Authors: Vestal McIntyre
D
ress kind of old.” That’s what Winston had said to Wanda over the phone the day before. At the time, it had stirred her vanity a little, and she had smiled. What he had meant was that they would never believe that Wanda, at thirty-one, was the mother of Winston, a high school senior, unless she made herself look older. Now, as she flipped through the stained tops in her closet and rifled through the jeans in her bureau, all of them snug-fitting, she wished she would have listened to what Winston said and actually considered what she would wear, rather than collapsing onto the couch with a Newport Menthol, a glass of sun tea, and her last pain pill, settling into the happy truth that she’d have a hundred dollars to buy five more pills tomorrow, and, as part of the deal, get to spend the afternoon with Winston. She wished she would have listened to him, because now she realized that she had nothing at all motherly to wear.
Then the phone rang. It was Winston, calling to make sure they were on. From the echoing shouts in the background Wanda could tell he was calling from the stairwell pay phone at Eula High. Wanda had once used that phone to call in a bomb threat to the school in order to get out of a geometry midterm.
“When you said I should dress old,” she said, “what did you mean?”
“I meant that you should try to look older than you are. Like, responsible,” Winston said.
“Well, I looked through my clothes and I couldn’t find nothin’ like that.”
“And you’re telling me this an hour before we’re supposed to leave?”
“Sorry.”
Winston was quiet for a moment, then he made a sound that showed that his throat had been tensed in exasperation and had at last released his breath—a tiny, grumpy dam-break. “Think of what
your
mother wears,” he said. “It can’t be that hard.”
This caused a flutter of panic in Wanda’s heart. First came the memory of her mother’s pants, jeans with an elastic waistband that she wore nearly every day. They gave room to her belly, which was round as a bowling ball and low, a grotesque bulge, though her arms had become spindly. This was the body drinking had given her—that of a wizened old woman, pregnant not with something living and growing but something dead. Her mother had been wearing these jeans when she died. Wanda had awoken on a Sunday morning not long after her eleventh birthday and went downstairs to find her mother curled up on the couch, facing away from the blaring TV. This was not unusual. But on this morning there was a nasty, unfamiliar odor in the room—the caustic smell of bile or something else from deep in the body, some essence, some ugly fuel that had kept her mother living and was released only with her ghost. Wanda walked toward her mother. She put her hand to her mother’s hip, the elastic waist of those jeans, and shook. The whole body rocked as one, something living things cannot do. Wanda climbed onto the couch to look into her face. Then she was wild, running to one window and then the next, throwing each open with a bang. And—did it occur to her then, or only now as she remembered?—how
alive
the curtains looked, billowing into the room with the cool breeze, turning up their hems in graceful gestures!
This memory was followed quickly by the realization that Winston didn’t know that her mother was dead. Should she tell him? Of course not! But she pitied him, as if she already had: for the shock of the news, for the remorse he would undoubtedly feel for bringing it up, and even for the imaginings of his own mother’s future death it might kindle. This pity for Winston, even though she hadn’t told him, outshone her memories and became the prevalent emotion of the moment. Then she scrambled unsuccessfully for a response.
This was how her heart cast about in fits when she was out of painkillers—twisting and flipping like a fish that had slid out of her grasp and onto the hot aluminum floor of her uncle’s fishing boat.
“What do you wear to church?” Winston asked.
“Of course!” she said. “I know just the thing. I’ll see you at noon.”
Using the stepladder from the kitchen, Wanda got down the box from the top of the closet, took out the dress, and laid it out on the bed. The fabric was silky rayon with a floral print; a bit springy for late September, but she’d wear her black overcoat, too. This coat was coming apart in the back, but she’d take it off in the courtroom and fold it over her arm. When she tried on the dress, though, the seams hung off her shoulders, and the lacy V-neck plunged farther down between her wide-set, cone-shaped breasts than she remembered. (“They look like party hats,” Hank had said once, holding both breasts out by the nipples. Wanda had laughed, even though it hurt.) In the mirror she could see the hard plate of bone in the center of her chest, from which her ribs radiated like the spokes of a lady’s fan. The last time she had worn this dress, two years ago, she had been fuller, meatier, and prouder. Oh, well. It would have to do.
She found the overcoat in the back of the closet and went out to the porch to smoke while she waited for Winston.
“You shore look nice!” yelled Darrell from across the street. “What’s the occasion?” He was bent over, burrowing into some piece of machinery in his driveway. Was it a furnace?
“Nothin’,” called Wanda. “Just goin’ to Boise with a friend.”
A kid rode by on a bicycle, and Skeet, Darrell’s dog, came charging off the porch, barking his head off. The kid stood up to pump madly on the bike pedals. Darrell swiftly threw a pipe that rotated in the air and hit the dirt just in Skeet’s path, sending the dog in a quick U-turn back to the porch, where he shifted from paw to paw and groaned.
“Good shot!” said Wanda.
“Only kids on bikes!” said Darrell. “Leaves the mailman and everybody else alone ’cept kids on bikes. You’d think they’d learn not to ride by here.”
Darrell went back to his burrowing and Wanda blew out a stream of white smoke that disappeared against the white sky. Her porch wasn’t really a porch. Every unit in her block-long two-story complex had its little box of a balcony that accommodated an easy chair or a bicycle, not both. The upstairs neighbors’ balcony hung over hers. They were boys who commuted to Boise State University, although it seemed they rarely attended class. Last January they had thrown a keg party (Wanda had taken a pill and slept through it) and had left the keg out on the balcony overnight. The beer had expanded in the cold, seeped out of the keg, leaked down, and formed long icicles over her balcony that cast a pretty amber light on Wanda’s sliding glass door in the morning. However, not knowing what these yellow icicles were and worrying that they might contain a dangerous chemical, Wanda phoned the boys. One of them staggered down, red-eyed in his sweats and ski jacket. He broke off a thick icicle and licked it. “Want one?” he asked.
Winston’s big Buick pulled up. Wanda ran inside for her purse and keys, and jogged down to the car. There was a boy in the passenger seat she had never met before. Wanda got in the back.
“Is that what you’re wearing?” asked Winston.
“Yeah. What?”
“I don’t know, it’s just kind of . . . revealing.”
“Oh.” Wanda looked down between her breasts, then quickly up at the boy in the passenger seat, who looked away. “It’s a church dress,” she said.
“It’s just real summery,” said Winston, “and it’s not summer anymore.”
“I thought I’d wear this coat, too.”
“Yeah, but not in the courtroom. Do you have anything else?”
“No.”
“Shit.” Winston put the car in drive and sped, bouncing, down the street and around the corner onto the boulevard. “We’ll have to get you something, then.” He drove toward the interstate that would take them to Boise, then veered swiftly into the parking lot of a strip mall. The store largest and farthest from the boulevard was a Dress Barn. He pulled into the fire lane and left the car running.
“Gary, move the car if somebody makes you. Gimme twenty bucks.”
The boy dug in his pocket for a bill.
“Wanda, this is Gary,” said Winston. “You’re gonna play his mom, so maybe you two should get acquainted. I’ll be right back.”
“I thought I was gonna play
your
mom,” Wanda said.
“Didn’t you listen to anything I said?” Winston demanded. “I’m eighteen. I don’t need to bring a parent. I paid my fine. I’m done. Gary’s seventeen.”
Winston slammed the door and disappeared into the store, and the car was quiet.
“Hi,” Gary said over the top of the passenger seat. He was big, like Winston, but softer, chubbier, and more sloped in the shoulder. He had the longest eyelashes Wanda had ever seen on a boy, and for a moment he appeared to her a frightened forest creature peering over a tree root.
“Hi,” said Wanda.
Gary heaved his backpack into his lap, which made Wanda remember that he and Winston were cutting school to go to court. “Here, I took this from my mom’s wallet. I was afraid to take her driver’s license, ’cause she might miss it. It’s her sports club ID. She never goes.”
Wanda took the card and looked at the tiny photo. It was the face of a real mother—round, generous, and exhausted. “It doesn’t look like me,” she said.
“Yeah, I know. Winston says they won’t ask you for an ID, but I thought, just in case.”
“It’d probably be better if I just say I forgot my purse,” said Wanda, giving him the card back.
He nodded.
Wanda took out her cigarettes and began searching the complicated door for a way to open the window. Gary pushed a button up front that did it for her. “Wow, electric,” Wanda said. She lit the cigarette and blew the smoke as far out of the car as possible. Then she sat leaning against the door and dangling the arm that held the cigarette out the window.
“So, what do you do?” she asked Gary.
He stifled a laugh. “I go to high school,” he said.
“Yeah, I mean, in high school, what do you do?”
Gary shrugged. “I dunno.”
“Do you wrestle?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you on the team with Winston?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, there ya go. That’s what you do,” Wanda said, and she took another drag.
“I took photography last year,” Gary said.
“Oh?”
“Yeah. I was supposed to be on yearbook, but I couldn’t fit it in.”
Something in the tone of this last sentence told Wanda that one of his parents had forbidden it. Maybe it had come down to yearbook or wrestling.
“Sorry,” she said.
Gary shrugged and looked off toward the store. “For what?” he said.
“Do you have a girlfriend?” asked Wanda.
Gary blushed. “No,” he said. The blush climbed his neck, then spread like a mottled rash onto his cheek, as if bloody fingers had left their prints on his white skin. Wanda was fascinated. She had never watched someone blush in so detailed a manner, and it reminded her of an old book she had read where young ladies “coloured”—with a
U
—then hid behind their fans when men looked their way.
“You’re shy!” Wanda said, and she reached out to pinch his shoulder, which wasn’t as soft as she expected.
“Stop it,” said Gary.
“You’re a big enough boy to get in the type of trouble you need to go to court in Boise to fix, but you still blush around girls.”
“Don’t tease me, please,” he said.
There was something old-fashioned about this kid. It was cute. His mother had taught him manners.
“Okay, I’m sorry.” She smiled in such a way as to let him know she wasn’t, really. “Do you have brothers and sisters?”
“Two little sisters.”
“And what about your mom?” said Wanda.
It seemed Gary remembered he was preparing her for a role. “Oh, right. She answers phones in the afternoons at Eula Feed and Supply.”
“What’s her name?”
“Theresa. Theresa,” then he said a last name that sounded to Wanda something like “void check house key.”
“What was that?”
“Theresa Void Check House Key. My dad is Polish.”
“How do you spell that?”
Gary handed her the ID again.
The car door opened and Winston tossed a bag onto the seat next to Wanda. “We’re gonna be late. Don’t smoke in the car.” They tore out of the parking lot, back onto the boulevard, then onto the highway toward Boise.
Wanda dropped the cigarette out the window, opened the bag, and took out a navy-blue-and-white dress. She knew at a glance it was too big for her. It had long sleeves with white cuffs and a white yoke that tied in front like a sailor’s scarf. She tugged at the scarf to see if she could remove it, but the knot was stitched. A paper tag covered in two red clearance stickers, whose prices were scratched out and halved, then halved again, was attached to the label with a plastic tab. The last price was $5.99. Winston hadn’t given Gary his change. Attached to the sleeve of the dress with the same type of plastic tab was a floppy white hat.
“There’s a hat,” Wanda said miserably.
“Yeah, I think you should wear it,” said Winston.
“Why?”
“You’re so
blond
right now, Wanda. I thought it would be better to cover it up. Not that it looks bad. It’s just, you know.”
She touched her hair, which felt like hay. It did look bad, she knew. She had bleached it on Monday, and had been meaning to give it the conditioning treatment that eased the color from straw to caramel, but she hadn’t gotten around to it. All the aches in her joints and the craving in her chest that had subsided while she interviewed Gary now returned, and she felt tears coming on.
Would you trade two of the pills you’ll have later for half of one now?
Yes.
Would you give the hundred dollars to have a better dress and pretty, conditioned hair?
Well, no. But I would give twenty-five.
(All her life Wanda had bargained with this power who, in school, had been God:
Would you shave off your eyebrows if it meant Billy would ask you to the dance?
No.
Would you shoot a stranger in the head if it brought your mother back to life?
Yes. The power had long since lost his name.)
“Maybe you should put it on now,” Winston said gently. “We’ll be in kind of a rush once we get there.”
Wanda retreated into the corner of the seat, hiked up her dress, and pulled it off over her head. She sheltered her chest with one hand as she used the other to open the new dress from underneath and determine which was the front and which was the back. She was careful not to look up at Gary’s mirror. Her body looked ugly and crumpled, her belly creasing as she dressed in this cramped space, and she didn’t want to know if Gary was watching her. And if he was, she didn’t want to embarrass him by catching him. She pulled the dress on, and tried to smooth it. She had never worn anything so stiff, starched, and ugly. She began to cry.