Portable Childhoods Page 8

  Red vinyl booths

  Chrome napkin holders and

  Texas Tommies

  the food that I eat at twilight

  on picnics in my dreams.

  The menus were wooden signs,

  faux western saloon,

  with hand-painted anthropomorphic food.

  Texas Tommy was a six-gun shootin’

  sheriff-star wearin’

  son-of-a-gun

  of a hot dog.

  A hot dog that was grilled

  split, sizzling

  inside a bun

  buttered, crispy.

  In the groove of the meat

  cheese was yellow and molten.

  Spiraled all around with bacon,

  pinned to the dog with wooden toothpicks

  that had no frills.

  I loved the Feed Bag.

  It was a diner

  in the Twilight Zone,

  six blocks from my house.

  And so, so creepy noir that it’s in black and white

  in my memory

  even though I was there in person.

  The hairy man behind the counter in his white paper hat

  glared as he cooked.

  We never sat at the counter.

  We sat in a booth.

  Or sometimes,

  once or twice,

  in the empty back room with chrome-rimmed tables

  linoleum floor

  buzzing lights

  and a secret passage to the underworld.

  The Feed Bag shared a basement with the barber shop next door.

  Down six steps, up six steps.

  Feed Bag. Barber Shop.

  At the bottom was a narrow hall to the bathroom

  single bulb

  concrete floor.

  Door to the left, painted green

  hook-and-eye latch.

  One night

  I had to pee so hard I couldn’t sit still

  couldn’t finish my Texas Tommy.

  My mother drank her coffee and pointed.

  She said not to touch anything.

  That was when I knew to be afraid.

  I went by myself,

  down six steps

  turn to the left

  green peeling wooden door

  sharp smell like a dog had been there.

  The hook and eye were not enough.

  I did not sit down.

  Not all the way.

  I squatted and leaked a little.

  The toilet paper roll was wooden and squeaked.

  An almost-naked lady on a calendar over the toilet

  watched me.

  I was eight.

  But at the bottom of the stairs I did not go up

  to the Feed Bag

  to my mother.

  I went up the other way, to the barber shop.

  The door was open a crack.

  It wasn’t shut.

  Outside the street was night.

  The shop was empty.

  Cold lights shone on metal chairs

  brushes in blue water

  gleaming sharp steel man things.

  The clock on the back wall was rimmed

  with pink neon.

  It was a scary color,

  pink.

  It glared down on the steel things

  and I could feel the old men

  hairy men

  gangsters

  men who got shaves

  who belonged here when it was daytime.

  I ran back to my world then,

  six steps down

  six steps up. When I sat down at the table

  I felt older.

  I had a second Texas Tommy,

  For the comfort of the cheese.

  Flying Over Water

  sPring Vacation. Kritter sits in the hotel’s restaurant, uncomfortable in the dress she had to wear on the plane. She edges her chair another inch toward the balcony, and stares out at the water, trying to look like she is not with her family. It is just a seating error.

  When they were flying over the water, in the plane, her father said that the dark blue color means there are reefs—rocks and coral just a few feet under the surface. He told her there are fish under there. Kritter stares out at the water, wondering about the fish. There are bluegills in the pond on Grandad’s farm, but the water is a milky, solid green, even on a sunny day.

  This water is amazingly blue—turquoise. No, turquoise is a good word for the shirt on the man at the next table or the stones surrounding his heavy gold wristwatch. But they’re as dull as the gray March sky back home compared to this water. The colors blend in and out of each other without edges. Pale, clear green to deepest blue. If her best friend Annie were here, it would be a good place to have an adventure. They could pretend to be pirates in search of treasure, or rich people who are sailing around the world to exotic places like Pago Pago or Rangoon. They would—

  “Kristine, I think that’s just about enough of those chips,” her mother says, interrupting her train of thought. “I know we’re on vacation, but that doesn’t mean you can forget about your diet all week.”

  Kritter—only her parents and teachers call her anything else—winces and pulls her hand away from the basket of thick, warm tortilla chips. She slowly and deliberately eats the chip in her hand, and watches her mother’s lips tighten in disapproval. She says nothing but Kritter doesn’t take another chip. A standoff.

  Her mother is a slender, delicate woman with pale blue eyes. When her blond hair is pulled back into a ponytail—for tennis or on Fridays before her hair appointment—she looks like Barbie.

  Kritter knows no one would make a doll like her. When she was younger, she heard people say she was built like her father, a sturdy child. She liked that. It sounded strong, and durable, like the pioneers. Puberty is softening her—adding hips and breasts to the solid rectangle of her torso—without changing her shape. She is becoming a woman, her mother says. But Kritter can tell it is not the sort of woman her mother had in mind, and feels responsible, as if she had been leafing through the body catalog and chosen the wrong one.

  She looks longingly at the basket of chips, but moves her chair another fraction of an inch away and says nothing.

  The next morning, after breakfast, a bright blue ferry pulls up at the dock in front of the hotel. Her father walks up the small, swaying gangplank. They are on vacation, but he is here on business. He will be at a hotel on the mainland for meetings all week and will come back and join them on Friday.

  They wave good-bye, and when the sound of the ferry’s motor is just a tiny buzz, her mother turns and says, “Well, now it’s just us girls.” She says it brightly, as if it is a special treat. Kritter would rather be on the boat.

  Other than her sister Beth Ann, who is eight and therefore not very interesting, the people at the hotel who aren’t grown-ups are all older kids. At least high school. The girls are all wearing bikinis and the boys show off until the girls giggle. Kritter is the only one of her kind.

  They have a two-room bungalow with a porch right on the white sand beach of a small lagoon. Kritter unpacks her snorkel—a neon-yellow plastic tube with a bright pink rubber mouthpiece—and lays it on the left side of the invisible line on the dresser that divides her things from Beth Ann’s heap of Nancy Drew books and tiny Malibu Skipper beachwear.

  She unpacks her new bathing suit last, moving it aside to remove first socks, then sandals, t-shirts, and the paperback copy of Travels with Charley that she is supposed to read over vacation. Finally the suit is the only thing left—a crumpled mass of flowered nylon in the corner of the green Samsonite.

  Kritter glares at it. She likes swimming. It is the only “sport” she doesn’t feel clumsy and awkward at. For as many summers as she can remember, she and Annie have worn matching black Speedo tank suits. Last month, like most springs, when she tried on her suit, she had outgrown it.

  But when her mother took her down to Nickerson’s, they walked right by the Girl
s’ department and its rack of Speedos and into Young Miss. Kritter knows she is not a Young Miss. She shudders with the memory.

  The saleslady has glasses on a beaded chain and smells like hairspray. She has a yellow tape measure draped around her shoulders, and she pulls it around Kritter’s waist, then her chest. “Let’s see about the bust,” she says. She talks only to Kritter’s mother, as if Kritter wasn’t there. A few minutes later she comes back to the dressing room with an arm-load of bathing suits.

  “Try this one,” she says, handing Kritter a hanger. “Then come out and show us how it looks.” Her mother gives Kritter a quick pat on the shoulder and pushes the louvered door shut with a click.

  Kritter stares at the pile of bathing suits on the bench. None of them are black. They are pastels—pinks and greens and pale blues—and all of them have flowers. When she pulls the top suit off its white plastic hanger, she sees that there are buttons on the straps. The front of the suit looks like there’s someone already in it. She thinks it’s newspaper, the way purses and knapsacks are stuffed so you’ll know how they’ll look full of Kleenex and keys and things. But it isn’t newspaper. It’s stiff white fabric—a bra—sewn right into the suit. She throws it on the floor. No one could swim in something like that.

  She pulls each flowered monstrosity off its hanger: they are all the same. She wants to throw them over the top of the door and run as hard as she can. Out of the dressing room, out of Nickerson’s, out of her life. But she is trapped. Her mother is outside the door, waiting. A tear of frustration rolls down Kritter’s cheek. Her only hope is that when her mother sees her in the suit she will know that it is ridiculous, and they will buy a black Speedo and go home.

  “Krissy?” Her mother knocks on the door. “We’re waiting.”

  “Just a sec.” Kritter wipes the wetness from her cheek with the back of her wrist. She picks up a suit from the heap on the floor and tugs it on, pulling hard, hoping it will rip. But it doesn’t. The straps dig into the flesh of her shoulders and the white cups are larger than her breasts, which are not much more than swellings with soft, pink centers. She pokes a finger at her chest and when she pulls it away, a crater remains in one rounded volcano.

  She feels like she is wearing armor. Stiff, flowered armor. She opens the door.

  “That one looks nice,” her mother says.

  The saleslady nods her head in agreement. “Come here, hon. Let’s see how it fits.” Without waiting for Kritter’s answer, the saleslady turns to her mother. “I think that’s the right size, don’t you?”

  Her mother nods and smiles. “Is that the color you want?” she asks Kritter.

  She has to be kidding. Kritter tries to save herself. “Not really. I was thinking more of a black Speedo. Like last year.”

  Her mother sighs. She and the saleslady exchange glances. “Do you think that a dark color might be a little more…slimming?” The sales-lady peers at Kritter, then nods and bustles over to another rack.

  “Mom, I can’t swim in this,” Kritter says desperately. “I want a Speedo so I—”

  “No,” her mother says. “Now that you’re getting a figure, well, things are different.” She is using her this-conversation-is-over (young lady) tone of voice, and Kritter knows then that she is doomed.

  The saleslady returns with another suit. It is black, but it has a flared polka-dotted white skirt around the waist. Kritter says nothing. There is nothing to say. She walks over to the heap of bathing suits and, without looking, picks one up and puts it on the counter.

  Her mother smiles at the saleslady. “Charge it, please.”

  When Kritter emerges from the bathroom of the bungalow, a white towel covering as much of her bathing suit as possible, her mother is sitting on the porch with a glass of iced tea and a thick paperback book. Beth Ann is digging in the sand at the edge of the beach.

  “There you are,” her mother says, looking up over the rims of her sunglasses. “You look very nice. I think those are good colors on you.”

  Kritter says nothing. She has no idea what she looks like. She avoids mirrors, seeing enough through her mother’s eyes.

  “Can I go swimming now?” she asks after a minute.

  “Yes, you may, as long as I’m watching. Just stay inside the lagoon. The ocean’s too rough. It’s dangerous. Okay?”

  Kritter nods silently and walks down to the edge of the water. The lagoon is a tranquil blue oval sparkling in the hot morning sun. Its perimeter is rocky—two parentheses of jagged dark slabs with a white sand beach at one end. Fifty yards out, its narrow mouth funnels into the open sea. There are large rocks on either side, and as she watches, a wave crashes onto one of them, sending spray and mist ten feet into the air.

  She puts her towel down on the sand and attaches her snorkel to the strap of the yellow rubber mask the way she has been shown, hoping it will be worth the effort. Before they left home, her mother signed her up for a snorkeling class at the Y. An entire Saturday afternoon. She learned to spit in her mask and put the equipment on. Big deal. She could see underwater, sharp and clear, but what was there to see? The black lines on the bottom of the pool. A penny by the drain. Her legs, magnified, disturbingly white and fat.

  She shakes the sand out of her mask and puts the snorkel in her mouth, then stands up. The flippers make it impossible to walk normally, so she walks backwards through the sand, feeling clumsier than usual as she wades out into the water.

  Even when she is up to her waist in it, the water is still turquoise. In art class she has rinsed out brushes, watching the paint swirl off the ends of the bristles, coloring the water in the empty peanut butter jar a rich, deep blue. That is what it feels like, standing in the lagoon. Like she is in the water where someone, some god, has rinsed out all the turquoise brushes in the world.

  She lifts her arm, half expecting it to be tinted a pale blue-green. But on her skin, it is just clear water. It glistens in the sunlight and beads up on the tiny hairs of her forearms. She readjusts the mask a fraction, then turns and falls forward.

  When she puts her face in the water, the world as she knows it disappears. She is alone in a cool, liquid place where there is no sound other than her own breathing. She watches, fascinated, as an endless web of shifting, shimmering sunlight dances across the flat sandy bottom. She puts her foot down and watches the pattern play across her leg like electric lace.

  A single kick of her flippers sends her gliding through the water, and she finds she doesn’t even need to use her arms. She pulls them in to her sides, hands fluttering at her waist like vestigial fins. Air bubbles rush down her body as she moves forward. Airstream, she thinks. Jetstream. Streamlined, sleek and powerful.

  Halfway across the lagoon, Kritter comes to the first reef. Gliding over the angled rocks stretching a few feet below her, she peers into miniature canyons. It looks like Wyoming did from the plane—hundreds of shades of brown, dappled with sunlight. She feels like she is flying, flying over a sunken western landscape where an occasional canyon wall is bright with pink and pale green anemones that would be monstrous if they were to appear outside Cheyenne.

  And then she sees the fish. Her first tropical fish. It is thin, nearly transparent, a tapering glass rod with shoebutton eyes. It floats a few feet below the surface, becoming visible, then invisible again in the shifting light. She follows it for a while, swaying back and forth in the gentle current with it, then notices others along the edges of the reef. Flat dark fish like wet, black velvet with a lemon yellow line along their backs, and dozens of tiny guppy-sized blips an iridescent, electric blue. Near the mouth of the lagoon she sees hundreds of fish float sideways as a wave breaks, all of them together, like fallen leaves skittering in formation.

  Kritter finds it hard to believe that any of these fish are real, that no one puts them into the lagoon every morning and scoops them up or turns them off when the beach path is roped shut at dusk each night. No one decided on what colors they should be and ordered them by the case, stocking
the lagoon the way Disneyland is stocked with pirates.

  She smiles at that thought a few minutes later when she is surrounded by a school of cartoon-colored fish. Huge dusty pink fish with bright blue-green lips, doting aunt expressions. Fish the size of small collies. She reaches out to touch one but it darts away easily.

  Kritter follows the school, enchanted by the way their colors shift from pink to blue-green and back again in the shimmering light. They circle her, playing tag, almost close enough to touch, close enough that she can feel a feathery brush of moving water as they swim by.

  She could swim with them forever. It is so different from swimming in a pool. Here she feels, for the first time in her life, graceful. She moves as if she is as liquid as the water surrounding her. Everything is so beautiful, and as she thinks that, she feels uncomfortable. Beauty stuff is for girls, and she will never be a girl. She kicks the thought away with a powerful thrust of her flippers, and dives a foot or two beneath the surface, skirting the edge of a shelf of sharp coral.

  When she comes up to blow the water out of her snorkel, she sees her mother waving for her to swim back. Reluctantly Kritter heads toward shore, and when the water is shallow enough, she stands up. Gravity is a rude shock. Her body becomes heavy again. She can feel the fluidness leave her as she leaves the water—waist deep, knee deep, ankle deep through the surf—until she is plodding through the sand.

  She looks toward the porch of the bungalow. Her mother has the movie camera up to her face, the red light indicating that it’s on, recording Kritter’s—no, Kristine’s—every awkward footfall. She knows she will relive this moment again, watching herself on screen in the third person. As she takes off her mask her eyes are stinging, and she can’t tell if it’s the salt water or the memory of the graceful creature the camera and her mother cannot see.