What You Don't Know(50)

Sammie looks away from the hamburger, turns her gaze up to him. She has beautiful eyes, she always has: wide, innocent eyes, like you’d see on a girl. She looks like she might cry, but he doubts it, because Sammie’s tough, she takes shit and puts it right back out. No, she doesn’t cry, but Hoskins is surprised when Sammie leans over the side of the table and makes a belching noise, it sounds like a bullfrog, and then vomits, all the dinner she’d inhaled coming right back up, all that chewed hamburger and foaming soda, spreading over the clean tile floor.





GLORIA

When Gloria was young, strangers would stop her mother on the street, call to her from their car windows. I think you might be the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, they’d say, and her mother would nod and move on, her purse looped over one arm and her lips pressed tightly together. And even if no one said anything to her mother, they’d still look, sometimes throwing glances from under lowered lashes, but most times it was open staring, and every so often there were whistles and catcalls, lewd suggestions. Her mother never talked about it, never repeated the things that were said to her. It was as if none of it had ever happened at all, like it didn’t matter. Gloria couldn’t understand it, didn’t know how someone could shrug off a compliment. Maybe it was because she was so young, or because she was so ugly.

“A man said Mama was pretty today,” Gloria once said. This was at the dinner table, when she was eight years old. They’d just sat down, the three of them at the table and the old dog curled up at their feet, snout on his paws, waiting for crumbs to drop.

“And what did your mother say to that?” Her father put his fork down so carefully it didn’t make a sound when it touched his plate. Her mother, sitting on the other side of the table, didn’t move. Didn’t look up from her plate, even though they were both staring at her, waiting for her to say something.

“She didn’t say nothing,” Gloria said.

Her father was a tall man. Thin and wiry. When he came into a room it felt like he sucked all the air out of it, all the life. He wasn’t at all handsome, with the dark hairs sprouting from his ears and the smattering of blackheads on his nose, he wasn’t even handsome in the wedding photo that hung in the dining room, but anyone would look plain standing beside her mother, who was spectacularly gorgeous in her white gown, although she wasn’t smiling. Gloria had always wondered how her parents had found each other, how her mother had ended up cooking in the kitchen of her husband’s restaurant and cleaning the dreary little brick house on Ninth Street when she looked like a queen, but she never asked, not until years later, and her mother didn’t have an answer, said she couldn’t remember how it’d all happened. Her father could be mean as a snake, but he had his moments, he could be kind, and there were times she’d see her parents happy together, laughing and holding hands, kissing each other, her father bringing his wife coffee in bed and rubbing her feet, but things could turn fast, oh, her father’s temper was quick, and unexpected.

“‘She didn’t say anything,’” her mother said, correcting Gloria, her eyes not moving any higher than the mound of buttered peas on her plate. “That’s how you should say it.”

“That man was right, you know,” her father said. He was staring at his wife, and there seemed to be heat in his gaze, hot and stifling. “Your mama’s so pretty, I might have to kill her before some other man steals her away.”

And then he laughed.

*

All her life, Gloria wondered what it would be like to be so beautiful that it made men look hungry, like starving dogs panting over a bone. But they didn’t always look that way—sometimes they seemed angry when they saw her mother, as if her dark eyes and perfect face were purposely made to piss them off.

But Gloria didn’t know what it was like to be beautiful, and she’d never know. She took after her father—tall and thin, plain-faced. When she was young, she’d overhear people say that she’d grow out of it, that ugly girls became lovely women, but that never happened with her; she was the same at forty as she was the day she was born. Her mother never said anything about it, but her father did.

“I always liked the smart girls better than pretty ones,” he’d say, although they both knew it was a lie, because he liked nothing better than to stare at his wife; she was no dummy, but not a genius either. “You’ll be a good wife someday.”

Not that her mother wasn’t a good wife, but she brought out something in her husband, something ugly and stupid and possessive, although no one except Gloria ever saw it. Like the time Gloria was ten, and her father was convinced that the butcher and his wife were having an affair, because she’d smiled as she’d ordered her roast for dinner, and even something as innocent as a smile was suspicious, and he’d asked her about it that night, accused her of being unfaithful, and then he’d pointed a gun at her face for three hours, one of the rifles he used for hunting elk in the fall. They’d been like that for a long time, her mother standing up against the kitchen counter, her father sitting at the table, the butt of the rifle nestled against the meat of his thigh, the TV droning on in the background and the beef in the oven. Her mother didn’t cry out when she saw the gun, didn’t seem at all surprised, and Gloria wondered if her mother had been waiting for that moment, if she’d spent her whole marriage sure her husband would kill her while dinner burned to a crisp.