Chapter One is linked here.
One fall weekend I’m at my mom’s townhouse and a tall mid-40s man shows up in a bronze station wagon. His name is James and he’s a friend of my mother’s, here to take us on a surprise trip to Albuquerque for the International Balloon Festival. We pack up and roll out of the carport in his station wagon towards the highway like it’s long been predetermined, even though I’ve just laid eyes upon him for the first time.
James met my mother through her post-divorce gig as a sales rep for a local trade journal. He’s a potential account, a civil engineer from Massachusetts who’s recently moved here, is fluent in Spanish and is looking for business in our border town. He’d been impressed by her firm handshake, a trick she sometimes uses on men to feign professionalism and solid oak character.
I sit behind them in the roomy bench seat, and by the angle of their adjacent shoulders it looks like they are holding hands. But I can’t be sure. Driving through pecan orchards that hug one stretch of the road, James speaks to me with a high, tender voice that mismatches his strapping 6’5” frame. He tells me about where he grew up, about the New England tree canopies and how their leaves change colors for the fall. A child of the desert, I only know of tumbleweeds that dance amidst the dirt storms and the pile of ochre, heart-shaped carcasses that I’m forced to rake up from beneath the mulberry.
We arrive in town late that afternoon, a day before the balloons are set to launch. At our rental condo, James pulls out a bag of groceries he’s brought along, then slathers almond butter on top of sprouted wheat bagels. These are foods that have never passed my lips before, but stunned by so much novelty I eat them anyway in the hallowed, unnerving silence.
When we’re done in the kitchen I follow Mom and James to the bedroom a bit like a lost puppy. He sits down on the large futon bed and folds his wire-rimmed glasses on the nightstand. He gently rubs at the bags under his blue eyes, smiles at us, then gracefully swings his legs onto the mattress and rolls over onto his side. I’m transfixed by this male body so much longer and more angular than my father’s own lines. Mom responds to his invitation by repeating his every gesture, laying her slender, hourglass frame just inches apart from him. So what else can I do but curl up next to her with my shoelaces still tied? I lay there watching their shoulders rise and fall as the sun sets, awake until the sliver of moon rises above the frame of the opposite window and leaves me nothing but a creamy black rectangle to ponder.
We wake up before dawn and drive out to a wide open field where clusters of people huddle around what look like huge bread baskets. James produces a silvery-green thermos and we stand beside the car to sip hot chocolate and watch the sky’s inky curtain gradually rise. Pilot burners torch on and off, stippling the silence with their brief fury. These swift spurts of light peekaboo massive envelopes of every pattern: checkers, swirls, polka dots, houndsteeth, chevrons, flags, and minimalist color blocks. They are the pillowcases of giants, the quilts of angels.
When the Mass Ascension of balloons begins, James sets me on his shoulders and I crane my neck after the fire-filled orbs that float into the sky. In the freshness of the morning, a member of this new trio, I feel higher than them all, lifted from the ground by his broad frame as effortlessly as if I’m a plucked dandelion. I am weightless; I can levitate.
James’s personal history is not a clean one. His first marriage failed, and he spent much of his 30s drunk when he wasn’t working on oil rigs off the coasts of South America. But he entered into a recovery program and is snugly seatbelted to the Wagon. To my mother--the daughter of an alcoholic, a woman on the rebound, and someone wearing the rose-tinted glasses of infatuation--this backstory takes on a patina of redemption. Plus he’s tall, white, brilliant enough to be a member of Mensa, and he’s got earning potential.
Less than six months after the balloon festival, they are married. The wedding takes place at their new home in one of the only neighborhoods in town that can approximate New England. It’s a symbol for the fantasy we are consecrating, a stretch of desert mimicking East Coast green through irrigation. Underneath the willow trees, she stands next to him with a lipsticked smile on her beautiful face. I can see through it better than anyone else and I detect the shame, uncertainty, and fragility she’s masked with her performative arts; she’s swallowed them down with her well-trained glottis.
Inside the four walls of their new home, the fantasy is extended to hardwood floors instead of stucco tile, and furniture and fixings designed for warmth rather than ventilation. I am the only girl I know with a down comforter on my bed. Everything in the home is at once foreign and intimate, like the strange taste of Tom’s toothpaste he purchases. Lacking any real history with the man, I have to rely on my immediate senses for connection. So I stand in his closet one day to run my fingers over the elbow patches of his tweed jackets just to try to know the person I am supposed to love and now call father.
***
About this time, I meet Kristi Thomas. When she first descends the steel staircase into our junior high’s bone-dry, cement courtyard during lunch hour, it’s as if the Universe has given El Paso, a city seen by many as the unofficial armpit of Texas, a B-12 shot. We have nothing like her.
She comes in the middle of the school year when her mother takes a job at the local hospital. her family’s from a small town in east Texas, a place where they taught Kristi to let the word “y’all” take wing from her mouth like a dove, its lilt and lightness on the air the true birthright of real Texans. Her irises are rust-brown and speckled with the color of red clay earth. She lines her eyes heavily and cakes the mascara on her blonde lashes until they look like velvety spider legs. This contrasts with her arrow-straight hair which falls in platinum sheets to tan, angular shoulders that match her sharp, handsome jaw. With a press of powder on her nose and Carmexed lips, Kristi’s face is a vision for every type of boy our middle school has to offer.
And if they find her appearance intimidating, they’re emboldened by the effervescent spirit behind it. That spirit, incarnated in bubbly laughter offered in response to just about any joke, hides that she’s a whiz at math and will later become a data analyst. She knows better than to be both smart and stunning in a small Texas town.
Other girls are jealous and shoot spit wads at her. But I’m quick to see that envy is powerlessness. Instead, I just pull out my pencil to take notes, because to me she’s a template for transcendence, one that’s arrived with perfect timing. She might just cut me loose from the puberty and divorce that’s drawn so close and suffocating recently, like a turtleneck too tight. If you add to these restraints a stepfather who’s rearranged my life at whiplash-inducing speed, you can see how I need some lever to pull. My identity, wet in the mold, is beginning to set and I don’t care much for it. So I’ll do something.
Martha can’t offer transcendence because she knows me and my story too well. She can’t possibly give me a new beginning. Plus, Martha’s joined the school band and is devoting her time to the flute, which I’m certain I don’t want to do after my struggle to play “Hot Cross Buns” on a plastic recorder during 4th grade.
Because Kristi comes in the middle of the year, she has a rough time making friends since all the other girls paired or tripled up at the beginning of the school year. So even though I lack charm and good looks, I qualify as a warm body. That’s how I become her acolyte and she becomes my Femme Ideal.
Between classes, we pass notes in the hallway, and every moment school’s not in session we’re together. In the bathroom of her two-story house, she presses ammonia into my lank, russet hair until my scalp sears an orangey-blonde. Then we rinse the old me down the sink. And under her tutoring, I learn to line my lids from the outside corner in and to let a coat of mascara dry completely before applying the next.
Often bored and aimless, we ask our parents to drop us off at Marshall’s or the mall on their way to work. There, we dare each other into foolish criminality, slipping clothes off the racks and tucking them in our purses. Then we trade the contraband crop tops and baggy jeans back and forth each week. Her flesh is a canvas pulled so taut over the stretcher that she almost disappears when she turns sideways. So even though she’s got more curves, we wear the same sizes. Except when it comes to bras; she’s that large-breasted woman at the beach I wanted to be so badly.
During the summer, Dad makes Jake and me volunteer Monday through Friday, forty hours per week, to keep us out of trouble (and get free childcare). Since Kristi’s mom works at the hospital, she scores us a gig as candy stripers while Jake shags basketballs for the little kids at YMCA day camp. When we’re not answering phone calls on Providence Memorial’s main phone line, we shuttle urine samples to and fro between the Home Health office and the laboratory. And when we’re not doing either of those things we practice our flirtation on the boys who stock and manage the inventory of catheters and bedpans in the Supply Room. Over lime green cafeteria Jell-O we whisper rumors about the man who runs the incinerator outside the main tower, guessing at what body parts we might find if we broke in at that very moment.
On listless evenings when nothing on MTV or VHI satisfies, we lay atop her bed listening to Alanis Morrisette, and she instructs me on the basics of making out. She takes my thumb and touches it to the middle of my index finger. Pretend it’s an open mouth and kiss the fingers like lips, she says one night, and then demonstrates. When she flits her tongue in the teardrop space between them, my belly flips and I giggle loose of her grip.
This is all in preparation for real live action, which materializes one summer night when we sneak out her bedroom window to meet two of my brother’s friends. They know nothing about girls except that we seem to be the answer to their little sprouts’ throbbing. So, in the neon lamplight behind a six-screen movie theater, she and I lean against the wall and flip our hair for effect while Sergio and Oscar skip rocks across the pavement to discharge the nervous energy that zaps in the air. They talk about basketball because it’s the only thing they know about, and we pretend to care. They fake box with one another and we supply the giggles. Then Sergio calls Kristi his guerita bonita, and she replies warmly, That’s me, babe. Emboldened by this reception he steps up behind her and grabs two fists full of her butt. When she spins around and kisses him on the mouth I blush and look away at the desert scrub that flanks the empty parking lot.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Oscar kick at the curb and then, like it’s mandatory, he follows suit and walks up to me, his arms arrow straight by his side, his chest puffed, almost as if he’s challenging me to a fist fight. I smile and toss my bangs, but inside I fight to suppress the flight response that sizzles through the arteries in my forearms. I’m too new to this to anticipate pleasure; I just don’t want to appear cowardly in front of my friend. Then mercifully fast, he’s right beside me reeking of Cool Water cologne and hair saturated with gel to the point it’s almost dripping. He puts his hands on my shoulders as if to steady the target, and his tongue enters my mouth with brute force like an entomologist’s pin, staging me on the brick wall. Then, just as swiftly as it started, it’s over and we cut our eyes away from one another and wipe our mouths.
In this moment I experience, for the first time, the linkage between threat and exhilaration and how alchemical it is. If only I’d known how foolish it was to mess with those reagents at such a young age. But I’m just twelve going on thirteen. High school’s about to dawn on the skyline of my life, and I’m grasping for something or someone to fill me so I can leave the ground and rise into the twilight, bearing strident colors of my very own.