Ray Garton: Trailer Park Noir

Anna tipped her head back and laughed. “I don’t think anybody ever explained sex to them . We were accidents, no doubt about it.”

They laughed together some more.

“I’ve talked to Ramona, and Frank talked to Bobby,” Rose said. Ramona was her teenage daughter, Bobby her ten-year-old son, and Frank her husband. “We talked to them early, and made them feel free to ask questions. It’s not a forbidden topic in our house, so it’s not the big huge deal it is to so many kids. So far, it seems to be working.”

“I know, I need to talk to her,” Anna said. “I’ve been putting it off. I mean, who am I to talk to her about sex? With my background?”

“You can’t think of it that way. She looks to you for answers, she sees you as being full of knowledge. Remember, she’s a teenager, but really, she’s still just a little girl.”

“Yeah? Well, sometimes I feel like I’m still a little girl,” Anna muttered.

“Get over it, you’re not, and neither am I. Kendra doesn’t need you to be a little girl, she needs you to be her mother. Even though Mom and Dad still treat you like a little girl.”

“Oh, don’t start with me, Rose.”

“Who’s starting anything? I’m just saying something that’s already obvious.”

It devolved into an argument, as usual, and Rose ended up leaving in anger, as usual; Anna called her a little later, as she always did, and sure enough, Rose was crying, and they went through the apologies and the declarations of love. Happened every time.

The truth was that, even with the two jobs – actually a job and a half, because more often than not, the temp job didn’t deliver – Anna still had plenty of difficulty making ends meet. She had to juggle bills and do a lot of tap dancing every month. Sometimes it was exhausting, and sometimes – like when she was forced to borrow money from Rose (her parents had stopped loaning her money) – it was humiliating. There were times when she felt she couldn’t go on with it, couldn’t keep it up. But she had no choice. That was why she’d taken the job dancing at the Mt. Shasta Gentlemen’s Club, and why sometimes, when things were especially tight, she took a little extra money from men for private favors. She tried not to think about it, even when she was doing it – it brought her too much shame, too much pain, and worst of all, too much self-hatred.

It was Anna’s hope to save up enough money so that someday she and Kendra could find a little house somewhere to live instead of this dump of a trailer park. The only problem was, she didn’t make enough money to save any. They lived hand-to-mouth. Except for the occasional temp job, the tips at night were the only money she made, and she had to pay a percentage of those tips to Rocky, the owner of the club. Just when she thought she might be able to put some money aside, something came up that prevented it – car problems, a trip to the walk-in clinic, and now the swamp cooler was making strange sounds and needed either to be fixed or replaced. That little house seemed so far, far away, like nothing more than a long-ago dream.

The trailer was stiflingly hot inside, even with the swamp cooler on. Something inside the cooler rattled loudly. It was mounted in the window over the kitchen table. The kitchen was just to the left of the front door as you came inside, the living room to the right. Through the kitchen was the hallway that led to the bathroom and bedrooms.

Anna felt perspiration trickle down her back and sides and she kept wiping her forehead before it dripped into her eyes. She saw beads of sweat roll down Kendra’s temples, saw it glisten on her neck.

“Mommy?” Kendra said as they ate.

“What, honey?” Anna sounded tired, distracted.

“If everybody knows Jesus is coming back soon, why are they so mean to each other?”

Anna released a small, weary laugh. “Boy. If I’d known you were going to ask such deep questions, I would’ve gone to college. I don’t know, honey. People have a long history of being mean to each other. It’s part of what we do.”

“But why?”

“Nobody knows. If we knew, then maybe we wouldn’t do it anymore.”

“Well… I wish we’d hurry up and figure it out. Is anybody working on that?”

“I don’t know , Kendra,” Anna said, an edge to her voice.

Kendra was chewing on a fish stick and her chewing slowed as she looked across the table at her mother with suddenly widened eyes. “You okay, Mommy?”

“Yes, I’m okay. Sorry for snapping at you. I’m just… distracted. Why did you ask that, honey? Is someone being mean to you?”

Kendra put a clump of macaroni and cheese in her mouth and chewed slowly. She did not respond for a long time, then shrugged one shoulder. When she finished chewing, she said, “Everybody’s mean. In one way or another.”

“Oh, surely that’s not true, sweetheart,” Anna said, leaning forward over her meal.

“They don’t mean to be most of the time, but… after they talk to me a little… after they see what I’m like… the way they look at me sometimes… the way they talk to me. Or stare at me. Especially stare at me. Most of that’s just accidental somehow. But the ones who are mean on purpose… there’s something missing from their eyes.”

Anna sighed as she watched her daughter eat.

The umbilical cord had wrapped around Kendra’s neck. She had been deprived of oxygen just long enough to do some damage. They didn’t know how much damage for a while. Later, the doctor told Anna that Kendra would never develop mentally beyond the age of eleven or twelve.

When he learned that there was something wrong with Kendra, Jack had skipped out, not only on Kendra, but on Anna, too. Anna had tried to explain to him exactly what had happened to Kendra, what had caused the problem, but all Jack knew was that she was “mentally deficient” – his words – and he refused to believe that she had come from his loins. He wanted nothing to do with either of them and he’d disappeared very quickly, leaving Anna and Kendra to fend for themselves. When she thought about Jack, Anna could not understand what had gotten into her – besides alcohol. She’d only been with him twice. Two times too many. Once would have been excusable, but twice ? It probably had been the second time that took.

Anna closed her eyes a moment when she felt a pang of guilt for thinking such a thought – as if she regretted having Kendra. Kendra was the best thing that had ever happened to her in her miserable life. She didn’t deserve Kendra. She thought of the life she’d led, and Kendra was an accidental godsend, a gift from heaven. She only hoped she could somehow make herself worthy of having her. She didn’t feel she had so far.

Now, looking at Kendra, thinking about what she had just said, Anna thought, She’s supposed to be retarded ? Sometimes Kendra seemed a whole world smarter than Anna ever could hope to be. Sometimes she would casually say something that made Anna’s jaw drop, or made goose pimples break out over her shoulders and neck. And then, in a moment, Kendra was a simple little girl again. She was a little girl with the incredibly voluptuous curves of a beautiful young woman.

She had no friends to speak of. She went to school when it was in session; the bus – the “short bus,” others called it derisively, and it was – picked her up in the morning and dropped her off in the afternoon, and she came straight to the trailer. She had no friends asking her to come over to visit after school. She attended no school functions. There were some younger children in the park with whom she played at times, but that was all.

Kendra wore a red halter top and a pair of denim cutoffs that had been cut off pretty high on her firm thighs.