As I pulled into our parking spot, two dogs and a cat with three legs limped off. Trevor turned and looked at me with a tentative smile. “Home?” he asked.
“The Taj Mahal,” I said, trying to play myself off as being outside of this life, Miss Disingenuous, as if Oh, dear – what happened here? Why am I living in this? “I wasn’t kidding.”
I tried to look at it from and outsider’s eye. Around here a double wide was bigger and better than a single wide. It conferred a kind of status to you that said, yeah, I may be trailer park trash – but at least I’m double wide trailer park trash. I suspected such nuances weren’t on Trevor’s radar screen.
He gave me one of those looks that I’d read about in books but I’d never actually had someone project at me. It was a slightly sickly, polite look of extraordinary pity mingled with something else that made his eyes go from that beautiful ocean blue to a faded grayish color, reminding me of a pulsating vein under extremely thin skin.
His hand that had rested on my thigh squeezed slightly and then it moved, fingertip under my chin. Our eyes met and I wanted to close mine, to sink into this last moment when we could still live in this crazy little bubble of a few hours stolen between a hitchhiker and a crazy lady, all tumbled along like stones being polished by fate.
“I don’t judge,” he said and I laughed, ropy strands of giggles being pulled out of me like anal beads from the star stripper in a moderately hardcore club – a little bit painful but one hell of a show for the person watching.
“Trevor, everybody judges, and this,” I pointed to the house, “shit, I’m judging it.”
His shoulders slumped a little and he looked out the window again, peering around the dust spots on my windshield. I tried to take it in through his eyes. The gutter that hung off the left side of the roof, fourteen or fifteen garbage bags filled, probably, with Mama’s recycling. Every few months she convinced somebody to drive her up to Michigan and turn in the ten cent cans. It wasn’t nearly as interesting a story as the Seinfeld episode about it.
Trash, just pure trash, littered the little patches of grass around the driveway and the porch really did slump at about a twenty-five degree angle on one corner, meaning you had to kind of bend your shoulders and neck to walk in to reach the front door. For $380 a month we paid lot rent, and that included our water, sewer, and supposedly our garbage. That was about all Mama could afford, her disability check not much more than twice that.
I’d been working some kind of a job since I was nine, from a dollar an hour yard work up to turning fifteen and lying about my age to make the glorious minimum wage at a truck stop a few exits down. I lost that job when Mama couldn’t afford the gas, and luckily I turned sixteen shortly after and picked up the gas station gig I held now. When my car didn’t work, or Mama’s didn’t, or we didn’t have gas money, I could walk or hitch a ride.
It made me think that in some ways I was just like Trevor, because right now we were both hitchhiking through life and we were both stark nak*d. Except him? His nudity was on the outside.
I wished we could trade places.
Trevor
I knew people lived like this but I always figured it was part of an episode on one of those A& E series on cable television. Holy shit! No, really, actual shit. Animal shit from the looks of it, strewn all over the neighbors’ side yard where a chain link fence held six…seven – I lost count – dogs. Were those pitbulls and puppies in there? It made my dick shrivel up and my balls crawl into my gut.
Once again that vulnerable feeling set in, because when you’re nak*d and the only thing protecting you from the world is a cowboy hat and a Mylar blanket, it would be an aberration not to feel unsafe.
If this is where Darla lived, then my sense of admiration for her actually shot up. She seemed so funny and deep, with an outlook on life that just took in whatever happened and rolled with it in a way that no tight-assed woman I generally met back at home would ever act. Even the sluts, the worst of the worst, the whores’ whores at home were so controlling, using unwritten rules of life and social graces that seemed to be ingrained in us from preschool to make every interaction pre-programmed, nothing spontaneous unless it involved some sort of substance that altered your consciousness.
I didn’t need any of that here. In fact, I think that whatever I’d taken must have been out of my blood by the time we pulled into her driveway because I was stone cold sober and I had a feeling that that was the only way I was going to get through the next experience here.
I told her I wasn’t judging her – but I lied. This made me, first of all, appreciate the f**k out of the four bedroom, three bath, bonus room with a game room/bar in the basement, house where I’d grown up in Sudborough. Dad commuted all week and some Saturdays into the city and Mom had returned to work when I had hit first grade. They could be prim, and proper, and priggish, and fake, and plastic – but damn, we had way more than Darla did.
I felt bad for poking fun at her flip phone, for pointing out the rusty holes in the floorboard of her shitbox. What I was looking at, sitting right here in the comfort of her car, was like something we’d watched in an eighth grade documentary – some PBS episode about poverty in America.
She said she’d gone to college and a massive wave of protectiveness hit me, of wanting to rescue her, to take her away from all of this. And yet, here she was, my rescuer. The one who found me stumbling, high as a kite, six hundred miles from home. So who was judging whom?
And who should judge whom?
She opened her car door and then paused, shutting it again, turning to me. Her hand covered my hand, which covered her knee now, rubbing slowly, soothing us both.
“Trevor,” she said with that sweet voice that spoke of beer and roasted corn and fun in a field of wildflowers, a kicked back kind of energy that made my erection turn the Mylar blanket into a tent. Oh, God no, I thought, the last thing I can do is walk in that trailer and meet her mother with a f**kinghard-on pointing at her.
“Trevor, there’s something that you need to know about my Mama,” she started and the tone in her voice made my dick wither like a vine cut off at the root.
“Yeah?” I asked.
“She’s umm…” Darla sighed. “Well, she’s…” What? my mind filled in. She’s what? Drunk? Crazy? Fat? Schizophrenic? A criminal? A murderer? Really a man? “She’s…she’s, well,” Darla stumbled.
Oh, boy. Of all the things that I could say about Darla in the past couple of hours of getting to know her, fumbling for words was not one of them. Whatever she was trying to spit out, it made my body go tense, made my eyes narrow and I could feel every bone go on alert, every muscle at the ready for whatever I needed to know.
“She’s real picky about her cooking.” I didn’t expect that. “And she also talks about sweepstakes non-stop.”
“That’s it?” I said, shaking my head, palms up. When I lifted my hands up it made the Mylar blanket drop a bit and Darla’s eyes drifted down to check out the one part of me that I hadn’t managed to put in her.
“Yeah, and umm…. She’s gonna wonder why you’re nak*d.”
“Most people would, Darla.”
“No, actually you aren’t the first…” Darla’s voice went quiet.
“I’m not the first what?”
“You’re not the first nak*d man I’ve ever brought home.”
She cut the conversation short, opened her door, stepped out and slammed it shut. I followed suit, wondering what the hell that meant and we walked up rotted out, wooden boards that used to resemble steps and then entered this cave-like collapsed porch. Without any ceremony, Darla opened the front door. The scent of cigarette smoke almost knocked me backward. I’ve performed in some serious dive bars, in basements with no windows with horrible ventilation, in rooms not much bigger than my mother’s clothing closet, but this was like eating cigarette smoke with a spoon. I plugged my nose instantly by shoving the back of my tongue up against the roof of my mouth and breathed through my lips.
“Oh, yeah,” Darla said turning back, almost making me trip off of the crooked stair. “She’s a chimney, too.”
“Yeah, I kind of noticed,” I said.
“Why are you talkin’ funny?” she whispered.
“Because I’m trying not to breathe through my nose.”
“That bad?” she said, wrinkling hers.
I nodded. “You can’t smell it?”
“I guess I’m used to it,” she shrugged.
As we walked into the kitchen, two friendly eyes stared at me from under layer after layer of fat. I wasn’t quite sure whether the person before me was female or male. Two cats began rubbing up against my legs, their fur so soft they had to be kittens. A quick glance down told me I was right. My sense of touch seemed heightened, as if being without clothes for so long had drawn out a proprioceptive connection to a tactile dimension.
That, or I was still a little high. My stomach chose that exact moment to make the loudest gurgle possible, an annoying rumbling that reminded me I was absolutely famished.
“You brought home an alien from the rest area, Darla Jo?” a mouth said, opening under the eyes. The eyes flashed over to Darla, who reached for my hand with a friendly squeeze. The voice was female, and had that craggy, curmudgeonly sound that plenty of old people in New England seemed to cultivate.
Then she coughed, a phlegmy, gross sound that made it seem like she’d hock up a lung and the kittens would feast on it tonight. My hand instinctively went for my pocket – the one that didn’t exist – because I wanted to call Joe and talk to someone, anyone, from my fake life back in Sudborough. Some deep core of politeness kicked in, though, the part of me that was nice to teachers even while my mind screamed a**hole! behind my eye sockets.
Darla’s mom wasn’t an a**hole, though. Her hair was neat and combed in a style that reminded me of the pictures my mom showed me of the late ’60s, of Grandma dressed in bouffant hairdos and sleeveless dresses that looked like they were made from curtain cloth. I remembered my grandma wearing one of those plastic bonnets whenever it rained, to protect her curly helmet head, and I was pretty certain that if it started raining and this woman needed to go outside, she had one of those plastic hats stuffed in a purse somewhere.
She stood. I forced my jaws together so I didn’t gape. The limp was pronounced and her face was friendly, with Darla’s pale skin that flushed easily with exertion, and brown eyes under brown hair that was so dated. Darla’s dad must have blonde hair, like me. I wondered where her green eyes had come from.
Hmm.
Darla whispered in my ear. “She’s missing a foot. Don’t look. She isn’t a fan of having her business talked about.”
My business was wide open and on display for everyone, so I could certainly sympathize.
“Cathy,” she said, reaching out to shake my hand. Her fingernails were thick, neatly trimmed, and a shade of yellow I normally only saw after a bunch of us ate Ethiopian food in Cambridge, our nailbeds stained by the abundant turmeric.