Not with me, he promises.
All I have to do is get out to the beach. Jet will drive his boat down the coast to Florida; he wants it that much. I will watch Natural Born Killers with my mother, our favorite movie, maybe sit at the typewriter and send Joni Baloney to the pyramids in Egypt, or the Academy Awards. My mother will say, So where’s your father tonight? Want to make a bet? But I won’t take her up on our game, not tonight, no. I’ll say, Go to sleep, MomMom, and wait for her to take her pills, the medicines, the smokes and bottles she and my father keep locked away in their bathroom. At two A.M. I will call a local limo company from my new landline. I’ll walk down the driveway in my satin blue pajamas, meet the driver under the stars. To the beach! I’ll say, handing over the wad of cash I’ve been saving from my allowance. An interesting girl like you must have very important places to go, the driver will say, opening a door for me. We’ll drive. I’ll stick my head out into the salty heat until it crisscrosses my hair.
At the beach, I’ll see it: the ocean glittering like a sheet of foil; Jet’s boat, lit up, windows blushing in the night, anchored. The sand will be cool by now, damp and hard between my toes as I run toward the water, toward the figure of a man splashing out of his boat, toward the lame waves frothing at the pier. We’ll meet in the water, Jet and I, and he’ll pick me up in his arms to carry me the rest of the way to his boat, our home, where music spools out of his radio. Jet will finally get to see the way I look when I laugh, and he will hear me sing his favorite lyrics, impressed that I know many words to many songs. I am cold, and he can see that through the satin, so he wraps his right arm around my chest and presses his other hand into my hand, and I say, Look at the difference of our hands, look how you could crush me, in my voice that has always been little. He is moved by this statement, and takes my whole face in his grip. I open my mouth for him and, for the first time, feel what it is. He tastes like something adultlike but new—crushed leather couch, cinnamon—too perfect to ruin.
When I think about it, I write in a letter, I touch where I’m not supposed to, and when I touch like that I want all the lights out in my room so that I cannot see where it is I am touching.
There is a reason why you like it, Jet replies, and that reason is shame.
Do you know what it means to be a grown-up? This was one of the first things Jet ever wrote to me. You’d have to be very adult in order to answer such a question.
Do I know?
My mother found the letters when we were packing to move. A new house: bigger, grander, white with eggplant trim; behind the front door, a swimming pool. She approached me in our laundry room. I can still see the both of us: my mouth hanging open with its metal and springs, my mother’s hand opening and closing a fist. She didn’t know where to situate her anger, where to store it. She still hasn’t found the proper place.
My mother lay the white envelopes on the dryer. Her chin, too steady. Even now, when I see piles of mail, I swear I can smell the floral pinch of detergent.
There are bad people in this world, she said, and bad people always want the good ones.
But he’s my pen pal, I said.
No more letters after we move, she said. Not unless they’re to Hawai?i, to Grandma, and I’ll read them first.
She cupped her hands around the back of my neck. My mother. I can still feel her there. Water dribbled from my eyes, and I nodded my head yes. Jet and I might find each other again after middle school, or high school, or maybe a summer in between. But in this moment, with the weight of my head held firm, I knew I didn’t need him. Jet would have to wait.
Do you know what it means to be a grown-up?
How much I wanted it before I knew.
EVEN THE DOGS
It’s four A.M. on my father’s birthday, and he’s in his red-sleep, the kind where his skin pulses the color of roast beef and his wedding ring looks ingrown. This is his don’t-wake-me-for-three-days kind of sleep, the face-down-on-the-tile kind of sleep, which is where he is now, naked, on my parents’ bathroom floor.
I said wake the fuck up, ass-blob. My mother pushes her bare foot into his back until it leaves a yellow-white imprint. A dead-body color. My father moans, and the sound drools out onto the tiles. His eyes wink on like lagging televisions. My mother curses in Chinese—you fucking fat cow!—the only Chinese phrase we both still use.
Why does he sleep on the floor like this? I ask. Your bed is so nice.
One day you’ll understand how good a floor can feel, she says.
It’s true: their bed is nice. I sleep in it sometimes. Night terrors don’t leave me alone come three A.M. lately—the shadows of limbs behind my windows, visions of blown-off faces with dangling eyeballs—and my parents are always awake, up to something, alive.
He plays dead because cold tile feels good to fucking fat cows after double fisting Sambucas all night with strippers, says my mother, each word louder than the one before it.
Sometimes, Mom buckles me into the car in the middle of the night to collect my father from these strippers. That’s the word she uses: collect. My father is always in need of collecting. The strippers seem sweet to me. They swing their shoes by the straps, tap their nails against my mother’s car window, saying, Come on, Chinadoll, relax, it’s nothing. They call my father Big Boss, or Mad Man, depending on the night.
My mother walks over to the bedroom closet. She claws into my father’s hanging clothes and tosses each item at his body—limp, cotton skins.
Both of you, get dressed, she says. We’re going for a drive.
My mother drives without saying a word. No music. No radio. I am curled up in the backseat, surprised to see that my father’s face is not asleep but alert. His eyes are wet and wide in that orange glow of night-road, that perfect combination of street lamp and moonlight that casts a terrific sadness, or wildness, on any face in its spell. I wonder if he and my mother will touch each other.
Where we going? he says. I have never heard my father’s voice—which is usually brass and gravel and all New York—go soft.
My mother doesn’t say a word. She stays focused on the road, fingers gripped around the steering wheel, leaning into it. She’s in another world, I think.
Honey? Hello? You hear me?
We are headed to the Florida Everglades, a one-hour drive from our house in Boca Raton. I know this because every school in South Florida takes a field trip here, and every kid hates it. On our class trip, we wore mosquito masks and earplugs and rode through the murky waters on an airboat. The whole thing smelled like a scum-skinned fish tank. A giant fan blasted as our boat moved through tall grasses, gators swiveling around. I didn’t learn anything.
Now, in the car, the grasses are thin, bleached bodies in our headlights. I touch the backseat window with my toes, as if I might be able to feel their scrape. There are no other cars, no signs or signals.
How you doing back there, kid? My father moves his arm back to give me three quick pats on the cheek. He does this when he’s in trouble—loves me like this. It’s his way of reminding my mother that he can function in the world in more ways than one. He can be a father, a family man, and also the Big Boss.
I don’t say a word either. I love my father more than anyone, for reasons I have yet to understand, but I feel more loyal to my mother. This is what I write about in my diary most days, though I haven’t stacked up the logic. All I know is that I want my father to enjoy our car ride together, but I will also bite his hand if it comes near me again.
You know, honey, if the kid wasn’t in the backseat—
My mother looks at him now, though she still says nothing.
I’m just sitting here thinking to myself: Self, if the kid wasn’t here and all—