Brutes, p.7
Brutes, page 7
Isabel’s mom fusses with the microphone. She moves her mouth but we cannot hear her.
‘We can’t hear you, Mom!’ yells Isabel.
Isabel’s mom blushes and slaps the end of the microphone. A screech shoots out through the mall. Everyone shrieks and slaps their ears closed, the auditionees the most theatrically.
Mia’s mother runs onto the stage and pushes Isabel’s mom aside. We laugh when Isabel’s mom sticks her tongue out at Mia’s mother’s back.
‘Okay, ladies and gentlemen!’ cries Mia’s mother. ‘Welcome to the Star Search!’
She looks at Jody and Hazel’s mom, who presses a button hopefully. Loud explosions ring out through the speakers. Mia’s mom pauses for applause. When none arrives, she starts to clap violently herself. A few others join in from the crowd.
‘Let me hear you!’ Mia’s mother screams. ‘Have you got what it takes?’
‘Yeah!’ shouts the little girl in the tutu.
‘Aw,’ says the food court.
A few other kids shout out, prodded by their mothers.
‘Yes!’
‘Yeah!’
‘Yes!’
The food court stays silent.
‘Well, today we’re gonna find out! It could be your lucky day. We’re offering call-backs, and even, I have had it confirmed’ – she drops her voice from a scream to a whisper – ‘a plane ticket straight to Hollywood!’
The crowd rustles with excitement.
She reads out a list of names from a clipboard, pausing after each one to place a hand on her heart and say, ‘Thank you.’ She does not thank our mothers. Then she introduces the agent. One little girl in the line starts to cry when Mia’s mother says the name of an actor the agent represents. He has curly hair that kills us all, and we guess it is too much for the little girl and her doll-sized heart to handle.
‘I’d let him put a Q-tip too far in my ear,’ whispers Christian.
‘I’d let him run over my foot,’ says Jody.
‘I’d let him chew my lips off,’ says Britney.
‘Ew, Britney,’ says Leila, and she does not even say who won.
We shut up because Stone and the agent come out of the Star Search offices. The agent has never been a woman before. When they pass by, the crowd tightens up like the two of them are cops. Stone leads her toward the two folding chairs in front of the stage and the plastic table waiting for them, designated with a gold plastic cloth. His hand is against the agent’s back. When they sit down, his hand stays, we can see between the gap in the folding chair. We watch as she reaches around with her own hand to remove it. He rests the hand between his legs. His knees widen.
The audition begins.
The first girl cries with nerves and walks off early. While her time runs down on the clock, we can all hear her mother screaming at her husband.
‘I should never have changed my name to Abbot! My baby’s always the first one off the diving board!’
The next girl seems to try to compensate for Abbot by performing her monologue about her mother’s chemotherapy with a cheery optimism, baring her teeth to the back of the room.
Then there is a beautiful boy dancer. His body seems elastic. His legs whack the side of his head when he kicks them up, his tight afro skims the floor when he leans back. Everyone claps for him, including the agent, but she doesn’t write his name.
After a dozen kids with no names written down, they start to get wilder, louder. They drop to the ground and do the worm, they hold their big notes even when the song is finished.
But the agent does not write down a single name. There is a break when the younger ones finish. Mothers calm down and pretend to be interested in other people’s children. The kids pull out painful hairstyles and play tag around the fountain, scooping out the coins dumb tourists throw in the water.
Then the teenagers start. They cry about sexy photos sent around school. They cry about being dumped. They cry about death. They cry about their parents getting divorced. No one mentions abortions, though we know some of the girls have held their moms’ hands on the way to Planned Parenthood. No one talks about pills, though we know half the boys have baggies of them rattling in the pockets of their cargo shorts. We are bored, watching their faces fake feeling under the lights. They look grey and sweaty. We wait impatiently for Mia and Eddie to rise up in the line. Mia is wearing the biggest pair of sunglasses we have ever seen. She wears sunglasses all the time, even in February when the sun gets gauzy. Sometimes we dream of wrenching them from her face. We imagine they make a satisfying sound like the Velcro on our sneakers. We have never seen her eyes. In our dreams, they are black as the black-hole faces of the blond couple on the construction site billboard, with no white left in them at all.
She is before Eddie. We clap fiercely when she climbs onto the stage. She wobbles a little when Eddie shakes his arm free from her, as if she is surprised he is not coming with her. We have never seen her alone and we think of her in her bedroom on the nights Sammy meets Eddie on the wall. We wonder if she watched from her window as Sammy leaped away from her into the sky every night.
We are surprised by how loud our hands are. We look around. Only a few other families are clapping, and they are not families we know. Our mothers and the women from the search party keep their arms firmly by their sides. We watch their painted lips forming whispers, quiet enough that we cannot hear, but we sense they say,
‘Where is she?’
‘Where is she?’
‘Where is she?’
Mia’s sunglasses dance with the bright mall light. The rest of her face does not even shiver.
‘I’m Mia Halliday,’ she says. The women fall quiet. The silence is sudden and whole and seems more aggressive than the whispers. We can hear the hydraulic shush of the fountain, the plop of pigeon shit on the glass roof, the low drone of heat lamps keeping the pizza slices, the burrito beef, the teriyaki chicken lukewarm and sweaty.
‘Hi Mia,’ says the agent. ‘What are you doing for us today?’
Stone leans over to whisper something in her ear. She shuffles to the edge of her seat away from him, until half her butt hangs over the edge.
‘I’m a triple threat,’ says Mia, sticking her hand on her hip and doing her impressive model-at-the-end-of-a-runway pose.
‘Can you take your sunglasses off for me?’ says the agent.
Our hearts thump. We open our eyes wider and try not to blink.
Mia fingers the arms of her sunglasses. We see her mother on the side of the stage, miming furiously. ‘Take! Them! Off!’ she mouths.
Mia takes them off.
‘Oh my God,’ says Isabel.
The shape of every pair of sunglasses we have seen her wear that summer has left large white patches in her extremely tanned face. She has not bothered with eye makeup, and her eyelashes are blonde and stubby. Her eyes are as black as we imagined they would be, or almost black, the colour of the lake. We thought they would sparkle, but they are still and dark and reveal exactly nothing.
‘You might wanna even that tan out for LA, honey,’ says the agent.
The food court laughs.
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’
‘She looks like you when you passed out by the pool that Fourth of July—’
‘Don’t remind me.’
‘Hush, poor girl—’
‘She’s embarrassed, look—’
‘Oh, don’t be soft on her!’
We laugh, too, we cannot help it. Then we bite our lips to stop them betraying us. We do not want to laugh at Mia.
The agent gestures to Isabel’s mother above the boombox. She is a nice mom and she starts the song quickly, spiralling the volume up to drown out the crowd’s laughter. Mia misses the first bars. She stands still until the crowd quiets. Then, suddenly and awkwardly, she comes to life. She tries to lower herself to the ground for a dance move, sliding one leg out to the side, but she still has her sunglasses clutched in one hand. She almost loses her balance, but she straightens up and shimmies instead, then breaks into a robotic version of the hula.
Then she starts to sing.
We want it to stop. She sounds like Jody and Hazel when they insist on performing their duets for us. We look toward the exit. It is the first time in our lives that we wish we had a drink. Around the court, grandmas plug their ears. Babies begin to cry. Mothers flee, clutching the babies to their chests, and some of the grandmothers shuffle toward the exits.
‘Sorry, honey, I’ve gotta take a break,’ they call back as they pull cigarettes from their huge purses.
We keep our eyes fixed on Mia. Distracted by the noise, she forgets the lyrics. ‘La la la!’ she sings. ‘La!’ The second-to-last la is quiet, the last la almost just a breath. Then she is silent. She stands still while the music beats on around her.
We watch her like we would watch someone dying.
When she stops singing, the fleeing crowd pauses and looks back at the stage, squinting. Mia seems to feel the attention return. We inch forward in our seats. She closes her mouth tight, bends over double, clutches her ankle and twists her face in mock agony. The music continues perkily as she hobbles toward the edge of the stage.
‘Is she hurt?’
‘Please, she’s faking.’
‘She’ll make all the excuses now.’
‘At least she’s stopped singing.’
‘Isn’t that the Halliday girl?’
‘I don’t know if she has what it takes.’
Isabel’s mom turns off the music, turns quickly to the advertising track, the appliance store that sponsors the auditions. ‘If you didn’t buy from us, you paid too much!’ the man screams. People relax. The advert is on every commercial break on every local station, the man’s shrill yell like a lullaby we have known all our lives.
As Mia edges her way off the stage, we swear we see her smile, but before we can tell, she trips off the stage.
Her fall is spectacular. She seems to fall upward, into a perfectly horizontal line, before she plummets toward the sticky food court floor, landing on her ass, her legs splayed out in front of her like a rag doll. She crumples up and starts to cry, a cry that seems to contort every tan and pale part of her face. The mall erupts with laughter.
She looks up at Eddie, bent above her, laughing so hard he howls. A little spit flies from his lips and over her white sneakers.
The women around us whisper loudly between giggles.
‘Stop laughing!’
‘You’re laughing!’
‘I feel bad for her, they still haven’t found her friend—’
‘Oh, did you hear she’s been climbing over that wall for months to meet that boy—’
‘Sure, I’ve seen her sneaking into that show home—’
‘I wish they’d burn that place down—’
‘The Halliday girl, you mean?’
‘No, the preacher’s daughter!’
‘With the wetsuit?’
‘Lordy lord.’
‘What boy was she meeting?’
‘The one next in line!’
‘Well, he is pretty.’
‘She’ll turn up crying at a Greyhound station—’
‘Remember that teacher’s daughter? Miss what-was-her-name?’
‘Let’s not talk about that.’
‘Where’d she go?’
‘The daughter? No one knows, God rest her soul.’
‘For a while, I was scared the kids would find her somewhere—’
‘It was so long ago—’
‘I said I don’t like to talk about that!’
‘That was a hell of a fall.’
‘Poor girl.’
‘I don’t know, she’s not fooling me with this act.’
Mia rubs a thumb across her sneakers. Her expression realigns. She shoves the sunglasses on her face. She pulls at her ponytail and her hair springs loose. She stands up. She does not look at Eddie or at anyone as she struts out of the mall. The crowd parts before her. We climb onto our booth table to brandish our still and loyal faces to her, but she does not look over to us once. She marches past a family entering through the automatic doors, sending a toddler tumbling, and we watch as she disappears into the whiteness of a bare Florida afternoon. We do not hesitate. We leap off the table and sprint in her shadow toward the ascendant light.
Britney
I look in the mirror. I stick on my black bow tie, adjust it. It looks like I am presenting my head as a gift. I have worn this uniform five nights a week for almost five years. I am a waitress for the most exclusive catering company in the city. I have held trays up to CEOs, senators, billionaires, artists. I don’t remember a single one of their faces.
My mother likes my bow tie, my black slacks. My uniform does nothing for my figure. It broadens my shoulders, flattens the waves of my breasts, my waist, my hips into a straight line. A body with no life in it.
No trouble, my mother wrote, approvingly, when she asked to see a picture of me in it a long time ago.
My mother is always worried about trouble. She only calls me when the sun goes down. My mother’s job is to protect me and so she believes she only needs to speak to me when it gets dark. She asks for the addresses of my jobs, the hotels and the conference centres, the ballrooms, the estates, the country houses, the beach cottages. I make up names and numbers to satisfy her. When I visited her last Thanksgiving, I found dozens of scraps of paper under a cushion on the couch, full of years of my light, impressive lies.
The Feenbody Hotel. North Hampton Avenue. Rockaway Plaza. The Tysky Gallery. The Golden Egg.
I could give her the real names, but I am afraid of her looking them up and calling if she decides to have her third glass of wine and becomes convinced I am going to die that night.
I often receive voicemails from her. I listen to them as I walk the blocks home. I am never scared. My mother talks about the dark like I imagined it when I was a child, that noisy, Floridian darkness, voiced by cicadas and thick as flesh. A true darkness. In the city, the sky never blackens. Sometimes it looks slightly burnt. My mother and I have traded places since I have grown up. We have bartered our fear. She pretends to be afraid and I pretend to be fearless. She sends me money for taxis and makes me promise never to walk home. I use the money to buy eggs and pancakes in all-night diners, sometimes keys of cocaine from my co-workers.
Sometimes I like to punish myself. Or sometimes I like to put myself in situations just to see how my body will react. I used to be curious about other people but now I am curious about myself. I often feel like I am living my life three feet to the left of my body. I let her live her life over there while I watch her. I prefer to be empty and cavernous.
I have not seen his face since the court case. Christian came to stay when it started. We thought maybe we should watch it on TV. Our take-out congealed on the table, untouched, as we chugged beers like we were watching a football game. We only lasted ten minutes. We turned it off and went out, took so many shots that we threw up side by side in an alley by midnight. We got pizza and then went out dancing. I told Christian to stay forever. I told him he didn’t have to pay rent, just stay with me, always, please. We drank more. I got in a fight with a guy in the smoking area who told me I had a nice ass. Christian made out with the DJ. We screamed at each other in the taxi home for leaving each other, then woke up spooning. I still speak to him every day, but he never came back to visit, and the court case never went anywhere, either, as far as I’ve seen.
I look down at the mark on my thigh. I have hung my black slacks on the shower rail while my roommate showers so the steam takes out the creases. I look ridiculous, in my underwear and white work shirt and bow tie, my top bun so tight my eyebrows are cinched upward.
My mother says I’ve had the mark since birth, she insists on it. Once in high school I came home so drunk I cried and told her about him, about the house. She was silent until I said about the mark, how it couldn’t be true but I felt he had given it to me somehow.
‘I gave that to you,’ she said. ‘It’s a birthmark.’
I had never heard her sound so angry.
‘I gave that to you,’ she said.
We didn’t talk about it again until I mentioned I was going to work at his art opening.
‘You’re crazy,’ she said. ‘Why would you do that to yourself?’
‘He’s not going to be there,’ I said. ‘I asked.’
‘Don’t look back, never look back,’ she said. ‘It’s the only way forward.’
She always says this, but I know what’s behind me. It’s what is in front that scares me. It could be anything. It could easily be worse.
My roommate comes in holding my pants from the shower. There are still creases in them and now they are damp. She hands them to me. We have lived together long enough now that we have become a symbiotic organism. Slowly, boundaries have dissolved. We eat cereal at the sink in our underwear. We never close the door when we pee. Our periods are synced. When we watch TV together in one of our beds, our stomachs seem to talk to each other as our food digests, gurgling back and forth. We often fall asleep in the same bed. I have never liked to sleep alone. I don’t like to be the only alive thing in a room. It makes me feel outnumbered.
I pull on the pants.
‘Are you sure you want to go?’ she says.
I wish I had never told her. It was when we first became friends, fellow waitresses, both a bottle down after work, cocaine working in our bowels, making us shit out our respective traumas. I hated doing it. When I was drunk or high, I couldn’t step out of my body. I was a snotty, bloody mess like everyone else. I don’t remember what she told me about herself. Obviously I didn’t find it too interesting.
‘I’m curious,’ I say.
Her mouth is consciously sympathetic, like the inflated downturned lips of a sad clown. I suddenly want to hit her, but the thought of hitting her is enough. Those lips bursting. Blood like lipstick. Her eyes wander toward my clenched fists. I think that she might want me to hit her, so she could call her boyfriend and tell him about my psychotic break.
‘I think she’s in love with me,’ she would whisper, somewhat hopefully, into her pillow.
