With or Without You Page 9

  And someday maybe there’d be a tourist attraction like the one down the road—the new Old West. Instead of the sheriff and the outlaw Edmond Cleve, it’d be filled with imitations of people like my grandparents and the ladies at the pool. Luckily, the oldies kept coming; there would be no shortage of actors. Someone goofy would play Mickey with his fruited smock. He was helping me get an oil palette together and lecturing on color but nothing helped.

  Eventually I would give up and stomp into the game room. A couple of kids were always playing Ping-Pong. Old men sat around dark wooden tables flipping decks of cards between stacks of red, white, and blue poker chips. They smoked fat, smelly cigars. I imagined the smoke being sucked up through the vents and pulled into a monstrous air machine for purification. Snuffed out with carbon dioxide. Re-freshened.

  Back in the art room, Mickey would still be at it. Working on cheeks one day, he showed me the colors he’d blended to make skin. I asked how he did the shadows and he cupped his hand around his ear, the one with the hearing aid trapped beneath a horseshoe of white hairs. He did this whenever I spoke to him. It looked so funny I tried it and was amazed by the acoustics. Like talking underwater. We were a couple of deep-sea dwellers stuck in the freshened-air colony of Palm Court.

  One afternoon, Grandma caught us talking with our hands over our ears and rushed me out of the art room. It was three o’clock. Upstairs, she said I shouldn’t joke around like that. “The man’s lost his wife, now his hearing’s going, poor thing,” she said. We were in the kitchen with Grandpa preparing for cocktail hour. “I know you think it’s funny but that’s his only way of hanging on.”

  “We’re just having fun.”

  “You’re having fun, this is his life,” she said, and looked over at Grandpa who was whistling as he smashed a tray of cubes into the ice bucket. So much like Mickey, like the old lady in the drugstore, hanging on to whatever’s left … I wanted to crawl into the closet and roll around in the moth balls, fumigate my brain. Re-freshen it. Instead I went to the bathroom, stuffed a towel in my mouth, and screamed.

  When I came out, the World Without End theme had already played and Grandpa was sitting on the terrace, his cowboy hat hanging over his face. “You missed the beginning,” Grandma said. “Alex is on the verge of finding Jaymie Jo. He’s talking to the Latin police.”

  I sat down next to my grandmother beneath the quilt and within seconds forgot how bad I was feeling, completely absorbed in Alex’s search to find Jaymie Jo, his long-lost daughter. “Poor Alex,” Grandma said, “all that money and he’s seen nothing but tragedy.” So when the rebels had contacted him and said you’d been switched at birth and demanded ransom, Alex Rheinhart knew it had to be true and set off for the jungle. Meanwhile, you waited in your cell not knowing any of this, until the rebel who’d fallen in love betrayed the group and told you that you had a different father, a very rich father, and when you expressed concern he wouldn’t come, the rebel comforted, “Don’t worry, he’ll be here very soon,” and looked so sad I almost felt bad for him. I knew exactly how he felt, not wanting to give you up.

  Your face had become more familiar than the desert. People were like that. They were supposed to grow on you, not slam into you like an eighteen-wheeler, a long-lost father. I felt sorry for you missing all those years with your father. You said you’d always known something was off, always felt so lost, so alone, and I understood. My father hadn’t made it out all summer. Yours had planned a few maneuvers of his own. He was the King of Diamonds, after all. He had his own private army. But at the last minute he was jumped by the kidnappers and dragged to another room, not knowing you were right next door with a giant cactus and mosquito netting, waiting for the father you’d never known.

  My grandmother turned off the TV. The room went quiet except for the bumpbumpbumping of my heart. “Maybe we’ll sit together by the pool this weekend,” Grandma said, and I nodded. But I knew I was going to go crazy two whole days without you.

  All I had was the hallway, and Mickey, and Grandma said we could go to the mall. Grandpa needed a part for an old radio. But I wanted the grandmother who stood in the kitchen complaining about termites that were really ants as she spilled peanuts into a bowl, Grandpa mixing me an egg cream before slinking out to the terrace for a nap. The television screen a comfort, like streaming seltzer water from a twist-off bottle. Different than the Bronx but it worked in the New West with air so thin and dry we were lucky to get any bubbles at all. What was the chemical property of bubbles, I wondered. How did they make H2O fizzle? Air, of course. Like I used to blow air bubbles in the pool, back when I could still wear a bathing suit. I imagined a factory of troll people blowing bubbles into vats of seltzer water with long plastic straws as simply as Grandma and I settled in beneath the patchwork quilt on the couch.

  By the end of the summer I’d memorized the lines on your face and could have mixed the glimmering tan of your skin. I asked Mickey to show me how. We spent three days mixing color, and at the end of the week, he invited me to have lunch with him in the dining room for oldies who didn’t cook. Grandma said I could go, although she disliked the place herself. She said it was like eating in a gymnasium. Mickey ate there all the time. Since he lost his wife, he hated eating alone. If it weren’t for the dining room he probably wouldn’t eat at all, he said. We had cream of mushroom soup and tuna salad sandwiches smothered with tangy mayonnaise. I drank apple juice and Mickey had coffee. Dessert was red Jell-O squares topped with whipped cream, what they’d given us at camp, and later, at school, and even later … well, let’s pretend, for a moment, there is no even later. For Mickey’s sake. He was such a sweet old man.

  The thing is, once the whipped cream’s gone you can see yourself in the squares. The reflective power of red gelatin is amazing. The day I looked into my dish with Mickey I saw my face shriveled up like a raisin. The oldies were rubbing off on me.

  Mickey took out his wallet and showed me a plastic accordion of pictures of his family, explaining their stories the way Grandma told me about the characters on World Without End, everyone connected to someone else. I listened even when it got boring. Nobody in his family was as exciting as you were. No one had ever been kidnapped or long-lost or dealt diamonds. I also fought to ignore the group of kids who hung out by the pool now eating lunch together. I could hear their laughter, make out a few words … “He likes you, Amy,” “Shut up!” “I’m serious … Amy and Richie sitting in a tree …”

  I asked Mickey why he painted from a picture. He cupped his hand against his ear and asked me to repeat the question. “Aren’t you supposed to paint what’s not already there, but the stuff inside?” I asked. “Isn’t that what art is?”

  “I don’t know the first thing about art, my young friend. I only paint the things I love.”

  He said it didn’t have to be people, but he liked that best. It was a way of keeping them with you even when they went away. And hearing those simple words I knew why I’d been struggling for three days to mix the browns and yellows and whites of your skin, knew I’d finally found a use for that sketchbook Blair had given me just before she left. Now both of you would be with me always.

  Mickey and I finished our lunch and walked up our trays. Again, it was a lot like camp. We dumped out the leftovers and handed the trays to a man who stood behind a window. I peeked into the kitchen and saw a few giant silver pots hanging from the ceiling, a stove in the middle of the room, chrome sinks stuffed with more greasy pans from the meal. A couple of guys about Richie’s age stood over the sink. Dark-skinned, black hair—Indians or Mexicans. Most of the workers were Mexican. In the new Old West town, phony Mexicans with twinkling green eyes will wash dishes while the oldies lounge by the pool, play golf, drive to Radio Shack, paint pictures of the things they love, everyone gulping molecules of air beneath the desert sun.

  IT’S HOLY HOT THE FIRST TIME the metal doors close behind me. I look up and see one milky window sealed shut. A couple of women circle me like cats, one
wears a blue bandanna tied around her head, the other has no teeth in front and big white freckles, definitely the softer one. I’ll stick with her. Heat burns out my eyes, ears, nose, and the room stinks of chemicals. Like the hydrochloric acid we’d burned in test tubes, long ago. I read somewhere that smells tap the first level of memory. The primal stuff. I used to go to school. I never studied and did okay. Inside we sent up flames in test tubes, outside, in big houses, kids burned white rocks in glass pipes and it smelled the same. Just like this laundry room.

  “If you need the bathroom, ring.” The guard yanks a thick rope, and a gong sounds. “No stopping for anything else. This is an important job. I don’t need to tell you how dirty laundry breaks down the system.”

  I nod. They always use the word system. I have no understanding of systems, communities. That’s how I ended up here.

  The guard smiles. Jack used to smile whenever he tried to talk serious. He never could get the words out. Instead, we’d eat cereal together.

  “You’re one lucky girl,” says the guard, and my coworkers stare.

  The job erases everything. Takes on its own rhythm. A mini-system. By the second time the room smells only like itself. Detergent, bleach, the sour static of the dryer. I never knew air could smell this bad, much worse than Palm Court, but only for a few seconds. You have to catch the memories quick: I never saw Nancy open the dryer. Someone else, usually someone darkskinned, did our laundry. Then the smell goes. Humans are so adaptable. But we’re still breathing crack air, shuffling it through our own private systems, everything recycled into everything else. At night I taste dirty socks in the back of my throat. They say we carry all the elements of the universe within us. Maybe we store air from all the places we’ve been, too. Maybe that’s memory.

  Chandon is the toothless, freckled woman. Every morning she and Stella with the bandanna are there first, the washing machines and dryers already rumbling. Chandon sits on the card table, one foot touching the floor, her fingers wrapped around a paperback without a cover. “Another day, another dollar,” she winks. I walk over to the pyramid of canvas bags, spill out the contents of one, and start sorting the whites and darks. Everything has a number on it. Indelible ink. Like my mother used to tag my clothes whenever I left home. She ordered iron-on name labels through the mail, and the dry-cleaner steamed them on. Here I’m a number: 5248.

  “Wha’cha doin’?” Stella’s voice jabs, makes me hotter than I already am. “That’s my job. You’re here for the folding.”

  “But I thought—”

  “Don’t think,” she nods, “just do what you’re told.”

  I make a spitting sound, tough. “Nobody told me anything.”

  “I’m telling you, you’re a folder.”

  A few days later I see her in the TV room, the “fishbowl.” She stands in front of the old set. There’s a yellow tint to the glass and dirt caked into the buttons and in the middle of the screen a chip the size of a marble. The worst is you don’t know whose dirt it is. I picture thousands of troll hands as Stella clicks the knob, flicking through the soaps, videos, reruns, The People’s Court. Another woman says, Stop. She wants to see her People’s, she loves her People’s. “Shut up!” Stella says and continues flipping. I move further from the group.

  When I walked in, they all stared. I haven’t been in here too often. Movement is systematic, too. Took me a couple months to earn it. Now I have a job. I can walk without a guard into the fishbowl and watch television.

  “Would ya pick a channel already?” says another woman. She is big and white and lumpy, brown hair cropped around her face.

  “When I’m good and ready,” Stella says.

  The People’s woman says: “I want my People’s!”

  “Anything worth watchin’ these days is on cable,” says the big white woman. “Why you even bothering with regular channels? All you got this time a day is soaps. I hate fuckin’ soaps.”

  Stella ignores her, cruising through the soaps just to get the white woman’s goat, although they’re allies. Who else could get away with that kind of backtalk? The clock on the wall says half past three. I think of my grandmother and my heart feels twenty thousand pounds. On TV flash hospitals and waterfront scenes, every soap opera town has a waterfront, then the monastery and that same bad priest and … you? Blood draining out of me, I stumble backwards. Stella stops the dial. The white woman says, “Oh, come on, what is this shit? I just said I can’t stand this show.”

  “You got taste up your ass,” Stella says, then shouts over a few bodies, focusing her eyes on me. “Don’t you think, folder?”

  I can’t speak I’m so frazzled. They were supposed to write off your character. Jaymie Jo Rheinhart is dead.

  “Hey, I’m talking to you,” Stella says, those I’m-telling-you eyes, that don’t-mess-with-me voice stealing me from the screen. Conscious of the sharpened bedspring taped under my arm, I stare her down. Her brown face is scarred from knife fights and she’s full of muscle. I don’t care. One slip and I’ll slice her the way Angel’s been teaching me.

  “She asked you a question,” the white woman edges closer to me. “Do you like the show or not? You’re the tiebreaker.”

  Do they think I’ll cave that easily? “It’s a good show,” I say, careful not to move anything but my lower lip. My tone is flat. Emotionless. Like I killed once and will do it again if I have to. Crazy, I’m in for a momentary flicker of violence and learning to be more violent than ever.

  “You think it’s a good show?” Stella walks toward me. “Well, I don’t agree. I’d say it used to be a good show, before you got to fucking with it—you lucky I don’t put your head through the glass,” she huffs. “Shit. That was my show.”

  A couple of women gather closer and I know what’s coming. First they corner you, throw a towel or jacket over your head, then do whatever. That tiny piece of metal in my armpit’s not worth a damn.

  Stella puts her face up against mine so I can’t see the TV, can’t see if it’s really you or my mind’s playing tricks. On TV, the priest is talking, saying something about his feelings. On soaps people always talk about their feelings. Even guys. “I been watching since I was a kid!” Stella shouts over him. “For a while, it was the only show that got any black people. But what you know about that? Huh? What the fuck you know about anything?”

  I don’t answer. What’s there to say? I spy a woman reaching behind her, another one moving around the circle toward me. I’m going down. I lean into the few strips of sun stretching through the bars. Then the volume dims. “What the … ?” Stella turns around. I shuffle forward and see Mimi standing by the TV set, her right hand on the filthy knob, and Chandon next to her. I had no idea they knew each other, but maybe I’d sensed it, maybe that’s why I liked her that first day in the laundry. Jail is like junior high. It’s less about who people are, more who they hang with. Their reputation. Mimi’s people are mostly Spanish; Stella’s black. They do not like each other.

  “What the fuck you doing?” Stella says.

  “Turning down the volume,” Mimi says.

  “Nobody said turn it down.” She brushes past Mimi and ups it even louder. For one second, everyone is drawn to the screen, where the evil priest talks to the girl who’s not you, though she looks so much like you I want to scream. Are they fucking insane? My grandmother is watching this! It was her show, too. Twenty thousand pounds of heart cut through my spin cycle. I want to cry. Shutting my eyes I see you in your leather miniskirt and psychedelic pink stockings … I miss you so much.

  “You little bitch!” Stella shouts, coming toward me. Mimi steps in between us. Stella pushes her aside, picks up a folding chair, and hurls it at me, but I duck. It bounces off the wall. I slide my right hand under my shirt going for the thin cut of spring.

  “You throw like my great-grandmother,” Chandon says to Stella, and a few people laugh. A couple more chairs fly. These coming from the back. Stella’s girls. Chandon takes down one of them. From out of now
here, Mimi barrels in and bumps Stella backwards.

  “That was my show,” Stella says.

  “Figures.”

  “Bitch got no right messing with my show.”

  Mimi snorts: “Too late.”

  No comeback, Stella’s madder than ever. She reaches down and pulls a piece of glass from her sock. “You stupid spic!” she says to Mimi, but slams glass in my direction. Wind sweeps across my chin, but she misses. Mimi grabs her arm and wrestles her to the ground, stepping on her hand until she drops the glass.

  One of Stella’s girls throws herself on top of Mimi, so I take my spring and stick her in the back. Her skin feels like putty. I can’t get my spring out. My head fogs; I’m a palpitating mess. The girl flips on her side, screams, “Fucking stalker bitch!”

  I shove my fingers in her face and calmly say, “Get off her or I’ll poke your eyes out,” but it’s not my voice I hear. It’s not my fingers set to gouge her eyes out. I shove her off of Mimi, who grabs Stella’s glass but stays on top of her.

  “I’m gonna get you, bitch!” Stella shouts over Mimi at me.

  “That was my show!”

  Without turning her head, Mimi says, “Go, chica, get out of here,” but I don’t want to be a coward, not about you. “Go’wan, go! We got this covered,” Mimi says, and I know she’s right. Another chair crashes. I see Chandon brushing off her green pajamas.

  On TV the priest says: “Delilah, let the Holy Father show you the way.” She turns. She’s not even Jaymie Jo.

  I mope back to my cell. Angel’s stretched across my bed, hands folded behind her back. Mobility is a strange thing. People just show up whenever they want. Keeps it interesting. A dim shadow on the wall makes it look like Angel’s got a basketball in her stomach. I imagine pressing down so hard the ball shoots out of her and think of the circus lady shot from a cannon, only here Angel’s the cannon. Like the Oriental women in my parents’ tapes who shot Ping-Pong balls, darts, tiny pieces of candy, which must take more skill than dropping a baby. I don’t like that Angel’s pregnant, don’t like pregnant women. But I like Angel.