5.
I’m out in the field behind our house by myself and I know I’m not supposed to be. I just couldn’t help it, though. I saw the horses through the kitchen window and I had to go see them. They’re so pretty and nice. Even though they don’t belong to us, I like to say that they’re mine. When things are yours, you have to take care of them. That’s what Daddy says. I came out here to take care of the horses.
The horses sure have a lot of flies on them and they try to hit them with their tails. I can help them by brushing the flies away from them. I can only reach the bottom of their stomachs because I’m just three, but I try hard anyway. My hands touch the horse hair and it’s so soft. It must tickle the horses when I touch them, though, because they make horse noises and run away. Pretty soon all of the horses are running around and I’m standing in the middle of them, watching. Even though they’re really big, I’m not afraid of them. They’re so pretty when they run and they won’t hurt me.
While I’m watching, I hear yelling from the house and I see Mommy run across the yard. She climbs right over the fence and comes to pick me up. She carries me back to the house and keeps on yelling the whole way. I don’t understand some of the words, but she says them so loud that I start to cry. I tell her I was just visiting the horses but she doesn’t care.
When we get back in the kitchen, Mommy puts me down on the floor so hard I almost fall over. She yells at me to quit crying but I can’t. She’s so mad and I’m scared. She tells me I’m not supposed to go in the field and I’m a bad girl. She says never do that again. I try to say sorry but I can’t talk right from crying so much. It feels like I have hiccups and I can’t breathe. Mommy says I need to shut up or she will give me something to cry about. I don’t know what that means and when I try to ask her she hits me in my mouth.
I sit down on the floor and my lip hurts so bad. My mouth feels wet and it tastes yucky. I try to feel what happened and I get red stuff on my hand. I know this is blood, like when I fall down and get a scrape. Mommy sees it and gets a box of wipes. She pulls one out and puts it in my hand really hard. She says to hold it inside my lip so I do. It tastes very bad and it stings. I try to take it out of my mouth but Mommy puts my hand back. She says to hold it there and not move it, or else. Then she says she can’t take this and goes inside her room.
When she’s gone I feel tired so I lay down on the floor. It feels cold and it makes my face feel better. I make sure I do what I’m supposed to and keep the wipe in my mouth, even though my arm starts to hurt. I want to go get my Big Bear so I can hug him, but I’m afraid to make noise and bother Mommy again. Pretty soon I just fall asleep.
4.
Green jacket man:
He always sits in the back half of the bus and always on the left side, if you’re facing toward the front of the bus. He always wears a light-weight green jacket with some silver parts on the sleeves. It’s made out of some kind of slightly shiny windbreaker material. When it’s cold he sometimes wears a close-fitting fleece hat, but usually not. He always reads something on the way downtown, usually business papers or scientific books with diagrams in them. One time I saw him read Gourmet Magazine but that never happened again. He listens to music with ear-bud headphones that I think are attached to a smart phone, but I’ve never seen it. The music is never loud enough for anyone but him to hear. On most days I end up sitting behind him, so I’m very familiar with what the back of his head looks like. His neck is quite tan and has pink undertones. His hair is a mix of black and gray. It curls a little bit where it reaches his neck and he just lets it grow how it grows. He doesn’t get it shaved into a straight line like some people do. He’s balding a little bit on top, but not very much for somebody in their mid to late 40s. Sometimes he smells like aftershave, but usually not. The aftershave smell and the fleece hat have never coincided. When someone sits next to him he shifts to make room and doesn’t seem irritated about it like some people. He also holds his satchel on his lap instead of putting it on the seat next to him and only moving it when someone pointedly wants to sit down. I think he gets on at the stop immediately before mine because he’s sometimes still getting settled when I get on and that stop is only one block away. I get off at the first stop downtown and he doesn’t, so I don’t know where he goes after that. I have never heard him speak to anyone so I don’t know what his voice sounds like. When I imagine him talking it sounds like Woody Allen in my head.
Backpack lady:
She has long, curly brown hair that she always wears in a low ponytail. It’s starting to go gray in places. She wears a red jacket with no hood every day. She only wears pants, either khakis or jeans, and she wears the same pair of athletic shoes every day. She always carries a backpack. It’s gray with orange on the pocket area and it has black straps. She sometimes wears glasses, but sometimes not. She gets on five or six stops after me and if there are no completely empty seats she sometimes sits next to me. She plays Sudoku on her phone all the time. When she turns the phone on the game is always already started and the timer is usually at around five minutes. I think she starts it when she gets to her bus stop and that’s how long she has to wait. When she gets done with Sudoku, she gets a running or workout magazine out of her backpack and reads that. She uses the subscription cards as bookmarks. She gets off at the same stop as me and she is always the first one to go out of the back door because she lines up in front of it when we’re still a block away from the stop. We go in the same direction for a couple of blocks and she always walks very purposefully up the hills. She holds onto her backpack straps as she walks. When she gets to the intersection at 3rd and Seneca she almost always jaywalks. Her confidence sometimes causes a ripple effect and large groups of people will follow her into the intersection, even if they had been waiting patiently for the light to change before. When we get across the street she keeps going east up the hill to 4th Avenue and I turn and go south down 3rd Avenue. I don’t know where she goes after that.
High school sweethearts:
Every school day there are two teenagers at the southbound bus stop at 35th Avenue and Avalon Way. I see them out the window of my bus when it stops on the other side of the street. They are both attractive young people. She’s around 5’6” and she has long, straight brown hair. She always wears jeans, sneakers, and a sweatshirt. He’s a few inches taller than she is and he has short, straight brown hair. His daily uniform is similar to hers, but the clothes are baggier and come in darker colors. The thing about these two is that they are always touching and kissing each other. They do this in three different ways. In their first pose, he sits down on the low concrete wall that borders the Kentucky Fried Chicken parking lot next to the bus stop. She sits on his lap and he wraps his arms around her waist, resting his hands on her thighs. Their second pose is a slight variation of the first. He still sits on the concrete wall, but instead of sitting on his lap, she stands in front of him. He crosses his legs behind her and rests his hands on the small of her back. In their third pose, they are both standing. She reaches up to hug his neck and he reaches down to hug her waist. That third one mostly happens on rainy days when they are forced by the weather to be under the bus shelter. There is no roof over the concrete wall. I have never seen either of these two talk to or interact with anyone else at the bus stop. In fact, excluding the times when she sits on his lap, I don’t think I’ve ever seen them look away from each other’s faces. Sometimes I find myself pessimistically thinking that today might be the day that I see them sitting far apart and ignoring each other. So far I’ve been wrong every time and I like that.
3.
Jackie got the old CD player out of the basement and now she’s playing David Lanz at dusk while sitting on the back deck smoking Marlboro lights and drinking whatever was in the cupboard. She offers me a cigarette and I sit beside her watching the sunset over the Columbia. She talks all the time and it’s always only about three people: her first husband (annulled), her second husband (dead), and her non-husband, my father with his wasted legs and his impossible requests. My father with the hole in his neck. She tells me how fun it was, “until it all went to shit.” They went for drives and they told that story about sharing the dessert over and over again. She thinks it’s all her fault, or she thinks that he thinks it is, which is the same thing. I want to ask her why she’s measuring her life this way. He went into the hospital and she quit eating like it had only been something she was doing while he was watching. Like she only exists when they’re looking at her, even if it’s only to figure out how to hurt her best or to wonder what she knows. The phrase “when I grow up” sputters once in my mind and turns dark like the orange Bic lighter in the breeze. I scratch my knee where a mosquito has bitten me right through the denim of my jeans. It’s only the females that suck blood, I’ve heard, and they don’t do it for their own survival. They do it so the eggs have something to eat. They do it so the mating has a purpose.
2.
Josh is the kind of person who keeps a pencil and a beat-up notebook handy at all times. When I ask him to show me something he’s written down, he blushes and starts flipping through pages. “Oh, here,” he says. “This is a good one. It says in Joshua Tree National Park there’s a hollow tree with a metal plate in the trunk. It sounds really good if you drum on it with your hands.”
When he first moved to Portland he didn’t have any friends so he ended up joining some kind of cult. On a whiteboard in his bedroom there’s still a note in someone else’s handwriting that says his chi must be really strong because he wasn’t injured very badly when he wrecked his car. He crashed right into a freeway divider and walked away with only a few stitches in his lip from where his face hit the steering wheel. The stitches were supposed to dissolve after a week but they were still there months later. The night we met at the hookah bar he cut them out with fingernail clippers in case I wanted to kiss him.
At his house one night we listen to the Jim Croce record I got him and he teaches me to play dominoes. He tells me that I shouldn’t feel bad if I don’t get it right away because it’s kind of complicated, but I win the first game by a good 40 points. “Is there anything you’re bad at?” he asks me. “Besides giving direct answers to personal questions?”
Sometimes when we have nothing to do we look at a big map of the United States that he has pinned up in his living room. “Right there,” I say, and my finger collides with the wall. “The very bottom corner of Washington.”
He shows me where his parents live and I tell him that I didn’t know El Paso was so close to the Mexican border. “Oh, yeah,” he says. “I used to cut class in high school so I could walk to Juarez and get drunk. It used to be 25 cents to walk over the border, then it was 35, then it went up to 50. It was always the same price as a pay telephone call for some reason.”
1.
We’re in the kitchen of the Ridgefield house, the real one, and Carrie’s doing that thing where she eats one slice of bread with jelly followed by one slice of bread with peanut butter and calls it a sandwich. Despite the fact that she’s technically “company,” she didn’t ask me or anybody if she could have some food. She just said she was hungry, walked in here, and got out the bread. She also took a swig right out of the juice jug for good measure when she was deciding what jelly to use. This is her usual habit and if anybody asked me why, I would say that her maternal protectiveness of me and her lack of fear of my father combine in her to leave her as comfortable in our house as she is anywhere else. As usual, Dad has a more succinct observation: “That Carrie just eats the butt out of the kitchen.”
And it’s true, she does. Even now as she finishes her so-called sandwich, she’s asking if we have hotdogs, which she prefers in their uncooked state. I tell her that we don’t have any and she returns to our refrigerator unfazed, making another pass at the cranberry juice and eventually coming up with the string cheese. I know that later she’ll probably make some popcorn and after she leaves my father will wonder out loud if she has a hollow leg.
In the meantime, though, Carrie is happily peeling her cheese and we’re talking about boys. I start to tell her that I finally kissed the guy from Portland I’ve been seeing and she interrupts me to ask if he’s the one who gave me the T-shirt with the dog and the pizza on it. I answer in the affirmative and she cracks up laughing. She reminds me that I wore that shirt for the next four days after receiving it and she imitates my father asking me if I don’t have anything else to wear. I tell her it’s not funny and punch her on the arm. She makes a big deal about composing her face and then says, lips still twitching, ‘Go on.’
I tell her about how hot it was that evening, how I had to invite him into my kitchen and basically make him eat a popsicle. I mention that he was much more concerned than I was when we accidentally dripped melted strawberry on the furniture. (Here Carrie snorts at my implied comparison of his behavior to her own and pointedly throws a string of cheese on the floor.)
I describe the way this boy and I sat down next to each other on my living room couch to watch a movie, slowly inching toward each other in the warm dark until our arms finally touched, his right against my left. The way it felt to find myself suddenly, wonderfully, holding hands with him. “Yeah, okay,” Carrie says. “When did you actually kiss him?”
“After the movie was over,” I say. “We were just sitting on the couch and hugging each other. I moved my head up and he moved his head down and I just kissed him.”
Carrie ponders this for a second and then starts laughing again. She pantomimes trying to kiss someone and accidentally bonking heads with them, indicating the moment of imaginary impact by making a confounded face and smacking her hand loudly on the kitchen counter. I tell her that it wasn’t like that, it was romantic and lovely. “I know,” she says. “I’m sure it was wonderful.”
I nod, and we fall into a comfortable silence there in the kitchen. Carrie plays with her string cheese wrapper, putting it together how it was and taking it apart again. I walk over to the refrigerator and take a swig right out of the juice jug. I think about how many times I’ve drunk after Carrie, or she’s finished a lollipop I was eating. I think about how accustomed we are to each other’s spit and tears and sweat. This is my best friend, I think.
Later, when we are walking down the sidewalks of our hometown to the grocery store on the corner, I notice Carrie paying special attention to the way I move my feet when I walk and trying to imitate it. I well up with things to say to her: I think I might be in love and I’m afraid that I’ll mess it up. I’m afraid that I’ll grow apart from you now that we’re not in high school anymore. I’m not as brave as you always seem to think I am.
As if she has heard all this, Carrie stops right before an intersection. She looks at me for a long moment and then smiles. She calls me a freak and I call her a creep. This is an old exchange between us and one that makes us happy. As we continue walking, she moves a little closer to me, brushing my left arm with her right. “You’d better not kiss me,” she says.
