Chapter One is linked here.
The summer after my parents split, Dad, Jacob, and I shoot out the arm of Texas toward the land of dreams: California. We drive along in Dad’s teal Chevy Lumina listening to Mike and the Mechanics the entire way: I know that I’m a prisoner to all my father held so dear, I know that I’m a hostage to all his hopes and fears. I just wish I could have told him in the living years. With the hand that’s not on the steering wheel, my dad--who’s tone deaf and has zero rhythm--snaps his fingers off-beat, trying to groove with the music. Free of my mother, he grins the entire way, especially when he farts, glances in the rearview to see our disgusted faces, and hits the automatic lock button on all the windows.
My brother’s dead center of the “awkward stage.” In fifth grade, he started to insulate his trunk with a layer of fat that ultimately stretched well over his 6’3” frame. But the stretch hasn’t happened yet, and he’s been at it for two years already. Meanwhile, his deep blue eyes are framed by a round, ruddy face and topped by a bright yellow flat top. Sitting next to me seat-belted and enthusiastic, he looks like Santa Claus’ grandson on the way to a beach vacation.
I’m not exactly graceful-looking myself. My shoulders curl forward like a freshly hatched bird, and I’ve got a blunt haircut with straight-across bangs that separate into brown chords of broom straw no matter how much I brush them out. At this age, my face has no remarkable features, positive or negative. Plus I’m exceedingly aware of my flat chest, so much so that for most of the car trip I’m in knots thinking about how silly I’ll look in a bikini on a beach next to the large-breasted women.
We take the 10-W the entire distance from El Paso to southern California. A faded denim sky stretches above us, perfectly cloudless, and we streak through a phalanx of New Mexican pecan trees followed by endless creosote-topped sand dunes. Alongside the road sun-bleached billboards entertain--‘Come See ‘The Thing,’ Exit 56, ‘Dead Ahead’’; ‘Welcome to the Deming Duck Races’; ‘Eat Beef: Klump Ranches’--and exit signs beg to tell a story: ‘Sore Finger Road, next right.’
Before we left home, Dad gave us each thirty dollars to spend on souvenirs or games at Disneyland. Late at night, nine hours into driving, Dad pulls over at a truck stop in Blythe, right past the Arizona-California border. We all get out to pee, and on the way back Jacob eyes a table set up outside with things for sale. There’s a man selling MC Hammer pants and other hip hop regalia, and Jake can’t resist. Money always burns a hole in his pocket. Dad shakes his head, warns him he’ll regret it, but gives him the bills anyway. My brother picks out a black pair with neon yellow triangles and aqua stripes and pays the vendor, smiling all the way back to the car.
He’s left himself vulnerable, so I start talking about all the ways I’m going to spend my money at the amusement park, fanning my three, ten-dollar notes in his face, saying, Sucka! over and over again. He threatens to give me an Indian burn if I don’t shut up, and I know he’ll make good on that threat or pin me down later in the motel room so he can drool and suck it up just before it hits my face. But I keep taunting because these are well-worn grooves in our relationship, rituals that have to be observed.
Hours later, as our heads bob with sleep in the backseat, Dad pulls into a Motel 8 in Banning. We’re both so tired that I don’t even get a beating from Jake before we go to bed. But I do wake up straddled, Jake’s knees on my forearms and his loogie descending towards my face. I know from experience that wiggling in this position can be counterproductive, so I try to act bored and stem the claustrophobia inside. I tell myself that at the last minute, he’ll slurp and everything will be alright. But Dad stirs in the sheets and it distracts Jake enough that gravity wins.
Stupid! Look what you did!, I scream, desperately trying to get free before it slides down my cheek into my ear. He chuckles and scoots off of me, instinctively protecting his groin so I can’t wrack him in the nuts. Aren’t you going to do anything? I shriek at Dad.
Leave your sister alone, Dad says in a groggy voice, then thrusts out of the sheets and walks to the bathroom in nothing but boxers.
If my mom were here, she might have taken my side, but that’s not the world I inhabit now. In this world I’m in a motel room with two males; three of us will return to the Lumina outside instead of four; the mathematics of family has gone awry.
Later I ask my dad if he’ll help me put my hair in a braid because I’m not able to do it well on my own yet. His forehead breaks out in condensation, but he says yes. We stand in front of the motel mirror in dim, jaundiced light and I explain as best I can the mechanics of braiding. He makes several attempts, craning his neck and bending his wrists into ungodly positions. In the mirror’s reflection, I see MC Hammer sitting on the edge of the bed watching TV, restlessly swinging his diaper pant legs. So after a few minutes, I call the braiding fiasco off and Dad checks us out of the motel so we can get back on the road.
As the miles go by and Mike and the Mechanics cranks on, the population density thickens and nature recedes from the highway. Instead of reading my book, I gaze out the window at the chipped concrete bridges blossoming with graffiti and exposed rebar, and all the colorful, disquieting decay feels a little like what’s happening to the innocence inside my eleven-year-old heart.
***
The last time we came to Disneyland I was six and the only major ride I went on was “It’s a Small World” over and over again. Now, almost double that age, I feel ready for Space Mountain and I promise Jake I won’t chicken out. So we make for the ride first thing, only to find our enthusiasm curbed by an hour-long line. After 45 minutes of leaning on the line chains, Jake spots a toe-headed girl sitting at a nearby fountain with her friends. Hormones in hyperdrive, he elbows my dad and points to the little cherub.
This is a mistake because Dad takes this as a critical moment in my brother’s development. Jake, go over there and introduce yourself, he says. Ask her if she’d like to ride with you.
Jake’s face twists, revealing his internal dilemma. He wants to impress my dad and save face, both of which may not be possible here. He eyes the ground for a while, then musters his courage and heads right towards the target. Ten feet away he aborts and veers to the other side of the fountain. He looks at Dad, pleadingly, and Dad shrugs his shoulders. Then Jake regroups, comes very close to the bench where she’s sitting, and walks straight past her back to us in line. He frowns, jerks at his Hammer pants, and looks to be very close to tears. I don’t say a word.
Dad eyes his son with empathy and then walks towards the girl. We watch in horror as he talks to her and her friends out of earshot. She glances over at Jake, looks searchingly at her friends, then nods at my dad and walks over to our spot in line. Ba-da-bing: Jake has a date for Space Mountain.
Later my father tells us how he’d done it. It was simple really: he introduced himself and asked if she’d be willing to go on the ride with his son who happened to have leukemia. But before Cupid’s stratagems are revealed, we strap into our coaster seats and head into the dark. Slowly, notch by notch, we ratchet up the first ascent, then suddenly plummet, our bodies twisting and tumbling through ink-black space, pretending to be free of gravity. I’m sure Jake has a perma-smile the whole ride. But to me, minus a cherub, it seems a celebration of vertigo, something I’ve had too much of lately and find difficult to befriend.
That night we get drive-thru and watch a pay-per-view movie at the motel. Then Mom calls to hear about our day, and we gush at all our adventures and exploits. I note the false treble in her voice and cringe at the brief moments of silence when she mutes her sobbing. After we finish, she asks to speak to Dad who takes the receiver and responds to her questions with a detachment that queers my stomach. I feel exposed by her tenderness, by the penitence she displays whenever they speak or are in each other’s presence. Despite Dad’s silence, I know she’s responsible for undoing their marriage somehow.
In truth, though I’m too young to connect all the dots, I know that a man named Neil—a business contact of my dad’s—was more than just her friend. Back when Mom and Dad were still married I rode with her to his ratty, pre-furnished apartment late at night for some unnamed errand. She made me wait in the car, but from behind the windshield, I saw the strange way they parted at the door. It turned my stomach then, too. Maybe that’s when Shame first built its nest in my body—I felt I’d been an accomplice to her infidelities.
At Huntington Beach the next day, I do my best to hide my flat chest, crossing my arms over my torso and lying on my stomach to tan. I spy intact families as they spread out their brightly colored towels and I blink, numbly, at the moms covering their kids with sunscreen. I wonder if it’s all just a show, like last Christmas when I opened my parents’ door and found them snuggling in the sheets as if all was well. I soothe myself with the thought that these kids might find themselves at the beach next summer minus a mother just like me.
On our last day at the beach, we walk along the Pacific Coast Highway shops and I discover a green gingham bikini with heavy padding in my size. I try it on, spend my $30 on it, and wear it out the door (so it turns out I’m not much better than MC Hammer Boy myself). Back home, far from Space Mountain and the beaches with big-breasted women, I wear this bikini top under my shirt as a bra. These fake, salvific breasts ease the insecurity coiled tightly beneath my flat chest. And each night I practice and practice until I can braid my own hair since it’s clear that for these daily nurturing acts I’ll need to become a mother to myself.