Wiser (2 page)

“I don’t tolerate mistakes,” she said, continuing to stumble forward belligerently for every step that I took backward.

I switched tacks, realizing that moving on the defensive was only giving Mama more room to play offense.

“Well, I don’t tolerate people guzzling whiskey straight out of my bottles,” I retorted. Behind me, all of the girls gasped. I might have been one of the bartenders at the nightclub, but it was a mistake to claim ownership over anything here. Mama had made it abundantly clear that the nightclub and everything in it was hers, including us.

While Mama blinked at me, unsure of what she was hearing, I plunged recklessly forward.

“You better let me put some Coke or something on top of that, at least,” I continued. “I’ll open the bar special, just for you. I think I might even have some pretzels back there. Pretzels sound good to you, Mama?”

Mama blinked her heavy-lidded eyes at me and nodded, holding the whiskey bottle out to me. She followed me to the bar—me still wielding the plunger—and I poured her a Coke without any whiskey. She seemed not to notice—or care—and guzzled it down, pounding the glass down on the bar. I filled it again and she drained it again.

I opened a fresh bag of pretzels and poured them in a little glass bowl, setting them wordlessly in front of her. While she munched mindlessly, I got a chance to really look at her.

When I’d first started living and working at her nightclub, Mama was a sight to be seen. She was always dressed nicely whether she was working or not. It took a while for me to realize that Mama was always working, whether it was regular business hours or not. She always had her hair perfectly coiffed and her makeup sparkled over her eyes and lips. Always a big woman, she touted the power of good food and good music.

Now, she was a sad, dangerous shadow of herself. Mama only cleaned herself up for when the club opened. Even then, I wondered how many people realized she was only barely holding it together. The woman I saw in front of me had bags under her eyes, stank of liquor, and needed about a week of sleep before she’d be back to normal.

“You had breakfast, Mama?” I asked softly, feeling pity for the woman in front of me even after everything she’d done and everything she was putting us through. “I can fix you something, if you want.”

“I’ll tell you what I want,” she said, her dark brown eyes leaping up to meet mine. “I want to make money. I want my rules followed. And I want you to take that tone of voice and stick it right up your ass!”

I narrowly dodged the glass bowl as she flung it at my face. It shattered behind me, against the mirror. I stepped to the side, giving Mama my profile—the smallest target I could present. The mirror behind the bar hadn’t broken, thank God. In its reflection, I could see the rest of the girls, all clearly terrified but holding it together at the bottom of the stairs. Their presence gave me courage. I had to be smart for them. I had to get us out okay on the other side of this situation.

It was Mama, of course, who’d shattered all of the mirrors upstairs in our bathroom, as well as who’d taken the stall door right off its hinges.

The night that Cocoa had escaped, Mama went on a rampage, trashing Cocoa’s room and putting her fist through each and every mirror up there before kicking down the stall door.

When I’d gone in to Cocoa’s room the next day, it was completely empty. The broken window was boarded up and there wasn’t a single stick of furniture that remained. I always wondered if Mama had hauled all of the mess out of there by herself or if she’d hired somebody to do it as quickly and quietly as possible.

I feared Mama’s temper immensely, as did all the other girls. The bar was in between Mama and me for now, but it also blocked my escape route. Mama’s nostrils flared as she breathed hard, rage making her chest heave.

“That’s fine, Mama,” I said. “I’m going to go on upstairs, now. Gotta get ready for tonight. I bet it’s gonna be a good one.”

Mama was volatile, but I was quickly learning how to play her like a fiddle. Talking money could almost always derail her from destructive thinking or actions.

She rubbed her hands together, a faraway look on her face. “It’s gonna be a damn good night,” she said. “I’m gonna be singing.”

“You are?” I said, pushing my voice up to a pitch that I hoped contained delight. “What a wonderful surprise! If it were up to me, you’d sing every night. It’s always so captivating.”

I was afraid I’d pushed it too far with the kiss-ass attitude, but Mama only smiled and nodded.

“They love it when I sing,” she murmured, mostly to herself. “They just eat it up.”

“You ought to rest that pretty voice of yours before we open,” I said, hoping I didn’t piss her off with the suggestion. The reality was that she needed to sleep off her drunkenness, but I wagered she’d still be feeling horrible by the time we opened the doors tonight.

“That’s just what I need,” she agreed, pushing herself back from bar and nearly tumbling to the floor. She caught herself at the last moment and toddled off to the office, slamming the door shut behind her.

To my credit, I calmly picked up the broken glass from the shattered bowl from the floor and washed Mama’s glass before grabbing the plunger and walking across the club as quickly as I could without it looking like I was running away.

I knew that I needed to show the rest of the girls that everything was fine, even if it wasn’t. It was important for that illusion to be firmly in place.

They all hugged me when I reached them, not daring to say a word as we hustled up the stairs and to the relative safety of the boarding house.

All of the girls who’d stayed upstairs were waiting in the hallway. When they saw that we were all there and that none of us was harmed, a small cheer went up.

“I better get a louder cheer when I unclog that toilet!” I announced, lifting the plunger over my head as if it were some legendary sword.

Everyone gave a relieved laugh.

“We heard glass break down there,” one of the girls said quietly.

“Mama’s just a little clumsy when all she’s had for breakfast is whiskey,” I said dismissively. I wanted them to believe that they didn’t have to be afraid of her. Living in fear was a terrible thing.

“You should’ve seen Blue down there,” Cream was saying, her smooth voice cracking in excitement. The story faded as I walked down the hallway, pumping the plunger up and down like a parade leader would a baton. I got to the bathroom before I collapsed into a panic attack, shutting myself into the middle stall.

My hands shook as I rubbed my hair back away from my face, raking my long nails almost painfully through it. My stomach roiled and I dry heaved over the toilet, my muscles cramping up. Whirling around, I sat heavily on the seat, sure I was about to faint. The inside of the bathroom stall spun around me, making me extremely woozy. I sucked in air, willing the attack away, willing everything to be okay.

Would anything ever be okay again?

When my symptoms began to ease enough for me to think straight, I yanked my journal from my waistband and cracked it open.

“Blue as ice,” I wrote. “Blue as the sky. Blue as a flower. Blue as the sea.”

I drew each of these things beneath the appropriate statement, shading them in with my blue ballpoint pen as I went along. Many of the pages of the journal were filled with such meditations, encouraging me to live up to whatever my name could be.

“Blue as a bird,” one page declared, a gorgeous creature spreading its wings, the plumes from its feathers trailing onto the next page. I had to know the right time to give up. I never wanted to give up, but I knew the day would come. At some point, life at the nightclub was going to be too overwhelming. I’d been having the panic attacks ever since the terrible night Cocoa left. I needed to recognize the moment that I wouldn’t be able to get out of there and seize it.

“Blue as a berry,” read another page, covered with berries of all shapes and sizes. I needed to know when to be sweet and when to be tart. Doing each at the appropriate moment would bring joy or wisdom to the right person. It might derail Mama from exacting her wrath on someone. It might also earn me some extra tips on the floor when the nightclub was open.

“Blue as the sea.” I finished sketching in the ocean on that page. It was bright and serene at the top, but it got darker the deeper it went, terrifying currents swirling around in complex patterns.

Each of my sketches had meant to calm me, but this one reflected the true nature of the situation. As placid as I could remain on the surface, there were many, many things going on beneath.

It was awfully hard to “Blue as the sea,” as the page promised, if my name wasn’t even Blue.

I only became Blue when I first started working at Mama’s nightclub. Before that, I was Sandra Webber, Midwestern girl wonder.

Of course, no one ever really called me that, either.

Kids in high school loved to call me “Webbed Feet” thanks to how far out into the Tennessee hills my family hailed from. To them, living in rural areas automatically denoted incest.

Before any of my classmates could wrap their minds around the ideas of incest, though, I was simply “Weirdo.” I liked to dress myself in strangeness, brightness and nonconformity more important to me than whether pieces actually looked good together. I had no problem donning teal leggings beneath a Tennessee Titans jersey so big on me that it hung off my shoulder, and finishing off the look with a long, faux-pearl necklace and a pair of pumps pilfered from my mother’s closet. Other looks included wearing sneakers with formal dresses, elaborate costume jewelry with a sweat suit, or showing up in my father’s three-piece suit, complete with tie and cufflinks, that he only wore to weddings and funerals.

Later in my high school career, I went to a party just for the hell of it. That was the reason I did most everything I did—just for the hell of it. I collected experiences like most everyone else collected baseball cards or bottle caps. I hadn’t been invited to the party, of course. I didn’t run in the right circle of friends to be actually invited to parties. But everyone had been talking about it and it was a small town. I knew when to show up and at what time.

During that party, which had featured pilfered beer and liquor bottles, I’d gotten drunk for the first time and kissed several people, including one of the school’s star basketball players. It didn’t bother me that she was a girl, and she seemed to be into it at the time, as well.

But the next day at school, she said I’d forced myself on her. “Dyke” was scrawled across my locker in marker. And that was what kids called me until we all graduated. Dyke. It was just a word. I absorbed it and went on with life. What else was there to do? I didn’t have any allies among the school administration. I had to deal with it myself.

My parents were always either passed out cold or already at work at one of the many jobs they held onto tenuously during my childhood.

Being the eldest out of five, I found myself responsible for my younger siblings even when I didn’t have the time. I juggled bowls of cereal and dirty diapers, the thought of finishing my own homework laughable when I was instead tasked with bedtime stories and showers.

The youngest of us, the one still in diapers, I took to high school with me. The school had a day care on the campus for teen mothers, and I never heard the end of it for taking that sweet baby there. My family couldn’t afford proper care, and I didn’t trust any of the neighbors in our trailer park to watch my own flesh and blood.

Knowing full well that it was my sister I was taking to day care every day, kids still hollered whether I knew the father of my latest mistake or why didn’t I simply punch myself in the stomach after I’d gotten knocked up by my whoring around. Others expressed surprise that I’d hooked up with a guy at all, given my dyke status.

I let the words slide off of me like water from a duck’s back. None of these people mattered. What mattered that I was good to my younger brothers and sisters—and that the baby was left in the best care available.

Without parental guidance, I was left to my own devices—fending for myself and my siblings while doling out discipline according to whatever morals and values I considered most worthy. Being kind to one another was a given. Helping around the house was another.

I intercepted most correspondence between the school and my parents, reading and then getting rid of them.

“We’re happy that Sandra is expressing her different identities at school,” read one, penned in hand by the high school counselor. “I only wonder if it might be more prudent to talk to her about the importance of fitting in at a time when teens are identifying themselves more within their circle of friends than outside it.”

My mouth had quirked up at that letter, more so when it was crumbled in the garbage. I didn’t have a circle of friends. I didn’t even have one friend. And I didn’t give a shit about what anyone thought about my clothing. It was for my amusement and my amusement alone.

Going in costume was the only reason I could get myself to go at all.

I excelled in art classes but nearly flunked everything else. The art teacher, who exhorted us to call her Miranda, and not Ms. St. John, became something of a second mother to me—or more like a real one. She took me under her wing from the first day of classes when I finished a still life that should’ve taken all period in just ten minutes and vastly better than any of my peers.

“You have a gift, Sandra,” she told me, clutching at one of my charcoal drawings I’d done of a little sibling. “You’re the most talented student I’ve ever come across in my entire career.”

Never mind that her career was in its first year at my high school. Miranda knew how to make a student feel special—me, in particular, who had never felt special in my whole life. Under Miranda’s tutelage, I won a number of art awards, stashing the ribbons and plastic trophies in the bottom of my closet. They might make me feel good about myself, but I knew that they weren’t putting food on the table for my brothers and sisters, or making my parents be actual parents.

When I expressed this view to Miranda, after handing her a painting I’d only half-heartedly completed, she shook her head vehemently.

“You’re wrong,” she said, her voice breaking with sincerity. “Art can take you many places. You’re so good at it, Sandra, and you’ve hardly had any training. It comes naturally to you. Maybe you’ll find yourself displaying your artwork at a gallery someday. Or maybe you’ll be a teacher, as well.”

It was Miranda who helped me develop a portfolio of works I’d done throughout high school and send it around to several colleges. It was Miranda who had waited just as breathlessly as I did for a response. And it was Miranda with whom I celebrated when the scholarship offers started coming in.

“This is what your talent is doing for you,” she said, giving me back the letter I’d shown her. “You’re going to get to go to art school for pennies. You’ll get the training you need to go to the next level. You can do whatever you want, Sandra. The world is your oyster.”

For a while, I believed her. It was easier than ever absorbing the insults of my peers when I carried around my scholarship offers in my satchel. They were like bulletproof vests. Every time someone sneered a nasty name at me, I remembered that I was going to go to art school. The letters in my satchel proved that.

I was talented, just like Miranda said. I was going places.

“Art school?” my mother said, her voice bleary with alcohol and exhaustion, thrusting the letter I’d shown her back at me without so much as glancing at it. “What are you going to do at art school?”

She balanced a smoking ashtray on her lap and was fending off my baby sister with one of her hands. The baby cried to be picked up, so I did it, jiggling her on my hip.

“I’m going to art school to make something of myself,” I said proudly, parroting everything that Miranda had been telling me for the past four years. “I’ll be able to do whatever I want afterward. I’m talented.”

“I don’t know what planet you think you live on,” my mother said, “but you’re not going to art school. Not by a long shot. It’s a waste of time and money.”

“I got scholarships,” I protested, waving the paper in her face. “People want me to go to their schools. I could be an artist. Or an art teacher. Or lots of different things. This is my chance.”

“I don’t know who’s been filling your head with these lies,” my mother said. “Nobody goes to school to become an artist. And nobody makes a living doing art. All of those paintings that sell for thousands of dollars? They’re by dead guys. You’ll be poor your whole life.”

“We have been poor our whole lives,” I said, disbelieving. “This is an opportunity to actually do something about it.”

“I don’t think you’re getting it,” my mother said, blowing her cigarette smoke angrily in my direction. I turned to the side, trying to shield the baby from the fumes. “You’re never going to be anything. You’re a failure. They’re only letting you graduate because they don’t want to deal with you another year.”

I scowled, realizing one of my other teachers or perhaps a school administrator had gotten a hold of my parents somehow to tell them about my otherwise dismal grades. Maybe by phone. Had they really said they were only passing me out of pity?

“I’m gifted in art,” I said loftily. “The art teacher at school says so. And these scholarship offers are proof of it. All I have to pay is room and board—”

“All you have to pay,” my mother huffed. “All we have to pay, you mean. That’s how they get you, girl. They say you’re going to get something for free, but then you have to pay for something else after all.”

“It’s not like that,” I said, feeling more hopeless by the minute. Why weren’t my bulletproof scholarship letters protecting me from my mother’s barbs? Were they losing their power? “I can take out student loans. I can apply for additional aid. I can work while I’m up there at school.”

“Up where at school?” she asked, peering at me for the first time. She flicked some ash in the ceramic dish on her knee and sucked furiously on the cigarette.

“In New York City,” I said, the words sounding ludicrous to even me. Why did Miranda tell me I could do this? I couldn’t. I just wasn’t good enough. Maybe if I had different parents, a different family, a different life.

My mother laughing at me was much more painful than all the combined venom of the kids who went to my school.

“Let me get this straight,” my mother said, hooting and wiping her eyes, the cigarette smoke wafting around her like foul incense. “You, Sandra Webber, who is barely going to finish high school, think you can go to college in New York City? They’ll eat you alive up there, you little fool.”

Her laughter followed me as I fled to my room, slamming the door behind me. The baby touched the tears running down my face wonderingly. I took such great care to never let my siblings see me upset that she was fascinated by the salt water leaking from my eyes. I set her up with some broken crayons and paper Miranda had let me spirit away from the art room before burying my face in my pillow.

I couldn’t understand why my mother would stomp on my dreams like that. I needed her to sign some forms for me, knowing that I had no hope of actually having her help me fill them out.

Why didn’t she just let me go to New York for college, whether I failed or succeeded? I knew it had nothing to do with any attempt at parenting.

When my father arrived home, later that night, my mother was already blitzed. I’d made sure all of my siblings were in my room, tucked into my bed, clean and fed. I didn’t trust either of my parents around them.

I cracked the door so I could listen in on my parents’ conversation. It was how I could try to keep a couple steps in front of them, or arrange my schedule to care for my siblings if they were going to be absent.

“Can you believe it?” my mother said, her words slurring. “She actually thought she was going to go to college—art school, of all things—in New York City?”

“Who put that fool thought in her empty head?” my father said, his voice hardly more than a growl as I heard the faucet turn on. I imagined him washing the oil and dirt from his hands after working at an automotive shop all day.

“Probably some bleeding heart teacher,” my mother said. “Good for nothing.”

“Still, getting her out of here would be one less mouth to feed,” my father speculated. “We’re up to our necks in brats.”

“True,” my mother said. “Then again, having her here would get us more money.”

“How do you figure that?”

“We make her get a job, get her to pay rent,” my mother said. “We can still claim her as a dependent.”