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Doll Crimes 20
20I don’t want to talk to Susie. What do Susie and me have to talk about, anyway?It’s morning again. Day again. At least for now we’re ‘rich’. I wonder if he even knows. About our money, I mean.I brush my teeth, I wash my face, I comb my hair out with my fingers. I dig through my mother’s shoulder-bag—the denim one with the hole in its lining—and scratch out her lipstick. The dark mulberry one she says is too old for me. I paint my mouth the way she does—watching the lines, following the dips and slopes. I leave my eyes naked.I’m this girl, I tell myself when I look again at my full reflection. If I had my way, this is the only makeup I’d ever wear. Enough me and enough not-me. The dark shade brightening my skin, lighting up my irises. My face nude but not unmarked. A child with a woman’s mouth. Only my eyes are entirely my own.I pull on my boots and grab my jacket. I ease the front door shut behind me so the deadbolt
Doll Crimes 21
21From the day we left Carris and started moving around, in every place we went and in every area we stayed, there would be a park nearby. Some of these parks had ponds, some of them had swing sets and jungle gyms. Some had ice-cream stands and hot dog stalls and small wooded enclaves interspersed with picnic tables. Sections bright under sunshine, others dark from shade. “We need to stay close to places where you can still go do things outside,” my mother said. “Play and stuff. What’s a childhood without any trees.”What’s a childhood without any trees.The way she said this, it wasn’t a question. I knew she was feeling bad for me, thinking about how big the Carris house was compared to these places we were living now. Swapping all our open space for strange buildings and zigzagging streets. Looking out at a horizon of jagged roofs, and not the Carris hills that rolled around town and rippled in a soft, gliding ascent toward the mo
Doll Crimes 22
22“Do you want to meet one of our new friends?”Carris, in those weeks before we left.My mother was making waffles when she asked me this. She was standing barefoot in our big kitchen with its sticky wooden floors and its tricky taps, pouring batter into the iron griddle. The mix made a soft hissing sound as it hit the hot metal. It was early afternoon—late in the day for waffles. Clem had left sometime before dawn without saying goodbye. Mom told me this last part the moment I walked in the room. She didn’t say goodbye to you.“She’s going away again?”“Not going away again,” Mom said. “Just gone away for the night.”Which night? How many nights? She didn’t say if that counted the night coming or the night before. I didn’t ask. If she was gone again tonight, I had stale popcorn and bad TV ahead of me, searching for my mother’s smell in the cushions while she walked through darkness towards the gate. Towards…who? People she so
Doll Crimes 23
23I’m not supposed to smoke, you know. Mouthfuls of it, warm swirls hovering at the edge of my esophagus, burning like tiny fireballs on the way down. My lungs crackle open, seize. I choke back a cough, jets of smoke jolting out my nose in staggered silver puffs. I wait a moment. I try again. My hands already shake from the nicotine. The nausea comes next.My mother has always smoked. Clem did, too. “It’s not a good habit for a kid,” my mother has told me. “Staying away from cigarettes keeps us girls pretty.” Winking. Sliding a menthol between her lips.It started with the guys offering me cigarettes back when I was nine or maybe ten, eleven or maybe twelve. Handing them to me when my mother wasn’t around, flicking open a box to show me a deck of slim, spicy-smelling tubes neatly packed in tight rows. The filters all clean as cotton without the scorch, the stain that marks them later. Would you like one?Something secret in their
Doll Crimes 24
24Those early days at the petting zoos and the public gardens, the nature spots and caravan parks. I remember them. Those hours we spent in the picnic areas where the shade fell over us in heavy, dark dapples. I kind of miss them. Those times we bought sparkly ice cream floats and bright red hot dogs and gave ourselves hiccups from laughing between swallows. Sitting out on the grass or at the wooden benches. Under the trees or beneath the sky. By the fire areas, at the camping spots. The scents of cut grass and scorched meat cutting over the dark, mud-smell of deeper soil. Momma’s smile switching sizes, sometimes so wide I could see all the way to the back of her tongue, other times so small it was just a sloped curve. Her smile waxing and waning, her upper lip dipping in when her mouth stretched out. Lipstick marks on her teeth. Traces of red rubbed off on white. Smiling at something I said or did, something she noticed. Silly question
Doll Crimes 25
25If you want life to be easy, you’ve gotta be a bit easy yourself. Advice from my mother when I was twelve, maybe thirteen. Old enough to need to know. Watching her snip the top buttons off blouses. Switch pale lipsticks out for red. Even men who are intimidated by heels, like heels.I’ve never worn heels, not even for a picture. My shoes have all been thin-strap sandals, Mary Janes, hiking boots. Beach slops, slippers. Once my mother made me two daisy chains, and wound them around my toes.Everyone wants something beautiful.She’s beautiful, she knows. Taking care of her hair, careful getting dressed. Never looking another woman in the eyes. Like they don’t exist, because even if they do there is still only her. There is only us. People don’t call me beautiful, they call me pretty. With my plastic bead bracelets, my breath like strawberry chewing gum.There are so many sad, lonely men in this world.Always in her bag: mouthwa
Doll Crimes 26
26I don’t know where Susie is. Gone for the day with his deliveries and grades. Mom bolts the front door from the inside and drags a chair up against it.“Our space now,” she says.She’s hungover again, red-eyed. My mom, she can look pretty young even though she has to be around thirty at least, but when she’s had too much to drink the night before, no amount of cleanser and hairspray can pull her youth back into focus. Her skin dries out and shows the crow’s feet and fine lines creeping in under her eyes, shrinking the blue above. Her mouth curves down at the edges against her smile—her headache grimace, warping her mouth. Her color is too waxy, too grey. Concealer helps, but it can’t change what’s beneath. We don’t have a hairdryer, so I’m combing my hair and toweling it in turns. My hair slides wispy and damp between my fingers when I pull. The process is drying it fluffy, light. My skin is slick with lotion. I’m chewing gum, eve
Doll Crimes 27
27I won’t lie about what I do and don’t remember. The eye in my forehead flutters like a black moth caught in a bad dream, fetching the images that shadow the back of my mind. Because the cliff-edge dividing what was and what is…the ink dot that bleeds in place before the line changes course. It starts falling down right about here.We made waffles and we burned them.And then my mother told me about Uncle Steve.***Momma was wearing her tan-and-sheepskin jacket, the one with the broken zip and the collar that flipped up against her ears. Faded and stained. It smelled the same way old books smell. She wasn’t wearing any makeup except for her mouth—a darker shade than normal, the color like the inside of a wound. She looked young and pale and kind of still. Maybe it was the chill on her bare cheeks, the way her breath puffed in tight bursts of vapor. She was breathing like her jacket was too tight and she couldn’t take air in all th
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Doll Crimes Epilogue
EpilogueSusie and me, we’ve decided my real age is seventeen. No more plastic bead bracelets, no more pigtails. No more cherry-scented lip gloss or strawberry-flavored gum. My real age is seventeen, we’ve said, but if anyone asks we tell them I’m eighteen. It was like a scene from the movie, the way we drove out of town. I sat in the passenger seat with the window rolled down, and it wasn’t so cold that I needed any arms around me. I wasn’t shivering so bad I couldn’t breathe. Maybe it was better than a movie, because usually in real life nobody cares that much. All those close-ups on faces. Panic or tears in the eyes. The parents rushing to the child. The kids rallying around their friend. All those understanding expressions, those touching words and heroic promises. In a movie, the star gets to be everybody’s priority. But nobody makes another person more important than them. Nobody puts everything of theirs on hold like that, not f
Doll Crimes 40-41
40She used to call me Angel-Kid. She used to call me Doll.Look, I hardly knew the woman. At least, that’s what my mother said, but I think she tried to help me once. I think she tried to stop this thing.“Little girls don’t need more than two eyes.”I know she never said this. Still, it’s her voice that speaks.
Doll Crimes 39
39I drink coffee until it makes my heart beat too fast. The refills are free and the waitress doesn’t talk to me like I’m a kid. This is why I stay, I guess. The way it feels like I’m okay to be here. The way it feels safe. The seats around me fill up with singles and duos. Laptops and notebooks. Actual books, too. I don’t have anything to occupy my hands or my eyes except the cup in front of me. I test out white sugar versus brown sugar. Sweetener. Sweetener and white sugar. Sweetener and brown. Cup by cup. I don’t look at the people around me. Something about them seems too real. The things they’re frowning at, mouthing at, even as they sit alone and type stuff or write stuff or make their notes on printed pages. Like the thoughts they’re having might really be real.I only leave the coffee shop when my bladder fills up, my belly pressing too tight against my button-up jeans. I pay. I stand. Probably the coffee shop has its own restr
Doll Crimes 38
38None of this happened in any way I really know. I see it anyway. I don’t know how much of it is crazy kid-nonsense, tossed together like a junk pile of barbed wire and blunt razor blades. I feel it anyway. The rust, the scratch. The facts.Uncle Steve waited down at the gate in his car. The drive was long, and mostly through darkness. Backstreet twists and dirt-track roads. I rode up front in my mother’s lap, her arms wrapped so tight around me I didn’t need my winter jacket, not with her and the heater, and the glowing buzz of Uncle Steve’s voice. “You’ll be all right,” I heard him say. Over and over again. Talking to my mother, and not to me. “You’ll be fine. You’ll do great.”The cellphone he gave her was a Nokia, small and black. They don’t make those anymore.“There are people in this world who dream every damn minute of meeting a girl like you. Girls like the two of you.”“I don’t know if we can make it alone.”“You’d rat
Doll Crimes 37
37Susie drives me to the strip mall twenty minutes out of town. I sit easy in the passenger seat of his old Camry, my hands folded between my knees. The day is rising bright and blue.I would be afraid, except I’m with him.I should be afraid, but I’m not.The strip mall peels into view ahead. A long, flat building with sunshine sparkling white on its roof. “Go see a movie or something,” Susie says. “I’ll meet you out front at five. To fetch you, I mean. And bring you…home.”The last time I went to the movies, Momma and me sat in the back row. It was the middle of the day, but it was dark in there. Giant people loomed on the screen in wide-angle views and close-up shots. When they spoke, their voices came from all sides. The Uncle who sat next to me told me what to do. I heard his voice just fine, even across all the noise. I fell asleep right after. Mom didn’t wake me until the end.I don’t remember what the movie was about.“Y
Doll Crimes 36
36“It’s cold outside.”My mother said this, too. Zipping my jacket. Flipping the collar. Covering my feet. That last night in Carris. The night we left.She was shaking, but not from the chill. Something shooting through her in liquid pulses, stinging her from the inside.Momma’s scared.I don’t know where I was when this came back, but a voice is asking: Can she take those off?Who asks what? What ‘those’ are. I don’t know. I don’t know.“We have to get out of here, honey.” She was in her sheepskin jacket. Her mouth was very red. “Where’s Clem?” I said.And she started crying like she didn’t care I could see.When this memory came back to me, I was sitting cross-legged on Susie’s bed. My mother was fanning fresh Polaroids and I was imagining her and Susie having sex in the space where I sat. My mother’s thighs, the curve of his shoulders when they hunch. The lube my mother secrets up herself leaking past the sheets. She’d u
Doll Crimes 35
35This is your Uncle. This is my Friend.That slow, sick wave coming up my insides and sloping down my scalp. Those other things she’s said to me.Open your legs.Flash.“Fuck you, Susie.”I say this out loud, looking at my mother as she lies asleep across from me. Naked and weak on murky-white sheets. Passed out, wasted, drunk, drugged, or just very tired, or sexed-out, or whatever. I don’t know and I don’t care. Her breath catches in the back of her throat in half-snores. She won’t wake up. I guess this is rage, spitting through my nerves so my hands shake as I look through her jacket. Mock-zips, half-sized pockets. But of course she wouldn’t leave them there. I dig the blue bag out from under the bed. She’s already split the new pictures into their own envelopes. Three packs of three. It doesn’t matter which shots are inside. They’re all the same, even when they’re not. Behind me, Susie clears his throat. “I didn’t know Po
Doll Crimes 34
34Look, I hardly knew the woman. I mean, I barely remember her now.Clementine Elizabeth Bough. I once saw a man on a jet-ski shatter through a wave. That’s how thinking about her feels. Careening. Crash. I wondered how different it would be if the wave was a brick wall. How he would look on the other side. Remembering her is a lot like this.The man who came to visit that night, his name was Lance. Lawrence. Something. “Your momma’s friend Lance is coming by,” Momma said. She was smiling at herself in the spare bathroom mirror, her makeup bag opened up in the sink. Bottles and tubes and shiny plastic pencils. It was the bathroom with ‘the best light’ she said, softening the color of her cheeks and darkening her mouth. She couldn’t stop smiling, her hands trembling, smearing mascara on her cheek. She’d brought the radio in with her, and she was listening to something with acoustic guitars and high voices, a steady beat. Somethin
Doll Crimes 33
33I wake up to the sounds of mom and Susie fucking. Specifically, I wake to the sounds of Susie fucking. The sounds my mother makes are nothing compared. I lie still for a moment, stiff and uncomfortable on this filthy couch, in my too-tight jeans, my eyes swollen from sleep and my hair tangled around my throat. I’m nauseous and slow and scared to move. There’s revolt in my body, it’s rallying forces. Like the second I stand, I’m going to throw up. Like the moment I think clear, reality will kick me in the gut.I nestle down and doze again for a while. When I open my eyes a second time, Susie is walking past me in his boxer shorts. No shirt. His gut is taut and firm, tough fat over tougher muscle, softening his lines. Not the other kind of gut, the heavier slap-barrel type that traps you down at the hips and thighs and makes you feel like you’re caught in a compressor. Crushing you, pounding through and around in smothering shudders.
