Claire Watkins: Battleborn: Stories

She will be thirty when she walks out on a man who in the end, she’ll decide, didn’t love her enough, though he in fact did love her, but his love wrenched something inside him, and this caused him to hurt her. She’ll move to an apartment downtown and soon — very soon, people will say, admiringly at times, skeptically at others — she will have a date with a sensible man working as an attorney, the profession of his father and brothers, in the office where she is a typist. They will share a dinner, and the next weekend another, then drinks, a midday walk through the upheaved brick sidewalks of her neighborhood, a Sunday-morning garden tour of his. On their fifth date she will allow him to take her to bed.

Before they met, he’ll have been a social worker, and after they make love he will tell her this, and about the terrible things he saw in that other life. He’ll begin — At CPS, there was this woman. She had this little girl. Beautiful. Two years old — then stop and lean down and put his lips to her hair. Do you really want to hear this? he’ll ask, as though just remembering that she was listening. He’ll feel her head nod where it rests on his chest and go on. About the Mexican woman who let her beautiful, bright two-year-old daughter starve to death in a motel room near the freeway. About the teenage boy, high on coke, who broke into the apartment next door and slit his neighbor’s throat. About the man who worked at the snack bar at the Sparks Marina, who lured a retarded girl into the men’s bathroom with a lemonade. About the father who made his son live under their porch in Sun Valley, about the hole the boy bored up through the floor so he could watch his stepmother brush her hair in the morning.

He will talk, and she will listen. It will be as though she’s finally found someone else willing to see the worst in the world. Someone who can’t help but see it. For the first time in her life, she will feel understood. When he finishes one story she’ll ask for another, then another, wanting to stack them like bricks, build walls of sorrow around the two of them, seal them up together. An uncontrollable feeling — like falling — will be growing in her: they could build a love this way.

Then, feigning lightness, she’ll ask him to tell her about something he did, something terrible. When he was a boy, maybe. It will be late. Watery light from a waxing moon will catch the corner of the bed, setting the white sheets aglow. Two candles — the man’s idea — will flicker feebly on the nightstand, drawing moths against the window screen. He will tell her about his younger brother and a firecracker and a neighbor’s farmhouse in Chatsworth, of straw insulation and old dry wood that went up like whoosh so fast it didn’t seem fair, of running around to the front door and ringing the bell — she will find this curious, the bell — and helping the neighbor, an elderly woman, down the front steps. Now you show me yours, he’ll say, and laugh. He will have a devastating laugh.

By then, there will be much to tell — too much. A pair of expensive tropical lizards she’d begged for, then abandoned in a field to die when their care became tedious. Birthstone rings and a real gold bracelet plucked from a friend’s jewelry box at a sleepover. Asking an ugly, wretched boy with circles of ringworm strung like little galaxies across his head to meet her for a kiss at the flagpole, laughing wildly when he showed. These she’ll have been carrying since girlhood like very small stones in her pocket. The sensible man will be waiting. Who can say why we offer the parts of ourselves we do, and when.

• • •

Our girl is sixteen years old. Her palms press against the stinging metal of a heat rack. Her best friend, Lena, a large-toothed girl from Minnesota, stands across from her, palms pressed against the rack, too. Their eyes are locked, and a skin scent rises between them. This is their game, one of many. In the pocket of our girl’s apron rests a stack of fleshy pepperoni, their edges curling in the swelter. Behind her, the slat-mouthed pizza oven bellows steadily. A blackened sheet of baking parchment floats in a dish of hot grease. The grease has a name, and as our girl tells the story this name will return to her, along with other details of this place, which had until now left her — the flatulent smell from a newly opened bag of sausage, the flimsy yellowed plastic covering the computer keyboards and phone keypads, the serrated edge of a cardboard box slicing her index finger nearly to the bone. Naked in her own bed with a man for whom she feels too much too soon, our girl will recall the name of the grease — Whirl, it was called — and the then-exquisite possibility of searing off her fingerprints.

Lena, her friend, finally pulls her hands from the rack, shaking the sting from them. You win, she says.

Our girl waits a beat, gloating, then lifts her palms from the surface, lustrous with heat. She folds a pepperoni disk into her mouth. Let’s go again, she says.

Soon, our girl is cut loose for the night by the manager, a brick-faced, wire-haired woman named Suzie. She goes to the back of the restaurant, to a bathroom constructed from Sheetrock as an afterthought. At a row of metal sinks outside the bathroom, two delivery boys wash dishes. One of the boys, a nineteen-year-old named Jeremy, has convinced himself that he loves our girl, though she has already once declined an invitation to watch Dawn of the Dead in the single-wide trailer he has all to himself on his mother’s boyfriend’s property.

In the bathroom the plastic shelves are stocked with fluorescent lightbulbs and printer paper and a dozen two-gallon plastic tubs once used to store a cream sauce the franchise no longer offers. She removes her hat, her apron, her once-white tennis shoes and ankle socks. She unpins her name tag from her patriotically colored collared shirt, and pulls the shirt off over her head. Yellow grains of cornmeal sprinkle into her eyelashes and along the part in her hair. She steps out of her khaki pants, stiff with dried doughwater and dark, unidentified oils.

She stands before the mirror in her bra and underwear, listening to the hollow, slow-motion clangs at the triple sinks. She steps out of her underwear. Suzie bellows from up front, and someone’s nonmarking sole screeches against the tile. In the sink, using the granulated pink soap from the dispenser, our girl scrubs the smell of herself from her panties. Later, the dampness left from this washing will remind her of the pizza parlor and of poor pathetic Jeremy the delivery boy, and other remnants of a life she already wishes she could forget.

She waits for Lena on the bench in front of the counter, watching carryout mothers waddle from and to their idling cars with their pizzas and their slippery, foil-wrapped cheese sticks. Six and a half hours ago, in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart across the highway, Kyle Peterson, a tenor sax in their school’s jazz band, dumped Lena, his girlfriend of nearly a year, for the first-chair flutist, a freshman and a thinner, looser version of Lena. Two hours later, our girl wiped mascara from under Lena’s rubbed-raw eyes in the Sheetrock bathroom and asked her whether she wanted to get the fuck out of this shit town. Two hours after that, when she was certain her mother and stepfather had left for their Friday-night twelve-step meeting, our girl dialed her own phone number. She told the machine, I’m going to Lena’s after work to stay the night, and, I love you, which is what she always says after she lies to them. By the time Lena gets off, they’ve both got an uneventful adolescence’s worth of recklessness welling inside them, and one of them has a driver’s license and a like-new Dodge Neon and it’s just the tip of summer, which means there are college boys from places like Chicago and Florida and New York City wandering the Strip, sixty miles away, boys who came to Las Vegas looking for girls willing to do the things she and Lena think they are willing to do.