Infandous (3 page)

So even though I mostly sleep alone, when my mom started making noises a year or two ago about getting a set of twin beds, I didn’t encourage her. It’s nice to know there is still space in her bed for me if I want to climb in.

***

It’s weird how sometimes you can’t really tell what exactly wakes you up. Is it the smell of the coffee and the sound of it brewing? Or the light slanting though the front window? Or the feeling of my mom’s presence, the weight of her taking up some of the space that had been empty while she slept in the next room? Maybe it’s all of it, everything together. I open my eyes, just a crack at first and then wider. Mom is sitting at the little round table in the nook off the kitchen, just to the left of the front door. Her coffee steams next to her, and she looks down at the free alt-weekly newspaper she always gets for the sudoku. Her long copper hair is damp from the shower and hangs in a sheet on either side of her face.

She is more beautiful than me. Absolutely, even though I am seventeen and she is twice that plus one more. There is a quality to her beauty, a luminosity, that something special you can’t fake. It embarrasses me sometimes, her beauty. Its unnatural immutability. There are other kids with young moms, but no one else with a mom like mine. Really, it’s like she is
too
beautiful.

Too beautiful, certainly, to live in this shitty building, too beautiful to have a job as a dental assistant, peering into people’s maws, while she works her way, with painful slowness, through nursing school. Too beautiful to wear the awful green scrubs she spends most days in.

I don’t mind that she’s more beautiful than I am. Because she is beautiful and I am near her, I can look at that beauty all I want. If I were the one who looked like that instead of her, I couldn’t enjoy it nearly as much. No one walks around staring into a mirror all day, right? I know her in her entirety. I know where her hair doesn’t lay evenly in the back, where a whirl sends one wave in a slightly different direction than the rest. I know where her left eyebrow thins to almost nothing, then picks up again, a tiny fracture caused by a chicken pox scar. I know each fleck in her gray-green eyes. I know her chin, her jaw, her ears, and her mouth.

She must feel me watching her. I blink when she looks up from her puzzle and smiles at me. “Hey, baby,” she says. “Sleep well?”

“Mm-hmm.” I find that I have sat up without realizing it. Now I stand and stretch. The sky outside the window is heavy with fog, and the light that filters through it is soft like an old photograph.

“Coffee’s ready,” she says and dips her head back down to the newspaper.

I run my fingers through my hair as I cross the kitchen to the coffeepot. My hair is the same color as my mom’s, but the texture is totally different. Where hers is smooth and sleek, mine is a tangle, a mess of waves and curls that doesn’t want to fall into a neat style. Where she has one unruly whirl, I have dozens of them.

Three years ago I’d sheared it all off during the first semester of my freshman year. I was in Intro to Spanish with Mr. Gunn, who insisted that everyone call him Señor Pistola. He flirted with all the girls. One day I raised my hand to ask a question during a test—something about subjunctive verbs—and he walked up the aisle, then knelt by my desk. His knee pressed against my foot.

“Señor Pistola?”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. His hand snaked out and touched a lock of my hair. “I just can’t concentrate when I’m looking at your beautiful curls.”

That night I borrowed Marissa’s dad’s clippers and took it down to the skin, almost. I nicked my head in three places. The long tendrils whispered as they fell to the bathroom floor. My mother cried when she saw what I’d done.

The next semester I switched to French.

My hair had been halfway down my back when I cut it; I’d kept the sides buzzed short but let the middle grow out. Now it reaches my shoulders, but just barely.

Through the kitchen wall I can hear our neighbors’ TV. Their kids are watching morning cartoons. As I pour milk into my coffee, I hear a door downstairs slam closed. The clock reads 6:52. Joanne is running late this morning; usually she’s on her way to her housekeeping job at the big hotel on the beach by half past.
Housekeeping
is a fancy word for “maid.” Once I asked her what the weirdest thing was that she ever found in a room. She said she’d tell me when I’m older.

Mom finishes her coffee and puts the cup in the sink. “I’m going to meet Lucy for dinner after work,” she says. “You’ll be okay on your own?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What are you up to today?”

“Just hanging out with Marissa.”

“Going to try to find a job?”

Mom has gotten the idea that I should spend the summer gainfully employed. Things are going to be bad enough with summer school, and since I’m leaving town for a while anyway, visiting my mom’s sister and her family in Atlanta, I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to fill up the rest of my free time with some lame minimum-wage job.

But we’ve had this “discussion” before. Mom perceives a lack of work ethic. I explain that I’d rather be broke than yoked. She shakes her head and looks disappointed, and I feel like shit.

Instead of getting sucked into it again, I shrug noncommittally. Mom must not be in the mood for a fight either, because she just sort of shakes her head and drops the subject. She rubs her hand briefly against the side of my head, the part of my hair that is sheared close. She says it reminds her of a kitten. “Okay, baby,” she says, kissing my cheek before she reaches for her purse. “Be good.”

“You too.” I watch her leave through the steam of my coffee; then I slide into the seat she’s vacated at the table. It is still warm, the way the bed feels when she’s just gotten out, leaving a little pocket of warmth for me to curl into.

The sudoku is complete. My mother’s neat numbers—she crosses her sevens—fill each square. Her numbers are like her fingers, her hands, and the rest of her—elegant and ordered, near perfect without effort. I trace her numbers with my fingertip, then flip the paper over to the funnies and run my finger along each comic strip, not really paying attention to the words but instead looking at the color palette each artist has chosen. Some are heavily pastel; others lean toward bright, bold primary colors. A couple of them—those with a darker, more political bent—work in grays and blacks with an occasional fierce pop of red.

My fingers are as colorful as the comics they trace. Layers of paint have totally wrecked my nails, which I wear short like a boy’s. Each cuticle is blackened from my charcoals. Red and yellow and green stain my nails and fingers. A thin callus runs down the inside of my index finger, and a matching one mirrors it on my thumb. They are proof of the blade I often hold. Rubbing my finger across them, I can almost hear the sound the blade makes as it pushes through cardboard, through Styrofoam, through whatever I can find, and tears a line. A Band-Aid wraps around the tip of the middle finger of my left hand where I cut myself last week in my studio.

“Studio.”

There is nothing neat or clean about my studio, but I can see it all when I close my eyes. A tall table runs along one wall. It is littered with bottles of paint and adhesives; little tins of brushes; stacks of newspapers; markers in all colors, which I’ve collected since childhood; and coffee cans full of shit I’ve found, like bottle caps and scratched CDs, little stones and broken cell phone pieces and beach glass. There’s a couple of X-Acto knives (the pink one is to blame for my most recent injury), half-empty bottles of glue, spools of tape (thick blue tape, skinnier black electrical tape, and one thinning round circle of shiny gray duct tape), a couple of discarded water bottles, and an old MP3 player (splattered here and there with paint but still functional). There’s a stack of whatever paper I can get my hands on for sketching—all the apartment residents hand over their cardboard boxes to me whenever they get a delivery, along with the light brown packing paper that comes inside. A few of the sketchpads I carry with me everywhere (some full, some half full, and one gloriously empty). On the concrete walls are tracings and sketches I’ve taped up over the last few weeks. They’ll stay there for a while, either developing into ideas or eventually disappearing into the bin out back. The biggest pieces of cardboard I’ve been able to find or forage lean up against the short wall at the back of my little room. Someone two apartment buildings down got a new refrigerator last week, and its box is here now—tall, clean, fresh cardboard, flattened out and waiting for me to cut into it and bend it into something else, something better.

The last of my mother’s warmth is gone from her chair, and just thinking about my studio makes me itchy to get down there. I untangle my jeans and shove my legs into them, yank my hair up in a knot, pour myself more coffee with a dollop of milk, and grab a banana before heading out the door, down one flight of stairs, and around a corner.

A humming strip of fluorescence makes it bright enough; still, even with the door open, no real natural light comes in.

But hell, it’s mine.

Everything costs something. This small space, one of three storage rooms off the back alley, cost me weeks of worrying how to approach Johnny, our apartment manager, plus the promise to clean it out—it had been packed to the gills with things former tenants had left behind. Plus, it cost me the two hundred bucks I’d gotten for the one thing in the room that hadn’t been a complete piece of shit—a vintage fiberglass Eames chair, sold to the hipster shopkeeper on Electric Avenue. And maybe most of all, it’d cost me pretending not to notice when, as he slipped the storage room key into my palm, Johnny’s hand cupped my left breast and squeezed once, hard.

I unlock the door and switch on the light. It stutters into existence in that way fluorescents do, and I step inside. I sip my coffee and look around, then trace my toe along the scratches I’ve made in the concrete. They form a permanent web, layers and layers of them, sort of beautiful actually, from all the shit I’ve cut. I set my mug on the table and perch on the room’s one chair, a beat-up metal stool. There is no need for a second chair; no one ever comes here.

Then I do that thing I’m pretty good at, from all the practice. I turn my mind away from every distraction—the echo of last winter against my heart; my vague curiosity about how Marissa’s night might have gone; my growing irritation over Mom’s job nagging, mingled with the impending cloud of doom that hovers just overhead, as summer school ticks closer and closer each second; away from Aunt Naomi’s offer, the offer I haven’t shared yet with Marissa or my mother. I turn away from all that as I start a playlist and music booms through the small, narrow space.
My
studio. I turn away from all that as I flip through my sketchbook, as I run my finger along a sketch. I’ve already sculpted this image once; it’s displayed in the window of the café where Carson works, though I didn’t let them post my name. Now I want to see if I can figure out a way to take this same shape and make it something more, cause it to cast a different shadow.

Three

It’s only because this is Venice Beach that Carson’s café agreed to put my baby pie in the display case. The sculpture has fluted edges and a latticework crust, just like a real pie, but pierced here and there by the fat arms and legs of well-fed babies, harvested from secondhand baby dolls. People in Venice like the freakish and the odd. They identify with it. A couple of miles up or down the coast, and my pie wouldn’t have a place to call home.

The baby pie image has stuck with me. When is a pie not a pie? That’s the question I’m playing with, and the answers are pretty funny, right? Like, of course, a flower isn’t a flower all the time … and then there’s pi, the mathematical term, 3.14 … et cetera et cetera, and then I’m back to geometry, which, let’s face it, isn’t all that far away from any sculpture.

I’ve rotated the table lamp so it throws a shadow on the far wall, and I’ve been experimenting with different shapes, piling up little empty wooden spools and twisted bits of pipe cleaners stuck together with molding wax. The single bulb pumps out some pretty good heat, and when the morning’s fog has burned off, my space grows sweltering. I ignore the first two texts from Marissa, tensing a little each time my phone vibrates, then relaxing again as her name pops up on the screen. But her third text—
Lolly working 2day meet ASAP
—gets my attention.

Our friend Lolly attended Venice High with us until the middle of last year—our junior year—when she decided enough of that shit. Now she works three jobs, all part-time. Marissa and I like it best the days Lolly works at the Smoothie Shack.

Back upstairs I find the green triangle top of my bikini hanging in the shower and a pair of black bottoms in the laundry basket. My gray tee is still clean enough, and I have some cutoff Dickies that aren’t too grungy, so I put those on too. Then I slip into my Vans and take my board down to the street.

I pass a few of the local places—there’s a secondhand shop that passes itself off as “vintage,” a shoe store I can never afford to visit, and a hipster boutique that specializes in ironic eyewear. The shop owners all know me pretty well, and a couple of them let me install some of my art. There’s this owl I made from bent spoons hanging in the front window of the hipster place. People can talk all the shit they want about hipsters, but they’re pretty cool about making space for local artists.

That owl sculpture—I bought most of the spoons at this one big thrift store where my mom and I sometimes shop. I took the whole stack of them, like twenty-five. And while I was waiting in line, this guy came in. Eighteen or maybe twenty years old. Used up kind of, already. And he tapped me on the shoulder and asked me, “Do you need all of those? Can I buy one?” And I shrugged and said, “Why not?” and gave him one. Later, when I told Marissa about it, she said he probably needed it to cook his H.

The Shack is on the boardwalk, so I have to maneuver through the tightly packed crowd of tourists. Venice Beach is its own thing. There’s nowhere else like it … at least, that’s what people tell me. I haven’t really been many places.