Life Is Funny (10 page)

“You look lost,” she says.

I shrug.

“You look pregnant, too.”

I didn't think I was showing yet.

“Fuck off,” I say.

“Are you going to drop out?”

She doesn't even know me.

“I asked you nicely to fuck off,” I tell her. I'm hoping she'll disappear after that, but she stays put. I get through a whole other cigarette before she says anything again.

“There's a high school in this district that has day care,” she tells me. “Maybe you'd be interested.”

“Maybe I'm getting rid of it,” I say.

“Maybe,” she answers.

“Maybe,” I say.

*  *  *

If I were really going to move, I'd pack all my stuff and my mother's marbles, and I'd go to Greenland. The only person I'd write to would be Molly, and she'd be forbidden to tell anyone where I was at. I saw Greenland in a movie once. It's nothing but white and blue and cold and people in brown skin coats, dog-sledding to get around. In Greenland you can always see the air thickening out of your mouth and little crystals on your eyelashes, and every second is pure, uncluttered peace.

My mother's marbles would go pretty well there. There's one thousand of them, exactly, all milky clears. They belong somewhere cold, icy. They look like they sprouted right out of a glacier. My mother counts them every Sunday. She dumps them out of a black drawstring bag and counts them over and over.

She was counting them the morning I told her I didn't want to go to my father's anymore. I was seven, and he'd just dropped me back home after our Saturday sleep-over visit. Molly came running out of our bedroom to see what he'd bought me. She hadn't ever even met her dad, and mine wouldn't let me share him with her.

“I don't want to go anymore,” I'd told my mother. I felt disgusting.

“I'm counting,” she'd answered.

“Don't make me go next week,” I said, louder. She didn't look up from her groups of ten.

Molly tugged at my mother's hand. “Monique's crying,” Molly had said.

My mother slapped her hand away, and I'd leaped at the marbles, raking my fingers over and through them, scattering the neat piles into hard clicks of rolling glass. My mother grabbed my hair and yanked me across the rough carpet with one hand until the other had put the mess right.

She never even asked me why, and when Molly did, the next Sunday morning, I knew it was too dirty to say.

*  *  *

There's a guy I notice at the prenatal clinic on Fourth Avenue. He's Spanish, and he's wearing one of those white lab coats. He's the one who takes your blood. I notice him because he's looking at me. And because his eyes aren't brown, or green, or even blue. They're white. Frost white.

“What are you staring at?” I ask him, after they tell me the baby's alive and well and don't drink alcohol.

“What are you staring at?” I say again.

He smiles a huge smile. He's got a ton of white teeth.

“What's so goddamn funny?” I spit.

“You,” he says, and I want to kill him. “You're trying to look so ugly, and you can't do it because you're so beautiful.”

I would have slammed him right then, but the dyed redhead who answers the phone goes, “Ooooh, Hectah, I'ma tell everybody you finally talk to a girl.” She looks at me. “You bettah take this good, sweetheart, 'cause Hectah don't play.”

While I'm trying to figure out which one of them to pop first, he loses the smile.

“You are so beautiful,” he says.

He doesn't mean pretty. I know that because I'm not pretty and because of the tone of his voice. He means I'm beautiful, me, somewhere inside. Asshole.

I haven't shed a tear since I was six, but the next thing I know I'm out on the curb, crying so hard I think it could kill the baby, and he's sitting next to me, going, “You date dark?”

*  *  *

I sleep over at Molly's the next night, my sixteenth birthday. Her dorm room at NYU is the size of a bunk bed laid out on its side, but she's got the walls lined with stack shelves and pull-out drawers and desktops that hinge out and prop flat. Molly's a fucking genius. She got a full scholarship from her grades and SATs and her entrance essay, which was all about how our mom's crazy but mostly on Sundays.

“Happy birthday,” she calls, swinging open her door while I'm still way down the hall. She's filled the place with yellow and white balloons and streamers and a little round cake with white and yellow frosting. She makes me open lavender-ribboned presents, one by one. I get a gift certificate for a thirty-minute massage, a videotape on childbirth, a fleece hat topped by three silver bells, a hardcover copy of
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,
and a bag full of chocolate-covered pretzels.

“You're such a bitch,” I tell her, shaking my head to make the bells ring. “You know I can't get you shit like this for your birthday.”

“You're welcome,” she says, and tries to give me a hug.

I shake her off, but not too hard, because it feels good to have her touch me.

The telephone rings. It's my mother. I can tell by the way Molly's voice gets extra polite. She hands me the phone. I hand it back to her. She hands it back to me.

“You should have told me you were celebrating over there,” my mother complains. “I would have come.”

“Uh huh,” I mumble. She's full of shit.

“What do we need?” she asks.

“Toilet paper and English muffins,” I answer.

She owns a hair salon. It's open from eight a.m. to ten p.m., Monday through Saturday. I never see her if I can help it. I make sure I'm out or closed up in my room by nine forty-five and gone all day Sundays.

“Happy birthday,” she says. “You can have a free cut and blow dry.”

“Dried-up old whore,” I mutter, after we hang up, just to hear Molly tell me I'm disgusting.

*  *  *

Hector takes me out for pizza on his afternoon off. No white coat this time. Just those teeth and eyes. He asks me about the baby's father.

“He's a crack addict,” I say.

“Did you love him a lot?” His voice is deep, and he has an accent. His eyes are the color of my mother's marbles. I can't understand how a Spanish person can have eyes that look like glass. I can't understand how anyone could.

“How can you see?” I ask him. “It looks like you're blind, or something.”

He shrugs. “Did you love him a lot?” he says again.

“Not a lot.”

Hector tells me he graduated high school two years ago, and he's in a nursing program part-time. His father used to beat him up because nursing is for women and fags, but then his father died of a heart attack. The kids in his neighborhood used to jump him until he started carrying needles around and telling people they had AIDS blood on them, and then everybody stopped fucking with him.

“You have it?” I ask him.

He shakes his head. “You?”

I shake mine.

“I thought maybe that's why you're so mad all the time,” he says.

*  *  *

He invites me to see his place. The neighborhood is mostly Puerto Ricans. They speak fast Spanish and sneak smirks at me, peppering their words with
puta,
which means “cunt” or “slut” or something.

In front of his stoop, I finally get it. “You prick,” I tell him.

“What?”

“You want some white pussy to show off what a goddamn manly lay you are?”

“What?” he says again. I shove him.

“You piece of limp cock.” I spit at his feet. A group of guys on the corner start bullshitting louder, laughing.

I shove him again, and he stumbles backward. I stand there, waiting for him to punch me, to yell, “Monique. Jesus. Monique. Please.”

But Hector doesn't move. “You don't have to do that,” he tells me. He acts like he can't even hear those guys squawking and screaming over at us. “You're beautiful,” he says. “You don't have to do that.”

*  *  *

I'm so out of breath and I have to pee so bad by the time I get home I think I might wet my pants, and then I realize I left my keys on the windowsill in my room. Damn it. I start bawling all over again, even though I thought I'd gotten myself under control by the time I'd hit Flatbush Avenue, and then I start cursing myself out for bawling over a prick like Hector. I'm still bawling and cursing while I check for the extra set of keys that's supposed to be hidden behind the garbage cans three stoops down. When there's nothing but old dog shit in plastic Baggies and white packing peanuts stuck to clumps of dirty leaves, I stop bawling and cursing, and I throw the neighbors' cans all over the place instead, pretending they're Hector, and after that I still have to pee worse than anything.

The bawling tries to start up again on the way over to the salon, making me take deep breaths and letting them out with the word
fuck
to stop it, because I'll be double goddamned if I'll let my mother see me cry.

“I need the keys,” I say, before I'm even through the door, before that blast of strawberry and fried hair and chemicals hits my nose.

“Again?” she asks as I blow by her and the cash register, the old-fashioned kind made of brass and shiny black button keys and a crank on one side, the kind that nobody but her knows how to use anymore.

“You heard me,” I say, slamming the bathroom door as hard as I can to piss off the idiot customers, and my mother's idiot staff, and especially my idiot mother.

After I'm done peeing, I think about how I shoved Hector and how he called me beautiful, and I want to smash the mirror with my fist or with my forehead. But instead I just stick my face under the swan sink fixtures for a while and then dry off with one of the green cotton capes from the stacks piled on shelves over the toilet.

When I come out, a guy around my age is walking toward some woman sitting under a dryer. He doesn't belong here because for one, he has a crew cut, two, he's male, plus, he's under forty.

“Drew,” the woman says when she sees him, like she's surprised.

“I locked myself out,” he tells the woman.

“Isn't this funny,” my mother says, loud, to everyone, handing me her master ring so I can wiggle off our apartment key.

Nobody answers but me. “Hilarious,” I say.

The woman rummages through a leather purse. She's wearing a Rolex you can tell is real, and her suit looks like the kind my sister's boss wears. Expensive as hell. When she hands her Drew kid their key, her sleeve rides up, and you can see a bunch of bruises the color of the sky on a shitty day. And fingerprint squeeze marks all over. The same kind my father used to give me when I was little.

I stare hard, feeling better by the second while she yanks her sleeve down and the Drew kid turns as pink as her nails.

“What happened to you?” I fake whisper, fake polite, just to mess with them, just to be disgusting. “Looks like you pissed somebody off.”

The words aren't even half out of my mouth before he whips his head toward mine and goes, “
Fuck
you.”

Then his mother's messed-up arm flashes out to smack him, and in one part of a second he starts to jerk away, and he could, only he stops and takes the slap, and then she drops her hand and just sits there, and he just stands there, and the customers and staff are still and quiet, and my mother rearranges the shampoos in the display case, pretending she can't hear or see any of it, and I want to keep on being disgusting, only the bawling starts up again, and I can't help it, and I go, “I'm sorry. Shit. I'm sorry.”

Hector calls me four times before I'll talk to him. His messages are calm, quick. “Monique. It's Hector. Please call me back.” Each time he calls I want to bawl and I want him to call back and I smash something. A plate, a ketchup bottle, a lamp, another plate. I can't find my mother's marbles.

On the fifth time, the fifth day, I pick up. “What do you want?”

“I want to be a part of your life.”

“Where do you get that shit from? Do you watch soap operas?”

“You're real, Monique. I need to be with someone who's real.”

“Faggot,” I say.

“That's such immature bullshit,” he tells me. I roll my eyes at the phone. “You're too smart to do all that,” he says. “You don't have to keep doing all that.”

“What makes you the goddamn expert?” I ask him.

“What makes you?” he fires back.

“I hate you,” I tell him.

We agree to meet at the handball courts at five. I call Molly before I go. “I can't do this,” I say.

“Are you crying?” She doesn't have to sound so shocked.

“No,” I sob.

“Don't go,” she says. “What did this guy do to you anyway?”

“I think I need to see him.”

“Okay,” she says, really sarcastic. “Then go.”

“Will you come?” I ask.

“Now?”

“Please?”

“Monique, I'm at work.”

“Bring Caitlin with you.”

“To Brooklyn?”

“Please. I need you to meet him.”

“I'm not going to be able to tell anything just by meeting him,” she argues.

“Yes, you will,” I beg. “You're good at that.”

“I have a class at eight,” she says. “I can't stay long.”

*  *  *

The handball courts are empty, as usual, when I get there. While I wait for Hector and Molly to show up, I imagine them taking one look at each other and falling in love. I imagine them dropping to the pavement and fucking right there in front of Caitlin. I imagine Hector with his dick hanging out of his jeans, forgetting my name, and Molly with her skirt hiked up, apologizing and asking me to take Caitlin back to Manhattan for her.

While I'm imagining all this, I feel the Doritos I ate earlier rising to my chest. At first I think I've made myself sick from being so mad at Molly and Hector for fucking on the blacktop, but then I remember I'm pregnant. My knees give out, and in the same second Hector's here, catching me from behind.