Wiser (3 page)

My father laughed. “Besides that sweet ass of yours, this is why I married you,” he said. “You have a good head on your shoulders.”

The wet sounds of their kissing, and a moan from my mother, made me close the door in disgust. So that was it. My mother was hoping to get money out of me in exchange for me not going to New York. Well. I’d show her. I’d forge her signatures, get Miranda to help me with the forms, and go have my life in New York. I would be successful, just to spite my mother.

The sounds of passion increased from outside, permeating into my room, and the baby stirred. She was a light sleeper, like me, and I didn’t want her to wake up. I turned my simple clock radio up a little louder. Classical music flooded the air, drowning out my parents in a symphony of violins and flutes.

I looked down at my siblings, their limbs akimbo, mouths open in slumber. What was I thinking?

I couldn’t leave them here, alone with my parents. My brothers and sisters needed me. I couldn’t go to New York, even with all the proper forms and signatures. I didn’t want to think about the future they’d have without me, most of all because there wouldn’t be one. I was the only one who cared for them. The next youngest sibling was only nine years old. The responsibility couldn’t fall to her.

I knew what I had to do. Reaching in to my satchel, I tore up the offers from the colleges. I added the shreds of the application to the college in New York to the pile. I couldn’t leave my brothers and sisters to fend for themselves. They needed me. I climbed onto the foot of the bed, counting four little pairs of feet, as I did every night, over and over again to help me get to sleep.

Miranda hounded me as the deadline came and went to turn the application in, but I always had some excuse, some lie that I was working on it or that my mother was looking something over or getting such-and-such document. Finally, there was nothing to do but tell her the truth.

“I’m not going to college,” I said bluntly, crossing my arms.

“Why?” she asked, blatantly shocked. “This is an opportunity you can’t let pass you by, Sandra.”

There were so many things I could’ve answered. Because I’m not good enough. Because my parents are assholes. Because I’m afraid. Because they won’t help me.

Instead, I answered with the truest thing I could say, the thing that had to get Miranda off my back.

“Because I can’t leave my brothers and sisters alone,” I said. “My parents aren’t good parents. My siblings need me. They wouldn’t get fed. They’d start slipping in their classes. No one would be at the trailer to watch them.”

I could see Miranda’s face caving in even as she made a concerted effort to stay calm and supportive. I knew that I was her hope—that even such a poor student as I was could be saved through her beloved art. I hated disappointing her, but I didn’t know what else I could do. My brothers and sisters really did need me. My parents weren’t fit to raise them. They wouldn’t even try.

“You’re a good girl, Sandra,” Miranda said finally. “I know that you think you have to stay with your siblings to take care of them, but I hope that you someday realize that you need to take care of yourself, too.”

And that was it, the end of my relationship with Miranda. I graduated, walking across the stage alone, not a soul there to cheer me on. Summer came and left, and school started up again. I saw my siblings off, my mother berated me about getting a job so I could “help this family for once,” and I went on existing, a shell of myself. I couldn’t even bring myself to sketch, thinking about a room full of my potential classmates in New York, gleaning knowledge that I would never be able to obtain.

“I’m going to issue you an ultimatum, girl,” my mother said one day after I’d been moping on the couch, watching my siblings. “You get a job or you leave. You’ve been a weight on this family for too long.”

Her statement made my blood boil.

“I was going to go to art school,” I said as calmly as I could for the benefit of my brothers and sisters. “Then, I would’ve made this family proud.”

My mother scoffed. “You were never going to art school,” she said. “That ship has sailed.”

It had sailed because my mother and father had refused to support me in it. It had sailed because my brothers and sisters had needed me. If I was being perfectly honest with myself, it had sailed because I had let it, afraid that New York City would swallow a simple Tennessee girl like me whole. I couldn’t drag ass back home a failure when everyone had been so certain of it happening.

“Who’s going to watch the kids if I get a job?” I asked as my mother mixed herself a white Russian. I knew her drinks by sight, smell, and the time of day she had them.

She took a sip of the cocktail and shuddered. “Miki will do it,” she said, waving her hand toward my nine-year-old sister, who was patiently sharing a doll with the baby. The boys were back in my room, jumping on the bed, from the sound of it. Miki looked up at me, a question in her eyes.

“Miki’s too young,” I said, forcing my voice to exude patience. “I have to be here with them—or you do.”

“I’m busy,” my mother said automatically.

I had to rub my eyes in order not to roll them at her. God forbid anyone should remind her of her duty to her offspring.

“Here’s an idea,” she said, the ice tinkling in her glass. “Get a night job. The kids’ll be asleep.”

“Kids wake up,” I reminded her. “Are you guys going to be here with them? Things happen at night. There could be a fire, or a break-in.”

“Nothing like that ever happens,” my mother said dismissively. “You’re just coming up with excuses to be lazy, to sit around here on your ass all day.”

The drunker she got, the meaner she got. That was one truism about my mother.

“Fine,” I said quickly, not wanting my siblings to witness a shouting match. “I’ll see what I can do.”

And that was how I got my first bartending stint.

After I put the kids to bed, my mother always either just walking in the door or already with her head lolling on the couch, staring blindly at the television, I walked to the hovel of a bar at the entrance of the trailer park. It was a sad, shady place, but at least I could be close to home. Proximity made me feel better about leaving my siblings alone. Even if my mother was there physically, they were pretty much alone.

“Do you know where I’ll be?” I asked Miki as I tucked her into bed with the rest of them.

“At the bar at the end of the road,” she said, pointing in the general direction. The kid had a good sense of direction.

“Good girl,” I said. “It’s not a trailer. It’s a building. It has Christmas lights on the outside.”

“I know where it is,” Miki said, yawning widely. She was sleepy, and I tucked a strand of corn silk hair behind her ear. We all had the same hair. Our mother would, too, if she stopped dyeing it red.

“If anything happens,” I said, “and I mean anything, you take the rest of the kids and you come down there. Now, what do I mean by anything?”

“Robbers,” Miki recited. “Fire. Flood. Somebody’s sick. Somebody’s yelling. Anything.”

“Bingo,” I said. “And even if it’s a little thing, you can come running yourself and get me, okay?”

“Okay,” she said, her eyes half closed.

I kissed her and looked at my two brothers and the baby, all of who were already breathing deeply. I turned on the little radio to the classical music station. It was a trumpet piece, so I turned the volume down a bit. I hoped it was enough to drown out whatever nonsense our mother and father would conduct while I was gone. They fought often and loudly and fucked even more often, having no regard for the fact that the walls were paper thin and there were five of us, crouched in my room.

The first night at the bar had me outshining the existing bartender, who was working the night shift to help train me. I knew white Russians from black Russians, all manner of vodka and whiskey cocktails, and could open a bottle of beer by knocking the top against the counter. Eighteen years living in the same trailer as my mother and father made me an expert in liquor whether I wanted to be one or not.

I was eighteen, but I wasn’t naïve. The trailer park had seen to that. The bar was operating illegally, especially since it continued to serve alcohol well after the cutoff point, as designated by the state of Tennessee.

“If the cops come, girl, all you have to do is run,” the day bartender told me as I drizzled tequila into a blender for a margarita.

“I’m not very athletic,” I said uncertainly.

“You don’t have to be the fastest,” he said, laughing. “You just can’t be the slowest.”

I peered around at the clientele, a solid third of them resting their foreheads on whatever surface was in front of them.

“I think that’s doable,” I said, sliding the margarita down the bar to a woman who was chain-smoking cigarettes.

“And if they do catch you, I’m telling them you lied about your age,” the bartender continued.

“They won’t catch me,” I said. “I’m probably faster than you.” The man was older and had a prodigious belly. I didn’t like the way I caught him staring at my bare legs, looking hard at the frayed cuffs of my jean cutoffs, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. If I didn’t keep this job, my mother and father would kick me out or force me to get another. I needed to be with my siblings during the day. I didn’t want Miki to just become another me—someone who threw her life and dreams away because her parents refused to be parents.

I lasted all the way into the winter, when everything came to a head. The bar that night was crowded with people and I was working a double, covering for the daytime bartender. The place didn’t have heat, but it was warm enough with all the bodies pressed in there. Something about the frigid weather made people want to warm themselves with alcohol.

I was wearing a ratty old coat and scarf that had outgrown their use years ago, but I preferred to spend my earnings on my brothers and sisters. They all had new coats this year, and matching scarves and hats. They were purchases my parents would never think to buy, instead spending their paychecks on alcohol and, occasionally, rent. I was also in charge of buying food.

“Look at her go!” someone roared.

Bartending was something that I had mastered at this point. I could make everything from a hot toddy to a mint julep without batting an eye. To cure my boredom, I was learning little tricks with the bottles, like spinning them around, holding two or more in one hand at a time, and tossing them in the air. I was currently doing all of the above, making a long island iced tea.

I pushed the finished concoction down the bar and watched as my father caught it.

“That’s my girl,” he said, his head bobbing and weaving, already drunk from wherever he’d been before he got here.

I covered my face discreetly and got on with the next ticket. It was a nonstop night, patrons downing their drinks as fast as I could make them. The old bartender had switched to nothing but days now, so it was just me, the owner, and a couple of dried up waitresses.

It was ludicrous that my father was proud enough of me being behind a bar to claim me as his own. I could’ve made something of myself in art school. I could’ve gotten out of this town. Maybe I would’ve even made my parents proud of me for something more than just slinging liquor at drunks.

“She makes a better long island than you,” I heard my father say. I chanced a glance down the bar to see the person he was talking to and my eyes bugged out. It was my mother.

Stalking down the bar, shaking a cosmopolitan in a mixer as I went, I glared at them.

“What are you doing here?” I hissed.

“What, we can’t see how our oldest daughter is doing at her first job?” my mother said, her eyes bloodshot, the eyeliner smeared beneath them. How long had she been drinking? Where had they been before this?

“You’re supposed to be at home with the kids,” I said, pouring the cosmopolitan into a pretty glass and dropping a cherry in it before handing it off to the cocktail waitress.