where we are and where we need to be

Of What Little Girls Are Made

2008-02-16T17:04:00.003-05:00

Her First Half

Jackleen is fifteen and three-hundred sixty-one days. She walks home from school, staying close to the side of the building with the big dark windows so she can glance in them and see behind her. Sometimes she looks in the windows and sees two girls walking behind her, dressed in polo shirts and pleated skirts and knee socks just like she has, and it makes her walk faster, because other times all she sees in the mirrored windows is:

Jackleen has her mother’s cheekbones, high and wide, and her mother’s thick eyebrows, which she has not yet learned to manage. Jackleen has her mother’s voice, which is too high-pitched and sounds like a small hurt animal, especially when:

Lloyd, the husband of Jackleen’s mother, which she supposes makes him her step-father, pulls back hard on the hair of Jackleen’s mother, which is blond and thin and hangs straight down just like Jackleen’s hair does. Jackleen’s mother, Jackie, for whom Jackleen herself is named, had been walking up the stairs as he pulled, walking up and out of an argument she wouldn’t win, and Jackie falls back and down the stairs. There, Lloyd says. That kid needs a driver’s license like I need another hole in my head. Jackleen stays quiet because, with her cheek bones and her hair and her voice, she is Jackie. She is her mother sobbing and bleeding. Jackleen is as much a victim now as she is when:

Amy Lynn’s voice comes from behind Jackleen before she’s glanced behind her in the big dark windows. Your mother is a whore, it hisses, and Jackleen barely cringes. She’s heard it before. Why’d your father leave, Amy Lynn asks, and Jackleen knows that she doesn’t need to answer, because Amy Lynn will answer. Three days ago Amy Lynn said, Did he leave her for a guy? Is your dad a fag? and Meena laughs with her, and Amy Lynn pulls hard on Jackleen’s hair. Today Amy Lynn says, Was your dad a freak? Did he have three heads? Or four asses? Are you a freak too, freak? and Meena laughs with her, and Amy Lynn pulls hard on Jackleen’s hair. Jackleen doesn’t fall down like her mother but in the mirrored windows she sees her mother’s face, and she holds back her mother’s hurt animal sounds as she keeps on walking until:

When Jackleen gets home from school, she flips through papers on the table, looking for the mail. She’s fine, she doesn’t even feel the sore spot on her scalp where Amy Lynn pulls so regularly, when she finds her own birth certificate, whose date says that she can get her driver’s license in exactly four days, provided she has a copy of the birth certificate and a parent’s permission. The birth certificate also lists the name of Jackleen’s father, a name which she is certain she has seen before, though her father’s identity has long been kept a secret. After a moment, she thinks she might know where she has heard the name before. She turns on Lloyd’s computer, against penalty of figurative death and perhaps literal dismemberment, and into a search engine, she types:

Her father’s name turns up many results, all articles relating to the brutal slaying of a single mother and her two daughters. Jackleen reads the first article, and then the next, and then the next, without listening for the rumble of Lloyd’s return from work. Her father’s name is not listed among the victims, or the friends of the victims, but as the perpetrator. A picture accompanies the fourth article, a mug shot of the man with the name that appears on her birth certificate, and Jackleen looks hard into the blue eyes that stare out of the picture. The front door opens, and Jackleen shuts the computer down fast. Hi, her mother's voice calls, but Jackleen can’t look away from the blackened computer screen, which, despite the loss of power, still showcase in Jackleen’s reflection the same blue eyes staring back at her.

Well, she says. This changes everything.

Her Second Half

Jackleen turned sixteen earlier this week, and she doesn’t look in the mirrored windows on the way home from school. Today, when she hears Amy Lynn’s voice, she doesn’t slow down. Hey, Amy Lynn says. Going home to wax your eyebrows?

Before Amy Lynn has had time to grab for Jackleen’s hair, Jackleen has turned around and clenched her fist, and it is with this fist that Jackleen’s hand connects with Amy Lynn’s left cheek hard. The fist connects with so much force that Amy Lynn loses her balance and lies on the ground. Meena doesn’t laugh, and Jackleen brings her right foot back and then forward into Amy Lynn’s stomach. Her foot sinks into the stomach, which feels softer than it looks so Jackleen steps and kicks again, this time in Amy Lynn’s face. The blood dripping from Amy Lynn’s nose has covered her face and Jackleen’s shoe by the fourth kick.

Jackleen glances up into the mirrored windows. She doesn’t see her mother’s cheekbones. She doesn’t see her mother’s eyebrows. She doesn’t see her mother’s hair. Staring at her, calm and blue, are her father’s eyes.

She bends over next to Amy Lynn, who is now making her own hurt animal noises. With Amy Lynn’s plaid skirt, Jackleen wipes the blood off her own shoe.

Yes, actually, Jackleen says, looking with her father’s eyes into Amy Lyn’s squinted ones. I am going home to wax my eyebrows.

End of a Love Song

2008-02-09T10:20:00.000-05:00

The love song starts like this:

When they are fourteen, she tells her friends and herself that she loves him, despite his skinniness, despite the jeans that are too tight at the ankle, despite the shirt—too cheap, and the wrong color too—he’s tucked in with no belt, and despite or maybe because of his monstrosity of a nose, with long and wide nostrils that face out, and with which he holds up his crooked glasses. His hair always needs to be cut, and even when he doesn’t bother to shave, it doesn’t cover the ugly splotches of pimples across his jaw line.

Even so, she comes to think of him as her inverse reflection: she is chubby, but her reflection looks back at her as morbidly and irreversibly obese, and she’s loud and awkward, with ex-step-families all over the country. His thinness, his sarcastic silence, his apathy, his calculated success and all-American family—they all make her hate the side of the mirror on which she is trapped. I’m doomed, she thinks, in the teenage style, and when she breathes in deep the smell of the bitter black tea he nurses, she shivers because she loves him. You drink too much tea, she says. He rolls his eyes at her, and tells her not to be so dramatic.

When they are seventeen, they’ve already dated and broken up—his decision, not hers—and she’s puked into sinks (several) thinking about him kissing other girls (several). He’s forgotten that she once loved him, or maybe he never knew, and she keeps on writing bad poetry about how she misses him. Stop being so dramatic, her friends tell her with italic inflection on different syllables each time they repeat it, but she can’t internalize their words because they’ve turned into the refrain of a catchy song. She continues to sing the verses, which sound like this:

When they are nineteen, they’ve gone to college, and he’s casually apologized for “breaking her heart” (stop being so dramatic, says the chorus), and she’s begun to sleep with men just to remind herself that they aren’t him. She writes bad poetry and mourns the loss of her innocence, while taking “great joy” in multiple orgasms produced mostly by men whose last names she does not know.

You love someone else, one man tells her. I don’t love anyone, she lies. Another man says, we don’t love each other, do we? She turns toward him, naked on his bed, and rolls her eyes. I’m only sleeping with you to forget someone else, she tells him. And to herself, she says, stop being so dramatic.

When they are twenty-two, and she still tells people that she’ll be twenty-one next summer because she’s afraid of getting old, she calls him every month or so to check in. I thought of you today when I saw your mother at the store, she tells him. Did you, he says. Yes, she lies. She hears him roll his eyes and sip his tea.

When they are twenty-five, she moves in with his cousin, whom she has dated for four months and who hits her and regularly sleeps with other women while denying it to everyone but her, when he’s drunk. She sees the one she’s always thought about at family functions, where he looks disapprovingly at the finger marks, getting red now, on the arm his cousin has just grabbed. Stop being so dramatic, she means to say, and he knows, so he rolls his eyes and sips his tea, the smell of which makes her shiver like a love-struck teenager.

When they are twenty-six, it’s over with his cousin, with whom she still sleeps, but she accepts an invitation to a Thanksgiving dinner at the home of their relative, who (along with the rest of the family) thinks they are still together. I’m going to run a marathon, she announces, awkwardly, and the one she’s always thought about looks skeptical because she’s gotten even fatter in the last twelve years than she was when she first thought she loved him. I’m training already, she says, and he doesn’t believe her, but it might be the first true thing she’s said to him in years. I’m a different person now, she says, but she thinks, that’s debatable.

They go to a bar that night, with several of the cousins. The one that she’s lived with gets drunk enough to pass out in a booth tucked away in the corner, and the one she’s always thought about looks at her over a drink. Not tea, she says. Not tea, he says. They’re a little drunk, and after all these years, they finally hold eye contact.

Someone drives them home, but neither of them remembers later who it was. Thirty people, at least, sleep in extra bedrooms and on couches at this uncle’s house, whose name she never knew in the first place. There’s one unclaimed couch left when they get back from the bar, and she sits on it between the cousin, who hasn’t woken up since they pulled out of the parking garage, and the man she’s said that she loved since he was a boy. He turns the television on and keeps it low. He slides the remote to her over the couch cushion and says, you choose, with that throaty sound in his throat she knows, from years of trying to forget about him, means sex.

Slowly, their fingers find each other. (Stop being so dramatic.) His hands feel cold, and she doesn’t like it.

Stop, she says, but she doesn’t finish the refrain. And after twelve years, two months, and ten days, the song, abruptly, has reached its end.

Where She Needs to Be

2008-02-03T13:31:00.003-05:00

Run faster, she tells herself, out loud, and her body begins to take her to where she needs to be.

Second-hand Heartbreak; or Kind of a Liability

2008-01-26T20:53:00.000-05:00

When you go to the bus station or the train station or the airport, there’s a woman sitting there always, with frizzy hair and smelly clothes and a broken heart, which would be cliché if it weren‘t so true. She hums to herself and talks to Shelley or Kelly or Tiffany or something, and you look away, embarrassed for her.

In her melodies, which you can’t recognize as any particular song you’ve ever heard, she tells you her story. The story is this:

When she was a girl, she was a Shelley or Kelly or Tiffany, even if now she can’t remember which it was. She was blond and perky and turned guys down like she was sending away those black-clothed men with Bibles that knock on suburban doors. It was miraculous, really, how she stayed way up there above everyone else, and it was even more miraculous that she one day believed a guy named Matt or Mike or Mitch when he told her that he loved her, that he only wanted to be with her, that he wasn’t with anyone else. I’m kind of a liability, she said, meaning that she was a virgin, but he kissed her on the mouth and then in other places, and when she breathed in and out and he was there, it was a miracle. And more miraculous that she opened up her legs for the very first time to him, and he filled her up and emptied her out and filled her up again, and by the time he went away for good, his baby was growing inside her.

He’d been gone two months before the heartbreak got really bad, and her internal organs got all mixed up and her heart started pumping some kind of poison, instead of it staying in the liver where it belonged. To make a sad story short, her heart shot that bile right into her belly, and it found its way through all sorts of membranes to that baby. That baby died, which was just as well, because if it couldn’t survive a little second-hand heartbreak, it had no business being born in the first place.

The baby melted out of her, but she kept on talking to it, calling it Shelley or Kelly or Tiffany or whatever blond and perky and well-liked name she’d thought of that week until, pretty soon, people thought she was crazy just for loving some man who’d said he loved her and for feeling kind of bad about the heartbreak that dissolved the little thing growing in her. But still she sits always, waiting for the bus or the train or the airplane that might bring back the people that she loves, or that at least she thought once loved her. And sometimes, when it’s really noisy in one of those places, she likes the quiet.

It’s always so quiet when the sounds are loudest.

You stop to listen.

When she hums at the bus station or the train station or the airport, this is the story she’s humming.

After that, after that first time you listen, she’s finally told her story to someone; or rather, someone has finally listened to her song. And now, even though you’re stuck in that seat waiting for whoknowswho to come back, she’s gone.

Dead Girl

2008-01-19T19:23:00.000-05:00

Wake up, he says. He looks down into the long wooden box. She lies still.

I know you can hear me, he says. She opens her eyes and sighs.

See, you’re still there, he says. She sits up.

Well, he says, aren’t you going to say anything?

No, she says.

Just a little something, he says.

No, she says.

We can spend some time together, he says.

Well, she says. Maybe.

So let’s go, he says. She starts to climb out of the box.

What should we do, she says.

What, he says.

What should we do, she says.

But you’re dead, he says. Why can’t you just stay dead?

Hey, she says, closing her eyes again. I’m not the one talking to a dead girl.

But Not We Can't

2008-01-12T15:19:00.000-05:00

When they decide to have the party, neither one of them thinks that maybe it will rain and everyone will have to stay inside. But it does rain, and so Jolie and Mack and their guests pack into the house, and it smells stuffy like wet wool and yeasty like beer.

Nothing happens until much later, even though Mack invited Hannah, whom Jolie knew he’d slept with the year before, and Hannah planned to stay over since she’d driven from so far, along with the other guests that drank too much to find their car keys. Of course Jolie complains, especially after another and another martini, the fruity kind but with more vodka than sugar. But these complaints are more flirty than vicious, seeing as how they are made to Nick, a young twenty-something guy who just joined the force with Mack and who didn’t talk much, especially to her.

But your eyes are so pretty, she tells him, running into him by the bar cart where she shakes herself another martini. She leans in close, but nothing is still happening.

Later, even later than her leaning into his pretty blue eyes, Jolie is falling over, trying to sleep under the folding table they set up inside for the food, long gone. I’m not respectable enough to be standing up here talking to you, she means to say, but it comes out as a moan, and Nick catches her and keeps her up talking to him. To let her sober up, Nick reminds himself, eyeing Mack, who fell asleep on the couch. And didn’t Mack say they were divorcing anyway, he reasons, eyeing Jolie, who fell again into his pretty blue eyes.

And when she pulls him through the dining room, where they step over Hannah and one of the other police officers (single, at least, she notes, even through her stumbling) sharing a thin blanket on the floor, and into the office, where she sits him in the office chair and sits in his lap while she insists on checking her sister’s email, since she is impressed that she can remember the password, even if she can barely pronounce her sister’s name.

See, she says, turning toward him, leaning into his pretty blue eyes, and in the dark with only the glowing of the computer screen to light up the room and with Hannah (that slut) lying outside the doorway, Nick looks like Mack, with his strong shoulders and law enforcement crew cut, which is enough of a reason to lean far enough into his eyes to kiss him, and suddenly it is forty minutes later and her lips are still on his, only now his hand is up inside her shirt and her fingers are tracing the zipper of his pants.

The chair creaks loudly.

The floor, they say and slide onto the carpet Mack had installed a few months ago, and instead of closing the door they whisper shhh to each other, and when she says things like, That feels good, or Don’t stop, or Pretty pretty eyes, he can’t hear her but he smiles at her anyway. And soon her dress is up at her waist and his face is buried between her legs and she tells him no, that it’s going to make her beg him to fuck her, but he sucks the words out of her, and when he crawls up her to kiss her sticky-sweet on the mouth she says, Fuck me. I’ve never, he tells her, and she doesn’t really believe him, because she can feel him up against her. He reaches down to guide him into her.

We shouldn’t, she says.

But you didn’t say we can’t, he says.

But we shouldn’t, she says.

But not we can’t, he says, as he pushes inside her, and he still looks like Mack but the weight of Nick’s chest is heavier and his hair is coarser and it scratches her. More rug burn on my front than on my back, she says, but he only smiles at her and concentrates on lasting longer, which doesn’t work because it’s coming, he’s coming, but at least he’s pulled out. Hi, she says. Hi, he says. Her stomach is wet and sticky.

Jolie sleeps on the floor of the office, and Nick sleeps on the floor of the living room, next to the couch where Mack had passed out. Mack is the first one up, and Jolie wakes up smelling the coffee he’s made, which she will drink but not he. She walks into the laundry room, right outside the office, and pulls on one of her husband’s t-shirts and a pair of his boxers from the dryer, taking off the dress right there in the open. She puts it, not thinking, into the dryer with the clean clothes.

When she walks into the kitchen and her husband is standing there, he says, you didn’t sleep in the bed. Neither did you, she says, and she crawls under the blanket he’d slept under on the couch, right above where Nick is sleeping.

Hannah comes into the kitchen then, with the other officer, and talks loudly (that slut), and Nick wakes up and sits up, leaning against the couch where she is not sleeping but thinking that she’d like to. He reaches back and tickles her feet. She pulls her legs away. I’ll move if you want to sit up here, she says, and he gets up and sits next to her but they don’t look at each other.

When Nick goes to leave, she offers to move Hannah’s car, which blocks Nick’s in the driveway. You remember how much of last night, he says. Everything, I think, she says. Well, I’ll see you around, he says. Thanks for coming, she says. And he drives away, and she goes back inside to drink her husband’s coffee.

Birthday

2008-01-05T18:14:00.000-05:00

She takes the bus back home, which she's never done before, so she's nervous about that in addition to being weak from the thing she's just had cleaned out of her belly.

The bus smells like urine, and she thinks that she might fall asleep, but every time the bus rocks around a turn or slides to a stop with a hydrolic hiss, her insides lurch. So much lurching, she thinks, for being so empty. She stays awake and even gets off at the right stop before she climbs all those stairs up to the apartment and falls down on the bed.

He comes to get her hours later, because it's her birthday, and she's dressed up and put on make-up, and not even just a little mascara and lip gloss. She's got her game face on tonight.

He takes her to some dark restaurant and requests a booth scrunched into the corner, which she sort of likes because it feels cozy and safe. What's wrong, he asks her, and she cocks her head to the side. What, she says. You look like shit, he says, and she almost tells him that she's saved them, that she sacrificed for them. We made a mistake, she'd told him. We fucked up, he corrected her.

She lets the hair fall in front of her face so he doesn't have to look at her, and they talk a little bit about how work was, what he did that day.

Listen, I brought you here for a reason, he tells her. She looks up at him without moving her hair, but he doesn't wish her another great year. I saw her again, he tells her. We made a mistake, he says.

You fucked up, she thinks, but she keeps it behind her hair. So, she says, what will happen.

He waves away the waitress who comes and starts to ask if everything's okay with their food.

I have to be with her, he tells her. I can't just leave her.

He can't just leave her.

And I can't let her take care of it by herself, he tells her. I wouldn't want her to do that.

She doesn't look at him anymore, just brushes the hair completely out of her face, and she slides up out of the booth and pulls her purse, which almost gets stuck but hits his water glass, which spills and shatters on the floor, and she walks out of the section of the restaurant and into the lobby, and the floor is moving under her feet as she walks but she doesn't fall down, and when she pushes the glass doors open in the front of the restaurant and runs outside into the fluorescent parking lot lights which blind her, she slips and falls hard on the ground.

That hurt, she says.

Small Talk With Strangers

2007-12-30T17:48:00.000-05:00

The house is on a street off a one-way street, and for a moment, she's worried that she's gone the wrong way. He's told her to park right behind the dented Continental near the corner, and it's not hard to find. She calls him. Come outside, she says. It's just across the street, he says. Come outside, she says.

She sits in the car, where she's already sat for almost three hours, and watches the street. It's dark out already, and this might be a bad neighborhood. Philadelphia is the murder capital of the world, he's told her, and she believes it because she hears sirens in the background whenever they're on the phone. A teenager rides his bike past her car, and she's embarrassed to be white when he looks at her.

She stays in the car for a moment, until she sees a door opening and closing. He's there, and when she opens the car door, she hears him swearing. Fucking cat, he's saying. And she waits for him to be done to start pulling things out of the car, which is so full of crap that she has to climb into the back seat to find the little bottle of shampoo that's fallen out of the bag she's packed and under the piles of clothes and books and mostly unread newspapers and paper coffee cups. By the time she gives up looking for it, he's standing there waiting for her. Hi, she says. Hi, he says, and they're strangers making small talk again.

He looks normal, she thinks, with a regular haircut and a trimmed goatee. Last time she'd seen him, there was a mohawk, or maybe a shaved head, which showed off the tattoo that covered his skull. The tattoo was of cogs, like inside a clock, all meshed perfectly together. Behind the cogs, however, is fire, and when he showed her that first time she thought about how sad it was that all the work that the cogs were doing was all in vain. Now that his hair, and a black baseball hat with some logo she doesn't know on it, covers the tattoo, she imagines that it's no longer there. Being near him is easier if she doesn't imagine everything going on under that black hat.

She doesn't imagine much as they cross the road together, after she's been sure to lock the car, and he unlocks the front door. Careful of the cats, he says. They can't come out, he says. Okay, she says, and she follows him inside, through a little hallway and into a giant yellow living room with pin up posters and metal band show advertisements and the low, creeping stench of cat piss. I like the color, she says. Very yellow. Yeah, he says. My roommates did it.

She puts her bag down, and a cat crawls over to it. She picks the bag up again. I need to shower, she says, at the same time he asks her if she wants a tour. Sure, she says, at the same time he asks her if he's supposed to shower with her. Nah, she says. By myself.

He takes her upstairs, and the smell of cat piss gets stronger. Their rooms, he says, pointing down a hall. My room, he says, walking her by a large closet. The air inside is hot and stale. Bathroom is down there, he says. Thanks, she says.

In the shower, she borrows someone's shampoo, and she squeezes gel from the giant bottle of liquid antibacterial soap, the sort he tells his customers to put on their fresh piercings. She lathers, shaves the air under her arms, her legs, between her legs. A fresh cut opens on the back of her heel, but she doesn't stop it. Out of the shower, she dries off with a towel she'd had in her car when he called, and she puts her dirty clothes back on.

He's watching television when she comes back downstairs, and she sits next to him. Small talk, again. Small talk, and a documentary about water buffalo. They pretend to watch for a moment, and then he pulls her legs open and wiggles his fingers between them. She pushes his hand away twice, and then lets him push them inside her. Upstairs, he says, and he pulls his fingers out so she can follow him upstairs and onto the mattress on the floor of his little closet

where he's on top of her pushing and she's on top of him rocking her hips and he's behind her slamming into her and she's under him again and he's biting her nipple while she's reaching for his balls

And here's a few things she doesn't know while he's fucking her:
1. When he was twelve, his best friend killed himself, and he was buried over to the left in that cemetery he took to screw her once.
2. He never drinks because his father is, he suspects, an alcoholic who brews his own beer. He grew up taste-testing the skunked brews, and the smell of beer smells too much like the home he's been running from forever.
3. His first tattoo was on a dare, in a parking lot by some kid in the back of a van, and his first piercing (his left nipple) was done by himself, with a safety pin one afternoon when he was even too bored to jerk off.
4. The last girl he'd dated had aborted his children (first one, then twins four months later), and he'd refused to go with her to the clinic, even after she'd cried for real.

and she's on top again facing away from him and he's grabbing her ass as she wiggles it down on him and he slaps her once and pushes her forward so he's behind her again and it's hard and fast and harder and faster and everything tightens and he pulls out and

releases. She feels warm wetness on her back and it drips down her ass. Here, he says and throws a dirty t-shirt off the floor at her, and she uses it to wipe him off her. There are no clothes to put back on, since shorts were just pushed aside and shirts were pulled up and down. She lays next to him for a minute, and she moves a little and accidentally brushes him with her arm. Sorry, she says. It's okay, he says. And there's more silence. And how do you feel about children, he asks. Why do you ask, she says, and he says, oh, no reason.

And that's how it goes: small talk with strangers whenever they're not lapping up each other's lonely fluids.

Politesse; or How it Was Supposed to Be

2007-12-27T21:28:00.000-05:00

And they're halfway there before she's disappointed that she's come with him. The highway stretches out before them, and the edges of the road are muddy and rocky, not green like she expected they might be. The snow has melted, if there ever was any; either way, it looks mucky.

He was moving to Colorado, he'd said, months ago. Would drive his truck in the springtime, when he figured it would make the trip without breaking down. Staying with friends, he said. You need company, she said. For the trip, she meant. Invited herself, really.

The snake is wedged between them in its aquarium. It wiggles, irritated, she imagines, that it's in a smaller glass box than usual. She, he reminds her. The boa is a she. She doesn't much care about the snake, only that he's cranked up the heat in the car so that the snake doesn't get cold, and it's about four thousand degrees in the car. Worse, they're on at least day two of the clothes they're wearing. Part of the adventure was to pack light, for her at least. She didn't expect a rain forest environment, however, and her clothes are sticky and, she thinks, they smell mushroomy and earthy, mostly in a bad way.

He'd cleaned the espresso machine while she swept the floor. And what are you doing when you get there, she'd asked, one of about a million questions that maybe he wanted not to answer. But he'd smiled the smile that got her, maybe just to be polite, the wide one that crinkled his blue eyes into little pokes in his face, slanty ones, and his cheeks drew up high, and she could see all his straight white teeth. He was twice as big as her, tall and wide through his shoulders, and when he smiled he was a sweet boy and not a nearly unemployed linebacker who read literature with a capital L and used words like pragmatic and pandemic, which intimidated the shit out of her. He was going to work in construction, he told her, he knew people that knew people. No ivory tower for him. Four years in an Ivy, and he just wanted to build with those big hands of his.

His hands on the steering wheel look like an adult's hands on a toy car, which might, she's thinking, be the best way to describe the situation, and the way the truck stays so perfectly centered in its lane scares her. He's control, perfection, a strong man who always knew what he wanted.

He's stopping soon, he says. Does she care where he stops, he asks. No, wherever is fine with her. It's all the same, rest stops and gas stations and coffee for her with too much stuff in it and tea for him, two bags and black. Maybe she'd try switching the coffee for the tea, she thinks but she can't say it outloud to this man who she's spent two days with in the cab of a half-red, half-rusty pick-up.

This is how it was supposed to go:
1. He is so grateful that she wants to accompany him across the country, in his truck, that he leaves behind the creepy snake.
2. He seduces her with his words; they talk about every single thing they have words for, and some that they don't. He is well-spoken and well-read; she is witty and amusing. They laugh and sometimes stop and look at each other with the knowledge that each is the only true mind-mate for the other.
3. Their conversation continues into the campground they've found, and even after they stop talking, their bodies continue to speak to one another, using friction and motion to stay warm on top of plastic on top of warm, muddy dirt. They come together, and there is no mess or awkward conversation afterwards. He holds her for just the right amount of time, and he doesn't smother her when she tries to sleep.

This is what really happens:
1. The creepy snake sits between them on the seat, pushed up next to her. It (she) stares at her like a wife stares down a mistress in polite company.
2. Conversation is short and polite. They have little in common, and they have even less to talk about.
3. At the first campground, they find out that the tent has a hole in the side. They drink a few beers around the fire he's made and don't say much, except to relate a few stories to each other about other times they've had a few beers, especially around other fires. When they finish, they retire to their own sleeping bags, where she is cold at night and sore in the morning from the hard, cold, uneven ground. He farts in his sleep, but she doesn't know him well enough to tease him about it when they wake up. The second night, the tent smells funny from the farting and, she thinks, from the condensation that had gotten inside the tent from the hole in the side, which they hadn't dried out before they balled up the tent and shoved it back into the truck the next morning.

They'd closed down the little cafe those months ago, and she knew: the mountains would be breathtaking, and the sky would be high and painted beautiful. He and she would end the trip best friends, at least, and lovers, she'd thought, watching him count out the money in the cash register. And he slammed the register shut when he was done, and she knew that meant that he thought that too.

When they get to Colorado, it's overcast and she slumps down in the seat, up against the snake, not caring what, if anything, the mountains look like. He introduces her to the friends that he's staying with, after he hugs them with heavy, genuine pats and smiles at them, wider than he smiles at her, even when she says something she's sure is clever. She helps them unload the truck, mostly by just sort of holding doors. The snake is almost the last thing in the truck, and for a minute it's just those two females out there together.

And she grabs her own bag from the floor of the truck, which has no clean clothes, a bar of soap, a toothbrush, and toothpaste. There is a sweet rotten smell coming from the bag too, and under the watchful glare of the snake, she digs around until she comes up with an apple that has been sitting in the warm truck under her well-worn clothes, and the apple is now brown and squishy on more parts than not. She thinks about throwing the apple at the house he's in, but only for a second because the door opens, and he's coming up with the friend he's staying with. In one movement, she rolls the apple underneath the seats and pushes her hands under the snake's cage, lifting it out of the truck. Got it, her, she says, and carries the aquarium to the house.

What time is her flight, he wants to know, and she doesn't have one, so she lies and tells him that it's very soon. They better get in the car then, and he'll drive her, he says, and he smiles the beautiful smile, even if it is his polite one. Not needed, she says. She's made other arrangements, she tells him, and she lifts the bag she's brought off the ground near the truck. Thanks for the company, he says, and she smiles but doesn't say anything. When she walks away, down the street, he doesn't know that it's not towards the airport, and if he ever runs into her again, he doesn't recognize her.