Anonymity (3 page)

“SO BETH'S moving back to Juniper.” Barbara's eyes fell on the red and black club stamps decorating her daughter's hands. At least they weren't permanent.

“Right down the street from her parents.” Emily sighed and pinched crust from her sandwich.

“It'll be good to be close to her parents when the baby comes,” Barbara said. Her e-mail dinged in the other room, but she forced herself to ignore it. This was Saturday. Her daughter was visiting. E-mail could wait.

“Did she invite you to a baby shower?” Barbara asked.

“Oh God. Don't even think that. I hate those things. Besides, I'm tired of always buying wedding gifts and baby presents and never getting anything in return.”

“Well, your luck would change if you picked young men who are marrying material.”

Barbara had learned not to stop by Emily's house unexpectedly. More than once she'd dropped in unannounced in the middle of the day and caught her daughter with some young man still twisted up in her bed sheets. They were always scruffy things, mostly musicians, boys with tattoos crawling their arms. Late work schedules made musicians appealing, or at least convenient, for a bartender.

“Please don't start,” Emily said.

“You lack a people filter. You always have. You'll just let anybody into your life.”

“Just because I don't want to live in this cookie-cutter suburb and date the khaki clan doesn't mean I'll never get married. I date nice guys.”

“None of your generation actually dates. All young people seem to do now is read each other's profile online and text a few thousands times. Then suddenly, there's the hookup.”

“Whatever.”

“How a girl's supposed to know if a boy really likes her if all they ever do is meet at a bar? If the guy springs for a couple of beers, does that mean you sleep with him? Seems risky.”

“Don't worry. I have a strict no-glove, no-love policy.”

“Please. That's not the type of information a mother wants to hear.”

“Well, you brought it up.”

Barbara often wondered if her daughter's laissez-faire attitude was common to today's young adults. Perhaps she should have pushed Emily harder, demanded more. Isn't that what all the talk shows and magazines harped about? How her generation had ruined their children by trying to be their friends rather than parents?

“I hate all the expectations,” Emily said. “Like there's some grand life plan you have to follow to reach happiness. Step one: go to college. Step two: get some big job. Step three: get married. Step four: buy a house. Step five: be a breeder. It's like, if you don't have a widescreen and a golden retriever, you're somehow less of a person. I want to know who made those rules.”

“Nobody made the rules, Emily. But if you ever want to be somebody, you have to apply yourself.”

“I AM somebody. I'm a person. When did
being somebody
stop meaning being an individual and start being defined by jobs and college degrees?”

“Everybody has to work. Why not do something worthwhile?”

“You don't respect what I do.”

“Do you respect what you do?” Barbara swirled the ice cubes in her tea.

“Your tone implies I'm not supposed to be proud of my job.”

“It was just a question.”

“Right. It's just a question. Why can't you love me just the way I am?”

“It's because I love you that I want you to get past this teenage angst and grow up. Life isn't easy. You've had every possible advantage. We bought you computers, took you on nice vacations, sent you to camp, paid for lessons. I should have had such an auspicious start in life.”

“Been reading your word-a-day calendar again?”

“Don't judge me for trying to improve myself. And don't change the subject.”

“I'm well aware of your working-class background and how Grammy and Pops didn't help you much. Blah. Blah. Blah.”

Her daughter's dismissive attitude stung. It wasn't that Barbara flaunted her childhood of diminished circumstance. It was only that she wanted Emily to understand how hard work was the only way to security in life.

“That's disrespectful.”

“I'm sorry. You're right. I don't want to fight.” Emily pushed away her plate. “Beth said our ten-year reunion is next summer.”

“Will you go?”

“Probably not. And I know what you're going to say before you say it. I'm ashamed to go back, but I'm not. That's just it, I'm not unhappy with my life. I'm content.”

“You can't bartend indefinitely.”

“Really? Why not? Maybe I'll open my own place.”

“With what money? Investment money? Honestly Emily, I do wonder about you sometimes.”

She crinkled her nose. “It's just that I don't know what I want to do. I've never had that big goal, that one thing that I just knew I was meant to do.”

“Why don't you start by picking something you'd like to study? What about architecture? You had a real interest when you were younger.”

“Too much math. I'd never pass now.”

“What about photography? Commercial photography pays nicely. All your old equipment is still upstairs in your closet.”

“I should take that stuff. Might be fun to pick it up again.”

“Put together a portfolio, even those artsy weird shots you did, and see if you can find a part-time job at a photography studio. Then you could learn the business. See if it suits you. You could still keep your job at the bar at night.”

Barbara had a laundry list of things she wanted Emily to consider, but she held back. The news about Beth seemed to have loosened some contemplative place inside, but Barbara wasn't going to push. This relationship with her daughter was a delicate thing.

Gerald said to let go, that she would find herself, but he'd always been the calmer, less involved parent. Emily tried to hide that she preferred her father with his less challenging ways, but Barbara could tell. The hugs Gerald got were always a few seconds longer. Emily's smile was always brighter around him. Barbara suspected that there were times when Emily went to Gerald for money, times when they shared a secret and left her out.

While it hurt, Barbara didn't really resent Gerald. Certainly a girl should love her daddy. But sometimes it was hard being the stronger parent. Instead of the hugs and kisses, she often got the confused Emily or the depressed Emily. When things got rough, Barbara was the one she turned to.

Just like today. When Emily had called to say she was on her way home, Barbara had heard something in her voice. It was just a tiny quiver, a tone that a mother can sense.

She would deny it, but Emily came home to be reassured that she was not alone. She came home to feel safe and insulated. She came home to be loved.

And Barbara would always love her. Always help pick up the pieces. Always.

UPSTAIRS, IN the back of her old closet, Emily found a black portfolio coated with dust along the top edge. She laid it on her bed and unzipped it. A jumble of photos fell out. She fanned them around and slid one from the bottom.

It was a self-portrait, a Cindy Sherman-style shot with a constructed set and a costume, part of her experimental self-portrait phase. From the stack she pulled a simple, stark black-and-white. Dark waves of hair twisted around her skinny shoulders in the shot. Her lips were slack and her eyes, icy blue in life, looked eerily clear from the photograph, too round and lonely on her face.

For a while, she'd been absorbed by the documentary photography of women like Dorothea Lange and Diane Arbus. Their gritty shots made her want to wipe away the dirt. She loved how they made her feel uncomfortable for the humanity of their subjects.

This interest in strange photography had started with a job at a photo booth in the mall. She had liked the quiet routine. Feed the machines and they spit out images. Simple. And fascinating. For hours upon hours she looked at snapshots of other people's lives—their parties, their vacations, their secrets.

One day, while she was dumping a disposable camera onto a disc, the fragile face of a dead infant appeared. She couldn't stop looking. Eventually, the dead baby photos moved from the regular file to the late file. When she called, the number had been disconnected. The shots moved to the abandoned file and a month later Emily stole them. That packet of dead baby images was still in the back of her desk drawer.

Her mother was suddenly at her side, pulling the black-and-white portrait from the pile. She studied it.

“You look so much like me when I was younger,” she said. “So pretty.”

“You're still pretty.”

“Oh, with this gray hair.” She touched her temple.

“Geez, you've got the body of a yoga instructor. I wouldn't worry about a couple of gray hairs.”

This made her smile. “Take those with you,” her mother said, waving a hand over the portfolio mess. She reached into the top of the closet and came out with Emily's camera bag. “This too.”

From the bottom of the portfolio, Emily pulled images of neighbors with their kids at the pool. People jogging. Dogs. There were close-ups of the jumpy anoles that clung to the sides of their house. None of these had ever satisfied her in an artistic sense. They were vanilla, just mundane snapshots of suburbia.

Barbara perused Emily's display.

“You should organize them. Put them in a form you can show somebody.”

“I was never happy with most of them.”

“They're nice.”

“Nice?” This lukewarm endorsement showed her mother's lack of insight into art. Barbara was a practical thinker. Art for art's sake had never made sense to her.

“I don't know,” Emily said. “I always felt that my work lacked that elusive element that makes you feel something when you look at it.”

“Feel what?”

“An emotional response. Art should make you laugh or make you sad or disgusted or horny or angry or…whatever. It should make you feel something. Anything. Everything. Indifference is the worst response to art.”

“These look perfectly fine to me. They show you mastered the basic skills of photography. I never was sure exactly what you were trying to accomplish.”

Still don't
, Emily thought. In Barbara's world, art matched the couch.

Her mother could not grasp why Emily liked the frayed edges of life, a little dirt in the cracks. Barbara felt life should be pretty and clean and efficient. She would only be happy when Emily was weighed down with a career, a husband, a baby and an enormous handbag with hardware.

“I've got to go,” Emily said as she zipped the photos back inside the case. “I work tonight.”

Her mother followed her downstairs and out to her car. The MINI, a sixteenth birthday gift, still got her where she needed to go.

Emily flung her portfolio in the back and got in. The windows were down, so her mother came to stand next to the driver's door.

Emily reached for the key, then she paused and looked down the street past her mother. “You know, when I was really young, I noticed that every house on this street is the same brick, that every front yard light pole is a replica. Every fourth house has identical dormers and shutters, every third house has stockade fencing around the backyard.”

“So?”

“Everyone's grass is the same height because Mexicans mow on Mondays.”

“Ah, your powers of observation astound me. Guess it's the artist in you. Drive safe. Love you.”

On the way back downtown Emily passed big boxes—Costco and Target and Sam's. As a child, fifteen minutes of every shopping trip had been spent swimming oceanic parking lots of SUVs looking for a space. Juniper people ate in chain restaurants where neon signs called from both sides of raised super highways. They drank shocking green cocktails from the spouts of margarita machines bought at deep discount price clubs. They had theater rooms and game rooms and patios with built-in barbecues.

Everyone in her childhood had lived by the law of acquisition. She'd learned early that most of Juniper parents lived leased lives, even hers. Juniper families didn't own their homes or their cars or their children's cars. These people took alcohol-fueled Corpus Christi vacations, drove pricey, gas-guzzling vehicles, and when it came time to send their entitled children to college, they took second mortgages on their suburban homes.

Her parents would say she was unappreciative of a perfectly lovely childhood, but Emily had grown up feeling like just another one of their projects. Another task they had to manage in their hectic lives. They exhausted her with their perfection and expectations.

By the time Emily graduated from high school, all she really wanted was a way out of the pancake flat crescent of planned living that fanned the edges of Austin.

SHE SLEPT hard, not waking until nearly noon. Tucked into untamed shrubbery, her back against the cool stone foundation of the church, she was invisible, actually comfortable except that she had to pee. She rolled her blanket tightly and trussed it to her pack with a dirty string she kept twisted around her wrist for just such a purpose. She used another string to tie back her hair before she pulled her hood forward over her face.

A line of people had formed along the sidewalk that snaked around to the back of the church. She was relieved to see a gate open that had been closed the night before. She wouldn't have to scale the fence a second time and chance being noticed.

Although her need to urinate was painful, she walked to the end of the queue to wait. She didn't want to cut line and risk a confrontation. Inside the church, she slipped into the bathroom and found an open stall. The prickle of relief rushed her. Somebody banged on the door, but she took her time. The toilet paper dispenser was one of those irksome kinds that stopped short of a full rotation. She doggedly yanked it around and around until she had collected a thick wad of grainy paper that she shoved into her pack.

She washed her hands and face and brushed her teeth with her new toothbrush. She spit and was wiping her mouth with the back of her hand when the girl next to her met her eyes in the mirror above the sink.

“Wow. That's a wild tattoo.”

Lorelei had come to expect the stares. The questions.

She raked her things off the sink's edge into her pack and pushed out the bathroom door. There was a lull in the food line. A tired looking guy plopped a large scoop of spaghetti on her paper plate. Farther down the line, she filled the rest with torn lettuce in some sort of yellowish dressing. At the end of the table she drained a glass of orange juice and picked up another to take with her.

Outside, she went around the corner of the church and sat back against a wall. An adult approached with a girl about her age. She'd been spotted. This was usually how they worked it, using another kid to break the ice. But once Lorelei saw her up close she realized that this girl was probably older.

“Hey,” the girl said. “You're new.”

It wouldn't get her anywhere to be rude to these people.

“Did you get enough to eat?” the man asked. He looked like Santa Claus, in shorts and sandals. He wore a T-shirt that had the Tumbleweed Young Adult Center logo over his heart.

“Name's Steve. This is Fiona.”

Fiona had a nose ring and dirty white-girl dreads sticking out from under a dusty black bowler hat. A tangle of old-fashioned watches wrapped her wrists.

Lorelei liked the girl's style and the man seemed nice enough. Still, she didn't have anything to say to them.

“I don't like to eat alone.” Fiona sat on the grass without waiting for an invitation.

“I got to go do something. I'll talk to you later,” Steve said and walked away.

“I haven't seen you on The Drag before,” Fiona said.

Lorelei hoped this girl wouldn't be an annoying motor-mouth. She decided to guide the conversation. “What's The Drag exactly?”

Fiona motioned with her fork. “This part of Guadalupe. The shopping strip down this side. See that tower? That's where that crazy dude picked off all those people with a rifle back in the sixties. Stood up there and killed like a dozen people or something, people just walking along The Drag. Real whack job. They said he had some major brain tumor or something.”

“That's convenient.”

Fiona looked at her quizzically. “What do you mean?”

“Just that people would think that's a legit reason for going postal. Some mega tumor would mean being crazy wasn't your fault.”

“Like a free pass to off a few people?” She grinned. “I like it. You're all right.”

“Where does everybody hang out around here?”

“Different places. Some people hang in the alley back here because it's close to the drop-in. There are some parks around. Most of us walk down to Pease Park on Shoal Creek. People squat down there.”

“Don't the cops run you off?”

“Not so much. Not as long as nobody steals anything or tears anything up. They're pretty cool usually.” She took a bite of her food and chewed. “Usually.”

“What's the shelter like?”

She shrugged. “Not many beds. Hard to get into. They only want the kids who are,” she made quotation marks in the air, “transitioning.”

“What's that mean?”

“Getting your GED. Getting a job. Getting clean. Getting ready to go home. Getting off the streets.”

“Oh.”

“So, what's your story?”

“None of the above.”

“Where'd you stay last night?”

She didn't want to talk about herself. Time to go.

She stood up and gathered her things.

“Hey, where you going?” Fiona asked.

“Is there a trash can around?” she asked, holding up her paper plate and cup.

“Just leave it here. I'll get it for you. Where are you going?”

“I don't know. Maybe I'll go check out that Shoal Creek place.”

“That's cool. I'll go with you.”

“No thanks. I've got something to do first.” She needed to shoplift some clothes and find a bathroom where she could clean up and change. Afterward, she'd have to hide for a few days, just a precaution in case anybody happened to see her pinch the clothes. She couldn't afford to get picked up. You get busted, you go home.

“Will I see you back here?” Fiona asked.

Lorelei heard her, but walked away as if the question hadn't registered.

“Hey,” Fiona called after her. “You didn't even tell me your name.”