Hick - Andrea Portes [50]
Eddie makes a face and grabs a bottle of Jack Daniels out the sack by the side of the bed. He’s a long man. His legs go from one end of the bed to the other, one folded on top, not even straight out. He starts switching channels. Switch. Wait. Switch. Wait. Switch.
I go to take a shower, wanting to get the old geezer and the cockroach pizza and the dog-and-cat-eaten lady off me and out of my skin. I take off my clothes in the steam, wondering if I look good. I don’t even remember what looking good looks like. But I want to. I want Eddie to look at my shiny new body and be rendered helpless. I want him to lift my chin and call me honey.
But that’s a long shot.
When I was little I used to watch Tammy play dress-up. She would twirl around in front of the mirror, looking herself up and down, quiet, contemplating with two small wrinkles furrowed into her brow. That serious squint, that need and desperation, increased ten-fold with age. The older she got, the less fancy-free dress-up became. She went from twirling to turning to standing still to frowning silent.
When I was ten, my dad and I sat at the kitchen table still while she knocked bottle after bottle of Wind Song and Shalimar and Charlie onto the floor. For her grand finale, she threw a bottle of Jean Naté at her reflection, shattering the mirror into thousands of mite-sized pieces, shining out like diamonds in the orange shag rug. My dad and I sat there, contemplating the tabletop, waiting for the show to stop.
When her number was up, she passed out on the bed and he got up, quiet, quiet going up the stairs, quiet, getting down on his knees, quiet, picking up the little mini-diamonds, one by one. Then he walked to the bathroom, threw them out, quiet, walked to the bathroom, threw them out. He wouldn’t let me help, wouldn’t even let me in the room, even though his hands were bleeding at all ten fingertips and even though it was an endless job that never did get done.
The next morning my mama woke up, came down the stairs and asked, “What the fuck happened to the mirror?” It was the kind of thing you would laugh at, if it wasn’t your mama. My dad didn’t even look up from his cornflakes. He just took the blame, said he broke it and promised to buy her a new one straightaway. She walked out into the hall, shaking her head and mumbling about what kinduva idiot husband she had who’d be so clumsy as to break a mirror, seven years’ bad luck and all.
That happened when I was ten. So I reckon I got four more years in payment.
I inspect my reflection. I’m starting to look like her. My body is starting to make the same shapes her body makes, bubbling up. I don’t know what it is I’m supposed to look like. I don’t know what it is I’m supposed to be. With Eddie in the other room I feel off my game and peculiar, like I’ve done something wrong, but I don’t know what. He makes me lose my courage. He makes me feel like I wish I was better or prettier or just plain not me. He makes me feel like I’ll never be good enough and he’s right.
“You gonna be in there all night?” he yells out over the TV.
I put my clothes back on and walk out to find him sitting on the bed in nothing but his underwear, the bottle of Jack Daniels leaning against the headrest and a make-shift drink in a see-through cup resting where his belly’s supposed to be. His body is angled and disjointed like one of those paintings where the people are made up of circles and cubes. His hipbones cut through his skivvies, razor-sharp, and you can count his ribs from the front. He looks up at me.
“Jack and Coke. Cures what ails ya.”
He takes a drink. “What the hell you put those dusty ol clothes back on for?”
“Cause I don’t have nothin else.”
I try to position myself out from under the green fluorescent light. None too