Our silver car falls from under the deep green canopy of the freeway and moves upwards over a long concrete bridge. The traffic pushes against our car on all sides as we're swallowed into something greater than just the people behind the wheels.
Below in the waterway nature and industry work; some boats are much bigger than others, and they move in and out of loosely floating gas stations and between bobbing logs.
But dad has never ever been in a car accident, as he mentions frequently (especially when mom dramatically shoots her right hand up to the oh-shit bar – as he calls it, which to her is the safety-lever), so I roll into the big city comfortably observing the buildings and the boats from the rear passenger window on his side. I put my face up close to the window and Kathy’s hand reaches over and shoves the back of my head hard into it, and she snickers.
Probably, I should turn around and declare backseat war – maybe a pinch on her leg – but instead I leave my forehead pressed up tightly against the cold glass, watching the grayish waves below swell and disappear, back and forth, in regular patterns caused by passing boats. Cars move endlessly alongside on the exposed bridge, and dad tries to look into the windows of each one.
It was a long drive for no one to talk. Upon entering the city I hoped, waited, for a comment on the weather, or mom to say: looks just the same as she does every year – or even just a sigh – but the only noises that remained were the whir of the engine and my sister endlessly working a piece of gum. She popped the gum in her mouth way back when we pulled out of our driveway, and at one point of the drive, sometime after the tunnels and before the freeway, I stared at the green LED clock on the dashboard and counted how many chews she would make in a minute; she chewed with amazing consistency and I got tired of waiting.
Mom stared forward without talking to dad the whole way and there was no other room for noise –Kathy had never been so quiet, unless sleeping. Dad thinks about work a lot, so he hardly talks anyway.
Rain falls lightly as we descend the bridge; final rays of sun reflect off mom’s gold link necklace before we drive into the shadows of tall buildings. The car drifts to the left lane. The light turns yellow and dad accelerates out of the turn. He hasn’t driven one block before I am reminded where downtown begins: a place where mom always locks the doors and dad drops crusted names of which I know nothing, other than their bad breath sound: Skid Row, The Slums, Hooker Central. I can never seem to remember the street where The Floozies hang, though it creeps up on me like a dream. My sister and I crane our necks to watch the people wash by in detached amazement, carefully avoiding eye contact –
We come along a side street with a black police van and a crowd. Two cops each have a black boot pressed into the back of a guy’s back as he lays face down on the concrete. A small group watches with glassy eyes as if there is a television on the sidewalk; two straddle small rusty bicycles. The back of the van is backed-up against the three of them, and thin fingers beckon out of the deeper shadows inside – and since mom isn’t going to – I secretly lock my door.
The light turns red and dad stops the car. Marching away from the crowd, towards us, is a teenager wearing a stained football jersey over a bulky hooded sweatshirt, and his head is far back in the darkness of the hood. Fast strides begin to slow and he suddenly spins around, drawing back towards the crowd like a magnet. One of the cops springs forwards and yells at him, pointing with authority to keep walking; he stops and stares for a moment, and calmly turns back around with his head low and tipped to one side, resuming his course towards the intersection.
A black drop is falling from below his left eye. The neon yellow sign of a pawnshop flickers on behind him. He shrugs and leaves his shoulders up high as he strides across the street against the backdrop of the city, which reaches high into the clouds and stands as innocent as a billow of smoke from an old man’s pipe. In the front windshield, out of the corner of my eye, emerges a stumbling woman in red high heels wearing a tight black skirt up around her waist and an unbuttoned jean jacket with no shirt underneath. She is screaming at children who are not there; her eyes dart back and forth as if trying to follow invisible butterflies. They’re on paths that collide in the center of my window, and he turns his head slightly from deep in his black hood, but not toward her. Hard eyes like black diamonds, or coal, immediately find mine through the thick air and hold them. My body drops against the back of the seat. He flashes his teeth like a vampire, the way anyone can, a bloody smile, and then turns straight ahead. The light turns green and everyone inches forward. Our car jerks ahead, nearly into the teenager, who then swings around in a smooth motion and runs full speed, knocking down the screaming woman, who screams even louder, back towards the crowd. He runs faster than anyone I have ever seen, like there is a prize; his hood flies off and his shiny pink head is open towards the low ceiling of the sky. Our car pulls away and my eyes listlessly follow the curb of grimy hotels and stained sidewalks and broken humans looming in shady doorways.
After two more blocks we turn left and are on a street of the tallest buildings with glass doors and gold numbers. There are no more cop cars, and everyone’s face matches.
“Harold…where are you taking us?” mom says.
My sister and I looked at one another. Finally. And with the silence broken, Kathy says “Stupid” under her breath while staring at me. Her ponytail sticks out from the back of her head like a single, ingrown horn. I stick my tongue out because I should.
Dad begins with a laugh. “What do you mean where am I taking you? Like I’m kidnapping my family or something. We’re going to the hotel.”
“Where?” She is staring at him like he is out on the sidewalk. He stares at the street because driving takes concentration. I have a good idea of where we are going, so I wonder why mom doesn’t. We stay at the same hotel every year – the one with the pool that is half inside and half outside.
“Daddy! I’m hungry!” Kathy yells. She awakens the remaining sleepless silence. I wonder how she could yell like she does at home after being so quiet for so long, and upon entering into a city that is much, much bigger than she.
“We’re almost there, sweets.”
“Mommy, can I go swimming when I get there!”
From my seat I have an angle on mom’s face, and I’ve watched it almost the whole drive down. It hasn’t changed – beautiful without makeup; beautiful and sad like a bruise in a bowl of fruit. She won’t get angry and she won’t say yes – she doesn’t want to say anything because her silence is the loudest. She opens her hand palm down on her lap and rubs the back of it with the other, circling her wedding ring, and says, “not ‘til an hour after you eat, Katherine. You know that. Once you’re in the deep water you’ll get cramps.”
“Well, I don’t want to eat then!” One foot stamps twice on gray car carpet. Her words are slow because she does not know what she wants. I am mixed up in mom’s hands as she twirls her wedding ring like the girl next door twirls her hula-hoop; she always complained on the looseness of the ring. She’s making me sad and I do not notice that we have pulled up the circular driveway of the sky-high hotel until I hear the sound of dad’s car door opening as he gets out to meet a man in a funny red suit with gold buttons. The cool, damp, salty air rushes into all corners of the car. Mom is staring towards the top of the hotel, upwards into the light rain, though from her angle I know she cannot see the top. Kathy starts to kick the back of mom’s seat at a slow, constant beat.
“You have to eat, or you won’t be able to swim. You won’t have the energy,” mom adds. Kathy is baffled by this and frantically scutters around inside herself to work up a fit.
I am seven in the backseat. If a parade were to float along now, coming around the corner, I’d join it—if I were allowed, because parades do come around corners at any time. And if someone had free candy, I’d take a few steps. Kathy is ten and she is beginning to act like women as my dad explains them. I hate her. She’ll never learn anything. To her there is no silence—and if there is, she chews loudly. My dad says her gum smells like pig shit. She leaves a mean streak wherever she goes and she won’t go alone. But that last street was kind of like a parade—a lost parade through a ghost town, with no beginning and no end. And the teenagers run into old screaming women.
Mom gets out of the car last. She stares at the yellow line on the edge of the curb like she’ll never be able to get over it. I keep watching for the smallest signs of committal but her feminine approach is full of long moments. Dad is fumbling with the cargo, trying to carry it all from the car to the lobby himself, but as the zippers and small wheels bang loudly and rattle the glass doors, he finally heaps everything onto the trolley that the bellboy pushed in behind him.
Kathy marches through the lobby and gets onto the long escalator and floats out of sight, and dad chases after her. The lobby is red and gold, and large vases, blooming with flowers like forging fireworks, sit on every surface. Any place to sit is covered with leather. The lobby is a slow rush of people stepping off of the escalator, or out of the elevator at the far end, on their way out for dinner at a downtown restaurant. A woman in a black dress and a black hat and black high heel shoes steps out of the elevator and crosses the lobby. Dad almost stumbles over her. She intently turns her head and stares at him up taking clumsy double-steps up the escalator. Her stiff body is not very tall but there is much invested in each step, as she moves in a perfect straight line without bother. She crosses my path and is older than I thought, and although she is many of my small steps away, I can smell her scent strongly in the air, like raspberries soaking in gasoline. A man in a blue suit follows her on a string, and although his strides are long he can barely keep up. Mom appears beside me. I look up at her. People tumble over the lobby like pieces of a board game.
The blank look on mom’s face has grown more desperate. She guides me forward with her hand on the back of my head as we ascend the escalator. I climb up two steps beyond her so that we are face-to-face.
“Wassa matter, mommy?”
“Oh Jimmy,” she sighs, “nothing baby, don’t worry.”
“Are you sad.”
“I’m something.”
“Why?”
“Well, honey…you’re father is well beyond his means right now,” she said. I don’t know what she means, is why she said it.
“But it’s nice here. We come every year.”
“Well things change over a year. Like next year you’ll be eight.”
“Can I still go swimming later?”
“Well, we’re here, aren’t we?”
I nod.
The shiny escalator reflects the high, bright lights and propels us towards the second level. I am as high as the crystal chandelier. More people come into the hotel and stand beneath it, looking around.
Mom suddenly grabs me by the shoulders and pulls me towards her in a swift motion. I startle as she draws me into her breasts and holds me tight to her soft maroon sweater. She wraps me up in her and the ground stops moving.
“Always face forward on escalators, hun. You almost had an accident. Then there definitely would have been no swimming.”
I’m dazed and stumble forwards onto the complicated pattern of the big square carpet of the lobby. I feel lucky that dad didn’t see it because he tells stories of how little kids get swallowed up by the escalator if they are not careful. I believe that I am littlest one in such a big room; I familiarize myself with the restaurant and the gift shop and the piano that sits in the far reaches of the bar where mom and dad sometimes go after dinner when me and Kathy are in bed. I start towards dad and Kathy who are standing at the front desk, but mom grabs me by the shoulder and maneuvers me with ease towards the elevators where we sit on a leather pink couch… and wait… until Kathy comes zooming through the leaves of a large plant and presents herself to us with her hands on her hips; dad follows around the corner dangling in his fingers a plastic card. He fights mom’s glare with a wide, forceful smile and for a moment I think mom is just overreacting (as she often does). Kathy pushes the elevator button frantically, and keeps pushing well after it lights up. Mom leans over and covers my ears, but I can still hear her muffled voice.
“What the hell are you doing, Harold? Now you’ve gone too far,” she says.
And she’s wearing him down; his smile hangs on by a thumbtack and he looks into my eyes for a moment like he’s trying to climb through a window; he turns and walks into the elevator. We all walk in. Kathy importantly jams on 16 and the button lights up and she keeps jamming; the door closes, but not completely, as an older girl, older than Kathy, slips in. There isn’t much to look at in the elevator so dad’s looking at the girl’s legs beneath her white miniskirt. He looks at the girl like mom looks at the pharmacist when he fills her prescription. Mom is staring at him. The girl gets off at 15 and dad doesn’t look anymore.
He’s shoving and swearing the card in and out of the slot, and after much coercion finally there’s a click and a green light. Kathy pushes open the door and runs in. Dad opens the door to the bathroom, looks around it, and nods in approval. By the time we walk out of the hall and into the main room, Kathy is already jumping on the bed closest to the window.
The view through the raindrops skipping down the window skims over the tops of the city buildings against the gray sky. Clouds like fingers stretch across the sky, threatening to stop the city. Dad shuffles over to the window in his brown shoes and beige pants and looks over the dull, vibrating concrete. He can’t know that I can see his face in the reflection of the window, and he’s looking down at the street far below like he might be nailed to the ground the moment he steps back onto the elevator. Now that we’re here, mom’s feelings are stopped. The stone shadows descend and darken our room. Kathy stops jumping and I sit on the bed beside her. Mom sits on the far side of the other bed, looking over her shoulder either at dad or out the window. He grabs a beer from the mini-bar, looks over at her and tantalizingly shakes the green bottle with a twinkle.
“Well, this is as high as you can get, kids. Would you like a drink, hun? It’s been a long drive, hey.”
She stares at him. He keeps rolling...
“Well, should I give some of our friends a call? Maybe meet them for dinner? The Jackson’s, yah, sure—I’ll try the Jackson’s.”
“We don’t have any friends here anymore, Harold. Everybody knows,” she says. She talks like someone’s hands are clasped lightly around her neck; her face turns red. Whatever everybody knows makes dad quickly walk over to the TV and start fumbling with the remote.
Mom continues. “We can’t be here Harold, we can’t,” and then she stands up, “be here!”
“This is supposed to be a reconciliation,” dad spurts.
“Well you can’t reconcile my security, or trust, or the hotel bill.”
I can’t tell if she’s angry or sad, and then she starts to cry like summer might never come back; the solid face I watched the entire drive down begins to crumble and crack into the fine wrinkles that she had recently begun to complain about. Dad still frantically fiddles with the remote control, but as the TV comes on, he drops it to the carpet. A man on the TV, sitting at a desk, stares at him. Dad’s body shrinks there for a minute and he turns around and faces mom without looking at her; his face goes red like he was kissed all over with trashy lipstick.
The man on TV talks quietly about a disappointing day, and the weatherman smiles.
Mom moves through tears now. “We just get in the car like any other year and drive down here. Why? Because it’s marked on the calendar? We don’t have any friends here anymore. We don’t have any business going on vacations. It’s one thing to dream about all this being the same, but you’ve taken 1000 km. too far…and now how are we supposed to get home? Did any of this ever occur to you? Things aren’t what they were…you screwed up, Harold! Stop trying to convince me that nothing’s changed, because it all has! How are you so afraid to walk away from problems now? You were always so good at it. No, you ran…like a lonely runner.” Mom hunched over on the bed, crying. She grabs a corner of the tightly tucked bed and rips it down as far it’ll go. “We can’t afford this damned place,” and she looks apologetically at me and Kathy for a second.
Dad is standing next to the TV, staring blankly across the room. His eyes, pale and empty, move slowly across the space between the beds and field me and my sister in an encompassing stare. He takes the wallet out of his back pocket and drops it to the hotel room floor, next to the remote. It hits the carpet with a lifeless thud. He opens his mouth slightly, waiting for a breath to take out the words, and looks back out the window.
“W…we sure are h-h-high up, aren’t we kids…my children, you are my children. I won’t let this happen to my children. What do you think people do up in those high buildings at night?” He downed his beer and added it to the pile on the floor. “They eat you…the city eats you like the monsters in your books.”
“Don’t scare them, Harold. Kids…your father is the monster,” says mom.
Startled, I look out of the window. Dad isn’t a monster, though he often comes home late from work and sneaks into my room. It’s getting darker and the windows of the tall red building across the street light up randomly like a game board: maybe there is a woman cleaning, or a man sitting at a desk working late. And behind that building, other buildings, higher and lower, until the water begins, also light up. The mirrored windows of some buildings seemed to reflect nothing at all.
He awakened. “Shut-up Maria. The struggle to stay alive is what we do up here. We’re not monsters, but we’re not birds. And look at all those lights. It gets lonely up there at night. Just for money. Money for jackets and cars and doctors and vacations.”
Mom speaks into the bed. “And some people just can’t handle it, and then it all comes tumbling down.” As she said all comes tumbling down she made her hand like a feather and it drifted back and forth through the air and it landed onto the bed.
Nobody had turned the lights on in the room and there was barely any light coming from the charcoal sky anymore. Everyone became shadows.
“Desks full of whatever and phone numbers spilling out of drawers and a long dark drive homes. No feelings. Thinking that there is something better for a moment, losing the battle when you look in the mirror in the bright bathroom down the hall. Black circles and greasy skin...And then your dad screwed up. He sure did, kids. And worst of all, I thought of you and mom. Too big for you to understand right now, but you’ll know. That’s the way the story goes…take a look around at this nice room,” he breathed deeply and looked around at the room, momentarily regaining his composure, “and ask the monster how many ways there are to mess it up."
Mom exhaled until she had enough breath just to say “one for the love and two for the money.”
Dad walks over and gives my hair a scruffy rub, and then Kathy’s ponytail a tug. He walks over to mom and smells her hair like she was an April flower, and then disappears down the hall into the darkness. I hear him pass the bathroom and open the room door. For a moment the open door casts a wedge of light across the still room. I get off the bed and stumble, unable to see. It seems to take me hundreds of my small steps to get down the corridor to the front door. I step out into the bright hallway, surrounded by strange doors and noises behind each one; I run left by instinct. And before I get to the end of the hall, I hear, from the other direction, doors glide shut and the sound of the elevator descends like a ghost behind the walls. I scream, but all I can hear is the buzz of the ice machine. He was just going down to the lobby to get the paper, as he always does.
I walk down the hall. Every now and then the ice releases. Dad would always make me go get the ice in hotels; hand me a white bucket and tell me to go and find the machine, and I knew it was an important job because the ice made his drinks cold. Without the bucket my hands feel empty and my heart heavy, but as I approach our half-open door I stop and feel the gravity, like I am going to go into a room much bigger than I am…on the top floor of a tall building in a big city, standing still in a world turning. And with all the running and driving and falling around me, I don’t want to move.
“Mommy, can I go swimming now?” I hear Kathy say.
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