Short People (14 page)

But right now, Mary can’t decide what to wear. She wants to pick just the right thing. She wants to be someone—anyone—else tonight.

MERCY FUCK

She was barely into puberty when it started—twelve, she told me. One day she was playing Mommy at her Fisher Price stove in the basement, and the next she was in the living room doting on the men, fetching them beer, and she couldn’t fool anyone, not even her mother, into thinking she was still some innocent little girl. Or that’s what it felt like. Maybe there were a few interim years of sitcoms and soap operas, raspberry lip gloss and bubblegum eye shadow—she must have learned somewhere—but in her memory there is no transition: she was first one thing and then another, innocent and then experienced.

I prodded her. “What do you mean? You were only twelve, you
were
still an innocent little girl.”

“I’m only seventeen now, and am I an innocent little girl?”

“I don’t know, are you?”

She glared at me and popped her jaw.

She wasn’t innocent. Not now, not when she was twelve. Naive, maybe, but no, not innocent. She blushed too darkly when her uncle said things—and not from embarrassment. Well, maybe the first time, but not after that. “You’ve got yourself a knockout, there, Teddy. I’ll tell you what, hey, if I were you, I’d keep her locked up until she’s twenty, thirty, forty-one. Until she’s an old bag like this one.” He slapped his wife’s ass as she walked by and was swatted away, his wife barely annoyed, as if he were a common fly. No, even at twelve, she liked the attention too much. She coveted it. She liked the thought that she might be a dream, a figure of beauty, floating like Mary the Mother of God far above the world of men, casting shame and neglect on the lumpy women they could actually get their hands on. The bawdy directness with which her uncle spoke of her, the implicit fear and explicit rancor that her overwhelming femininity provoked, were normally reserved for the women in beer commercials, the women in thongs and wet t-shirts who, on the posters and calendars hung in the basement, lounged on the roofs of cars, not the real, mango-shaped women who lived on her block. He said to her father, “You’re lucky I saw her when she popped out, or I might be tempted to forget she’s related,” but he was staring right at her, his eyes lazy under heavy red-rimmed lids, and she stared right back, locked eyes with him and thought for a moment about whether it was better to cross her arms in embarrassment or throw her fists on her hips, arch her back and show off what was growing so disconcertingly quickly between her shoulders. She chose to hide her new body, but still, her father had sensed the transformation and sent her off to change her clothes.

“Where’d you get that halter top?” he asked. “I never gave my permission for a halter top. Go put on something floppy, a sweater, something.”

“Dad, it’s summer.”

“So?”

“So . . .”

“So nothing.” As she scrambled up the stairs, he slapped her ass just like his brother had her aunt’s.

Later that night, the relatives gone, her father got lurchingly drunk. Big deal. What was news was what he did in the haze before he passed out.

I was sick of this story. It was ruining the mood. We’d hooked up around eight and since then had been wandering all over town, visiting friends she just had to see. Boys, always boys. I didn’t know any of them. She lived in the next town over, smaller and less sophisticated than mine, though that wasn’t saying much, my town was all rust and dust itself.

We hung around first in a damp, cluttered basement and swilled beer with three geeky kids who were playing nickel-ante high-low, anaconda, fuck your neighbor. They didn’t even bother to nod at us when we walked in, just kept playing, muttering about how much the party they weren’t invited to tonight sucked and how the people going were the same assholes they didn’t want to hang around with anyway, fabricating great tragedies in which those who slighted them now, while in high school, turned out to be failures once they were released to the real world, where nobody cared how well you could throw a football. They called each other dickweed, numb nuts, fucking mo-fo whenever a hand was won. She asked how to play a few of the games, five-card draw and the one where everyone got a single card, held it to his forehead, bet, then on the count of three, looked at it. They shrugged. Their leader—who had the balls to wear an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt over his Walk-a-Thon t-shirt—mumbled, “It’s complicated,” and glanced leerily at me, as he’d been doing since we’d arrived. We sat there in silence and watched them play until she finally announced, “Well, we’ve got to go to that party, so see ya.” They threw backhanded waves at her.

Outside, I asked, “What’s this party?”

“It’s, you know, a party.”

“Yeah, but do we really have to go?”

“What else are we going to do?” she said.

I chuckled awkwardly and didn’t push it.

Then we wasted a half hour at Burger King so she could flirt with the pudgy kid working the cash register. His one eye was loose; no lie, he’d be looking at her with his good one and the other one would bob all over the place and creep up toward the ceiling. “When’s your break?” she purred. Leaning, arms crossed on the countertop, casually pushing her breasts together so they spilled slightly out of the rip at the top of her t-shirt. “I drove past your house this afternoon. Did you see me? You were out raking leaves. You didn’t see me. That’s okay.” Hands fluttering around his elbow. “I would’ve stopped, but I couldn’t. I had a . . . I was late for this thing.” Some customers came in, and he gave us free Mountain Dews, told us to wait, he’d meet us out back.

I shuffled behind her into the parking lot and tried unsuccessfully to dream up an escapade compelling enough to transform the evening. I was insulted by how things were going; I had it all over each one of these guys, yet she fawned on them as if they were God’s gift and left me, in their presence, to lurk dumbly behind her without even an introduction. I was just a prop, a shadowy figure from a different world, trotted out to show the boys how desirable she was. Or—and I preferred to see it this way—I was the one she was trying to impress and make jealous. Keeping this in mind, I could observe her behavior with wry detachment, a condescending tolerance, secure in my own desirability, though I could not hide what I thought of the competition.

“Hey, what’s with that guy’s eye?”

“Leave him alone.”

“I’m just curious. Is he . . . I mean, can he see out of it?”

“He’s a sweet guy. I’ve known him since kindergarten.”

“So what happened to his eye?”

“It’s just like that.”

“Touchy. You like him or something?”

She popped her jaw and peered out from under lowered eyebrows. “He’s okay. I let him fuck me if that’s what you’re asking.”

Which, of course, it was, though being told this information so matter-of-factly left me feeling cheated, duped, more by myself than her, like you feel when a con artist convinces you to empty your bank account and willingly hand over every cent, and you realize what kind of person that makes you and what kind of person it makes the con artist. I hid my shock behind what I hoped looked like earnest, empathetic curiosity. My arms hung limp and conspicuous at my sides.

“You sound so bitter when you say that. Did you enjoy it, at least?”

She shrugged. “It was over quick.”

She toyed with the skintight bracelet around her wrist as if she were bored, but when she couldn’t separate the intertwined strands of plastic, rage suddenly jittered through her body. She ripped the bracelet from her arm, threw it to the blacktop, and ground it into the tarmac with the platform sole of her sneaker.

I found myself actually caring about her. “So why do you hang out with him?”

“Who, Stevie? He’s got the best weed in town, okay?”

Stevie got us stoned behind the green dumpster. I braced myself against it with a stiff arm and watched them chatter while considering what I’d just learned about their relationship. He was the silent type, but she made up for this with stream-of-consciousness riffs, paraphrased from books she didn’t understand, I was sure, about what it means to be “fully alive, really alive, not like the fuck-alls in this town.” She touched him incessantly, but I noticed now that he was barely conscious of her attention. His good eye was as unfocused as his bad one; though he gazed vaguely at her, the iris was dilated and he twitched every time the lights of a car trolled past. She kissed him on the cheek as we were leaving. “You’re my hero, Stevie. You’re going to call me tomorrow?” He shrugged and I doubted that he’d remember she existed by the time he got back to the cash register.

I felt great affection and pity for her now. “What was that all about?” I asked.

She ignored me.

I took a risk. She was a few feet ahead of me, and I reached out and placed my hands on her shoulders, a simultaneously freewheeling and possessive gesture. She didn’t brush me off, but she also didn’t bend under my weight and invite a chin on the collar or an arm around the waist.

“So,” I said, “what’s the deal with that Stevie guy?”

“You were there.”

“I couldn’t follow it. I need a context.”

“I’ll tell you if you let go of me.”

I loosened my grip slightly and she spun and ran giggling to the car.

Instead of chasing after her, I flicked my shoulders like I was stretching, working out a knot. I cracked my neck. I continued slowly, as if I were cool and unrattled, to the driver’s-side door, where I pulled my keys from my pocket, spinning the ring on my index finger so they slapped clicking into my palm, and unlocked the doors, all the while staring into her eyes—intensely I thought— trying to force on her the understanding that I was more serious and dangerous than her stoner playmates, that I was humoring her with my time, not vice versa.

“You fail,” she said, hopping into the car.

“At what?”

“You just fail.” She flicked on the radio and scanned the stations, giving each song half a second, two or three notes, before rejecting it with a grimace or sigh.

“Okay, fine, I fail, but at what?”

“If I have to tell you, you
really
fail.” She continued scanning the stations until they began to repeat, and then she flopped in disgust back in her seat.

We idled in the Burger King parking lot listening to power chords, the car still in park, and I wondered if I should start driving. I didn’t know where she would take me next, though, and since there were no distractions here, I wanted to find an in while I had the chance.

“Maybe if I knew what I failed at, I could—”

“Don’t you have any tapes?”

“Sure. What do you want to listen to?”

“Something good, I don’t know. Where are they?”

“First tell me what it is I failed at.”

“Forget it. Let’s just go.”

She found me laborious. I found her tedious—or wanted to. Instead, I was charmed. She was so much better at living than I was.

“You don’t like me much, do you?” I said.

“I like you fine. Let’s go.”

I watched her body language. She was pinched everywhere, curled in an upright fetal position, brow furrowed, lips pursed. I held my gaze in the hope she would return it, that I would receive at least this small kindness, a moment of eye-to-eye contact, possibly a sneaking smile to let me know that, despite appearances, she still thought we might have something in common. She held out. Her cheek pulsed with tension. Giving up, I released the parking brake. Then I reached over her and popped open the glove compartment. She yielded as my arm brushed her calf, spreading her legs to make room while I fished around for a tape.

“Is Lapin okay? He’s all I’ve got.”

She sighed. “Fine,” and as soon as I was out of her way, she snapped her legs shut.

We listened to my friend Lapin Milk’s demo as I squealed the tires in frustration and defeat, and spun out into the street. Lapin’s folk-tinged rock and roll, so earnest, tormented and lyrically loopy, so in love with the pain of love, eased us out of our separate selves. Neither of us could help but to mumble along to the morbid chorus:
You hit and you run / You tore me to shreds / You left me mangled / You left me for dead / You bailed with the best parts of me.
The windows were open, and the backdraft whipped and swirled through the car. All the way across town, I gauged the intonations of her shifting posture, watching her tension and annoyance flutter away like loose parking tickets in the circulating air. Eventually her shoulders slumped, her feet fell to the floor. Legs splayed, calves crossed, she slipped off her sandals and wiggled her toes, and I began to feel emboldened. While shifting gears, I allowed myself to brush her outer thigh, lightly, subtly, lingering just for a second, as if by coincidence.

She sat up. “Hey, how
is
Lapin?”

I’d been fearing this question all night. Lapin Milk, formerly Nate Parker, was a big deal, the only kid making the rounds of the podunk local clubs who had more talent than ego. He’d just returned from Boston, where he’d been going to some fancy music school for the past year. The people there—self-important, pretentious, the worst kind of music geeks—just didn’t get it, so fuck them, he came home before they could embitter him and destroy his passion. Unlike them, he really had something to say, and chose to protect what he knew over making the contacts and capitalizing on the buzz the school offered. He didn’t care about fame, but about being understood, and anyway, if you’re good enough, the industry will come to you.
I
understood him: we’d been friends for years, since we’d been the two worst players on JV baseball, taking up space on the far end of the bench and trying to pinpoint exactly what we found so profound about the piercing metaphysical cry that is Bowie’s
Aladdin Sane.

And she thought
she
understood him, though in fact, the way Lapin told it, she pestered him, annoyed the shit out of him, calling him four, five, ten times a day until finally he got a caller ID box and began answering only when he had another girl over. She willfully misunderstood—or maybe got off on—his sadistic and ruthless exegeses on how this or that girl, whoever he had there, was such a better fuck than she was. “She’s crazy,” he told me. “She’s obsessed. She won’t take a hint.”