Windfalls: A Novel (3 page)

Standing beside her bed, Cerise slipped out of her bell-bottoms and tossed them toward the laundry basket. At least she’d worn her nicest blouse, she reminded herself as she shrugged it off and pulled a T-shirt from her drawer. At least she’d maybe looked a little okay.

She’d spent the whole bus ride home trying to decide whether or not she should stop at the market for a Coke. It was Friday, and she’d wanted that little reward for making it to the end of another week. She’d wanted to begin her solitary weekend with a treat, and she’d also thought that if Sam were working that afternoon, she would be able to catch a glimpse of him, though she was so afraid he might notice her that by the time the bus reached her stop, she’d decided to skip the Coke. But as she stepped down onto the diesel-scented street, she found herself heading toward the market, after all.

She’d seen him the minute she’d opened the worn screen door. He was leaning against the counter beside the cash register, reading a magazine. Standing in the doorway, she’d felt a hot buzz of confusion, and only her fear that he would look up and see her sneaking away convinced her to enter the store. Like a timid thief she’d eased her Coke from the cooler and then stood for a long time, pretending to study the cans of Spam and Spaghetti-Os before she worked up the nerve to carry the bottle to the counter.

Sam hadn’t said a word as he rang up the sale, not “Hi,” or, “That everything?” or even “Want to use the opener?” Keeping her eyes on the upside-down picture in the magazine between them—a girl in a bikini straddling a shiny motorcycle—she’d handed him her dollar bill, mutely held out her hand to receive the change. When, along with the trickle of dimes and pennies, she felt the press of his forefinger inside her palm, she’d looked up, startled.

But although his finger was caressing slow circles around the coins cupped in her hand, his face was as blank as if he were watching TV. She’d snatched her hand away, and her change shattered across the counter and down onto the sticky floor. Hurriedly, she knelt to pick up her pennies, and when she’d ventured a glance at Sam, he was studying his magazine, though she thought she saw a private smile flicker across his face.

Now, as she crossed the strewn floor of her bedroom and turned on her television, she felt a fresh flush of shame. The laugh track from an
I Love Lucy
rerun frayed a small hole in the silence of the house, and she stood before the TV, watching as Lucy wrung her hands and Ethel tried to comfort her. Still staring at the screen, Cerise reached beneath her bed and drew out the box of cake mix she’d snuck from the kitchen cupboard and hidden there. She fed herself spoonful after spoonful, sitting on the floor of her room, almost choking on the chalky flour, and rubbing the sharp grains of sugar against her palate with her tongue until the sweetness disappeared, her mouth was scoured sore, and she could taste the secret salt of her blood. But even after she’d eaten half the box, she could still see Sam’s half smile, still feel his finger in her palm, still feel the roar of confusion it caused inside her.

She left her bedroom to roam the house, drifting like a wraith from room to room. Downstairs, she stared so long at Rita’s new painting that the floppy-eared puppies almost seemed to move. She felt such a helpless cramp of love for those creatures that for a moment she was tempted to draw them. Back in junior high, when she found a picture she liked on a calendar or a greeting card, she used to tear a sheet of paper out of her binder and draw a copy of it for herself. The lines on the paper always made the baskets of flowers or the kittens or colts look as though they were behind bars, but even Rita used to remark how much like the real pictures Cerise’s copies were.

“Where you got that knack from,” Rita would say, “I don’t know. Not me, and for sure not your dad. He couldn’t even draw a paycheck,” she’d add with bitter humor, and Cerise would feel a guilty compunction, as though she’d dragged her ability for drawing home like another doll from someone else’s trash.

Now she imagined Sam finding her copy of Rita’s painting, imagined him looking up from her drawing to eye her with a new admiration. But then his face as she had last seen it bullied its way inside her daydream, and she winced and turned away, left the puppies to frolic on their own.

In Rita’s room, she shoved aside the stockings draped like perished ghosts across the rumpled bed and sprawled there herself, flipping through the
Cosmo
that lay beside her mother’s pillow and gazing at the skinny, suntanned models until a keen self-loathing filled her soul. Unlike the models’ breasts, and unlike the breasts of Rita’s dolls, when Cerise’s breasts arrived, they came with silver stretch marks and with nipples that tightened or softened as inexplicably as the moon that was sometimes round as a pizza, sometimes skinny as a torn-off toenail, and other times entirely absent in the sky above Rossi. Cerise’s feet had grown, too, stretching out flat and long in front of her, and though the hair on her head had remained dense and blond, new hair grew in the sticky V’s of her armpits and her crotch.

It seemed as though she had never even had a body before her breasts began to grow. Back in grade school, her body had been unremarkable, reliable as a machine. But in junior high that machine betrayed her, growing so tall and thick and smelly it seemed as if Cerise had turned into some kind of animal instead of the sleek creature the pictures in Rita’s magazines promised she would be if she became a woman. Suddenly she was the largest kid in the whole school, and the tiny boys and compact girls who the year before had ignored her now gawked and whistled and whispered when she passed.

Cerise Center,
the boys called after her as she hurried down the halls, her schoolbooks clutched against her chest as if she could press her breasts back inside her. But she was too clumsy and self-conscious to play basketball, and later, when the sting had worn from
Center,
the boys changed it to
Centerfold,
and snapped her bra and inquired about her cup size.

“Hey, Centerfold,” they yelled when she ignored them. “Whatsa matter? You on the rag?”

“My name’s Cerise,” she said once, after Rita told her she had to stand up to them, that no one could do for Cerise what she was too spineless to do for herself. But she said it so halfheartedly, her voice rising at the end, that she turned her own name into a question, and her protest only added to their joke.

“Cerise?” they jeered, “My name’s Cerise?” and when she finally submitted to tears, they asked her, “Is Cerise? sad? Is Cerise? on the rag?”

She slapped the magazine shut in self-disgust and headed toward the kitchen. Standing in the draft of the open refrigerator, she swallowed a full-throated swig of milk, gnawed on a cold drumstick from the Kentucky Fried box, helped herself to a fingerful of Cool Whip. She glanced at the clock above the stove, saw that it was almost time for
Star Trek,
and closed the refrigerator.

But a note on the kitchen table snagged her attention,
CERISE—FOLD LAUNDRY& IRON
. She stared at her name until her vision blurred, nearly washing those words from the page. She had always hated her name. It was awkward and unusual, and it seemed to have more to do with Rita’s pretensions and aspirations than with Cerise herself. Once she had looked it up in a book of names for babies and found herself dismissed in three words—“French for cherry.” Cherries were okay, she guessed, but French was foreign, foreign was strange, and she was already strange enough without a name that substitute teachers, to the pooled delight of the rest of the class, always mispronounced—Shir-ice? See-rise?

Sighing, she crumpled the note, tossed it in the trash, and set off through the house, assembling the iron and ironing board, the basket of laundry and the spray starch. Back in the kitchen, she plugged in the iron and waited listlessly for it to heat. When the air above the sole plate wrinkled with heat, she licked her forefinger and flicked it across the surface of the iron, felt the sizzle of evaporating spit. It was satisfying, the tidy quickness of it, but it was oddly exciting, too, that small proximity to danger.

“Cerise!” she exclaimed suddenly. Ruthlessly and without warning she cocked her wrist and thrust it against the hot edge of the iron. The hurt was quick and wicked. She made a little sound like someone else’s moan. Tears flung themselves from her eyes, but she used her other hand to keep her wrist pressed against the iron. This is me, she thought, burning, and for a moment she felt a kind of triumph that overshadowed all her pain. When she could stand it no longer, she yanked her wrist away, first lifting it to her nose to sniff, and then holding it out so she could study the tidy white stripe of ash running like a broken bracelet along the inside of her wrist, across the tender skin where a razor might be pressed. That was strange, she thought, pleased by her courage, by her ability to punish herself for her awkward size and awful name. She imagined Sam seeing her wound and being impressed—and maybe even a little intimidated—by what she was capable of doing.

Looking at the burn on the pale inside of her wrist, she couldn’t keep from remembering Sam’s finger in her palm. But somehow all the shame and confusion of that moment had vanished like a lick of spit against a hot iron. She felt clear and focused, as near happy as she’d been in a long while. This time, as she reached toward the iron, she had a swell of feeling that could only be known as hope.

B
Y THE TIME THE BUS FINALLY REACHED
A
NNA ’ S STOP, HER MIND WAS
scraped so raw from a week of working through the same sad set of facts and coming to the same inevitable conclusion that she’d almost ceased to think at all. Mechanically she lurched down the aisle, stepped blindly onto the street, and stood for a moment amid the diesel fumes and dust, blinking in the gritty light and trying to get her bearings. A large cluster of people was milling on the sidewalk in front of the building where she was headed. At first she thought there’d been an accident. But the crowd seemed too purposeful to be waiting for an ambulance. A second later it crossed her mind to wonder if she had made a mistake about the address or the time of her appointment, but even as she scrambled to recheck her memory, she knew she could not possibly have got those details wrong.

She’d brought a book to read in case she had to wait, and now she clutched it to her chest and began to walk faster. As she drew nearer, the group resolved into individuals, though to Anna’s eyes they all looked much the same—the women in thick hose and knee-length skirts, the men in crew cuts and polyester jackets. There were also several children, scrub-faced kids in tidy hand-me-downs. With a jolt of alarm Anna realized that the whole group was watching her.

Her thoughts clattered together, and her steps began to slow. For a split second she thought she should try to speak to them. But before she could think of what to say, she saw the suspicion on their faces, and her apprehension sharpened into fear. One of the men was holding a placard toward the passing traffic. When he turned his sign in Anna’s direction, she read its scarlet word and started as though she’d been slapped. A protest blurted up inside her, inadvertent as vomit. Part of her wanted to turn and run, and another part wanted to stop and rage at them. But instead she focused all her attention on walking.

When she realized that she would somehow have to pass through those people to reach the building where her appointment was, a new confusion fluttered through her chest. But as she was hesitating, the crowd parted grudgingly in front of her, creating a rough corridor down which she might pass. Her shoulders cringed in anticipation of the blows it seemed would surely come if she tried to reach the doors at the far end, but she forced herself to start walking, passing so close to the bodies of the protesters that she could smell the spice of aftershave and the acrid musk of nerves, so close she could hear the censure in their breathing. She kept her eyes down, watching the fringe of weeds that was already beginning to grow in the cracks in the sidewalk, watching the toes of her boots as her feet propelled her on.

“I’ll raise your baby,” a man said to her when she came abreast of him.

His voice was low, insinuating. Glancing in his direction, she saw his shiny face and the way his belly distorted the plaid of his shirt beneath his jacket, and she looked away, repelled at the thought of giving anything of hers to him. The doors loomed ahead, double doors with metal handles like twin halves of a moon. She stretched out an arm as though she were an exhausted swimmer floundering to reach a dock. But suddenly a child darted between her and the doors, a girl of ten or twelve.

“Miss?” the girl asked. “Would you read this?” She kept her face twisted away from Anna so that she seemed to be speaking back over her own shoulder as she thrust a pamphlet blindly in Anna’s direction. Anna reached out to take it from her only because the girl seemed so uncomfortable—more miserable, even, than Anna herself. Then, in an attempt to reassure the girl and to prove to the watching crowd that she was no monster, Anna tried to smile.

But the muscles in her face trembled so violently it seemed she had forgotten how a smile was made. A sound came from the back of her throat, involuntary as a glob of coughed-up phlegm, and the child shot a startled look at Anna’s face. Their glances met and held. The girl’s eyes were blue and somehow strangely familiar. For a crazy second Anna had the sensation she was looking into a mirror, although Anna’s eyes were brown and she was twice the girl’s age.

From somewhere in the crowd a man’s voice rang out, “Remember Jesus.” The girl’s eyes filled with fear, and Anna glanced down at the pamphlet in her hands as a way of protecting them both. But the photograph on the cover of the pamphlet was so appalling that even before Anna could react to its lack of contrast, bad focus, and cluttered composition, she was staring aghast at the image itself.