the kitchen. I covered the sink with newspaper and started to comb. It was like combing tangled pasta. One good yank and it would all come out. I combed starting at the bottom and worked my way up, thinking how I used to brush my mother's hair at night. It was shiny as glass.
Marvel talked continuously, about her friends, her Mary Kay customers, something a woman saw on Oprah — not that Marvel watched Oprah, only Sally Jessy because Oprah was a fat nignog and not good enough to scrub Marvel's floor, though she made ten million a season, blah blah blah. I pretended she was speaking Hungarian and that I couldn't understand a word as I put on the gloves and mixed the contents of the two bottles. The smell of ammonia was overwhelming in the small windowless bathroom, but Marvel wouldn't let me open the door. She didn't want Ed to know she dyed her hair.
I separated the shreds of hair, applied bleach to the roots, set the timer. If I left the mixture too long, it would eat huge bloody sores into her scalp and all her hair would fall out. I thought that might be interesting, but I knew there were places worse than the Turlocks'. At least Marvel didn't drink, and Ed was unattractive and barely noticed me. There wasn't much damage I could do here.
'This is good practice for you,' Marvel said as we waited the last five minutes before working in the color to the ends. 'You could go to beauty school. That's a good living for a woman.'
She had big plans for me, Marvel Turlock. Looking out after my welfare. I'd rather drink bleach. I rinsed off the dye, leaning over her like a rock. She showed me a page in a hairdo magazine, a setting diagram intricate as an electrical schematic. A style called The Cosmopolitan. Upswept on the sides, with curls in the back and curled bangs, like Barbara Stanwyck in Meet John Doe. I thought of Michael, how he would shudder. He adored Stanwyck. I wondered how the Scottish play went. I wondered if he ever thought of me. You could not even imagine how it was, Michael.
The pink sticky setting gel added to the stench in the hot bathroom as I wrapped the strings of hair around the curlers. I was getting faint. As soon as I was done rolling, I wrapped the scarf over her pink curlers and finally was allowed to open the bathroom door. I felt like I hadn't breathed in an hour. Marvel went out to the family room. 'Ed?' I heard her calling.
The TV was on, but Ed had slipped out to the Good Knight bar, where he drank beer and watched the game on pay-per-view.
'Damn him,' she said without bitterness. She turned the station to a show about middle-aged sisters and settled onto the couch with a carton of ice cream.
IT HADN'T OCCURRED to me the worst was yet to come, until my prescription ran out. I had foolishly doubled my dose, and now I lay shipwrecked on a desolate shore littered with broken glass. I caught a cold from the air-conditioning, which worked too well in my small porch room. All I could think of was how alone I was. My loneliness tasted like pennies. I thought about dying. A boy in the hospital had told me the best way was an air bubble in the bloodstream. He had bone cancer and had stolen a syringe he kept in an Archie comic book. He said if it ever got too bad, he'd shoot up some air, and it'd be over in seconds. If it weren't for my mother's letters, I would have thought of something. I reread them until they were soft and divided along the creases.
When I couldn't sleep, I'd go out in the backyard, where the crickets sang duets and the blacktop was warm as an animal under my bare feet. The crushed white gravel flowerbeds glowed in the moonlight, their sterile length punctuated by white plastic dahlias stuck into the gravel at regular intervals. I once sent my mother a painting of the house set in its sea of blacktop and white gravel edges, and she sent me a poem about the infant Achilles, whose mother dipped him in black water to make him immortal. It didn't make me feel any better.
I sat on the redwood picnic table and listened to music coming through the closed shutters of the house next door. They were always closed, but a jazz saxophone worked its way out from between the wood slats, music personal as a touch. I ran my fingertips over the dark carbon blade of my mother's old knife, imagining opening my wrists. If you did it in the bathtub, they said, you didn't even feel it. I wouldn't have hesitated, except for my mother. But the scales were in precarious balance, everything on one side but my mother's letters, light as good night, a hand touching my hair.
I played with the knife, spread out my hand on top of the slide, and jabbed the point past my fingers. Johnny johnny johnny whoops! Johnny johnny whoops! Johnny johnny johnny johnny. I liked it just as well when it stabbed me.
WITHOUT PERCODAN, I began to see why mothers abandoned their children, left them in supermarkets and at playgrounds. I had never imagined the whining, the constancy of those tiny demands, the endless watch. I told Marvel I had papers and reports to write, and buried myself in after-school library shelves, working my way through the book lists that came in my mother's letters, sharing table space with old men reading newspapers on sticks and Catholic school girls hiding teen magazines inside their history books.
I read everything — Colette, Francoise Sagan, Anais Nin's Spy in the House of Love, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I read The Moon and Sixpence, about Gauguin, and the Chekhov short stories Michael had recommended. They didn't have Miller but there was Kerouac. I read Lolita, but the man was nothing like Ray. I wandered through the stacks, running my hands along the spines of the books on the shelves, they reminded me of cultured or opinionated guests at a wonderful party, whispering to each other.
One day a title jumped out at me from a shelf of adventure books. I took the volume to a table, opened its soft, ivory pages, ignoring the dark glances of the girls in their white shirts and plaid jumpers, and fell into it as into a pool during a dry season.
The name of the book was The Art of Survival.
