Rose of No Man's Land (6 page)

So many other people had lived where I live, and it never even freaked me out that probably some of them died in there, maybe even in my own bedroom. I always
thought that something kept us lucky, and maybe it was that we were being watched over by a gang of ye olde ghost grandmas, all swirling around in otherworldly housecoats. All the months we didn’t pay the rent on time and we were still here. Ma fake-sick all the time and she never got cut off, never got real-life bad sick either. Me only giving half a crap at school and still I got by. Being underage but never having a problem getting the beer I wanted, always that excellent swept-away feeling there in the bottle and I was good with it, I hardly ever puked and never, ever got blackouts. It was a real low-key sort of luck we had going on, my family. No megabucks sweepstakes won, no long-lost relative who croaked and left us suddenly loaded. It was a sort of loser luck, I guess, the luck of the cigarette-smoking ghost-grannies who shuffled the scuffed linoleum, but I’d take it over no luck at all.

Ma made the sound of the television swell against the hateful hollers of me and my sister. Passive-aggressive for sure, but I’d rather Ma communicate her irritation by cranking up Jerry Springer instead of sending Donnie in to do some pretend-Dad song and dance. Still, the blast of talk show hysteria made all my jumbled anti-Kristy feelings surge higher and larger until my insides were chaos. My immediate instinct was to gather my beer bottles and run screaming into Kristy’s room and hurl them at the paper bodies on her walls, terrifying but not actually hurting my sister with the rain of green glass. But I am so contrary I rebel against even my own impulses, so instead I slowed down. I nudged my door deeper into the sticky frame. The rising heat and humidity would swell the door and goo the
paint, effectively sealing me into my bedroom. Slowly I moved and breathed toward the beer bottles. The fluttering plastic handle of a grocery bag poked out from under my bed. I tugged it out and laid the bottles inside, dumping the drippy remains down my throat first, so that they didn’t spill out and dribble through the holes in the bag, making everything sticky and stinky. I tied the handles in a knot and continued to clean my room. I folded my limp jeans and placed my leather bracelet on my bureau. With my bare hands I gathered the gray dust bunny puffs that formed against my walls. I tossed them out my open window and watched them blow along the nighttime pavement like tumbleweeds. Everything was fine. Who cared about missing the last day of school, anyway? It’s not like I was particularly in love with any of my teachers. I was also not very connected to my classmates. I’m what they call on television a “loner.” On television most people are suspicious and even scornful of the loner, but one or two key people tend to be intrigued, and if the loner manages to avoid becoming a victim of circumstance, he or she often prevails. It’s not so bad. I only needed to locate the one or two key people who would find my lonerness interesting and befriend them. And then learn to identify the precarious circumstances that could victimize me. I thought: this is my summer plan. I decided it right then, sitting on my bed, which I had more or less made — tugging the sheet up over my pillow and then sculpting the fabric around the pillow so I could see its distinct shape, like in magazine pictures of beds. The air that came in my window smelled like summer trees, like their limey-green leaves. It smelled like
the tar in the street that had turned gooey under the sun, the whole world softened in the heat.

My burst of self-willed calm and optimism was so inspiring I was moved to paint my toenails. Just for the fuck of it. Who’s the teenage alcoholic now? The girl sitting in a cleanish room, enjoying some fresh air and giving her toenails a little color? I don’t think so. Soon enough there was the sound of pressure against my door, a heaving, creaking sound, and it appeared the rickety door with its globbed-on paint dried in drips and blobs would split down the middle. The thing popped open and Kristy fell into my room. She did not have the video camera. How’s that for turning over a new leaf? For trying to be a humane person in the world? Though what a redeeming shot it would’ve been: me in my cleaned-up room, the beer bottles bagged up and tucked away, waiting for disposal. Me actually painting my toenails, a well-adjusted female activity. The red pooled on the tiny nails and made them look like candy. I imagined feeding my candy toes to some sort of salivating boy who liked girl-feet.
Your toes look like Red Hots
, he would murmur excitedly. I gave a bitchy glance at Kristy and returned to my feet, shaping the puddles of polish with the brush, stopping the excessive paint from rolling down onto the skin of my toes.

Wow
, Kristy said humbly, and I relaxed.
You’re painting your toenails.
I shrugged like I did it all the time.
If you want, I’ll do your fingernails for you. A manicure.

Did They Teach You That At The Voke? I asked, and she shook her head.

I already knew it.
Kristy moved to the end of my bed
and sat down on it. Many times Kristy has tried to buy my bed frame off me. She’s had jobs forever and has more money than anyone in the house, and she deeply regrets the temper tantrum that caused her own bed frame to crack down the middle, the wooden slats gutting the shabby box spring. She offers me insultingly low prices to part with my bed. I’ll never do it. My primary activity is lying around in bed, so you could call my bed and all its parts my number-one possession. Cash would be nice, but I got by without it. There was always some dried-up ramen bricks in the pantry, waiting to be plunged into a pot of boiling water. I’d never starve. Ma liked to brag about this fact. She’d say,
You kids don’t starve.
She’d say it like she wanted a prize, like she wanted the mother-of-the-year award for not starving her children. But she was right, we didn’t starve, not so long as the big ramen factory kept slapping up those bunched-up nests of noodle. I bummed beers off Donnie when possible, I didn’t need much. Kristy could buy herself her own damn bed frame anyway, if she didn’t spend her money on endless beauty products and douche-bag clothing from Ohmigod!, but she’s got her priorities, I guess.

Trisha, what are you going to do?
she asked me, arranged on the edge of my bed like a little canary. Her voice had a made-for-television-movie heaviness to it, like I’d been diagnosed with breast cancer and she wanted to know what treatments I’d be pursuing. I capped the polish and set the bottle on my nightstand, began wiggling my toes to accelerate the drying process. The last time I painted my toes I didn’t wait long enough for them to dry
properly. I put on a pair of socks and then my sneakers, and at the end of the day the polish had dried with the socks stuck into it so they were attached to my feet by these smears. It looked like something horrible and bloody had happened to my feet and I dramatically limped into the parlor screeching, My Toes, My Toes! and scared the shit out of Donnie and Ma. Ma in particular was affected by the joke and seemed to have a hard time viewing my feet as healthy ever sense. She insists I have athlete’s foot and a toe fungus but really they seem fine, just a little peely. I worried that Ma’s hypochondria might be branching out into Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, like Eminem’s mom. And look how fucked-up he turned out.

Are you going to give me the silent treatment?
Kristy asked. Her voice was tender like a Hallmark card. She loves to play Big Sister.

No, I Just Don’t Know What You Mean, I said, staring at my crimson toes.

I mean, what’s your plan for the summer? Like, my plan is to work at Jungle Unisex and pass my boards and complete my application for
The Real World.
What’s your plan?
She gave me a sisterly smile. I shrugged.

I Don’t Know, I said. The plan I’d just made, to find people intrigued by my essential loner nature, seemed both complicated and embarrassing. Like, my plan is to find a friend. God. Kristy shook her head impatiently, making the layers in her streaky brown-blond hair shift and tremble. Kristy cut her own hair, using an impressive configuration of mirrors. She wouldn’t let any of the girls in her cosmo shop do it because she said they smoked too much pot, but
I bet she was paranoid.

No, Trisha
, she said intensely.
You need a plan. You can’t sit here like this in your room, with those two out there all day. You’ll go crazy.
She slapped the bottom of my feet.
You need a job.

Oh, Kristy, I groaned.

You need to pay attention
, she said, and if possible her voice got even more intense.
You need to look for all the bits of your personality that are like Ma’s and you have to work against them or else you could end up just like her. And it worries me that you don’t have a job, Trish. You’re old enough. I’ve had one for years. You can’t lay around all summer like she does.

Our mother doesn’t work. She hasn’t really ever, and her mom didn’t work either. It’s like a family tradition, not working. A few years back she’d actually freaked us all out by going down to Joe’s Club and managing to get hired, and for a minute that was really exciting. Joe’s Club sells basically everything you could ever need, and workers get a discount on the already cheap stuff. The possibility of such material riches almost made me anxious. We could get a DVD player. Cassette tapes in bulk, for hardly any money. Giant-sized bags of potato chips. Oh, the luxury of a giant new bag of chips. One you pull open with a pop, releasing the greasy-salty puff of potato chip air from inside. You can snack ’til you’re stuffed and not worry about leaving enough for the other hogs, there’s just so much. A pirate’s treasure, an endless magical bag of chips. The Joe’s Club thing opened up these wondrous possibilities, possibilities that were then slaughtered because of
Ma’s back problems, how the job aggravated them. And the thing about back problems is doctors can’t even say if they’re real or not. I mean, if Ma’s lying they can’t prove it, but they also can’t give her the big Bad Back Award. It’s a weird gray area, the back. Ma brought hers back to the couch and that was the end of my Joe’s Club dreams. I did console myself with one of Ma’s new painkillers, which was sort of nice. Ma had to hike down to the welfare office, all doped up on them, and explain her failed attempt at rejoining society to her caseworker, getting back on track with the flow of paperwork and aid that came regularly through our door slot. I just lay in my bed, feeling heavy and wobbly like a pan full of Jell-O.

All in all Ma doesn’t have it so bad. I mean, if I’m right, most people work all week to scavenge two brief days of the kind of living Ma has all the time. It’s like she’s on a permanent vacation. I have to admit, this lifestyle has a queasy pull for me, sort of like the last beer or two of the night — I know it’s not so good for me, but I want it anyway. Even the kind of wanting is similar, a sort of familiar and comfortable and even physical want, like I’ve already had it and I want it back, intimate like that. Like that lying-around life or bottle of beer was mine some time ago, was ripped away, and I’m just working to get it back. I know that Kristy’s right to ride her own ass so hard, and that she’s right about me too, but the conversation still shakes me up and makes me sort of frustrated. Because it’s just not that easy for me. I can’t just crash out into the world with a smile and a flip of hair and make shit happen. I don’t know how to be like Kristy, who seems to understand the crucial
way to be if you want to get things in this world.

Kristy, I Don’t Know How To get A Job. Nobody’s Going To Hire Me.

Kristy’s eyeliner-wide eyes grew larger in alarm at my words.
Well, to start, stop talking like that
, she hissed her voice like it could put out the fire my negative sentence had sparked.
You shouldn’t even think like that, Trish. But you really, really shouldn’t talk like that.
She took a breath.
Okay, say this: people are waiting to hire me.

Kristy, I groaned.

Say it!

People Are Waiting To Hire Me.

That’s good, that’s good
, she encouraged. It was nice of her to ignore my tone and the toss I gave my eyeballs. And really I think it’s great that Kristy has this tie to the cosmos, this ability to indulge her hocus-pocus emotions without feeling like a total goon, but I don’t have that power. Even though it was just Kristy, who has seen me naked and smelled my farts, I felt the way you do during those naked-in-class dreams that seem to be a universal human experience. Like she’d lodged a telescope into the parts of my person most hopelessly riddled with loserness.
Say it again
, Kristy beamed,
but really like you believe it!

People Are Waiting To Hire Me, I repeated. This time I made my voice louder and didn’t roll my eyes. I couldn’t help the tone, though. Tone is generally beyond my range of control.

Trisha
, my sister gasped. She looked like a soccer mom whose brat had just head-butted the ball to glory. Proud.
We are going to get you a job!

On the morning of the next day, at an hour I usually don’t wake up at without the requirement of school, Kristy was putting the finishing touches on her new project, me. My hair, which she was unable to handle without making intense squeals of grossed-outness because of the dirt, was weaved into some ladylike hair sculpture on the back of my head. It felt heavy and fragile, like a small animal was pinned to my scalp.

I do believe that in your case, dirt might be working as a styling agent
, Kristy mused.

See? I said. If We Could Find A Way To Bottle My Funk We Could Sell It To Hair Salons And Be Rich.

Kristy snorted, wiped my organic hair grease from her hands with a dishrag.
Hold your breath
, she ordered, and I
sucked air into my lungs and squished my eyelids tight as suffocating clouds of Aqua Net shot from the giant can and engulfed my head. When she was done, Kristy tipped her own feathery head upside down and blasted a gust onto her own hairdo.
Okay!
she said proudly, her hair settling back around her face, somewhat stiffer. She plonked the can down on her dresser. Once I watched some girls in the bathroom at school take a lighter turned up high and spray a cloud of Aqua Net at it. It transformed into a swirling ball of fire, suspended for a moment in the air, then vanished. It was maybe the best thing I’d ever seen. I thought of it whenever I saw Kristy’s can, but am generally too scared of burning the house down to try it myself. From what the girls in the bathroom were saying, if you fucked up the fire could somehow be pulled back into the can and explode in your hand and then you’re dead or all burned up.