Jessie. You're going to save the day!”

Since when do we need someone to save the day? Why didn't Bill tell me he was hiring someone new? Did he actually think I'd be happy about it? All this means is I have to share my meager tips with someone else. And now I have one less thing in my life that doesn't suck.

* * *

If Bill thought hiring someone new would mean less work for me, he was sadly mistaken. Not only did I have to run the register while he was in the back cooking, I also had to train the incompetent Jessie and run interference all night to try to prevent her from knocking things over. For someone so small, it's pretty amazing how much damage she can do.

I ride my bike home in twilight, sticky with four-hour-old sweat and French fry grease. My shorts are slimed pink with the remains of a double-scoop strawberry ice cream cone Jessie seemed to have flung across the restaurant at me in an epileptic fit. I have no idea how many times she said “I'm sorry” to me over the course of the night, but I would estimate it to be in the hundreds.

If I ride fast enough, I can't smell myself. So I tear through the night, fueled by three hot dogs, two bags of potato chips, a root beer float, and frustration. Bats dance their creepy silhouette against the darkening sky. Something about them makes my heart clench tight with an impending memory, but I push it away before it has a chance to solidify, an action that has become so automatic I barely notice it anymore. In my head, I cross off “work” from the short list of things I enjoy.

In a few minutes, I will be home. Mom will be working in her studio, one of the few times she doesn't feel the need to talk to me. I will take a shower, brush my teeth, crawl into bed, and drift away to a place where things are still as they should be.

Forest. Night. You call bats flying vermin. You are trying to make a joke. But I can't laugh. Not tonight. I am stone, my jaw cement. I am trying to punish you.

You say, “Say something, Kinsey.”

I say, “Something.”

“Very funny.”

The lightning bugs are early. You want to stop and catch them but I keep driving. This is not a time for diversions. The night is unsalvageable. You are the only one laughing. You laugh harder to fill up the silence, to make up for me, to make up for him, to make up for the fact that neither of us is trying.

We should have known. The bats and the lightning bugs making ominous promises, all their dashing and blinking, their violent silence screaming a warning.

“Kinsey,” you say, but you are not talking to the girl in the car. You are talking to the sleeping girl, the watching girl, the Kinsey of now, the Kinsey outside this memory. I am driving but I am not driving. We are here but we are not here. We are only visitors, tourists. You are taking me on a trip. You are my tour guide. Making me remember.

“What, Camille?” I say, my voice slicing the dark.

This is where you take me. The night, dark. The party, painful. Hunter and me, lost in our own silences. He has too much to drink. I stay too sober. I insist on driving. You say I always want to drive when I can't fix things.

This is how we cope: You laugh when you get nervous. You laugh when you are scared of the dark. A shadow in the shape of Hunter is slumped in the backseat, nothing more than a mannequin for this memory, a placeholder. He knows so many ways to sleep. I hold on to the steering wheel tight. The whiter my knuckles, the safer I feel.

“Kinsey, the next part is going to suck.” This is not what you said then, but it is what you say now.

“We can stop it,” I say.

“No we can't,” you tell me. “It already happened.” Then you laugh. “And you're supposed to be the smart one.”

“We just have to try.”

“But, Kinsey,” I hear your voice say inside my head. “You can't fix everything. Some things you just have to let happen. Some things you just have to let go.”