Snap, p.12
Snap, page 12
“It was pretty scary,” Roxanne said to her father that night in the bar.
“I bet it was. They’re wild animals.”
Roxanne hadn’t cared that much at the time. She thought very little about the whole event. It was just a raccoon, which fell out of her tree, which ran away, which no longer tore up the neighborhood trash. But Monique had been sitting on Roxy s bed and had seen it all happen through Roxy’s window.
So it just wasn’t quite fair, because Roxanne could just as easily have witnessed it herself, through her own two beautiful eyes.
2
ROXANNE’S MOTHER SCREAMS, “WHERE’S THAT GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING HALF A Q-TIP?” and then starts muttering, “I bet she picked it up. She threw it out. She’s thrown out a perfectly clean half a Q-Tip. ROXANNE!”
The door to Roxanne’s room swings open. There isn’t a lock. Susan wears knee-high stockings, a white underwire bra and Roxanne’s own tangerine-colored nylon bikini panties. She’s all gooseflesh when she gets excited, and she’s always excited now that the wedding is only a few days away. She is marrying Roxy’s father again, for the umpteenth time, unless he calls it off, which he’ll probably do at the very last minute when the justice of the peace is in the living room clearing his throat. But if he doesn’t call it off, then they’ll all three move to a bigger house, not on Mulberry Street. Two bathrooms, Roxy hopes.
“Mommy, do you know those underpants have Sammy’s name stenciled on the bottom?” Roxanne asks.
“Oh, God.”
“The Q-Tip’s in the ashtray on the coffee table in the living room.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. Please don’t move my things around, okay? Okay, Roxanne?”
Roxanne shrugs. The ashtray is smooth glass rounded like a scooped-out teardrop, meant to be free of ashes, and the Q-Tip isn’t the first thing Roxanne has ever picked off the floor and put in there. Stray coins, hair combs, a cuff link that never was claimed. Mostly she wishes she might crawl into it herself and lie down in a languid, lazy way, warmed by the glassy reflection it would throw around her, and be forgotten. It would be like the claw-footed bathtub her father has in his brownstone in Richmond. Supposedly. She’s never seen it, but he’s told her about it. Four lion’s feet, with sculpted claws amid tufts of sculpted fur, poised for the kill on the white tile floor of his fancy bathroom. Roxanne and Susan’s bathroom features a stall shower of poured, molded plastic; the water falls in rounds of thunder claps. On a ledge molded into the plastic sits a wedge of soap and a shared pink disposable razor. Roxanne’s room is really not a room at all but a slant-roof space adjacent to the bathroom, surely a closet when the house was still a whole house and not divided. The space contains a window but no closet; Roxanne hangs her jeans and blouses from the window’s one bent curtain rod. In the morning, she parts the clothes hangers to look at the day. At night, she slides them back together. She keeps her pink Baskin-Robbins uniform rolled up and stored under the bed so that she never has to see it. On her side of the bathroom door hangs a full-length oval mirror. When the door is closed, the mirror doubles the size of the room. Roxanne shares this larger world with her own reflection, a girl on a bed, always brushing her hair. The girl is beautiful, and not even Roxy can second-guess her. One minute, Roxy might be studying her math, fooling with problems, but if she glances at the mirror the girl has her fingers laced through her hair, teasing and stroking or just then reaching for a comb.
To get to the bathroom, Susan has to cut through Roxanne’s room, of course. In a way this arrangement is fair, because Susan’s room is just a portion of the living room lopped off by a pleated wall that pushes open or shut on two sets of tracks. Beyond the tracks her mother’s room is dusky and smells of birds. There’s an old down comforter and six soft feather pillows on a giant, unmade bed. This leaves the bathroom, the kitchen and the remaining one third of the living room as shared territory. Roxy and her mother get along most amenably in the bathroom, one brushing her teeth while the other smears dollops of cold cream, one braiding her hair while the other fluffs hers, each sufficiently self-absorbed to stay out of the other’s way. For a mother and teenage daughter, they get along fine, just fine, and are careful to avoid each other when necessary. Sometimes they talk, sometimes they just don’t bother.
“Are you going shopping today?” Susan asks. “Buy another box of Q-Tips. But not Johnson and Johnson. But not the cheapest kind, either. I don’t think I care to wear my daughter’s boyfriend’s name on my crotch, either, thank you.” Susan changes underpants and snaps the elastic waistband of her skirt, then bends to adjust the hem. She locates the Q-Tip, and, back in Roxy’s room, becomes very still while twirling the swab first in one ear, then the other.
“Not that I think you should be wearing his name on your ass, either, Roxanne. You’re only fifteen, for God’s sake. You can keep it in your dresser but please don’t wear it. I remember you used to have Days of the Week. How long have you been going out with Sam now, anyway?”
“Sammy. Eight months.”
“Well, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. Christ. I mean, please be careful, okay, Roxanne?”
“I am.” The truth.
“Don’t get pregnant.’
“I won’t.”
“Are you on the pill?”
“No.”
“You have a diaphragm?”
“No. Don’t worry, Mom.”
“Are you having sexual intercourse with him?”
“No.”
“Oh, ho-ho.” Roxanne’s mother tosses the waxy Q-Tip into the trash and then vanishes into her own room. She emerges in one of her starched white blouses, buttoning the cuffs and then demurely looping the narrow cloth ribbons of her bonnet. The bonnet is printed with small blue flowers to match the skirt and has a brim wide enough to keep out the sun.
“I don’t even mind these stupid costumes anymore,” Susan says.
“I hardly notice them, either.” A lie. Roxy’s mother guides tourists through Colonial Williamsburg, describing the sights and telling off-color jokes about the earliest innkeepers. In colonial garb, she looks like Liza Minelli dressed as Bo Peep. The resemblance to Liza Minelli is one of her more striking features, and Susan makes the most of it. She is colorful, weird, flamboyant and awkward. She wears a spider haircut, smeared lipstick and green fingernails like in Cabaret. Roxanne believes her mother’s appearance is responsible for her mother’s temperament, and not the other way around. It is the runny mascara that causes Susan sleepless nights, the too-pale cheeks that make her nervous, the runs in her stockings that make her nick the coffee table every time she crosses the living room.
Susan agrees appearances can run a person’s life. To back it up, she likes to tell this story: Right in the middle of her first divorce from Roxanne’s father, when Roxanne is only eight years old, Susan drives her friend Annette’s car from Richmond to Williamsburg to apply for a job. She wants one of the tour guide jobs. The other positions — sweeping thresholds with rush brooms, stitching wigs, cutting gingerbread men — are too servile. Besides, she likes being on her feet and talking all day. It’s a Saturday and raining a fine, foggy rain, so Susan takes along Roxy and Roxy’s stuffed whale. Up to Personnel she climbs, daughter in tow, both dressed in good new blue jeans and turtleneck sweaters, one mauve, one gray, both misted from rain, hopeful and disheveled.
No luck. “Fill out this application,” she is told. “In ink, please. And mail it back.”
Susan drives home, parks Roxy and whale with Annette, wipes off the silver eyeshadow, puts on a slimming skirt and new pantyhose, black pumps borrowed from Annette, the same mauve turtleneck but also a jade pendant snitched from a display in her husband’s store. The jade has been carved into a miniature latticed pagoda, whose sloping tiled roof Susan kisses for luck before driving fifty miles back to Personnel, where she is hired on the spot and decked out in no time like Martha Washington in bonnet, apron and petticoat.
“No pantaloons!” she likes to exclaim. “How do they expect us to behave like ladies?”
To which Roxy thinks, every time, Just be one, Mom. Stop behaving like one.
Roxanne troubles herself only to appear serene in the face of small adversities. Small, because she trusts that the big ones will pass her by. Simply, there are people around whom bad news converges, and she is not going to be one of them. Roxanne has big, round walnut eyes and honey-colored hair that falls in separate spiraling tendrils below her shoulders. Also a covering of baby fat turned womanly, and a subtlety of expression characteristic of Venus on the half shell, floating quietly to shore. She hoards her own secrets, not even sharing them with her best friend, Monique, who makes too big a deal out of things. To Roxanne, a secret is a kind of private joke, not one you laugh at but one that keeps you pleased with yourself. For example, Susan, despite her shrewdness, is wrong in supposing Roxanne to have had sexual intercourse with Sammy. Roxanne is still a virgin. She has never even reached orgasm with Sammy. She thinks of her body as a small, high lake containing layers of warmth amid pockets of cool reserve, the stillness of its surface not disrupted but emphasized by mysterious patches of sweeping, flickering motion. Her thing with Sammy has provided just the perfect blend of tension and release, like a rowboat traversing the width of the pond or circling its perimeter, pausing here and there in the shadowed recesses overhung with spruce. Moored, the rowboat rolls and slaps, rolls and slaps, but patiently. Not that Sammy isn’t skilled. He is loyal to the rhythm of his hand and tongue, and his ministrations carry her gradually and steadily upward like a bubble that upon reaching the surface simply merges without ever seeming to break. He doesn’t seem to know she doesn’t come. She supposes he thinks she does it quietly, the way she does everything else. She puts a hand on his head to stop him and then goes down on him herself, sucking slowly and deeply or just seeming to explore him, all of which she finds perfectly acceptable except for the ferocity with which he suddenly breaks, how he shudders and yells and spurts hot, salty, sticky semen all over both of them as if his whole self has exploded. Not all men sweat, supposedly. Monique s boyfriend, Jim, doesn’t, but gets a dry, warm glaze all over his shoulders and down the whole length of his knobby spine. Sammy does, and his eyelids twitch and flutter and his toes and fingers grip air. No, she won’t fuck him. All that jackhammering and splitting apart. Besides, she’s not in love with him and won’t be, either. Monique is in love with Jim, and gets all wrapped up in Jim’s details. Jim did this, Jim said that, Jim thinks this, Jim does that. Anything Jim says or does could shatter her. Roxanne thinks about an egg that won’t crack when you squeeze it. Grip it as hard as you can and still it won’t break. But Sammy’s too dumb and persistent; give him the egg, he holds it out over the sink, squeezing and squeezing, trying too hard. Sammy doesn’t understand how Roxanne feels. To be fair, she has never told him. He thinks they’re working up to something, and that sooner or later they’re going to really do it.
Monique inquires, “What on earth do you do, anyway, if you don’t fuck? How do you stop in the middle?”
“It’s not the middle, really. Think about it,” Roxanne tells her friend. “It’s not like that. We finish. We’re satisfied. We just don’t have the opportunity to go any further. We don’t have the privacy. We don’t have a car. His mother’s at home. She doesn’t work. My bed’s too small, too, it’s a day bed, on castors. It rolls.”
To Sammy she says, “I can’t do it with your mother so close. I feel like she’s getting off on us.”
Which is no excuse, either, because of course it’s not true. His mother can’t even hear them; she plays the piano and sings. She does a song Roxy learned in the sixth grade choir, which Roxy didn’t get then, but she gets it now. It’s called “Today,” and in it people taste each other’s strawberries and drink each other’s wine.
Sammy’s mother sings, Ooooh.
And then, Ahhhh.
The lyrics don’t help matters, Roxy supposes, lying on the closet floor with Sammy on top. The closet is the size of her room, with rods all around hung with winter coats, outdated dresses, army blankets and creepy giant zippered clothing bags.
“These bags give me the creeps,” Roxy argues. They are batlike, upside-down with their wings folded, swaying just a little, half alive and half dead, nightmarish, and who could relax with them hanging around, making her nervous?
Monique, that’s who.
So Sammy offers to slide the clothing bags all to one corner of the closet, where they can be ignored. He’ll push the coats to one side, too, and the dresses to the other. He’ll devise a little cave. He pulls himself up, takes an army blanket from a hanger, folds it twice and lays it on the floor.
“Too scratchy,” says Roxanne.
He unzips one of the clothing bags, flips through it, pulls out one of his mother’s wrap-around skirts made of brushed dyed cotton, soft as a cloud, and spreads it on top of the harsh wool blanket. The skirt is batik; violet sparrows perching on scarlet cattails.
Roxy says the closet stinks of mothballs.
“Camphor’s a stimulant,” Sammy insists, kissing her, removing her blouse, button by button. He gets to her jeans, undoes the snap, follows the zipper down with his tongue.
Roxy watches her own legs parting: creamy thighs, bent knees and then a stirring of desire.
Below them in the dining room, a bit muffled, his mother still plays and sings on. And on. She seems to have forgotten a few of the words, but still the sense of the song comes through. I’ll la la la la la, I’ll la la la clover, she sings.
Roxy closes her eyes.
“I could get pregnant. It’s not a good time.’
“I have a rubber.”
“Your mother stopped playing. She’s coming upstairs.’
“She’s going out shopping.”
“It’s too cramped in here, Sammy. It’s too bright. That bulb. No, don’t turn it off. I don’t want to do it in the dark the first time. I don’t really want to do it now Sammy, okay?” Not true. She wants to do it, but she wants to do it by herself. If only Sammy would leave her alone in the closet for a minute. Her legs already parted, her insides fiery hot.
“What if we get something on your mother’s skirt?” she says.
“She has a hundred skirts.” But Sammy relents, settles down, stops pressuring her for the time being.
Roxanne lies back, cups her hands on her breasts, waits out the sensation. Then it’s her turn. Both hands. Sammy climaxes at once. He has acne on his back and chest, and she is always most aware of it when he is coming. It seems to alter in color. He has acne on his face, too. So does Monique. Not much, but there is always a pimple or two. Roxy’s father’s skin is pasty and thick, and her mother’s cheeks are pitted with open pores. The equation doesn’t balance. How did Roxy come about? Her skin is peaches and cream all over, and smooth as anything.
3
ON THE FRIDAY after school has let out for the summer, Susan sends her daughter on what seems to be an ordinary errand: Roxy and Sammy are to take DOG Street to Capitol Landing Road up to Ida Mack’s house, and pay in advance for Susan’s wedding cake. The wedding is only two days away, but a payment made even so much as a day in advance is a much-needed gesture of good faith. The wedding will take place, it seems to say.
“Much needed by you, or him?” Roxy inquires. Her mother only snickers. That same marriage has come and gone so many times that there’s no telling who is responsible. Roxanne thinks, No one, that’s who’s responsible, and that’s the problem, too. Mostly she keeps her mouth shut, and now she takes the sixty dollars and starts off walking with Sammy. Susan says to keep the change, if there is any, it’s Roxy’s father’s anyway.
“Buy yourselves a trick-or-treat,” is what she tells them.
The afternoon has a lingering, hanging-on quality, as if the world is made for tourists out to waste time and get suntanned. Glass clinks against glass in the outdoor beer garden behind the inn on DOG Street, while on the green a flock of sheep basks lazily like a single, drifting animal. Two dogs romp in the prison yard, and far-off piccolos shriek like birds. Roxy had been in the prison cells once, for a look. She’d wandered in with Monique last autumn, their four clogs thud-thudding on the packed dirt floors. Monique made one of her faces, ghostly sound track included, and they’d marched on out into the flow of tourists and drifting, spiraling leaves. Later, in winter, Roxanne went back, poked her head in each cell, found one she liked. One on the end with a tiny high window, a space that seemed open and closed, simultaneously. She liked the dirt floor; she wondered how far down it went before hitting bedrock. There, she devised a plan: to go back one night with a blanket, an orange and a canteen of water, and sleep out. Just her and the frozen night. But she never did go. Now Sammy is clowning in the stocks like a tourist, wanting everyone to take his picture. Roxy stands by the fence and waits, wishing she’d kept the sixty dollars herself instead of letting him hold on to it. She wears a tank top and a short, flared dirndl skirt of sea-green knitted cotton, breezy around her thighs. No pockets. Now Sammy’s got his head in the stocks. Roxy can see, reflected in the mirrored lenses of his glasses, a dual image of the girl in the mirror leaning against a split rail fence, alone among a crowd of tourists, her fingers in her hair.
From the Macks’ driveway a slate walk leads to the front door between rows of spent flowers, their tops lopped off. In a red clay pot lies a heap of bruised petals, purple as night. Just beyond, in the yard, stands a gathering of small trees in varying stages of bloom: bud, blossom and wilted spray. Roxy guesses cherry, dogwood, apple. At the base of their three trunks is a cleared oval of turned earth ready for planting. Sammy presses the doorbell. Nothing. Roxy is disappointed. She’d wanted a look inside. Grass pokes up between the blue-gray slates of the porch, but somehow even the weeds look tended, lush and green as if they belong. The place feels like an island, as if at any second the rest of Virginia might drop away from it. Her father and his brownstone would stop being real. Her mother, too. Monique and Jim. Sammy. Baskin-Robbins, and in it Roxy with her hair bound in hair nets, her perfect wrists sticky with chocolate syrup. Another Roxy, wrapped in a sarong, perhaps, will make herself at home on this island. Flowers in her hair. At once she asks Sammy to give her the money; she’ll hold on to it herself. But Sammy has already walked back down the path toward the driveway, where an electric-blue Volkswagen Rabbit is parked. What is he up to? Mystified, she watches him open the hatch and crawl inside. Then he shimmies through the rear and over the back seats to the front. Roxy goes up close enough to see. Sammy sits inside with the keys latched to a furry foot nestled in the palm of his hand, fie grins, beckons her closer and rolls down the window.
