“Dad, what the fuck?” The door pushed against him abruptly, the knob jamming into his back as he climaxed.
He looked in the mirror and saw his daughter and Chickie, covering her face. “Oh my god.”
He turned quickly, realizing they’d seen enough in the mirror. He shut the door, locked it, pushed his back against it, holding up his pants. Maybe they’d seen only a bit, he reasoned, zipping up and clearing his throat. He heard them rush down the hall to his daughter’s room.
She was old enough to understand her father was a man, he figured. He looked in the mirror and washed his hands. They felt dirty and he washed them a second time, scrubbing under his nails the way his mom had taught him. He stayed in the bathroom until he heard the girls leave. He wasn’t sure what he did during that time, waiting, except stare at his hands. What broke through his shock was the hard sound his wife made coming home, the thud of her purse on the kitchen counter, all the hurried noise she made after entering the front door. Only then did he dry his hands and go to change his clothes.
The sky was about to crack open and release everything held in its dark clouds, but Chickie Rodriguez didn’t care. She kept swimming, ignoring the shade creeping from the clouds, cooling off the water. She’d paid her two dollars — money she’d saved by skipping lunch — and wasn’t going to waste it.
She sank again into the water, held her breath, let it blow a big balloon in her chest, beneath her breasts. A hot-air pump, made of anger.
At home, her mother waited to be fed, bathed, comforted like a child. But Chickie would no longer be the one to do it now. Thinking of her mother’s stench, Chickie held her breath as she spun upside down, feeling her hair cast wet fingers from her head, floating her legs into a perfect V. She held it as long as she could, picturing her mother’s crooked smile that was no longer a smile.
It’s not so bad, she thought as she left the pool in her worn bikini bottom and the anti-drug campaign T-shirt she’d had since second grade. For instance, she could be that lady in the studded bathing suit with her little brats, clearly trapped in a life of watching them grow and shit and scream. Diamond ring glinting as she moved to grab one child or another, to keep them from scratching or biting each other. Golden handcuffs, lady.
Chickie never cried. She didn’t cry at her father’s funeral, and she didn’t cry when the two police officers showed up at their filthy apartment, full of empty vodka bottles and pills, to take her mother away.
One of the officers was a woman who acted overly compassionate and warm, and to Chickie, it seemed feigned and slightly arrogant. This disgusted her. For some reason, it mixed in her mind with the disgust of finding Renee’s dad in the bathroom pleasuring himself the day before.
“It’s going to be okay,” the officer said, patting her shoulder. The condescension made bile gather in Chickie’s throat. The fuck it is.
Chickie walked to the room she shared with her mother and packed up her clothes: a cotton shirt with the logo of a Mexican restaurant they’d loved, a pair of faded, too-loose jeans, a busted bra, an extra pair of underwear that used to be gray. She looked at her mother’s things, especially the ceramic elephant sitting on the windowsill. Chickie had always admired the figurine, which was probably a gift from one of her mother’s boyfriends. It symbolized the precious, hateful, and painfully loving relationship she had with her mother. She would run her fingers over its lines and indentations after putting her mother to sleep beside her. We’ll be okay, she would say to herself during those times. But she didn’t mean it the way the police said it.
They were waiting. She left the elephant on the sill and left the room for the last time.
Farah Peña is always that other woman. She imagines that, on some other planet, she walks around in a nightgown, fresh from a bath, living the life she should’ve lived. That other Farah leans against the brick of her house, exhaling sweet breath, holding a wineglass to her mouth, tasting something foreign and glistening. Her mouth is not a horrid thing — just a mouth. Her breasts and torso held lightly in a gown for sleeping, and just that — a body. She listens to the crickets’ and frogs’ music. She goes back into her own house, disappears behind a thick layer of curtains fat with dreams, with hours and hours stitched inside them. Oh, how that other Farah sleeps.
She hasn’t heard the sound of frogs and crickets in years. It’s annoying and sad — the wrong background noise for a concrete lot with pitiful fists of grass and weeds growing from split cracks. Farah stubs out her cigarette on the bottom of one of the black stilettos — the ones that don’t slide against the spa floor, that give off a solid crunch when she walks in them, like she might be safe in them. She likes the gritty sound they make when she walks, the way they’re too big for her feet and not two or three sizes too small. She took them from Mary’s feet while she slept off the fresh bruises one of the johns had left. It was a repeat guy, a soccer-dad type who spooned his wife at night — the worst kind. Farah’s prepared for the same john now, her little stash lined up neatly at least an hour before he’s expected to show up: the plastic card with the Pizza Hut logo propped against her can of spray lubricant.
Back inside, Justin tells her to put on the bright pink lingerie — the cotton candy one, he calls it — the one most coveted by all the other girls. Farah used to care about such things, and about Justin’s preferences more than anything.
When she first met Justin — her friend Chickie’s cousin — he paid attention to Farah like no one else ever had. Called her twice a day, bringing her flowers, food, jewelry, little notepads, and drawings. Soon he was fingering her in her bedroom with the door half open while her parents walked around the house, oblivious. She didn’t want to do it, but was willing to endure, to keep his attention on her. Wasn’t that what it meant to matter?
Then, he asked her to endure more things — things she didn’t mind at first, until she realized she minded very much and had all along. Things like him touching her beneath her clothes when he dropped her off at school, a favor her parents appreciated, once they warmed up to the idea of their fifteen-year-old dating a nineteen-year-old. She endured him pushing her head into his crotch on the freeway, on the road to her house, in parking lots behind factories and chain stores, before and after dinner. She endured this with him and soon with others, and he promised her dinners, clothes, makeup. Suddenly, no seemed unavailable. No had disappeared. No had been swallowed with semen and the salt from sweat and tears. She was sneaking out at night to meet grown men behind her house, by the bayou. Not because she wanted to — because it was something she had to do to see Justin, to win his favor. She didn’t know how to stop it.
Months later, Farah packed a backpack with all her money — two hundred dollars accrued from a summer job and six months of skipping lunch — and a notebook in which she’d already written one sentence: And now I’m pregnant, and he has met his goal of destroying me. She left her parents’ home — her family, Chickie and her other friends, and the rest of her life — with no plan, only the thought that she couldn’t live this way anymore.
She had gotten as far as Antoine and Frick Road, near the middle school, before Justin caught up to her in his Chevrolet, as if he knew exactly where she’d end up. Without a word, she got into his car. What else could she have done? She had swallowed that no, and that no was now her life.