Marrow

I can’t stay the way I am. I don’t remember what it’s like to be free. To be wide open without fear. I need something to break me. Just enough so that I have new pieces to work with—make them into something else. I don’t want to give anyone the right to treat me like a loser. I don’t want to be fat, I don’t want to live in the Bone, I don’t want to be without knowledge. I won’t be the girl who people laugh at. Not anymore. Good thing I memorized their license plate. Just in case.

A WEEK LATER, a rusted brown pickup truck sits in the parking lot of Wal-Mart. I am supposed to be buying more granola, and shampoo for my mother, but all I can do is stand on the curb and stare. The license plate matches the one in my memory. I stare into the window; it’s filthy—trash and mud everywhere, a waterlogged copy of a nudey magazine lies on the floorboards, a piece of blue gum stuck over the model’s exposed breasts.

The door is unlocked. I climb into the driver’s seat and place my hands on the wheel. It stinks of manure and stale beer. I breathe through my mouth and try to picture what goes on in a jackass’s head. Probably everything that’s littering the floors of his truck: sex, food, and beer. I bend to retrieve the magazine, paging though the pictures, flinching past spread legs, and hard, round, baseball tits. Glossy lips, parted to remind men of all the places a woman’s body can accommodate them. I tear off one page, then another. I keep tearing until the magazine is a ripped pile of tits and ass and feathered hairdos, then I scatter them across the cab of the truck. There is a hammer in a toolbox on the seat next to me. A fix it man! I pick it up, weigh it in my hand, then I swing it at the windshield.

Crack!

The glass splinters straight across. I like the way it looks, so I hit it again to make sure he won’t be able to see when he drives. As an afterthought I look around to see if anyone is watching me. There is a mother a few cars away, wrestling her screaming twins into her car, but she is too distracted to notice me. I dig around the toolbox until I find a box cutter. Climbing out of the truck, I lower myself to my haunches, flipping the switch to draw out the blade. An old station wagon is to my back, and beyond that the field of lilacs. If the driver of the truck leaves Wal-Mart now, I won’t be able to see him coming. I should feel something, fear or anxiety, but I don’t. I don’t feel anything. On the side of the truck I carve the words: I DRINK AND DRIVE, AND I HAVE A SMALL DICK. When I’m finished I toss the box cutter into the back of the truck. Dusting my hands on my pants, I head into Wal-Mart to do my shopping. Until the windshield cracked, I hadn’t realized I’d been holding such a grudge. The minute the hammer hit the glass it was as if everything surged out of me all at once. Anger, so much of it. I decide that there must be more grudges hiding in me. I wonder what it would feel like to exact revenge on people.

My mother has left me a note to get cigarettes. I sit at the kitchen table and tap it with my forefinger as I stare out the window and watch a jay until it takes to the sky. Cigarettes, it says. No smiley face to soften the command hidden in those neat, curlicue letters; no lopsided heart. Just Cigarettes.

She is floating around the kitchen in her red gown—right in front of my face—but she left me a note rather than tell me herself. I’ve long stopped asking why? Why, as it turns out, is the most self-indulgent waste of time. There is no real reason for her to be in the kitchen. We are out of the crackers she likes, and I stopped buying coffee to piss her off. I’m comatose, watching the linoleum like it’s Fargo. I saw that movie once at Destiny’s house. We were supposed to watch When Harry Met Sally, but someone had already checked it out at the video store. So we watched Fargo instead. All that snow and those weird accents. It was just a different kind of ghetto from the one where I live—full of hopeless, worried humans. I’ve never met anyone from Minnesota, and I don’t want to. That’s what I’m thinking as my mother floats around the kitchen demanding cigarettes. I think about Jean Lundegaard. Running around the house covered in the shower curtain until she falls down the stairs. She was stupid, and she wore ugly sweaters, but she didn’t deserve that.

She wants her cigarettes, and I just want to sit here and think about Fargo. I wish I had a better movie to think about. All that snow…

If she asked, I would tell her about Nevaeh. How I’m grieving for a little girl I saw around the neighborhood. Children shouldn’t have to suffer. To be alone. To feel unloved.

I get up and walk out of the kitchen. Out the front door. I’ll go get the cigarettes.

When I walk past Judah’s house, he’s sitting outside in his chair, slapping at the bugs landing on his arms.

“Hey Margo!” he calls. “Where you going?”

“To say goodbye to Nevaeh.” And also to buy cigarettes.

“Take me with you.” I don’t question him. I just walk up the pathway to his house and push his chair toward the street. He’s wearing one of the shirts I bought for him from the Rag—the one with the little hearts. It looks good on him, which makes me sour. I can’t even take him down when I try. He’s quiet as the wheels of his chair squeak across the pavement. One of his hands is up and under his chin as he looks off to the side. His eyelashes are black and thick. They remind me of broom bristles, and then I feel ashamed that I’m comparing a man’s eyelashes to broom bristles. He must have gotten those from his dad since Delaney is as fair as I am.

“Do you have your groceries and shit bag?” he asks me suddenly.

“Yeah.” I move my body so he can see it hanging at my waist.

“Good,” he says. “There is a memorial for Nevaeh, over at her mom’s house.”

I’m quiet for a moment. I wonder if he wants to go. I walk past the corner store where I usually buy my mother’s cigarettes and turn toward the main road. “Let’s go get her some flowers,” Judah says. There’s a Wal-Mart a few blocks up. I tell him that’s where I’m going. He points out a secondary pathway that’s not quite as bumpy as the one we’re on, and I wheel him over. As we walk, people call out to him.

“Hey Judah.”

“What’s up, Judah.”

“What’s up, man. You look good.”

“Wanna come hang out tonight? We gonna play poker, and Billy is bringing over his shit.”

Judah declines multiple invitations to “hang out” and tells them he’s going to Nevaeh’s memorial.