THE THIRTY-EIGHTH DAY . . .
(Sunday, July 19, late morning)
CÉCE:
Marcy shows up at my
house with a bag of wet laundry. “My mother’s drying a blanket. I’ll be forty-six by the time the thing’s
not damp anymore.” She pulls out my clothes to dry hers, and then
she yanks open our fridge. She taps a head of lettuce and says,
“I’ll have that,” and sits and waits for me to serve her. Our ratty
old Maytag drones eeeooooeek-clu-clump,
eeeoooeek-clu-clump as it spins Marcy’s Skechers.
I rip the lettuce
twice, dump it onto a plate that might or might not be clean,
squirt it with expired diet dressing, this raspberry vinaigrette
thing that tastes like mouthwash, not to mention it’s been left out
of the fridge since yesterday. “Here you go, Queen.” I slap down
the plate.
“You can’t spare half
a carrot?” she says.
Here I am with my
PBJ, licking Skippy off the knife. Totally nick my tongue. “Canned
beets?”
“Bleh. Like an ant
farm in here.”
“Cornbread
crumbs.”
“Idea: vacuum. You
guys fuck yet?”
“What? No.”
“Serious?”
“How many weeks
should I wait before I give him a blow job?”
Marcy sneezes Orange
Crush. “Weeks? Are you flippin’
retarded? The only rule with bj’s is never on the first date,
except if the date lasts longer than six hours. What are you
waiting for? Céce, face it, he’s a summer distraction, jump and
dump.”
“He’s the
one.”
“Oh. My. God. This is sad. Look, here’s the math: Céce
Brainwave Vaccuccia plus Mack Moron equals zero. He should be with
somebody like me.”
“He’s not a moron,
okay? He has . . . Look, you don’t know him.”
“And you do? What,
you been together a month yet?”
“Since Anthony
dropped the hint, it’ll be forty days this coming
Tuesday.”
“What are you guys
doing for your anniversary? You are so
gay. Cheech, this boy has one purpose in your life: to break you
in.” She pulls my hair to bring our faces close so I have no choice
but to look into her totally overdone eyes. Quarter-inch-thick
makeup coats her cheeks. The girl came over here to do laundry. “By
summer’s end you’ll have screwed each other a hundred and fifty
times—hopefully. At that point, you’ll be thoroughly sick of each
other. Perfect. He’ll move on to some other crappy dishwasher job
in some new crappy restaurant where he’ll bone some other cutie-pie
waitress, and you’ll move on to some new crappy school after you
rock the G and T, and you’ll bone some new cutie-pie guy, except
this one will have an actual working brain. New is good, chica.
Ripping out your heart for a guy who didn’t finish junior high? Not
so much.”
“You. Don’t.
Know him. You don’t know us. We see
each other every day.”
“So do me and
you.”
“Yeah, but me and
Mack don’t get sick of each other. We do stuff together.”
“Hunting for
satellites up at the reservoir with his nastylooking pit bull? I’d rather tweeze my
mother’s shoulder hair.”
“We tell each other
things.”
“What
things?”
“We treasure each
other’s secrets, Marce. This is
forever, him and me. I feel
it.”
“ Yeah, and I’m so sure he feels it too. Wake up,
Céce: He’s after you for your rack. I gotta get outta here before I
blow a half a head of rotten iceberg all over your kitchen. Call me
when my sneakers are dry.”
I’m trying to lead
the ants outside with a rotten banana when my phone rings. Note to
self: Either get a new phone or figure out how to change Hannah
Montana ring tone.
“Yo!” Anthony says via live video stream courtesy
of a handheld phone.
“Yo,” I
say.
“Where’s Ma?”
“Put her in the
shower on a plastic lawn chair with a sippy cup full of high-test
coffee.”
“Nice!”
“Oh my god, why are
they not feeding you down there? What happened to your
hair?”
“Forget about me. What’s up with you? Quick, I have like
two minutes before my sergeant gets back. Why so mopey,
sis?”
“Marcy’s a
bitch.”
“C’mon, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing. The G and
T. I’m just nervous about it.”
“Liar. How’s Mack?”
I fail miserably at
trying not to grin. “He doesn’t own a computer, and he hates TV. He
doesn’t own a phone.”
“And this means?”
“Opposites
attract.”
“Knew you guys would work out. The peace medal. It’s doing its
thing.”
“It’s so doing its thing. My ESP is in overdrive: We’re
meant to be together. It’s real, Ant, the way I feel. I
swear.”
“A hopeful Céce Vaccuccia. Stunning. Yo, I gotta go. Tell
Ma I love her like a crazy person.”
Sunday nights we
close at nine. Dinner shift is almost over. Mack’s helping me
restock. We’re upstairs grabbing linens and each other. I push him
against the wall and suck his lips. “If I told you I had a really
important request, and that I needed you to say yes, would you ever
say no to me?”
“If it’s that
important, then no.”
“I want to go to your
place.”
“I don’t
think—”
“Don’t think. Just
say yes.”
He nods, but he’s
miserable. “Hopefully he won’t be home,” he says.
We walk down this
dark dirty alley lined with old mattresses, to the basement. The
lights are on. We hear staticky music. “He’s home,” Mack says.
“Let’s go to the roof.”
“I want to see your
room.”
“My room?”
“What you hang on
your walls, baseball crap or movie posters. Whether you’re PS3 or
Wii, the color of your bedspread.”
“Céce, I sleep on a
foldout cot in the kitchen. There’s nothing of me in that place,
except that Bible box full of money, and even that’ll be gone
soon.”
“At some point, don’t
I have to meet the people in your life?”
“The only person in
my life is you. Please. The roof.”
Up here, above the
streetlight glare, no moon, I see lots of satellites. The wind
comes cool, and the sheets float. Pigeons leave the hutch roof,
circle and resettle.
I’m sitting
cross-legged, scratching under Boo’s jaw. Boo’s sitting between my
legs, facing me. Her head rests on my shoulder to look at Mack,
who’s sitting behind me, against the half wall that fences off the
roof. He’s giving me the most righteous neck rub. “It occurs to
me,” I say.
“Uh-huh?”
“I have a pit bull in
my lap. This pit bull has a massive head. This head is largely jaw.
This jaw is less than six inches from my face, and I, a face bite
victim, am petting this pit bull, and my hands aren’t
shaking.”
“I’m telling you,” he
says.
“You’ve cured
me.”
“You cured
you.”
“In a month. Gently.
Little by little. Unbelievable. I’ll take her.”
He kisses me, but I
push him away.
“Under one
condition,” I say.
“Anything,” he
says.
“The first night she
sleeps over, you sleep over too.”
He’s
quiet.
“Tuesday night. My
mother’s going down to the shore to get trashed with her friend,
this other Bud Light bride from high school. Julie has this popup
camper for the overnight. Carmella won’t be home till late
Wednesday afternoon.”
“Céce, sneaking
behind your mom’s back like that—”
“Mack? I’m sick of
dry humping in the graveyard, you know? Of bringing ants home. I
want to be indoors with you. To
be with you, indoors.”
He stops rubbing my
neck. He gets up. He crosses toward the far side of the roof, and
Boo follows. “Wait,” Mack says as he keeps walking
away.
But she won’t. She
only stops when he stops, and she leans against his leg. He can’t
get her to quit following him.
“You’re up in the
country and she’s off leash,” he says. “She sees a jackrabbit on
the other side of the road with a truck hauling down it. You’ve got
to be able to stop her in her tracks before you can call her back
to you.” He studies Boo. “It’s the last thing she needs to learn,
and then she’s perfect.”
“Instead of
wait, try stay.”
“You can use whatever
word you want, so long as you use the same word every
time.”
“Stay is better.”
“Try it.” He heads
across the roof. Boo follows.
“Boo, stay,” I
say.
The dog stops and
sits and looks back at me.
“Boo, come,” I
say.
She comes to me for a
belly scratch.
Mack jogs across the
roof and chucks his arm over my shoulder and kisses my
forehead.
“Before she found
you, she must have been trained with that word,” I
say.
“Nope. You’re
magic.”
Boo wiggles between
us and slashes our legs with her tail and play-barks at us to stop
glomming.
Pounding beneath our
feet gets me jumping. “What is that?”
Mack frowns. “Larry.
He’s banging on his ceiling with a ball bat.”
Some dude shrieks up
the breezeway, “Make that dog stop barking, dirtbag. Hey, you hear
me up there?”
Mack yells down the
breezeway, “It was just for a second, all right? It’s over now.”
He’s so calm and strong with the dog, but now he’s off-kilter. He’s
pinching the inside of his wrist again. “You won’t ever hear her
again, all right?”
“Motherless liar,”
Larry yells up.
“What’d you say about
my moms, old man?”
“Mack,” I say, but he
doesn’t hear me.
“I hear that dog bark
again, it’s dead,” Larry says.
“What’d you say about
my moms?”
“I’ll tell her you
said hello,” Larry yells up. He’s snickering.
Mack’s eyes are
spacey, the way they were that night with those two dudes on the
motorcycles. He’s pinching his wrist so hard. I stop him. I hold
his hand.
“Just keep holding my
hand,” he says. “Don’t let go.”
“I
won’t.”
He’s trembling. I
lead him into the hutch. He slumps against the wall. I crack him a
Sprite and sit next to him, and he rests his head in my lap. I
trace arcs across his forehead with my fingertips, until the fret
lines soften.
“You’re the only
one,” he says.
“The only
one?”
Boo’s upset because
he’s upset. She wiggles next to him and nudges his hand with her
snout, but he won’t pet her. I reach out to Boo.
“Don’t,” Mack says.
“Wait till she’s not scared. If you pet her when she’s scared,
you’re rewarding her fear. My mom taught me that. Sorry. I keep
telling you the same stories. About my mother, I mean. Hell, I
guess it doesn’t matter.”
“What
doesn’t?”
“You were gonna find
out sooner or later. You might not want to be with me after I tell
you this. But you need to know it, the truth about
me.”
Now I’m afraid. This
is it: He’s going to tell me he killed somebody. Please, don’t let
this be over. Don’t let us be over. “Tell me.”
“I’m afraid that
someday, I’m gonna do something really bad.”
“Like . .
.”
“Like something you
can’t fix. I get so mad
sometimes.”
“Everybody gets
mad.”
“Not like this. Not
like me.” His eyes shimmer. They’re brown, but for some reason they
seem dark blue now. “You’re the only one who can keep me from doing
it.”
“Doing
what?”
“Losing it.” He looks
away. “I had this counselor once who tried to teach me a trick. She
said when I got mad, I should put myself in a favorite dream and
live there until the anger left me. But it never worked. Because my
dreams all seemed so far away. But now with you, when I’m near you,
holding your hand . . . If I fly off and wreck somebody, they won’t
let us be together anymore. As long as you’re with me, it’ll be
okay.” He strokes Boo’s neck. Her tail slaps the floor at his
touch. She rolls onto her stomach for a belly rub. He gives her a
quick scratch and squeezes my hand. “Tuesday night. I’ll stay over
your house, Céce.” He checks the moon. “It’s getting late. I better
get you home.”
He gets up and tries
to help me to my feet, but I say, “Wait. I need a minute to think
about this before I do it.”
“Before you do
what?”
“Shh, just gimme a
sec.” What does that mean, something you can’t
fix? I have no doubt he can cause some serious damage—he’s
all muscle. He’s all heart, though. All mine. He needs
me.
He’s right: As long
as I’m with him, it’ll be okay. “Okay,” I say.
“Okay
what?”
I pen the dog and
grab the sleeping bag and go to the back of the hutch and spread it
out under the open ceiling hatchway.
He looks at the
sleeping bag. He looks at me. “This can’t be a one-shot deal,” he
says. “One of those, you know, you try this out to see what it’s
like, and then you move on.”
“Never leave you. I
promise.”
His fingertips trace
the lines of my ribs. I can feel his heart beating through me. The
tip of his thumb rides a soft slow circle around my belly, winding
into the button. I feel myself breathing faster as his thumb arcs
down, and his fingertips are at the band of my underwear. Under the
band now . . .
It happens fast:
We’re naked. He’s kissing me everywhere. “You got
any—”
“Yes,” I say. The
ones they give you in school. To carry with you, just in
case.
His hands are shaking
as he gets ready and my hands are shaking as I help him and then it
happens and I take in the biggest breath and then another one and I
can’t let the air out of my lungs. Hot tears coast over my cheeks
into my ears. I’m holding his face and touching his open lips, and
still I can’t breathe, and he’s looking at me. Looking into my
eyes. And he isn’t turning away. And finally I let the air out, but
right away my lungs pull in another huge breath, and I can’t
breathe, don’t want to breathe, just want to stay like
this.
“You done this
before?” he says.
I shake no, and
somehow I whisper, “You?”
“Not like this.” And
he’s shivering and I’m shivering and I swear the sky is shivering.
Through the hatchway the stars are falling and drifting down on us
like that first soft snow, the kind that comes at the end of the
fall.
(Sunday, July 19, late night)
MACK:
I can’t stop looking
at her. She’s all goose bumps. She’s curled into me and shivering,
but the room smells like heat. I got my arms around her. She’s
looking up through the roof hatch. Boo snores on the other side of
the wall. “I’ll introduce you to my old man,” I say. “You’re going
to be coming over here all the time, and you’ll run into him sooner
or later.”
We just stare into
each other and smile for a bit, me and this beautiful girl, her
long bangs half covering her face. I brush back her hair to see her
eyes better. “Céce, I’m not like him, okay? I have my mother in me,
not him.”
A squirrel peeks in
through the hatch.
She yelps and digs
her nails into me. “They’re everywhere. You can’t even hang your
laundry anymore without one crawling into your bra and making a
hammock of it.”
“I’m not real
familiar with that situation.”
She wrinkles her nose
and nose-to-noses me. “Hey?” “Hey back.”
“I’m gonna be coming
over here all the time?”
I kiss her full and
hold her and tell her, “I wanna do it again so bad. To be with you.
Can we?”
“Make the squirrel
stop watching us.”
“Tsst!” I say, and
the squirrel jumps away.
“This is
Céce.”
“Chee-chee?” the old man says all slurry. He’s
flopped back in front of the TV with a box of doughnuts, crumbs all
through the hair of his chest, too bombed to stand up.
“Hello,” Céce says.
She shakes his hand, and the old man won’t let go. She doesn’t like
the way he’s looking at her.
I don’t either. I
didn’t think he was going to be this bad. He’s eyeing her head to
toe, and slow. “Reckon we better be going,” I say.
“Nice to meet you,
Mister Morse,” she says.
“Nigha
meea.”
I have to get in
there to pull his hand from hers.
He winks at me, gives
me a thumbs-up. “Attaboy, Cario. Thaw you wuzza.” He burps.
“Faggot.” A loud commercial comes on and his eyes drift to the
TV.
We’re outside. “He
called you Cario,” she says.
“My name.
Macario.”
“What’s it
mean?”
“Blessed.”
We’re quiet on the
walk home. My arm’s over her shoulders. Her arm’s slung low on my
back, her thumb hooked into my belt loop. She’s walking Boo. Boo
listens to Céce perfect. My legs are weak. I love her so bad. I
want to say it to her. I better wait.
“He’s not like that
when he’s sober, though, right?” she says.
“He’s like that, just
sober.”
“Yesterday I woke up
with Carmella in my bed. She was holding my hand. The lightning,
she said.”
“Lightning?”
“The thunderstorm.
The woman sleeps with a Snoopy night-light.”
“I like your mom a
ton.”
“If Anthony dies,
she’ll go from beer to liquor. After that, it won’t be long. I’ll
wake up one morning, and she’ll be dead on the couch with some DVD
menu music on perma-loop. Pretty Woman.
You ever see that one?”
“Hey?” I pull her
close. “Tony’s not gonna die.”
She studies my eyes.
“I believe you.”
“I been wanting to
send him a letter. To thank him for the medal. Can you help me
write it?”
She hugs me. “We’ll
do it right now. C’mon.” We’re just a couple houses down from her
house.
“I need a little time
to figure out what I want to say.”
“My mother made
Christmas cornbread.”
“In
July?”
“I know,” she says.
“Red and green icing.” She pulls me toward the house.
I hold up. “I’ll come
in Tuesday night.”
“Promise
me.”
“We’ll make dinner
and sit at the table and make out, but not when we have food in our
mouth, of course.”
“Of course,” she
says.
“After that, we’ll
write the letter to Tony.”
“And after
that?”
“Man, you’re cute
when you’re pouty, and I think you know it too.” I walk her to her
door and kiss her good night. She watches me back down the porch
steps with Boo. “Don’t know how I’m gonna look your mom in the eye
at work tomorrow.”
“Anthony was dating
this girl for two years, and he was a junior in high school when Ma
finally sat him down to talk birds and bees. Ant told me he chewed
a hole in his cheek to keep from laughing. Slutty as she was in her
youth, Carmella apparently assumes everybody’s a virgin now. The
last twenty-five years of soaking her brain in Bud Light must’ve
eaten away the part of her brain cerebrum that’s supposed to
initiate reasonable suspicion.”
“Say that last part
in English. Sure, the cerebrum.”
“Or is it the
cerebellum?”
“Your
pick.”
“Hate bio. Don’t worry about my mother, baby. The
woman is out to lunch when it comes to this stuff.”
“Yeah huh? Good
luck.”
“Good
luck?”
“The kitchen light
just went on. I better git.”
(Sunday, July 19, late night)
CÉCE:
Ma’s sipping in the
kitchen. I walk by fast for the stairway. “Night.”
“Cheech babe, can you
c’mere for a second?”
“Yeah,
babe?”
“Sit. Spend a few on
the old lady, catch me up on you.”
“Would so love to,
but I gotta study. G and T’s just around the corn—”
“Just for a sec. Grab
yourself a hunk of Carmella’s Christmas Confection there. I’ll take
one too. Yeah, no, the one with the headless snowman painted onto
it. The top part was burned. I had to chop it off. I’m saving the
good pieces for Anthony’s platoon.”
I sit, smile, force
myself to look her in the eye. “Howya doin’,
Carmella?”
“Hangin’ in, you
know. You?”
“Oh you know.
Everything’s good.”
“Excellent.” She’s
nodding. She’s squinting. She’s drinking coffee. I am so fucked. “So looks like my Tuesday
trip to the shore is getting canceled.”
“Julie crash the
camper again?” Shit.
“Weather’s supposed
to suck out loud.” She drowns her creepy headless snowman in her
coffee. “But Mack can still stay over.”
“What are you
talking about?”
“I’m going away, and
you’re not gonna try to swing the overnight? Hello, we share DNA.
If you’re gonna do it, and you are, then you’re gonna do it
someplace safe. You keep sneaking around, and that’s how accidents
happen. If you trust me about nothing else, trust me on that one.
The apartment downstairs, the storm door. You have your own
entrance. I don’t have to know when you’re down there, and I don’t
want to. Be respectful. Be discreet. Tell me you’re using birth
control.”
“I totally cannot be
talking about this with my mother—ew.”
“I’m serious,
Céce.”
“With your pink hair
and your gold teeth and your busted nose.”
“Right now, I’m your
best chance at not ending up like me.”
“You think we’re
stupid?”
“I think you’re
fifteen. And thanks.”
“Ma, look, I didn’t
mean it like that.”
“Yeah you did.
Condoms?”
I roll my eyes and
nod.
She nods. “I’ll take
you to the doctor for a prescription.” “I told you, we got it
covered.”
“Doesn’t hurt to have
a backup.” She holds my hand. “Just. Be. Careful.”
I roll my eyes the
other way. Why am I so bitchy to her when she’s being so cool? “We
will, okay?”
“I’m talking about
being in love with each other so soon.”
I’m about to tell her
I’m not in love with him, but that
would be a lie. “I do. I really do love him. And he loves me, I
think. He’s the one, Ma. He is. I feel
it.” Tears from nowhere. I am such a tool. She pulls me into a hug.
I’m sitting in her lap. She’s rubbing my back and hushing me. I
bury my face in her pink hair. It smells like burned pumpkin. “Ma?
He makes me feel like I can be somebody.”
“You are somebody, honey. You are so
awesome.”
“No, Ma. You don’t
get it. He makes me feel like I can be somebody else.”