I hate Mama sometimes. I know God will punish me for that, but right now I don’t care. All I want to do now is punch her in the face, make her hurt the way she’s been making me hurt. But I can’t. I’ve never hit her before (though I’ve heard her telling her friend Elsie on the phone that she’s afraid I will someday). But I can tell she knows I want to. She can probably see it in my eyes. And mother fuck if she hasn’t been kicking me as if I’d gone ahead and done it like I’d wanted to in the first place. You can’t win with her; she’ll smack you for even thinking wrong.
I’m down on the floor, crying, dragging myself back and forth around the fake fireplace heater in our front room. Her feet are like wooden stakes being hammered into my ribs. “Get off the floor, damn you!” she’s screaming, grunting from the strain. Sometimes she really connects and I feel the pain like an electric shock along my side going all the way down to the soles of my feet. But I won’t get up, because I know if I do she’s going to start slapping me in the face again, and I’d rather be kicked than slapped any day. Instead, I’m hoping she’ll just get tired of what she’s doing and go the fuck away.
It seems like a lot to go through for something so small; she’d been putting on her makeup, getting ready to go out for the night, and she’d told me to do something—empty the trash, wash the dishes, I can’t remember anymore—and I wanted her to say please. Nothing big. But I guess when I opened my mouth to tell her, I came across wrong. “Please?!” Her mouth got that crazy, twisted look, and her face got so red so fast that I knew I’d had it even before she made a move. She jumped up from her dresser chair and hit me hard across the mouth with the back of her open hand. “I’m your mother, for crissake,” she spit at me. “You just do as your told, and keep your goddamn mouth shut, or I’ll slap you again so fast it’ll make your head swim.” I hated that phrase: so fast it’ll make your head swim. She said it a lot, and it always had to do with one of us kids being slapped or otherwise knocked around.
I must have been in one of my more self-righteous moods: I thought of the empty cupboards and refrigerator, and how she always seemed to have money for going out—in fact, these thoughts might have been the real reason I was being such a little shit—anyway, I just stood there for a second, tight-lipped, staring at her. I had already started getting that “fog” around me that always seems to come when I know I’m about to do something I’m going to get hurt real bad for. “Not until you say please,” I said. It was someone else’s voice, I swear. I couldn’t hear myself in it at all.
That was it: she raised her hand to slap me again, but when I raised my arm to block it, she must have thought I was going to take a swing at her, because she jerked herself back a step, and I could just make out a brief shadow of fear flicker across her face. It lasted only a second. When she realized I wasn’t going to follow through, the red came back into her face as if a light under her skin had been turned on, and she hit me again with all her might. It was so quick and hard it knocked me down.
“Don’t you ever raise your fist to me like that again, do you hear me?!” she barked, kicking me now. “Don’t you ever, ever, ever!” Her thrusts were in time with her voice, as if the word could give her feet more strength. And now, it’s been some minutes and she’s still going for me, like I’d pulled the plug on some craziness she’s built up over a long time, until I can’t take it any more; I struggle to my feet—she slaps me then, as I knew she would—and run for the door, and, outside, the freedom of the warm summer night. She’s still screaming as I hit the sidewalk, something about not troubling myself to come home tonight, and I fight off telling her to go fuck herself. I don’t know why, but for some reason I can’t seem to say anything like that to her.
I don’t worry for long over where to go. I head up West Point Loma Boulevard, then south along Abbott Street, toward South Beach, where the new pier they just built is opening, and I figure I can waste some time. She’ll be gone in a little while and then I can go back, unless she’s locked the door—she does that whenever she’s pissed at one of us kids, or if she’s come home early and she’s humping some guy she’s picked up down at the Red Garter, something I’m really not inclined to listen to—and then I have to stay out for the night. Still, I’m irritated to think I keep forgetting to open a window to the bedroom I share with my sisters for just such an eventuality.
Not that staying out would necessarily be that bad tonight. The temperature’s pretty warm, even on this, the west—seaward—side of the Point Loma peninsula, and a lemony-bright moon just now popping over the hill to the east, above the San Diego Bay, so close you’d think you could hit it with a rock if you wanted to. Full moon, that silver glow over everything, and on nights like this I like to walk through the otherwise dark alleys between the rows of houses and see what I can see. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not necessarily naked people or sex I’m particularly interested in seeing (though if I happen to stumble upon a good fuck going on through a nearby bedroom window, I’m as likely as the next kid to hang around for awhile); it’s just the idea of being hidden and still being able to see other people doing whatever people do, eating, reading the paper, watching the tube.
But tonight there’s something knotted up in my chest, and I suddenly realize I’m not particularly in the mood to be alone. So I head back then up Muir Street toward Steve Collins’ house, hoping he’s home. I knew Steve in fourth grade, and again in my eighth-grade wood shop class, and he’s always been good for some laughs or a game of rummy or just to hang out with and listen to music. But when I get there a couple of minutes later, I see things aren’t that much better for Steve than they are for me—even from the sidewalk outside his opened gate, I can hear his mother from an open window, yelling at him and is older brother Billy. “That’s right, that’s right,” she’s squealing in her little, high-pitched voice, “you just keep talkin’ like that, and you’ll get yours. Your daddy’s going to be home any minute, now, and when I tell him what’s been going on and how you both have been treating me—“
“Yeah, yeah,” I hear a younger voice, Steve’s, mumble close by the window, and I can imagine him holding his hand in the air, moving the fingers to imitate a chattering mouth. Then the front door opens and he steps out onto his small wooden porch, his bright blond hair lit up by the yellow porch light. He closes the door and stands there looking at me looking at him from the gate. “Whadda you want?” he says sullenly. He jumps down the steps to the walkway and heads out the gate, past me, down the street toward the beach.
“They’re opening the new pier tonight,” I say, running to catch up with him. “I thought maybe you’d be going to see it.” I have to be careful not to say anything like “with me” or “together”—Steve’s paranoid about getting too close to other guys, as if it’d be queer or something. He doesn’t say anything for a second, just walks so fast I have to jog to keep up.
“Yeah,” he says finally, “why not. Anything to get out of the house. My mom is really getting on my nerves.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I know what you mean.”
He throws a sour look in my direction. “You? Fuck you!” he says. “You don’t know shit.”
Steve can be such an prick sometimes. I can’t help wondering why I hang around him as much as I do, or he me. Sometimes I think he doesn’t like me at all, just wants someone he can push around, which he does most of the time. I recall the times he’d get me into some weird, illegal wrestling hold that made me think he was breaking my legs, then laugh at me when I’d cry, and call me a wussie. “Fucking wussie,” he’d say.
But I guess he has another side, too. Times when he’d call me on the phone just to say hi, or invite me over to his house to play cards, or to go to Roller Derby games with him. Things that make me wonder if he’s not such an asshole after all.
It’s almost as if Steve can read my mind—he slows and turns to look at me for a second. “Well,” he says, looking impatient, “are you gonna just keep walking back there by yourself?” He waits for me to catch up, then reaches to “slap box” with me—a game I can never seem to win, because I never learned to fight—which means things are okay, we’re friends again. But he still doesn’t say much else to me the rest of the way to the beach.
We can hear the pier party all the way from Ebers and Newport Avenues, more than a quarter mile away. There’s a rock band playing what sound like Beatles covers, and a deep-base voice from a loudspeaker saying something unintelligible between sets, and a lot of cheering and clapping by a crowd that must have everyone who lives in Ocean Beach in it, from the sound. Then the lights. By the time we reach the beach sand it’s hard to see at all for their brightness, and the yelling, bouncing people all wear sunglasses or hats or have their hands over their eyes. I look toward the pier, too, and the bandstand, but the band, the emcee, all were in shadows. You’d think the lights would be pointed toward the them instead of the crowd.
I turn to say as much to Steve, and discover that he’s nowhere to be seen, as if the crowd just opened itself up and swallowed him whole. I’ve been ditched. Fucking typical. I swear to God, I hate him sometimes. I just stand there for a minute, screaming at Steve in my head, Fuck you! Fuck the horse you fucking rode in on! I’ve taken all the fucking shit from you I’m gonna take! Words I know I’ll never have the balls to say to his face, and I can’t believe how much this makes me want to just sit there on the sand and cry. But I don’t. I can’t stay here: I don’t recognize any of the jerking, undulating faces before me. In fact, it might be because I can’t see a goddamn thing because of the lights. So I make my way through the twisting bodies toward the base of the concrete pier, in back of the bandstand where there might be some room and it’s not so bright.
When I finally get there, I Wanna Hold Your Hand is so loud I have to hold my hands over my ears, and the base guitar and drums make my stomach rumble in time to the beat. But I can see better—I’ve found a place to sit on a concrete wall that’s part of the pier’s support structure—and I’m not being shoved around by the crowd. From my perch, the crowd is a stirred up ocean of brown faces that stretches back along the beach as far as I can see. There must be thousands of them—screaming, waving, dancing—all of them strangers.
Almost all of them, that is: off to my left, close to the water at the leading edge of the crowd, I catch a glimpse of Gerry Aho, a kid who used to live two doors down from me when I was in fifth grade. We used to steal things together, until the one day a few months back when we were caught stealing candy bars from the Safeway down on Cable Street, and he got beat half to death by his dad afterward. Luckily his dad never did find out about the dozen or so bicycles, or the skin-diving equipment, or the surfboards Gerry had stashed in an abandoned shack not far from his house. I wasn’t allowed to come over anymore after that, and we drifted apart in the year that followed, until his dad got hired to work in East San Diego and they moved away, out toward La Mesa. I can’t help smiling to see him now: he’s wearing his black German helmet which is emblazoned with huge white and red painted hearts, and a liberal dose of peace symbols. A cool twist, I remember thinking when I first saw it. Anyway, Gerry’s with some other guys we both used to hang around with last year, before he moved. I know they can’t see me—I can barely keep track of them—but I figure it might be fun to hang around with them again, so I slide from the wall and start moving in their direction. It seems forever getting there.
When I get to where they are, Gerry sees me and yells “Hey! It’s Billy Soup!” He holds his hand out to steady me as I stumble over a nearby clump of seaweed, just as the band bursts into the opening chords of Help! But in a second I see it’s he that needs the hand.
“Hiya, Ger!” I yell. There’s a loudspeaker not ten feet away, and even though we’re standing face to face, I’m not sure he can hear me. The others, whose names are Larry and Ron, both nod in my direction, flash the peace sign from one hand while holding a cigarette with the other. “Yeah, hi,” I say, making a fork of my own fingers. I look back at Gerry, whose eyes are closed. “You all right?”
A big smile spreads across Gerry’s face. “Hey, I’m high, man. Reds. Just popped ‘em ‘bout half an hour ago. Want some?” He looks down and reaches into his cut-off jeans pocket, and the helmet falls to the sand, but the noise from the speakers is so loud that it could have as easily fallen into a pile of cotton. “Oh, shit!” Gerry says.
I bend down to pick the helmet up for him, and it’s then that I first notice the girl—or her legs, at least—standing in front of me. They’re nicely shaped, actually, these legs, long, with well-defined calves and tapered thighs that go all the way up to places whose dark secrets I am only now beginning to appreciate. One of the legs has a bruised shin, the dark blue mark about the size and shape of a silver dollar. When I stand, though, I see there’s nothing particularly special about the girl’s looks—dull brown hair, loose over her shoulders, out-of-place whitish skin, dark brown eyes—except that she seems to be staring at me. And immediately, something in my stomach, my chest—and my groin—has begun to stir.
Gerry takes the helmet from my hands, then drops it again trying to put it on. I think he told me once it weighs almost seven pounds, though I doubt this. “Shit!” he yells again. He stoops to pick it up himself, but before he can grasp it, I rush toward him like a football lineman and shove him, off balance, backwards away from the others, down the beach. By the time I lay off him, we’re almost to the water. “Hey, man!” he says, “what the fuck!”. He looks at me, at first confused, then pissed. “Billy, what the fuck you doing, man?”
I look back toward the others to make sure I can’t be heard—an absurd notion, given the screaming and the music that fills the air—then back at Gerry. “Who,” I hiss at him, breathless, “is that girl?”
“What girl?” We both look toward where the others are. Larry and Ron seem unconcerned that their friend has just been bulldozed from the scene. They smoke their cigarettes, trying their best to look cool, and talk animatedly to the girl, who smiles politely but looks at neither of them with interest. Occasionally she glances in our direction. “Oh,” says Gerry. “You mean Penny?”
“Is that her name?”
“Yeah.” He closes and opens his eyes as if he’s ready to fall asleep. “Penny—uh—I think Larry said ‘Martin’.
“She’s with Larry?” My stomach begins knotting.
Gerry shakes his head, like he’s trying to clear something from his brain. “No, man. He just found her on the beach this afternoon. She doesn’t belong to anybody.”
I look over to where the girl is standing. She’s still listening to those idiots Larry and Ron, but more and more she keeps glancing in our direction, and every time she does, it’s like a jolt of electricity through my chest. I can’t figure why this is; she doesn’t look much different from any other girl, and not nearly as kempt as many. Her hair looks like it needs cutting: it hangs raggedly in front of her eyes and she has to keep brushing it aside. She’s a little big around her butt and stomach, like she’s still baby-fat. And she’s got this beat-up bath towel around her shoulders that she’s holding together over her chest with one hand. Even the color of her eyes is just an ordinary, dull, milk chocolate. And yet, there’s something about those eyes—maybe the way she’s using them, I don’t know.
“How old is she?” I ask Gerry.
He closes his eyes; I can see them jerking around underneath his lids, like he’s dreaming. “No idea, man,” he sighs. I can tell he’s getting real tired of the conversation. Then he says “You got any money?” and looks at me expectantly.
The question immediately pisses me off, for in my head I’m already spending money I don’t have on this girl. “Are you kidding?” I say.
Gerry frowns and laughs at the same time. “Oh, yeah, man. I remember your story, now.” Then he laughs even harder, as if he’d just heard a good joke. I laugh, too, though I really don’t see what’s so funny.
“Hey, Ger,” I hear Larry’s voice. “If you don’t keep this thing on your head, someone’s gonna kipe it from you.” And then they are around us again. Larry is absently twirling the helmet around his balled fist, and Ron is still puffing on his cigarette and chattering nonstop to this girl, and I’m wondering if he’s maybe on speed or something. The girl looks at me every so often and purses her lips in what I guess is a smile, then looks away. And now I can’t not look at her. It’s a brutally familiar feeling: suddenly I’m back in my sixth grade classroom back at Foster Elementary, sitting across the room from Ethel Charbonneau, dying a new death every second that she’s looking at something other than me, which was just about all the time, as I recall. But this girl is looking, and more boldly with each second. And that strange half-smile. I know it’s me she’s looking at, but I turn anyway, from habit, to look in back of me, as though I’m thinking there’s someone else she might be looking at, then back to her. I can feel my face getting warmer, and it’s hard to look into her eyes, plain as they might be.
“There’s no one there,” I say, and the words surprise me, coming from my mouth. I normally don’t have the strength to talk to a girl I like but haven’t yet met. Our relationship rarely progresses beyond staring at one another over a great distance.
She blinks, and looks at my mouth as if she were trying to see what I’ve said. “What?” Her voice is almost a whisper against the band, moving now into some more current music, Satisfaction.
“I said,” I yell to her, “there’s no one back there!”
She smiles at this, straight white teeth behind dark pink lips I hadn’t really noticed before. “I know that, silly.”
My own face smiles, as if someone else is using it. And then I feel even more uncomfortable, like we’ve been left alone together, and when I look around us I see I’m exactly right: Gerry and the others have disappeared into the wild crowd. (How could I have not noticed their leaving?) Penny and I look at each other awkwardly, not quite sure what to do. Then she says: “You a friend of theirs?”
“I guess. Gerry used to live next door to me. Until he moved.”
“Oh.” She’s quiet for a time. Then she holds out her one free hand. “My name’s Penny,” she says.
I take the hand and shake it once, but hold onto it; it’s cool, and a little sweaty. “Mine’s Bill.”
“Not Billy? I thought I heard that other guy call you Billy.”
“Used to be,” I said. “But I’m older now.”
I must have shaken Penny’s arm a little hard, because her other hand loses its grip on the towel. It falls from her shoulders, and I figure out then why she had it there in the first place: the two pieces of her bathing suit don’t match—in fact, their colors, blue top and orange bottom, clash pretty badly—and the bottom is clipped at her side with a rusty safety pin. Like an idiot, I can’t help looking too long at this, and the smile falls from her face, and she grabs the towel and throws it over her shoulders again and looks straight ahead, away from me, toward the band. A redness suddenly appears in her cheeks.
A new ache fills my stomach, like ice water. I suddenly feel as if I know a lot about this girl, maybe too much about her: we’ve been to the same places. I wouldn’t be surprised if she makes some excuse to just walk away, it was nice to meet you, Billy who calls himself Bill. But she doesn’t. We stand there for a long moment, me staring at her, she glaring off into the distance. I can see the wheels turning in her head, behind her eyes. She’s tempted to hate me, I think.
“Penny,” I say. “Is that short for anything?”
I’m looking only at her face now, or what I can see of it; I won’t even think of looking at her suit again, I promise myself. Then she says something I can’t hear for the noise and the fact that she’s facing away from me.
“What?”
“Penelope!” she says loudly. She still isn’t smiling, but she turns to look at me, and her eyes land on mine and stay there.
“Penelope,” I repeat, forcing my mouth into a smile. “I like that name. It’s pretty.” Penny’s face softens, but her expression doesn’t change. I want that smile back. I want to try harder. “I mean—what I mean is—“ I stumble, “you’re pretty.”
I know I’m going to fall down from this: my heart is pounding like some sort of cannon going off in my chest, and I want to run away just so I can breathe again. I’m not lying to her, really. There is something pretty about her. I just can’t say what that is. At any rate, my efforts seem to work—Penny smiles a little nervously at me, and I can feel a tentative grin breaking across my own face, of its own accord, and I think for a moment that I might be happy again. I can’t say why. All I know is there’s something about this girl that grabs me, tight, even if her bathing suit is a little crappy looking.
The rest of the night zips by, I swear there are times when I think someone’s screwing with the celestial clock, snickering at the sight of people on the Earth wondering where the time went. Penny starts looking nervous, asks me if I know what time it is. I don’t, but a passerby tells us it’s after ten-thirty, and her face darkens noticeably at the news. “I have to go,” she says. “My mom—she starts getting worried if I’m out too late.”
“Can I walk you home?” I ask.
She smiles at this, but there’s something not quite happy about it. “No,” she says. “That’s really not a good idea. My Mom’s a little weird about boys and me. She doesn’t want me dating until I’m sixteen.”
She’s already told me she’s thirteen, and I recall something troubled in her eyes when I first asked her, that same expression I’m sure was on my own face when the store manager caught me stealing candy-bars with Gerry Aho, after he’d ordered us to empty our pockets onto the counter, that exquisitely painful moment when we were all just standing there, silent except for my own heavy breathing, looking at the candy bars, looking at each other.
“Not even just a little way?” I press, trying hard not to sound like I’m whining.
Penny shakes her head half-heartedly and gestures toward a phone booth over by the lifeguard station “I have to call her to come pick me up, and I can’t have anybody with me—at least, not a boy—when she comes.”
She makes me promise to stay put until she’s gone, then promises me she’ll see me at that same spot the next day at one o’clock. I watch then as she walks slowly across the sand to the phone booth, and I curse myself for not having the guts to at least try to kiss her. I watch her as she makes her call, watch her for the next ten minutes until an old Buick pulls up to the curb and she gets in, pausing beforehand for the briefest of seconds to glance in my direction. Watch as her door closes gently and the old beater begins chugging down Abbott Street and disappears.
I’m lucky that night: Mama hasn’t locked the door and isn’t back from her nightly trolling when I arrive back at the house, and I wash up and go right to bed. Of course, I can’t sleep, for the music and Penny’s visage in my head. At one a.m., Mama finally stumbles in with someone whose deep but quiet voice I can barely make out. Mama chatters and giggles, and they go to her bedroom, and for the next hour and a half I have to listen to their pounding and Mama’s disgusting animal noises through the wall that separates us. I wonder if I ought to have stayed out after all, but eventually it is quiet, and I sleep.
The next morning, I’m up and out of the house by ten. Mama’s room buzzes with snoring in two different keys; apparently her latest fuck hasn’t left yet. I’m tempted for a second to bang on her door for some change—I can get a Hostess pie for twenty cents—but then it occurs to me I’d have to look at her, at them together. Fuck it, I think. I can swipe one from the little grocery store down on Abbott Street, and I’ve got a few cents change of my own for a carton of chocolate milk.
The morning air is damp, but not unpleasant, and the walk to the market cheers me. The guy who runs the market is in the back somewhere when I come in, so stuffing a pie (I like the berry) down my pants is a breeze, and I get the chocolate milk from the cooler and stand at the counter. It’s a full minute before he comes out, barely hiding his irritation at having to interrupt his stocking or whatever he does back there. “Fifteen cents,” he says curtly, then “Have a nice day,” after he scoops up my nickel and dime from the counter. I breathe, relieved, and walk out the door. Truth is, I’ve never been a fearless thief. There’s always a sort of gnawing in my stomach, the slight terror that I’ve somehow been found out, that I’ve been careless. I walk around to the alley in back of the store and find a quiet corner where I can eat in peace. The pie is delicious. And when I’m done I wash my hands and face from a hose bib on the back of somebody’s garage, then head down Ebers Street, toward downtown Ocean Beach.
Newport Avenue is already pretty busy; most of the shops open at nine, and it’s already nearly eleven. I make my way down to Cable Street, to Dersch’s Jewelers, next to the Save-All drugstore. The doorbells tinkle as I walk in the door, and an old man behind the counter, whom I assume is Mr. Dersch, glances up at me briefly from a black felt pad on the counter where he is showing a couple of women some chain. “Be with you in a moment,” he says, then turns his attention to the women. Already I can tell this is going to work out well. I walk over to the far end of the counter, and to the rotating chain display sitting atop it. I know exactly what I’m looking for. Several hooks jut out from this display, and suspended from each of them is a great selection of variously colored St. Christopher medallions hanging from stainless steel chains. Kids I know call them, simply, ‘Christophers.’ I choose several of them and carefully lay them down on the glass counter, and wait, fingering each of them, trying the different colors in my mind’s eye. Finally, one of the Christophers catches my eye: a gold center with a forest green ring on the outside. That’s the one. Now I’m just waiting, watching for my opportunity. My heart had begun to race even before I came into the store; now it’s beating so hard I can’t believe no one notices. At last the old man bends down to pull another jewelry pad from the display case, and I drop the Christopher and its silvery chain easily into my pants pocket.
A minute later and I’ve hung all the other Christophers back onto their hooks, and sailed out of the store, mumbling half under my breath that I’d be back when he got some different colors. The old man doesn’t even blink, in fact he even smiles at me a little, which somehow makes me feel a little sorry for him. Taking stuff from big companies, banks and the like, is easy: you don’t have a face to look at, it’s all very impersonal. Taking stuff from people is different: you have to think of something negative about them, something that justifies your taking from them. You don’t mind stealing from assholes, they’re just getting their due. But people like this old man, nice people, who are simply too old or stupid to be on the lookout for people like me, well, you just feel sorry for them, that’s all.
True to her word, Penny shows up in front of the lifeguard station at one o’clock, and when I first catch sight of her getting out of her mom’s beat-up Buick, I see she’s still wearing that bathing suit, and it looks even worse in the daylight. But her hair is clean and she’s got it pulled back into a pony tail that really does make her look pretty. And her fast, easy smile when I stand before her is so good that, after awhile, I don’t even notice her clothes, what sort of car her mom drives, wouldn’t care if she lived in a house that’s even shittier than mine. And when we swim together in the bubbling surf, we laugh and shriek, just like the goofy tourists who act as if they’ve never been to the beach before, because for some reason everything with Penny seems new and different. She holds my hand, sitting on her bath towel in the hot sand, and her eyes actually glisten when I ask her to go steady with me, and she says yes, and I give her my Christopher to wear, and I kiss her lips in the awkward fashion of thirteen-year-olds, and she holds the medal close to her chest as if she were afraid it will fall from her neck. And, until she has to go home again, we count ourselves as two of the happiest kids in the world.
But it’s the same old story when I get home that night: I can’t find anything to eat, and Mama’s getting ready to go out again. Our fight from the night before seems to have been forgotten, and I’m not about to bring it up. “Where are you going tonight?” I ask, opening the bathroom door. I can smell the vinegar of her douche—it slaps me in the face like a hand—and so I close the door; there isn’t really anything in there I want to see anyway.
“None of your business,” I hear her say from behind the door. “Why?”
“No reason.” I walk back into the kitchen. “Mama, I’m hungry. Do we have anything to eat? It’s about dinner time.”
There’s a slapping noise—she’s putting on her cologne. “I think there’s some peanut butter,” she says. “You can make a sandwich.”
“Aw, jeez, Mama, can’t we have something beside peanut butter sometime?” I go to the cupboard: there’s some bread—a couple of heels that are hard, and another part of a loaf that’s green from mold; some crackers; tomato sauce; peanut butter; and canned squash, which I can’t stand. I decide to eat peanut butter and crackers, which I string out over the counter. There are no clean knives; I hunt through the stacked dirty dishes in the sink to find one, and run it under hot water.
“I want those done when I come home tonight,” says Mama, walking past me in her bathrobe; the smell of vinegar mixed with cheap cologne trails after her like a poisonous gas.
All at once I feel like screaming at her, to get rid of the sudden fiery ache she kindles inside me when she talks to me like that, but then I remember the night before and I decide it may be better to just shut up. Thank God, she doesn’t press me for an answer.
A few minutes later, in front of her dresser mirror, she says: “Elsie says she saw you down at the beach today, and you were with some girl.”
“Yeah,” I say, my mouth full of peanut butter and crackers, “so?”
“So? I’m your mother, for crissake. Don’t I have a right to know who she is?”
“I didn’t think you’d care,” I say, right away knowing I’ve fucked up. I catch myself: “I mean, I didn’t think it was that important.” She’s quiet for a moment; bottles clink, sprays spray. I can tell she’s almost ready to go. Fine, I think, leave me the fuck alone.
“Well,” she says finally.
“Well what?”
She lets out a deep breath; a bottle hits the dresser top, hard. “Listen, young man, if you don’t get off your little high-horse, right this minute, I’m going to come out there and slap you so hard it’ll make your head swim!”
I chew on a cracker for a second or two. “Her name’s Penny,” I say finally.
“Penny?” Mama’s out of the bedroom now, and comes into the kitchen to get a glass of water, and, before drinking it, drops a small yellow pill onto her tongue. She gulps down the water and then puts the glass with the other dishes in the sink. “Penny. What’s her last name?”
“Martin.”
Mama’s face goes a little sour at this. “Martin? Where does she live?”
“Over by the community center. On Santa Monica. Why?”
The sour look lingers for a few seconds, then disappears. She shakes her head and waves her hand as if to say it doesn’t matter, then walks back to the living room, where I know her jacket and purse are waiting on the couch.
I don’t get the chance to ask her again: there’s a hard knock at the front door, and when I get to the living room, Mama has it open, and there’s Penny on the porch with a woman who looks like she might be Penny’s mother. She looks considerably older than my own mother, though, maybe in her forties, but she’s got these big gold earrings dangling from her ears that I’ve seen some of the kids at the beach wearing, and I can’t help thinking they look really stupid on her. I haven’t heard Mama say anything yet, but the woman is looking past her, then right at me when I come into the room. “Is that him?” she asks, in a voice like sand. She cocks her head to see Penny—looking real upset, so I know something’s wrong—nodding her head. The woman’s earrings are swinging like mad, and I think they’re big enough that they might actually pull her earlobes off.
“What is it you want?” Mama asks the woman, confused. “What happened?” She looks back at me with that sour look of hers. “What’d you do?”
“Nothing,” says the woman, answering for me. “Not yet, anyway.” The woman is still staring at me, hard. “Pen,” she says carefully, “why don’t you and him go outside for awhile—and try to keep your hands off each other! I want to talk to his mother alone.”
I can tell Mama doesn’t know what to think of this, but she looks back at me like she expects me to go, so I walk out. Penny has already started down the short cement walkway toward the rear of the duplex, and when she steps out into the alley and the light of the sun, she turns and looks at me, and I can tell she’s been crying and there are more tears on the way.
“What—?” But my words are cut short by the door slamming shut behind me, and through the living room screen we hear the old woman say to Mama:
“I don’t know how this thing got started, Barbara, but I want a stop to it.” She says ‘Barbara’ like it was the name of some sort of cockroach.
“Excuse me?” says Mama, “I’m not following things here—just what exactly are you talking about?”
“Barbara, I’m talking about your son, and my daughter. Together. You understand? I want a stop put to it. My daughter’s too young, too innocent to be—” She pauses, apparently to search for the right word. “—corrupted?”
An awkward silence follows. I see the women in my mind’s eye just staring at each other. “Corrupted?” says my mother, as if the word, the definition, isn’t quite registering with her. But there’s something growing in her voice, a tightening in her throat that I can hear. “Just what the hell is that supposed to mean?” she says lowly.
“Just this,” says the woman, again with the sand in her voice, “I won’t have any of my family associating with the son of a—shall I say it out loud?”
“Oh, say it, please,” says Mama, her voice straining.
“Alright then—the son of a whore,” says the woman. “There. I’ve said it. I’ve said what I came to say.”
I hear Mama cough, and in my mind’s eye I can see her mouth open and her face glowing red. “What?” she says quietly. “What did you just say?”
“I don’t think I need to repeat myself.” The woman was talking fast, now, as if she were suddenly in a great hurry. “You’ve lived here a long time, Barbara, and we all know what kind of woman you—“
“Why, you self-righteous old bitch!” Mama screams, in a voice like a hoarse screech. “You have the gall to stand there and call me a whore? You think I don’t know who you are, Rowena Martin? And all the men I’ve seen you with, what in God’s name do you call yourself?! And I know damn well you’re not giving it to them free!
“Now just a goddamn—!”
I can’t hear the rest; it’s like this fog’s just rolled in around Penny and me, until I can hardly see anything but her, and I can’t hear anything at all. Her face is wet, and she’s looking at me as if I were some dog she’s stumbled across that’s just been run over by a car.
“Oh, God, Billy,” she says, shaking. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. I told you, she’s weird about boys—!”
I don’t know what to say to her. I reach over to touch her face, the tears flowing freely now, and she takes my hand and pulls me to her and holds me, shaking. “It’s okay,” I say, holding her more tightly. “It’s not your fault. It doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter.” But she goes limp in my arms, and when I look at her, she’s got that dead expression people get when words alone aren’t enough to take away the hurt, when nothing is enough.
“It’s no good, Billy,” she says, tiredly. “No good.”
I want to say to her, “Listen,” I say, “listen to me. I’m saying it doesn’t matter to me, what your mom is, what my mom is, it doesn’t mean we’re the same! Does it?” But the knot rising in my stomach reaches up to my throat and squeezes. I say nothing.
“It’s no good,” she says again. “I have to go, to stay away. Before they’re finished. You understand, don’t you?”
Just mentioning them brings their voices to me and I clap my hands over my ears to shut them out. But what I hear isn’t so much a sound anymore as it is an idea, a thought, and there’s no shutting that out.
“No, Penny, please?”
She reaches into her coat pocket and pulls out my Christopher, takes my hand and presses the medallion into it; it falls to the ground when she lets go. Then she turns and walks away without looking back, down the darkened alley, disappearing into the fog that I hadn’t thought was real.
And now I am standing alone in the dark alley, numbly staring into the gathering fog, surrounded by the braying shrieks of the two old whores: voices I know I’ll hear for the rest of my life.