Infandous (16 page)

The sun has risen and the day will be hot, but it’s early still and the streets are quiet. A couple of bums are rolling up their sleeping mats and loading up their grocery carts for another day. There’s a young couple, my age probably, tucked into each other near the entrance to my favorite thrift shop. They’re still sleeping, tangled dreads exactly the same shade of brown. Their bed is a broken-open cardboard box.

I paddle by the House of Ink and the Venice Beach Freakshow, both still closed. The Freakshow claims to have the world’s largest collection of two-headed animals. I’ve never been inside, so I’ll have to take their word for it, but the whole idea of displaying monstrosities for money reminds me of the
Gods and Lovers
display and, in a way, of my own art too.

Art and money and wealth and poverty and what is fair and what isn’t. Casseroles and throw pillows and cloud-soft white duvets.

I think about the trades we make, what we sell and what we give away, and the secrets we keep—both good and not so good—close to our own hearts. The things that can have a price and the things that should not.

On the boardwalk, vendors are rolling up the steel grate doors that protect their goods at night. They rattle and clank as they retract, leaving doorways yawning open beneath them. You’ve got to do that—you’ve got to expose your goods if you want people to see them.

I twist the star ring on my finger. Part of the cost of doing business—of
living
, even, is that sometimes people will steal your shit.

My art, I decide, and my stories, these things are mine. Fuck, so is my body, my hair, and my touch. I own these things—all of them—and I can sell them or trade them or give them away.

***

I’m due at Riley’s at ten. I continue my slow skate down the boardwalk, stopping once at Carson’s café for a mocha and again near the art wall to drink it. Even this early, surfers are out in the water, and nearby at the skate park, the clatter of wheels on concrete sets the rhythm for the day. Not many tourists are out this early, so for now Venice belongs to us—the locals.

I nod hello to a few people I know, dopey-eyed skaters and wet-haired surfers, their skin dusted white with ocean salt.

I zip open my backpack and peel one round sticker from the first sheet. I smooth it onto the art wall, pressing hard to make it stick against the concrete. The wolf winks up at me.

Retelling.

***

At exactly ten a.m. I push through the turquoise Dutch door. There’s no sign of Jordan, even though we’re not supposed to leave the front of the store unattended—that’s kind of the whole point of my getting this job, so that Jordan can spend more time in the back, but he’s supposed to stay up front during the morning hours until I cruise in.

I ditch my bag at the counter and head to the back of the shop. When I get close to the door of the shaping room, I hear something, but not the rhythmic scraping of the sandpaper or the whirring of the power planer. And the omnipresent reggae that Jordan’s been semi-obsessed with since he started seeing my mother isn’t playing, either.

It’s Jordan’s muffled voice, and he’s talking to himself. “
Such
a fucktard,” he mumbles, and I hear a sound like he’s punched something and then something else like he’s slid to the floor.

I listen with grim satisfaction, like,
Good, you should be sorry, you sack of shit
. But after a minute the satisfaction wears off, and then there’s just the grimness left, miserly tightness in my chest and shame in being glad he’s suffering too, the way I know my mom is suffering, the way her sadness makes me suffer.

I push open the door. There he is, slumped on the ground, his back against the leg of the shaping table. He’s cradling his hand, and there’s a starburst dent in the wall across from him.

It’s winter in that room, white foam banked up in the corners like snow, a dusting of it on everything—the table, the shaping tools, the beat-up old stereo, the bar-sized fridge in the corner where we stash our drinks. It’s in Jordan’s hair too, snowflakes of it stuck in his dark-blond waves. Everything is sleeping here, quieted under the foam snow, everything except Jordan’s misery.

That’s blazing hot and wide awake.

He looks up at me and doesn’t try to hide that he’s been crying. Tear streaks stain his cheeks, and he swipes at his nose with the back of his hand. He looks like a lost little boy.

“Hey, Seph,” he says. “How’s your mom?”

I shrug. “Better than you.”

“She’s better than anyone I know,” he mumbles.

I don’t agree or disagree. It doesn’t matter if she is the best or the worst. She is the heart of me, regardless. It floats there between us, like another flake of snow, or surfboard foam, the question that both of us are asking him—why didn’t he say anything? Why did he just stand there, limply ineffective, and let his mother say those terrible things? Why did he let my mom walk away?

After a while I say, “Well, I’ll let you know if anyone needs anything,” and he nods, and I turn away and close the door, take my place behind the counter.

A minute later, music floats up from the back room, and I recognize it instantly since my mom’s been humming it for the last month, ever since the night of their first date—it’s a song by that reggae group they went to hear.

“Oh, Mama,” croons the singer to his lover over the beat of the snare drum, “You are my goddess. You are my Lover. Let me be your manna …”

I trace a finger along the edge of one of my wolf stickers.

Fourteen

It’s a slow day at the shop, and no one needs Jordan’s help until almost two. By then he’s pulled himself together and is back to work on a board. He’s prepping it for glassing, so he’s got the respirator on and is spraying it down with air from the compressor when I go back to get him. The compressor hisses loudly, and I wait for him to finish and pull off his mask. The music isn’t on anymore.

The guy who wants Jordan’s help is a white-ponytailed old-timer. Get this. He’s a mess because he’s finally broken the board he’s been riding for the last five years. He brought the pieces into the shop.

“Best board I ever rode,” he laments.

Jordan takes a look at the pieces, then looks up at the guy, eyes all full of wonder. “I made this board,” he said. “I’m pretty sure this was the first board I ever shaped for Riley.”

“No shit,” says the old guy. “Well, I guess it’s my good luck you’re still working here.”

He tells Jordan about all the epic rides he and the board had together, and Jordan nods and listens, but all I can think about is that there’s no such thing as luck or fortune. Not here, anyway. In Venice Beach, things just circle back on themselves. That’s just the way it is.

Jordan doesn’t hurry the guy. He listens to him talk about his board, giving a eulogy, I guess, and even though I know Jordan can’t really be in the mood for reminiscing, you’d never know it by looking at him.

Jordan is good at what he does. Shaping the boards, of course, but also this part, the thing that seems like it shouldn’t matter but actually it does, as much as the actual work and maybe even more. The customer service. Servicing the customer. Seeing what he wants and giving it to him. Lolly is an expert in this, though she doesn’t have a degree or diploma, either. Carson and Kai and me too, I guess. Our Venice Beach motto might as well be “We live to serve.” Pleasing people—serving them. It makes our little part of the world go around, like it or not.

I’m hanging out behind the counter, doodling on the edge of my Converse. Jordan and the old-school surfer start talking about classic boards. He wants something like the board he’s broken, and the boards Jordan is shaping now are different. Better, even, but this guy doesn’t want better. He wants what he’s lost.

Jordan says, “Let me get you a card, and you can call us next week. I’ll check with Riley to see what he’s got in the warehouse.”

Automatically I reach into the drawer under the cash register and pull out a card for Jordan. I hold it out. When he doesn’t take it, I look up. Jordan is standing right across the counter from me, staring down at my sheet of wolf stickers. He’s got a funny look on his face.

“Where’d you get those?” he asks.

“They’re mine,” I say. I’m a little embarrassed because I’m not in the habit of being around when people look at my art.

“But where did you get them?”

“I made them,” I say kind of slowly, because it seems like things aren’t sinking in real well for Jordan today.

He looks up at me. He’s forgotten all about the business card in my hand. The guy behind him clears his throat.

“
You
made them?”

I don’t say anything because I already answered that question.

Then Jordan asks, “Can I have one of these?”

I shrug. “I guess.” There’s a pair of scissors in the drawer where I got the card, and I pull the scissors out and cut carefully around one of the stickers so it’ll still have its backing. Then I hand it to him, along with the card.

He pockets the sticker and turns back to the guy, who looks a little impatient now. But Jordan gives him the card and says, “I’ll look into that longboard, man,” and the guy nods and smiles before he leaves.

***

When I go back to summer school the next day, it’s even worse than I remember. They’re working on applying Euler’s formula to polyhedrons, and I don’t understand any of those words.

I try to get the hang of it for the first half hour, but then I’m just
done
, and it’s all I can do to keep my ass in the plastic seat. It’s too much to ask of myself, though, to stay awake, so I’m facedown in a puddle of drool when I sense a disturbance in the Force and jolt up.

Crandall is leering down at me, and everyone bursts into laughter at the look on my face. It seems like they’ve been waiting awhile for me to wake up, and even in my haze, I wonder if staring at me is really the best use of their summer school time.

“Pleasant dreams, Miss Golding?”

“Sorry,” I say. “Long night.”

“I’m sure they all are,” he says.

***

I don’t have to work this afternoon, so I decide to cook for Mom. Somewhere in my mind is the idea that now that Jordan is out of the picture, maybe she and I will have more time together again. Maybe I can help her get over Jordan. Maybe I’ll tell her about Naomi’s invitation. We can work it out together. We can work everything out.

I skate to the store and get the stuff I need. I even pick up some flowers—tulips, yellow ones, Mom’s favorite color.

At home I roast a chicken even though our tiny kitchen is hellhole hot, and I make a tomato and avocado salad and I chill a bottle of the white wine she likes.

When I hear her footsteps coming up the stairs just after six o’clock, I’m excited like a little kid with a secret, but as soon as she comes through the doorway, I deflate. She looks the same as she always does when she gets home from work—green scrubs, neat bun, black clogs. But her eyes are puffy and tired, and there’s a softness in her shoulders, a look of defeat.

“Oh, baby,” she says when she sees the food. “That’s so sweet. But I need to lay down for a little bit, okay?”

And when she goes into her room, she closes the door.

I pour myself a glass of wine and sit at the table. The chicken looks like a corpse.

***

Later, when it’s too late to hope that she might be coming out for dinner, I put the food in the fridge and cork the wine. I’m a little dizzy because I’ve drunk two glasses, and I trip on the edge of the area rug as I make my way to the couch. There’s the door to the bedroom, and I stare at it a while before I knock.

She doesn’t answer. I turn the knob anyway and push the door open.

There aren’t any lights on, but the room isn’t fully dark anyway, thanks to the scarves-for-drapes. Mom’s asleep on the bed. She’s still dressed in the scrubs, but her hair is loosened from its bun. I stand over her for a minute and wonder if she’s dreaming.

My knees are weak. I want so much to climb into bed beside her, to pull the sheet up around both of us, to match my breaths with hers. But I don’t do it. After a minute I stop staring down at her and look around the room. There’s the dresser, the one we’ve shared all my life. The drawers on the left are mine. It’s a long, low dresser, painted white, with mismatched drawer pulls and a mirror. On the top of the dresser is some cheap beaded jewelry and Mom’s collection of shells and sea glass, arranged around a candle on a little round mirror. She calls it her altar, but she doesn’t use it to worship anything.

I pick up a few of the shells and run them from hand to hand. When I put them back, I make sure that they’re right where she left them. I have always been good at that—putting things back where I find them. It’s part of the way my mind works—I see how the items are arranged and remember, without even trying. So my mom never knows when I’ve been in her stuff.

Not that she’d care. Living alongside her open-door policy is her what’s-mine-is-yours philosophy. Though our underwear and socks and things like that are kept in separate drawers, all the jackets and skirts hang together in the closet. She pretty much never wears anything of mine but doesn’t mind at all if I borrow her things.

That’s how I’d found the picture. Last winter, I’d wanted to find a scarf to wear. I don’t know why; I’ve never particularly liked scarves. I run warm, and we live in
California
, so scarves are pretty much unnecessary.

But that day I wanted to wear one.

Maybe I was feeling like the kind of girl who
would
wear a scarf. Or maybe I was playing around with the idea of what it might feel like to be that kind of girl. After all, I’d been playing around with lots of ideas lately. Most recently, I’d played around with how it felt to be a nineteen-year-old college sophomore named Annie.

At the top of the closet on a shelf was a box labeled
Snowboarding Stuff
. I had never been to the snow, but before I was born, my mom went up the mountain regularly. Snowboarding was among the long list of things she did well and looked beautiful doing.