Still Life with Tornado(17)

Vodka Cranberry



On Sunday morning Mom comes home from her seven-to-seven shift and makes herself dinner-for-breakfast. She has a vodka and cranberry, a rare steak, a baked potato, and carrots, and she blasts Rage Against the Machine in her headphones while she cooks. She sings every word out loud, though, especially the “Fuck you” parts.

Dad stays in bed even though he can’t be sleeping through this. I pour myself a bowl of cereal. Mom takes off her headphones, turns off the music, and gestures to me to join her for dinner-breakfast.

“It was a good night,” she says. “Nearly cleared the whole ER before I left. That never happens.”

I crunch on my cereal.

“Three days off,” she says.

“Awesome,” I say.

She taps me on the shoulder. It snaps me out of an early-morning stare-at-my-cereal daze. She’s smiling at me with her head cocked to one side. Rage Against the Machine always makes her this sort of aggressive-happy. She says, “You want to do something fun?”

I want to say What happened to you? because Mom has never asked me to do something fun since I turned thirteen, but I just say, “Depends.”

“You’re dropping out of high school at sixteen. It’s not like you have anything to do, right?”

I can hear my cereal go soggy as I look at her with my confused face.

“Well?”

“You’re okay with me leaving school?” I say.

“I’m okay with anything,” she says. “I just want to have fun.”

“This is new.”

She looks at me with her confused face. Then she takes a bite of steak. “So you don’t want to have fun with your mom. I get it,” she says. “What do you plan to do, then?”

“I’m sixteen. I can get a job or something.”

Her Rage Against the Machine happiness disappears. Her concerned-mother face arrives. She says, “You need to go to summer school and get your diploma. Then art school. You shouldn’t mess up your plan.” I feel like I’ve just witnessed a magic trick. Magician’s assistant goes into the sword-trick box in one costume, comes out, unscathed, in another. With a dove or a rabbit or something.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t think I want to do that anymore.”

Confused face again. “You have real talent. I mean, real talent. Why give up on it?”

“I just don’t see myself ever being an artist. And what kind of dream is art, anyway? It’s so subjective and stupid.” All around me on the kitchen walls, I see imaginary Lichtenstein dots.

“When did you figure this out?”

“About a week before I stopped going to school.”

“No wonder, then.”

“Yeah.”

She fixes herself a second vodka cranberry. She’ll be sleepy in about fifteen minutes.

“I didn’t want to freak you out before. I just want us to have fun on my days off,” she says. “I miss fun.”

“Okay.”

“You sure nothing else happened?” she asks. “I mean, at school? With a boy or . . . or a girl or anything?”

“I’m sure,” I say. “Nothing happened with a boy . . . or a girl.”

I never told her anything about the art show. The opening was on a Friday night and she was at work. My project was so secret I hadn’t even shown it to her or Dad. The plan was to take them to the art show the next day—it ran from Friday night to Sunday afternoon—and present it like you present a prize cow at a farm show or something. I thought they’d be so proud. But, of course, by the time that Saturday rolled around, there was nothing to present. My cow had disappeared.

It’s a long story.

I wash my cereal bowl and put it in the drying rack. Mom goes back to her dinner and vodka. She doesn’t mention anything else about fun. She doesn’t ask me anything more about what happened. She just chews her steak twenty times and swallows. Do you know how many people come to the ER after swallowing unchewed steak? You wouldn’t believe how many problems it causes. You’ve been warned.

? ? ?

I find Alleged Earl at eight thirty curled in his alcove with his back to the world. I sit on the sidewalk with my back against the wall and my knees to my chest and I wait. After an hour, I think Alleged Earl might be dead. I can’t see him breathing under all his coats and blankets. He doesn’t move in any way. I wonder if he dreams.

I didn’t shower before I left. I have a bandanna on my head, two sloppily braided pigtails in my hair, and I’m wearing an old sweatshirt and jeans. As people walk by, they don’t see me most of the time, but when they do see me, they look away. I think they must think I’m homeless, too. This is funny to me at first, but then I think seriously about it.

This could be me. I’m about to drop out of high school for no real reason except that high school isn’t original and while dropping out also isn’t original, it’s not like I’m a normal case. Good grades. Art club. Even Mom says I have talent and Mom doesn’t bullshit.

I feel stupid for saying that stuff to her today about getting a job. Who hires a sixteen-year-old high school dropout?

Alleged Earl stirs. He rolls onto his back and coughs. The coughs are wet, and he spits into the side of the alcove. He sits up slowly and looks like he’s in pain. He sleeps on concrete. It can’t be comfortable. He digs into his blankets and coats and comes out with a small bag of Doritos, opens it with a tug, and eats the chips in fistfuls. Little bits of Doritos fall into his massive beard and to me they’re like Lichtenstein’s dots. Alleged Earl would know what to do with those dots. I wouldn’t. He backs up against the boarded-up door and lets his legs stick out like a little kid would do—in the letter V. I look at how he’s sitting and how I’m sitting. I flop my legs out in front of me even though if anyone walked by, they could trip over me. Maybe that’s the point.