Prose Excerpt

A SINGLE FACT CAN SPOIL A GOOD ARGUMENT

JAN PRIDDY

My mother catches me squeezing a zit on the side of my chin. “Don’t

pick,” she says. She has just come home from work, dragging the

smell of cigarettes with her even though she doesn’t smoke anymore,

and I can tell she’s tired from the way she walked through the kitchen.

Clack clack clack in her tired shoes. Don’t pick, she tells me. She thinks

I’m too picky about a lot of things, like friends and teachers and especially

boys. I should go out, I should see people. But I ask you, why bother

with guys you can’t even stand to talk to, you know? If I keep my eyes

on the bathroom mirror over the sink, I think maybe she will go straight

to her bedroom, the next door down the hall. So I sigh when her footsteps

stop and she starts in.

     “Did you pick up your room?”

     “Yeah, Mom.” I can feel her there, filling up the doorway to the bathroom.

I ignore her and go right on squeezing.

     “You’re not sitting around all evening, are you? It’s Friday.”

     I slide my eyes across and see she’s in bad shape—green really isn’t

her color. “Shouldn’t you change for your date?”

     “Don’t change the subject.” She pushes off from the doorframe where

she’s been leaning. “At least I’m trying. At least I get out—make an

effort to have some fun.”

     “Mom.” I roll my eyes. Some fun. “That is so boring.”

     “Boring. You always say that—no wonder you’re bored. You read too

much, you hang around with the same old people, you wear the same

thing every day, and you pick, pick, pick at everything—leave that alone,

you’ll get it infected.”

     You tell me who is being picky here. But all mothers do this, right?

Zits, boys, clothes. Pretty soon she’ll start in about having a skill to fall

back on. I should take keyboarding. I should get to know more people.

I should be dating while I have the chance. Yeah, yeah.

     Here she goes, “Blah blah blah dating—”

    “I am not dating,” I tell her while I wash my hands, “because I don’t

feel like being associated with the idiots in my class.”

    “There must be some nice senior boys. What about that Alex?”

   Alex. I twist around with my hands still over the sink, the water

blowing steam up onto the mirror. “Alex graduated last year, Mom.” I

can see her roots. “There are no ‘nice boys’ in my class. The boys in

my class taped a freshman to a post in the locker room and used him

as a target for spitting. Those are the boys in my class. Morons.”

    “I’m sure you’re exaggerating.” She turns from the doorway, and I

take my time drying my hands.

    “The vice principal says they should be locked up until they’re too

old to hurt anyone.”

    She stops at her door. “Oh really, Lydia.”

    “Really, Mom.”

    Her bedroom door snicks closed. She’s not listening. I don’t blame

her; I don’t see any point in listening to most of what we’re saying. I

hear hangers scrape across the pole in her closet. Her wardrobe is pretty

bad. She dresses like a mother, which she is, or even worse, she dresses

like she thinks young women dress for dates. I could tell her no one

dates anymore. And if we did, even I could show her how to do it better

than she does. I could offer to loan her something, one of the cheerful,

flippy little dresses my aunt keeps buying me from Banana Republic that

I have not and will not ever wear. That would get us into another discussion

about the way I dress, so until she goes out, I head back to my

room to read. I stretch out on my bed, tuck my pillow under my chest,

and pull The Color Purple out of my bag. My elbows dig into the mattress

as I find the place where Celie is sewing pants for people and sees

Mister outside in the street. It’s my favorite part. I think Mister is sorry

for what a creep he’s been.

     Mom opens my door. She has on spiky sandals and her flowered dress.

“Are you going out tonight?” she asks me.

     I pull my trig book over the novel. “Maybe.”

     “Your brother is at Kyle’s. There’s tuna salad in the fridge.” She checks

out my unmade bed and my dirty laundry on the floor, which she does

not tell me to pick up. “I might be late.”

     I try to be nice. “Have a good time.” At least she isn’t wearing green.

     “Thanks, honey.” She spins around and is gone. Tall heels on her

feet. Click click click. She’ll be sorry when she’s stood in those sandals

awhile.

     I take a breath and pull my novel back out from under the trig book.

Mom has no idea what I am reading. Last year I managed to hide The

Catcher in the Rye from her for weeks while we were reading it in Junior

English, and then she caught me with A Yellow Raft in Blue Water.

She freaked. She pointed out there are some bad words in that book. I

think Rayona, the main character, or her mother, says “fuck” a couple

of times. She hadn’t read that far, though. She was upset about “shit”

on page fourteen. She called the teacher and told him she thought the

book was inappropriate. So Mr. Peters gave me A Virtuous Woman to

read instead of our next book by Toni Morrison about a little girl whose

father rapes her, called The Bluest Eye. My mother said it’s disgusting.

She doesn’t want me to know about child molesters except what she’s

told me herself about my grandfather. I finished Yellow Raft, but I didn’t

notice the F-words. Peters had told us about the language, but I didn’t

even notice. The best thing about that book is the last part—about the

grandmother. All along you hate the mother while you read the daughter’s

story, and then you still hate the grandmother when you read the mother’s

story because Ida is this very hard-hearted old person, and then when

you read the grandmother’s story, you know how she’s tried the best she

knew how. She made mistakes and you know all about that from the

rest of the book, but when you read her story, you know she was a good

person and she isn’t hard-hearted at all.

     I try to keep this in mind when my own mother is driving me crazy.

Anyway, my mom freaked about the language in that book. She has

no idea. So one of these days I’ll read Morrison to get back at her. And

I am not getting serious about any guy until I get to college as far from

here as I can get. If I go to college. And I am never typing somebody’s

memos for a living. Maybe I’ll wait tables for the rest of my life. She’d

love that. It’s probably what she thinks I’m going to do. She has no

confidence in me and I really can’t blame her. Just based on the stuff

she knows I’ve done, I can’t blame her. That’s just the stuff she knows.

     Mom doesn’t know I didn’t go to school today. My best friends Kara

and Lindsey had an away game and I figured, Why bother? Credit

Recovery is OK first period, and normally I sit next to Lindsey in Senior

English and we’re reading stuff, which is fine, but I don’t have those

classes on Fridays, and anyway, Melissa was on a field trip and if Kara

and Lindsey aren’t there either, what am I supposed to do during lunch,

hang out in the hall? Yeah, right. Sometimes they cancel games, but

the sun is all over the place now that the season is almost over. And I

hate softball. It is so boring.

     It was boring at my house too, which was the price I paid today not

to have to talk to anyone if I didn’t want to. If I’m home by myself, I

can be quiet and no one will ask me if something is wrong or try to

cheer me up. With the curtains closed and the sun shining, the room

is all green like an aquarium and I’m the only fish in the tank. The cable

was out, which was a pain. My little brother has all these Japanese anime

videos and my mother has exercise tapes. Stupid exercise tapes that you

need special stuff for, elastic belts and treadmills and stuff, which she

doesn’t have, just the tape. A copy of the tape.

     So once Mom is gone for her date, I move back out to the living

room, and I’m still lying on the couch and watching Ghost in the Shell

for about the fortieth time when my friends show up at the door. Not

Tim who is off someplace getting high with his druggie friends or Lindsey

or Kara who had their game, but the rest of them—Simon and Melissa

and Matt. They look arranged standing on the porch, Simon and Matt

who are tall and skinny on the sides and Melissa right in the middle.

Their smiles make a kind of wavy line through the air. I’m glad my friends

smile, especially Simon who almost never smiles around me anymore.

I would like to admire the picture they make, but they are talking and

expect me to pay attention. They want to hang out. They want to get

coffee or drive out to the cove and look at the water; at least Simon

wants to do that because he surfs. And I’m all “whatever” until Simon

says Lindsey will not be back until really, really late because she’s playing

a double header, which I forgot.

      “Well, forget it,” I say. “I’ll watch Spirited Away.” I figure I’ll just sit

in here until my mother gets home from her date with the new hardware

manager guy from Freddie’s, who will probably be as much of a

jerk as the last one since, as I have good reason to know, my mother is

attracted to losers. It is the story of her life. Except my mother has no

life. Which is really depressing. Who wants to know that? A single fact

like that can spoil your whole day.

     But Melissa has other plans. We saw some marzipan fruit in the candy

store downtown, and I told her how my gramma taught me to make

them. “It’s mostly almond paste,” I told her. “It’s easy.” That was like

last month. Today she roots around in her bag and pulls out about ten

pounds of packaged almond paste and powdered sugar and some other

stuff like coconut that doesn’t even go in marzipan. When she dumps

it all out on the kitchen table, it ought to leave her bag light, but it

doesn’t. Melissa carries her trig book around in her shoulder bag, just

in case she gets the urge to study while she’s shoplifting at Safeway.

      “Come on, Lydia,” Melissa says.

      “Why would I want to make marzipan from shoplifted almond paste

on a Friday night?” I say.

      “But you do, don’t you?”

      I look into her big innocent eyes and she cracks a grin, and pretty

soon I get out the little squeezy bottles of food coloring and some plates

and explain how to knead food coloring into the dough so it’s red or

green or yellow. You can brush color on the surface too. It’s really pretty.

     Everybody pinches off lumps of the marzipan I’ve mixed and dabs

on a little food coloring, and we start kneading in the color and we’re

concentrating so it’s quiet for a while.

     I am making apples, Macintosh apples, so I make the marzipan yellow,

and when I get that color right, I shape tiny one-inch apples and

paint on streaks of red so that it’s like the apples my grandparents grew

in the valley. My gramma used to bake pies and put up applesauce. We

used the last quart of applesauce when I was about eleven. When I get

the second apple finished, I look around and see everyone is shaping

fruit, so I start kneading green food coloring into some more marzipan

so I can make apple stems and leaves that I will moisten with water

and apply to my apples.

     Simon is leaning over the counter making giant raspberries. He’s got

the color pretty good—dark red with a bit of blue to make the berries

look ripe. He’s rolling these little red balls and using his spit to attach

them one after another to the end of his finger, then he pries it off his

index finger and adds it to the row he’s made on the counter. He has

four fat raspberries, each one about ten times as big as real life.

      I crouch down beside the counter and look his berries straight in

the eye. “Cute,” I say.

Simon scrunches his lips without looking up and goes right on making

berries.

     I ignore him for a while and place five little apples on the platter

on the table, and Melissa picks up some baby bananas she’s been working

on and arranges them on the plate too. Matt’s fruit isn’t done yet because

he keeps forgetting what he’s doing when he sits near Melissa,

but Simon has a row of seven raspberries.

     “Hey, Simon, put ’em on the plate,” I say. “Don’t hog.” I point an

elbow at the fruit piled on the platter, but I smile to show I’m kidding.

    Then he picks each raspberry up and drops it into the palm of his

hand and dumps them onto the pile of fruit we’re building on the table.

Simon’s red raspberries make dark dots among bright apples and yellow

bananas. Everyone starts talking at once.

      “So how was the Maritime Museum?” I ask Melissa.

“They rearranged the net case, the one with the ivory seal,” she says.

We’ve all visited this museum on school trips about every six months

since we were born. “I think they might have dusted it.”

     “Did you hear that Joe told Mr. Gustofson to F-off?” Matt says F-off

because Simon objects to bad words.

     “Yeah, he got three days,” Melissa says.

     “He is such a jerk.”

     “He broke Mr. Ward’s pencil sharpener last year.”

     “That was Joe?” Simon looks up at Matt. “I thought you did that!”

He reaches his hand up and I know he wants to run it through his hair,

but he’s cut his hair short and there is nothing to run his fingers through

anymore.

     “Me?” Matt looks around from where he’s been staring at Melissa

again. “Are you nuts? Why would I do that?”

     “Ward said that thing about Vietnam and you got all weirded out.”

     “My dad went to ’Nam. Ward shouldn’t say about it being ‘ill-advised’

and all. What does he know about ill-advised?”

     “He wasn’t talking about your dad,” I say. “He meant because of that

story we read—”

     “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Matt looks down at his marzipan. The whole

kitchen smells of almonds.

      “Do you have to cook them or something?” Matt wants to know.

He’s rolling a skinny stem for his cherry which is not exactly miniature.

Why is the concept of miniature so tough for boys to get? Everything

has to be big for them. If they had enough marzipan, they’d probably

be making fifty-pound pumpkins.

      Anyway, Matt’s cherry is almost the size of an apple. He’s not paying

attention. This is kind of obvious since he has a thing for Melissa,

he stares at her all the time. It’s been going on forever, so you know

the whole cherry thing makes me want to pat him on the head and tell

him he’ll have to grow out of it because Melissa is not a dater, she’s a

destroyer. She got her heart broken in seventh grade, and she’s been

getting back at guys ever since. She’s not a bad person, though, except

for recreational shoplifting and tormenting boys.

     “Just let them dry out,” I tell him. I am attaching curved leaves the

size of my thumbnail to the stems of peaches.

     “What do they taste like?”

     “Kinda like they smell. You can try one, but they’re pretty rich.”

     And Melissa’s eyes snap up from her two-inch bananas. “You can

eat ’em? Cool!” and then everybody wants to eat our fruit. Raspberries

with spit, one giant cherry, and baby bananas, peaches, and apples blushed

with food coloring. They overflow the platter.

     I’m arguing we shouldn’t eat them because they wouldn’t be good

for us, and I’m doing just fine until Simon goes, “It’s mostly almond

paste and that’s just almonds—read the label. It’s all natural ingredients.”

Like I wanted to know that. Shit, I thought it was all pure unhealthy

stuff—sugar and salt and chemicals.

     But Simon comes along with his all natural ingredients, and five

minutes later we’ve divvied them into piles and eaten every last foodcolored

miniature fruit. They were cute too, and they gave me this incredible

stomachache and I felt like lying back in the overstuffed chair,

overstuffed just like me, and never moving again. Now that I think of

it, it’s usually Simon who brings on the cold water, it’s Simon every time

who spoils the direction of the discussion. I wonder if he even knows

he’s doing it.

     We’ve all gone to school together practically since we were born.

Our mothers took us to baby swim classes and all that, so I’ve known

the guy for a very long time and there is no spoiling his mood. It’s been

pissing me off lately since we broke up. I mean, I’ve tried shutting down

the sunshine before and it just gets you nowhere, but I gotta tell you

it’s all Simon’s fault, everything that happened.

     So we lie around in the living room groaning for a while until Melissa

says she wants coffee and my mother drinks only herbal tea, won’t

allow coffee in the house, so we decide to leave. Simon thinks we should

all go in his car, but the back is full of wetsuits for surfing, so I say I’ll

ride with Melissa in her mom’s junker Toyota.

     We’re heading out the door just as my mom gets home early from

her hot date. Her lipstick is still perfectly outlined so I figure, well. She

passes us in the doorway and can’t decide whether to be glad I am going

out or pissed because Matt and Simon are not boys, they are friends,

and this clearly is not a date. “Wear a sweater,” she says.

      A sweater. So we’re sitting at Judy’s Hot Cup with coffee and hot

chocolate and waiting for the stuff to cool down so we can drink it and

order another one and everybody is talking about college and dorms and

where we will all be next year after we graduate, which I cannot stand

to think about. I do not understand how they can be so cheerful about

graduation since they don’t know any better than I do what they want

to do the rest of their lives. Except Simon will play football and get married

to some nice girl his family picks out for him. Why talk about it? My

mother thought she would become an English teacher and instead worked

right here at the Hot Cup until she got married. She keeps offering to

get me a job waitressing because I’d make more in tips than at the bagel

shop where I’ve worked for three years. But this isn’t where I want

to go, isn’t even close to the direction I want my life to take. I try not

to think about waitressing for the rest of my life and I sneak peaks at

the rooster clock on the kitchen wall to figure out when Lindsey is likely

to show up. The vinyl squeaks every time I shift my butt on the seat,

which makes it kinda hard to see the clock from where I am without

making it obvious that’s what I’m doing. I should get a watch.

      Simon looks me in the eye and says, “Checking out the clock or your

future?”

     “What?” Someone at the counter laughs and I turn my head to frown

at the blonde waitress Jennifer Loomis; I have known and disliked her

since we were both four years old in Miss Penny’s preschool class.

       “Scared of what’s ahead?” He’s grinning, all pleased with himself

because he’s reading my mind again. Because he knows stuff I wish he

didn’t.

      “Simon,” I say sweetly, “do you know you’re a bitch?”

      “Lighten up, Lydia,” says Melissa without looking up from her coffee,

but I’m not done.

      “You just can’t leave things alone,” I tell him. “Just because you’re

so perfect you have to make everyone else feel bad!” I know I shouldn’t

care, that what he’s saying shouldn’t matter at all, that I am picking.

      “Bitch,” I say again.

      “Give it a rest,” warns Melissa.

      “It’s OK, Melissa,” says Simon, looking into his cup. “I don’t mind.

She’s just thinking about her future.” He tips his face in my direction.

      “She’s afraid she’ll never go anywhere or do anything that matters to

anyone, not even to herself.”

      I say nothing because I can’t talk.

     “She’s afraid she’ll always be a loser,” he says and looks away because

he knows he’s said the worst thing he can. Because he knows me, he

knows what he’s said.

      So I lose it, which is crazy because Simon and I have been fighting

for months since we broke up without either of us actually getting hurt.

I lunge toward him, but Simon leans back out of reach. My coffee cup

clatters across its saucer and coffee flies and the narrow vase of plastic

flowers shoots all the way off the table and clunks on the floor. I struggle

to get out of the booth, shoving past Melissa who is between me and

my target. Jennifer Loomis steps back out of the kitchen to see what is

happening, and some old people at the counter slip off their stools.

     Simon stands up too.

     “Hey guys, hey guys,” Matt says over and over. “Wait a minute!” shrieks

Melissa who hasn’t seen me lose my temper like this since we were in

the third grade and some kid smashed our tree fort. And my temper is

lost. I am so crazy mad I’m hitting Simon even though he’s way taller

than me. My legs are kicking and I am completely crazy; I know this

because every nerve in my body is screaming nuts. Then Simon gets

hold of my hands where I am trying to scratch his face and I feel his

beard scratching my palms instead. He yanks my arms hard up against

his sweaty T-shirt, where I can feel the heat of his body and smell the

chocolate smell of his breath coming from his nose, and I see his eyes

are huge and brown but not the way I remember. My ears are singing

like sirens. From far away someone rings through the shop door and

Lindsey’s voice says, “What’s going on?”

      My skin shivers all over like a tree when you bump into it and all

the raindrops held in the leaves let go.

Jan Priddy

Copyright  2006 by CALYX, Inc., a non-profit corporation. No part of this publication may be copied or reproduced without written permission from CALYX.