Heartbreaker. Claudia Dey
THE BONFIRE, the territory boys approach the girls. They have new shoulders, new jawlines, and are looking for kicks. A boy comes up to Lana. He wears a tire chain for a necklace, has a pine twig behind his ear. Across one set of knuckles, he has written PAIN, and across the other set, PAIN.
“Seriously, let’s reproduce. I’ll give you my chips.”
“I can buy my own chips.”
“You can have my headphones.”
“So?”
“You’re pretty.”
“Ew.”
“What?”
“Stop trying so hard.”
“Okay.”
“Effort is repulsive.”
“Okay.”
“Your effortful smile. Your kingdom of effort.”
“Okay!”
“You have the voice of a beggar.”
“Sorry?”
“Don’t punctuate your questions. A territory man presents his questions with flatness.”
“Will you do me.”
“It’s just don’t be keen. Seriously. It’s gross.”
“Okay.”
“Besides, what are headphones without a Walkman?”
“Okay. Here, take my Walkman.”
And Lana and the boy leave the loose circle for the dark space behind Shona Lee’s husband’s headstone. Lana knows that if she becomes a mother, she will never listen to her Walkman again. But still, Lana +.
I NEED TO GET some air. Lately, I have been hyperventilating in my sleep. This can be accompanied by a wet face. Love. Brutal error of my human body. Underneath my pillow, I keep a picture of a coach. A glossy image I tore from a magazine. He is wearing a collared shirt and a headset. He has his arms out and he is yelling. This is bullshit! Take a deep fucking breath and wipe your face on your black bedsheet and get back to it, Pony!
My mother has been missing for five hours.
I leave the bonfire and head for the woods that border the edge of the graveyard. The boy with the can of butane follows, and when I say, “Get the fuck away from me,” he says, “Do you need CPR?” And when I give him the finger, he returns to the bonfire, throws his can of butane into it, and yells, “Heads up!” (Heeyed-zyup!), then looks to outer space. “Did you get that?”
Pallas, performer of the Mother Trick, has a little sister now. She’s four. Every night, the girl begs Future to let her sleep with her in her closet bed. Future says sure and blocks the image of her own mother, Rita Star, from her mind. The sound of the girl’s silvery breath. She sleeps on the mattress with her arms above her head like she’s just landed on it.
It’s a new kind of darkness with my mother maybe roaming it. Don’t you scare yourself! Don’t you crack on me now, 88! You’ve got a plan to execute! Pony Supreme! Chin up! Chin the fuck up! I can see the Death Man’s trailer from here. He’s done some landscaping. I cannot picture him touching anything living. His furniture is plastic. His gray, featherless birds are on the roof of his shed. They don’t seem to eat or migrate. They just dive-bomb us, wailing. We’re so annoyed by the birds, but maybe they are trying to tell us something, issue some type of warning?
I wish I had a cigarette. I wish I smoked.
MY MOTHER WOULD never talk about her life before she arrived in the territory. She didn’t like to remember it, she told me. This was her life now. Her only life.
When Shona Lee’s husband, Wishbone, shot himself in the chest last winter, Shona Lee called my mother and asked her to come over. Said she wanted me to come too. Had a soft spot for me. We stood in Shona Lee’s driveway. Shona Lee lit a Virginia Slim and talked about walking a brave line. She wore a leopard dress, blue eyeshadow, and her dead husband’s plaid outerwear. A week before, the men of the territory had knocked on her door. It was early November. The middle of the night. The men stood on her small cement porch, all of them looking in different directions. Shona Lee was confused by the men and so called for her husband. When he didn’t answer, she checked their bungalow. Surely he was in it and this was her worst dream. “What is love if not a space for horrors to grow?” she said to my mother, and my mother agreed. An accident. He had been fully loaded, the men tried to explain to Shona Lee, something close to a joke. A woman’s despair can be so hard to take. When Shona Lee was told the next morning the ground was frozen and her husband would spend the winter in the Death Man’s shed, Shona Lee begged to see his body. She was told no. Once a corpse is handed over to the Death Man, it is never seen again, but Shona Lee was already walking away when the men told her that. She knew the rules.
The weeping went from bed to sink, floor to shower, vacant room to vacant room, and so much time balled on the bed. Shona Lee could not stand her widowed self. “Enough,” she said, and with her widow money bought twenty jerry cans of gasoline from Traps and an animal print dress from The Woman Store. She was set to drive the two thousand miles south to the next nearest town. “You’re the only one who knows what’s beyond the territory.” Shona Lee lifted the tarp and showed my mother her truck bed. It was filled with fuel. I had the crazed heart rate of prey, but was trying to appear cold and bored like the teen wives on Teen Wives. Like Denis. Arms crossed, eyes half rolled back. As much as I pressed my mother, this was the one line of questioning she would never submit to. What is beyond.
“You will be a stranger among strangers,” my mother said, and I could feel a charge run through her. “Why can’t a woman be more than one person in a lifetime?” she continued. “Why can’t she be two or three?”
“I will be a stranger among strangers,” Shona Lee motivated herself.
And that summer, while I sunburned nearby on an emergency blanket, The Heavy dug Shona Lee’s husband’s grave, and then Shona Lee stood over it singing Led Zeppelin with the voice of God. She sang over the drone of the horseflies. Her husband was in the ground. He had a place. She had a place. This savage place, her only place. She didn’t want to be a stranger. She wanted to be known. Shona Lee remained in the territory. No one has ever left it. And only she came that close.
SHORTLY AFTER my mother’s arrival here, Rita Star swore she saw a picture of her on television. The name on the screen was different than the one my mother had used to introduce herself, but the face was the same. She’d cut and dyed her hair, but any novice knew that was the first thing you did to bury your past. Wanted or Missing, Rita Star could not recall. She searched and searched, flicking through her channels, but the picture of my mother did not come back into focus.
Hearing about the picture, the other territory women searched and searched. The Heavy’s thin fox of a stranger is going to murder me, steal my husband, and make a nice den for herself out of my den things. “You are glued to that damn television,” their husbands would rant. The women didn’t know how to make sense of it. Rita Star was a gossip. She was lonely. She would come over and sit at your kitchen table, and tell story after story, and not know when it was time to stop talking and leave. This was long before she invested in her tanning bed and opened her palmistry business. Her young daughter basically lived across the street with Pallas Jones. Who the Grace girl’s father was, none of the women could say with any certainty. She had no husband, and in practical terms, Rita Star had no child. What do you even call that? The women had no name for a woman without dependents. Nothing feeding from her body. Nothing feeding from her hands. One knife, one fork, one spoon, one bowl. The emptiness of her bungalow. Should the women really believe this lone woman of mediocre fitness or was she just looking for attention? The women decided against believing Rita Star.
They all came to my parents’ wedding, and the men and women of the territory marveled at my mother, this woman who had appeared at their lunch counter with her short hair and her short dress now with her long