'Whatever you say.'
'So this girl,' my mother continued — and I knew what she would ask before she even said it. 'What does her father do?'
I told her there wasn't a father, at least not one that I knew about, and then I waited as she lit a fresh cigarette. 'Let's see,' she said. 'Nine-year-old girl named after an alcoholic beverage. Single mother in a neighborhood the police won't even go to. What else have you got for me?' She spoke as if I'd formed these people out of clay, as if it were my fault that the girl was nine years old and her mother couldn't keep a husband. 'I don't suppose this woman has a job, does she?'
'She's a bartender.'
'Oh, that's splendid,' my mother said. 'Go on.'
The woman worked nights and left her daughter alone from four in the afternoon until two or three in the morning. Both were blond, their hair almost white, with invisible eyebrows and lashes. The mother darkened hers with pencil, but the girl appeared to have none at all. Her face was like the weather in one of those places with no discernible seasons. Every now and then, the circles beneath her eyes would shade to purple. She might show up with a fat lip or a scratch on her neck but her features betrayed nothing.
You had to feel sorry for a girl like that. No father, no eyebrows, and that mother. Our apartments shared a common wall, and every night I'd hear the woman stomping home from work. Most often she was with someone, but whether alone or with company she'd find some excuse to bully her daughter out of bed. Brandi had left a doughnut on the TV or Brandi had forgotten to drain her bathwater. They're important lessons to learn, but there's something to be said for leading by example. I never went into their apartment, but what I saw from the door was pretty rough — not simply messy or chaotic, but hopeless, the lair of a depressed person.
Given her home life, it wasn't surprising that Brandi latched onto me. A normal mother might have wondered what was up — her nine-year-old daughter spending time with a twenty-six-year-old man — but this one didn't seem to care. I was just free stuff to her: a free babysitter, a free cigarette machine, the whole store. I'd hear her through the wall sometimes: 'Hey, go ask your friend for a roll of toilet paper.' 'Go ask your friend to make you a sandwich.' If company was coming and she wanted to be alone, she'd kick the girl out. 'Why don't you go next door and see what your little playmate is up to?'
Before I moved in, Brandi's mother had used the couple downstairs, but you could tell that the relationship had soured. Next to the grocery carts chained to their porch was a store-bought sign, theNO TRESPASSING followed by a handwritten 'This meens you, Brandi!!!!'
There was a porch on the second floor as well, with one door leading to Brandi's bedroom and another door leading to mine. Technically, the two apartments were supposed to share it, but the entire thing was taken up with their junk, and so I rarely used it.
'I can't wait until you get out of your little slumming phase,' my mother had said on first seeing the building. She spoke as if she'd been raised in splendor, but in fact her childhood home had been much worse. The suits she wore, the delicate bridges holding her teeth in place — it was all an invention. 'You live in bad neighborhoods so you can feel superior,' she'd say, the introduction, always, to a fight. 'The point is to moveup in the world. Even sideways will do in a pinch, but what's the point in moving down?'
As a relative newcomer to the middle class, she worried that her children might slip back into the world of public assistance and bad teeth. The finer things were not yet in our blood, or at least that was the way she saw it. My thrift-shop clothing drove her up the wall, as did the secondhand mattress lying without benefit of box springs upon my hardwood floor. 'It's notironic,' she'd say. 'It's notethnic. It's filthy.'
Bedroom suites were fine for people like my parents, but as an artist I preferred to rough it. Poverty lent my little dabblings a much-needed veneer of authenticity, and I imagined myself repaying the debt by gently lifting the lives of those around me, not en masse but one by one, the old-fashioned way. It was, I thought, the least I could do.
I told my mother that I had allowed Brandi into my apartment, and she sighed deeply into her end of the telephone. 'And I bet you gave her the grand tour, didn't you? Mr. Show-Off. Mr. Big Shot.' We had a huge fight over that one. I didn't call her for two days. Then the phone rang. 'Brother,' she said. 'You have no idea what you're getting yourself into.'
A neglected girl comes to your door and what are you supposed to do, turn her away?
'Exactly,' my mother said. 'Throw her the hell out.'
But I couldn't. What my mother defined as boasting, I considered a standard show-and-tell. 'This is my stereo system,' I'd said to Brandi. 'This is the electric skillet I received last Christmas, and here's a little something I picked up in Greece last summer.' I thought I was exposing her to the things a regular person might own and appreciate, but all she heard was the possessive. 'This is my honorable-mention ribbon,' meaning 'It belongs tome. It's not yours.' Every now and then I'd give her a little something, convinced that she'd treasure it forever. A postcard of the Acropolis, prestamped envelopes, packaged towelettes bearing the insignia of Olympic Airlines. 'Really?' she'd say. 'For me?'
The only thing she owned, the only thing special, was a foot-tall doll in a clear plastic carrying case. It was a dime-store version of one of those Dolls from Many Countries, this one Spanish with a beet red dress and a droopy mantilla on her head. Behind her, printed on cardboard, was the place where she lived: a pinata-lined street snaking up the hill to a dusty bullring. The doll had been given to her by her grandmother, who was forty years old and lived in a trailer beside an army base.
'What is this?' my mother asked. 'A skit fromHee Haw? Who the hellare these people?'
'These people,' I said, 'are my neighbors, and I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't make fun of them. The grandmother doesn't need it, I don't need it, and I'm pretty sure a nine-year-old-girl doesn't need it, either.' I didn't tell her that the grandmother was nicknamed Rascal or that, in the picture Brandi showed me, the woman was wearing cutoff shorts and an ankle bracelet.
'We don't talk to her anymore,' Brandi had said when I handed back the picture. 'She's out of our life, and we're glad of it.' Her voice was dull and robotic, and I got the impression that the line had been fed to her by her mother. She used a similar tone when introducing her doll. 'She's not for playing with. She's for display.'
Whoever imposed this rule had obviously backed it up with a threat. Brandi would trace her finger along the outside of the box, tempting herself, but never once did I see her lift the lid. It was as if the doll would explode if removed from her natural environment. Her world was the box, and a strange world it was.
'See,' Brandi said one day, 'she's on her way home to cook up those clams.'
She was talking about the castanets dangling from the doll's wrist. It was a funny thought, childish, and I probably should have let it go rather than playing the know-it-all. 'If she were an American doll those might be clams,' I said. 'But instead she's from Spain, and those are called castanets.' I wrote the word on a piece of paper. 'Castanets, look it up.'
'She's not from Spain, she's from Fort Bragg.'
'Well, maybe she wasbought there,' I said. 'But she's supposed to be Spanish.'
'And what'sthat supposed to mean?' It was hard to tell without the eyebrows, but I think she was mad at me.
'It's notsupposed to mean anything,' I said. 'It's just true.'
'You're full of it. There's no such place.'
'Sure there is,' I said. 'It's right next to France.'
'Yeah, right. What's that, a store?'
I couldn't believe I was having this conversation. How could you not know that Spain was a country? Even if you were nine years old, it seems you would have picked it up on TV or something. 'Oh, Brandi,' I said. 'We've got to find you a map.'
Because I couldn't do it any other way, we fell into a tight routine. I had a part-time construction job and would return home at exactly 5:30. Five minutes later Brandi would knock on my door, and stand there blinking until I let her in. I was going through a little wood-carving phase at the time, whittling figures whose heads resembled the various tools I worked with during the day: a hammer, a hatchet, a wire brush. Before beginning, I'd arrange some paper and colored pencils on my desk. 'Draw your doll,' I'd say. 'Copy the bullring in her little environment. Express yourself!' I encouraged Brandi to broaden her horizons, but she usually quit after the first few minutes,
