Dana Spiotta - Stone Arabia

I kept thinking how gay he was while he yanked my jeans and panties off as I lay laughing on his bed. My hand was in his hair as his mouth pressed and licked, both gentle and insistent, and I thought, This is the gay way to fuck a girl, right? Even though that was clearly unlikely. I thought of him as gay as we met up night after night, invariably making out in a corner, or a car, or a parking lot, his hands searching for a way through my fortress of clothes. He gave me a coquettish smile as he took my hand and pulled me toward his car. Chris had (and has) no edge; he was happy and easy. And he wasn’t, I finally understood, gay.

Nik thought Chris was a brainless pretty boy, but that wasn’t right. He was very smart, he just wasn’t dark. He came from a middle-class family in the Valley, and he had gone to private school. Yet he thought of himself as poor. I would have found that obnoxious in most people, but it seemed merely innocent in Chris. He was so comfortably not poor that he was able to take his background for granted and imagine us all in the same boat. He just didn’t know what it meant to have no one to borrow from if you really needed money. He didn’t know what it meant to have nothing under you or ahead of you, and he didn’t understand what a difference that made. He was, assuredly, always broke, but it was a phase. He had a nice car (a 1980 Honda Accord) and his folks paid the insurance. “That’s all,” he said. He had gone to college and had no debt. He had insurance and a small untouchable fund for a future down payment on a house. That’s all!

Chris didn’t want Ada at first. Our infatuation was already on the wane — we were not broken up but on the way there. I had already had an abortion in high school. I was twenty-two, I was sure I would get another one. But somehow I found I just didn’t want to. This pregnancy felt different. I knew (in the way women often claim to just know things and freak men out) that this was the baby I had to have. I knew. Somehow I believed that this would be my one chance to have a kid and I wouldn’t get another. I had this certainty; maybe it was from hormones or perhaps wishful thinking as a way out of my wheel-spinning life. We didn’t get married or even stay together, but Chris accepted my decision. He made arrangements. He gave me money every month until Ada was eighteen. He saw her regularly and he fell in love with her. He enjoyed, I think, being a dad but not having to do it full-time. Now-and-then dad. Naturally, Ada worshipped him. I didn’t mind. She may have adored him more than anyone in the world, but I was like the air and the sun and the sea. I was the world.

“I’m an ABAWD. An aba-wod, ” Nik said.

“What’s that?”

“Able-Bodied Adult Without Dependents. They don’t like to give ABAWDs any help. They fingerprinted me and issued me an Electronic Benefit Transfer card.”

Nik had finally signed up for food stamps. He got $108 a month, which wouldn’t come close to making up for the shifts he could no longer work. He handed me the shiny food stamp credit card. It had a picture of pristine Pacific coastline on it. He took it back, slipped it in his wallet.

“At least you got something.”

“Yes indeed.”

I remember the moment when I first understood Nik and I had made real mistakes. Nik was in his early thirties or had just turned thirty. These were the years when my life was organized by Ada, my blundering and earnest care of Ada. I remember noticing, with real sadness, that we had strayed from an acceptable course, that our lives were going in the wrong direction. I actually thought those words, how far we have strayed, but I don’t know if that was accurate. That would imply we were on the right course at some point.

We were having a pool party. The Maltman Avenue apartment complex where I was living at the time had a bright blue kidney-shaped swimming pool. In every respect, my Maltman apartment was horrible — the walls were thin drywall, the doors were hollow. At night I could hear arguing and fucking from all directions. This is what people don’t realize unless they have lived it: the low-level indignities of a lousy, cheap apartment cloud your every moment. When I stood in the kitchen, I couldn’t fully open the refrigerator door without hitting the edge of the stove. The plastic shower surround had permanent hard-water stains and moved when I leaned on it. Then there was the neutral-colored carpet and its odd petroleum smell. The sliding “natural wood” laminate shutter-styled closet doors that came off their rails each time I tried to open them. The popcorn ceiling I got to stare up at each night, and the odd layout contrived not for utility but only to fit the most in the least. It wasn’t at all the same as living in an older run-down apartment. This apartment was old-new, and being brand-new was the only thing it ever had going for it. When Ada and I moved into our one-bedroom, it felt — the low ceilings, the dark hallways, the flimsy construction — old and used, maybe only five years old but old already. I accepted it because I believed it was temporary. Everyone did. No one wanted to imagine an entire life lived in that kind of space.

But the Maltman Avenue apartment complex did have one significant redeeming feature: the community pool in the center courtyard. It was perfectly fine, clean and full of chlorine. And no one really used it. Ada and I would have the pool to ourselves on hot afternoons, of which there were many. I taught her to swim, and it made up for a lot.

We were having a pool party. I was dating this guy Bill at the time. He was a lot older than I was. He made good money as a lighting technician, he was a member of IATSE Local 33. He was not my usual type, but he asked me out and we ended up together for almost two years. He liked how I looked — I think that was mostly it — and he seemed charmed by our many differences, at least at first. I thought I was being practical. But he liked to tell me what to do, and when he drank too much, he would say perceptive things like “You sure got it all figured out, don’t you?” His low-grade sarcasm didn’t hurt me, it just made me feel dull and tired. Bill did help Ada and me. He helped me with rent sometimes. He helped me with my car. I needed help.

This particular party had gone on too long. Everyone had been drinking all day in the sun. Ada — she was eight, maybe? — lay by the pool, eating potato chips and reading. I was high but not out of control. The day carried itself and kept going. I had finally persuaded Bill to cook the hamburgers and hot dogs on the grill. The ten or so people had eaten. The day was starting to fade into night, and people hung in there, talking, listening to music, drinking, disappearing and returning the way people do at a party. Ada, I remember, also had a little girlfriend there. Earlier they splashed in the pool, and now they lounged facedown on fluorescent pink beach towels, reading magazines and talking to each other. Foggily, or through a fog of party murmur, I heard a rise in the pitch of Bill’s voice. I looked up at the stairs leading to our apartment, and there stood Bill and Nik. The volume of their argument escalated. They were nearly shouting. We all turned to look at them as the noise continued and rose above the music and conversation. We all stopped talking and watched them. A drunken, stupid argument. It was still daytime. The sun had not yet sunk out of view. I watched, Ada watched, we all watched as the men stopped pointing and shouting and stood back from each other. There was this evaporative moment, the moment when you could feel the violence in the air. Everyone was there with them, on the cusp. To watch it as it was happening made time seem to slow and also to collapse as I felt something rise in my chest and wave through my body. The intense autonomic discharge of frantic energy. It made me intake my breath sharply as though I were about to be hit.