Literary Log: Chapter 1

[mallorys_camera]

Drive twenty miles through the artichoke fields off the old interstate in central California and you hit Monterey, an outpost that since its inception as a frontier mission and military detachment had made its money by luring travelers from very far away. Most stick around just along enough to see the ocean, drop some cash. But then there are the people who decide to stay. They come from all over – Mexico, Europe, Asia – and for them the quaint tourist town’s number one attraction is not the famous aquarium, or the Pebble Beach golf courses, or even the ghost of John Steinbeck stalking camera-toting vacationers along Cannery Row, but Costco, a discount shopping depot, whose aisles are stacked twenty feet high with toilet paper and giant tubs of laundry detergent.

On Sundays when Jessie Morasca dragged her kids shopping, she often felt as though she'd ditched the car in a lot outside the Tower of Babel.

Overhead in the blue sky, white clouds floated on balmy breezes. They drifted toward Big Sur, Mexican beaches, the coast of Costa Rico, places this parking lot had once looked very much like until land developers realized people much preferred cheap electronics to natural landscapes. The seagulls were still behind the curve. They circled shoppers menacingly, looking for food. A Chinese couple clutched pouches of frozen pot-stickers nervously to their hearts. Nearby, an Indian family in turbans and saris engaged in jolly wrangle over the best way to cram a leather couch into the back of a Mercedes SUV. Costco was more fun than Disneyland. Jessie could relate. These people had not spent their formative years in the midst of consumer plenty. Unlike her own sullen offspring.

Jessie swerved her dented Camry into the far end of the lot near a median strip whose stunted trees might provide cover from marauding bird attacks. She'd already washed the car once that week. Not that it helped.

Mark, the fourteen year old, reached for the radio as she rummaged for her purse.

"Oh, no," said Jessie. "You're coming into the store."

"Why?" Mark said. The sneer still needed practice but it was coming along.

"Because we’re a family," Jessie said. "And we do family things."

"Megan has a family game night," said Anna, the twelve year old from the back seat. "They play Monopoly and Scrabble."

"We could have a family game night," said Jessie.

"You need a father for a family game night," said Anna. "And don't even think about buying me clothes here. I won’t wear them."

Christopher, the eight-year old, was too engrossed in his GameBoy to say much of anything. But the music from the pocket console was really annoying.

My children, thought Jessie. Genetic repository of all those barely conscious hopes and dreams. This time – the DNA polymers whisper to themselves – this time we’ll get it right…

"Pop never drags us to CostCo," said Mark. "Why couldn’t you just drop us off at his place early?"

Mike Ventimiglia, the children’s father, didn’t drag the kids to CostCo because he didn’t believe in keeping food in his house, let alone toilet paper or detergent. The alternate weekends on which he assumed loco parentis were one long orgy of fast food take-out and slasher movies.

"You’re making this unnecessarily difficult, Mark," Jessie told her son.

"No, I’m not," said the kid. "Give me a reason – a good reason – and I’ll do it. See? You can’t." His fingers danced on the radio dials.

A dare. Jessie’s eyes fell on the dusty dash. There – under a half-inch stack of unpaid bills that had spilled out from the manilla folder in which Jessie had confined them during one of her sporatic but earnest attempts at organization – lay a disposeable camera. She handed it to Mark. "Don’t you have a project due?"

Mark was a day student at the Jack London Academy, a progressive prep school in Pebble Beach. The boarders were the sons and daughters of corporate executives whose precocious forays into sociopathology had prompted their parents to send them far, far away, but the school needed some kids who could actually read and count past their fingers to bring up its test scores: Mark was there on a partial scholarship. The remaining eight thousand dollars a year in tuition was still another bone of contention between Jessie and the ex-husband. She tried not to let this influence her enthusiasm for the fresh crop of gimmicks the teachers trotted out each year to get their students more involved. This year the ninth grade social studies instructor had come up with the idea of autobiographical photojournalism and Mark had spent the last week prowling, Kodak disposable in hand.

"CostCo," said Jessie. "A cub reporter’s dream. Come on. I win, you lose. Do the honorable thing now."

"I don’t see why you had to park so far away from the entrance," Mark grumbled, climbing out of the car.

It was still early in the morning. The lot on this side was empty except for a black late-model sedan, one of those oddly anonymous rides of the rich and discreet who don't want anyone mistaking a Mercedes hood ornament for a peace symbol.

Mark aimed his camera at it, hit a button. "Why do you always have to drag us here anyway? I could stay home. Baby-sit. You could pay me."

"I don't need a baby-sitter," said Anna.

The last time Jessie had gone out shopping for more than an hour and left Mark in charge, she'd come home to find the house in full party mode. Mark and three of his skate board buddies had turned the living room into a mosh pit, much to the delight of the two teenage girls who lived with their mother in an apartment over the garage. There was broken glass on the floor. The toilet had over-flowed. Anna was sitting in her bedroom sobbing hysterically and Christopher had wandered off to visit a friend whose existence heretofore had been unsuspected. They'd found Christopher seven hours later after canvassing the neighborhood door-to-door. He was sitting in front of a stranger’s PlayStation, playing Grand Theft Auto in Korean. "Graphics have really outstripped other elements in this technology," he greeted his mother.

It wasn't a day Jessie remembered kindly.

"I'm putting the fun back in dysfunctional family," she told Mark now. "Doing my part to ensure employment for future generations of psychiatrists. Move your ass."

She spotted a shopping cart next to the black car, walked briskly towards it.

Behind the steering wheel a man sat smoking furiously, glancing now and then at his watch. He was one of those bullet-headed men with abnormally small ears that are sometimes the result of genetics but more often the result of abnormally high fetal alcohol levels. He wore mirror shades and his window was rolled all the way shut.

The rear door, though, was open a couple of inches. Someone was sitting back there smoking too. Someone wearing red sandals with stiletto heels, four inches high. Jessie could make out polished toenails, a gold ring on the pinky toe.

"Excuse me," Jessie said. She lunged for the cart.

The cart spun out of control and hit the car with a resounding crash.

The guy took off his sunglasses, rolled the window down. His eyes were a light blue, clouded like the eyes of a fish who'd spent a long time evolving on an ocean floor where there was no light.

"Sorry" Jessie told the man gaily. "I don't think anything got scratched."

"Why don't you lay down and let him scratch your belly?" Mark muttered.

The man got out of the car to check out the damage for himself. He was shorter than Jessie but powerfully built with a flash of gold at his ear and a jagged scar across his left cheek. If she ever ran into him on the street late at night, the sane thing would be to cross over to the side with the broken street-lamps and crack-pipe wielding gangbangers. She'd be safer there, Jessie decided.

From the back seat came the sounds of laughter. A female voice doing something to unfamiliar consonants to make them purr.

[Russian "Shut up,"] said the man. He glanced down at his heavy gold watch, tossed his butt on the ground. It lay there smoldering. "You have insurance?" he asked Jessie in a heavy Eastern European accent.

"Why? Because a shopping cart tapped your car?"

"Is expensive car. Maybe you give me a few bucks, I forget about it."

"Yeah, right," said Jessie. "This is America, the land of opportunity. I don't own this shopping cart and for all I know, you don't own that car. You want easy money? Buy a Monopoly set. I think they sell them inside."

Behind her, Anna was saying, "Mom," in a high-pitched voice that stretched the word into seven syllables. Christopher had turned up the relentless ice-cream truck soundtrack on the Pokemon game he much preferred to any interaction with his family. The divorce had been hard on the kids. Hard on Jessie. She had this tendency to over-react. She was trying to work on it.

Jessie shot a smile at the scowling small-eared man and was just about to apologize when the stiletto heels kicked the rear door open a crack wider and a woman peered out. "You tell him, lady. Fuck Dimitri. Let him go shake his own money tree, eh?"

Husky voice – Stolichnaya in a broken shot glass.

The woman was beautiful. Long black hair, pale, high-cheekboned Eurasian face, enormous dark eyes haloed in smudged mascara. A sumptuous, red-lipsticked mouth.

But decidedly underdressed for a Sunday morning shopping expedition.

She wore a black satin bra, lowrise panties, a flimsy black garter belt and black stockings of a fishnet type that Jessie had not encountered since her own senior year at the Immaculate Conception Academy when an attempt to smuggle a similar pair past the vigilant eye of Sister Mary Ignatius had almost gotten her expelled. The bra was the peekaboo kind, showing most of a pair of pale coral areolas. Nipples pushed through the shiny fabric. Stray pubic hairs curled above the panty elastic, lighter than the hairs on her head, and just above them Jessie could make out the blue ink of a tattoo. Except for her breasts which billowed under gravity in a way that made it clear they owed nothing to a surgeon's knife, she was very thin. Bony even.

The woman reached for a bottle of vodka on the seat beside her, leaned forward and lifted it high in a toast to Jessie and the children. "[Russian: Anyone who would bring a child into this fucking world has a lot of guts.']

"I told you – shut up," said Dimitri.

The woman caught Jessie's eye and winked. Reached down lazily to adjust her lingerie. "My girls have life of their own."

Mark was beet-red, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of gray parachute pants that sagged low over plaid boxer shorts.

"You drop your camera. Maybe you like to take a picture of me, eh?"

Dimitri circled the front door a couple of times like a dog looking for a place to pee. He adjusted the side mirror balefully and glanced again at his watch before getting back inside the car.

Mark crouched down to pick up the camera. There were some things a mother in her relentless quest to create that most perfect of Frankensteins, A Normal Human Male, was never meant to see. Jessie turned away from her son back to the woman in the red shoes who was practicing Marilyn Monroe poses in the rear view mirror, primping and pouting, arms outstretched behind her head.

One of her breasts fell out of her bra.

Dimitri caught it in the rear view mirror and twisted around. Backhanded the woman across the face.

Click went Mark's camera.

Blood mixed with saliva, dribbling down the woman's lip. Or maybe the red smear was just lipstick. She didn't stop laughing.

"Nothing to look at here," said Dimitri. "Give me camera."

Jessie cleared her throat. She felt chilled. Somewhere inside the paralysis, she had a cell phone. She began to reach for it.

"I wouldn't," said Dimitri, flexing and unflexing his knuckles, staring at her with his dead blue eyes. On the seat beside him something compact and metallic flashed.

A gun.

Christopher's voice. "Mommy."

At that moment another car roared into the parking space beside the sedan. A dented junker ineptly spray-painted a lurid maroon, lurching forward on over-sized back wheels that gave it the appearance of an automobile in heat. Graffiti across the side advertised Drive It Like You Stole It. The driver was Mexican. From ten feet away Jessie caught the sour reek of alcohol and old vomit. Dimitri got out of the black sedan and walked up to him.

"Is lovely day," said the woman with the red shoes. "American families shopping together! My heart grows big and hot."

She began laughing again so hard her legs splayed open and her head dangled to one side. Like a broken doll with pubic hair.

The tattoo on her belly was a tiny RV motor-home. It looked familiar.

The Mexican handed Dimitri a wad of cash.

Grim-lipped, Jessie grabbed the cart and kept moving. She didn't think the kids had seen inside the car. She hoped the kids hadn't seen inside the car. There was nothing she could do about the slap or the commercial transaction.

A better mother would never have let her kids stumble across a scene like this.

Invisible thumbs, pressing against Jessie’s eyeballs from the inside out, signaled the onset of a major headache. She tried to monitor the kids for signs of distress. Mark was a tall boy, almost six feet, who didn't look remotely like either Jessie or her ex-husband. Dark blue eyes, brown buzz, a moderate to bad case of acne that hadn't improved despite a year of weekly dermatologist visits and a small fortune spent on Neutrogena products which, thank God, they were able to buy at Costco in bulk. His face was down, she couldn't catch its expression. He was kicking a can. She had a funny feeling that he'd rather be kicking her.

Anna was doing that thrusting thing with the tip of her tongue. The habit was a carry-over from the night terrors of her earliest infancy and the expensive orthodontist who'd come with the divorce settlement – and whose ongoing presence in the junior Ventimiglias' life was another thing Mike screamed about in their monthly, court-ordered mediation sessions – kept warning Jessie it would ultimately ruin her bite. But then, Anna had so many bad habits for Jessie to worry about. Recently Anna had discovered clothes. She was decked out this morning in purple plastic platform shoes, a short purple skirt and a neon green crop top. She looked like a shorter, chubbier version of Brittney Spears, with a pot belly instead of implants. In between tongue thrusts, Anna was busy ravaging her cuticles with her teeth. This was good for her bite but led to unsightly fungal infections in her nails.

Only Christopher appeared unfazed. He was already back to the GameBoy. Christopher, in some ways the most observant of her three children but also, strangely, the least judgmental. And definitely the best-looking. The other two were pleasant-looking enough but Christopher, whose eyelashes seemed to grow another half inch every day, whose face had the perfect, preternatural beauty of a Renaissance page boy lit by moon light – he was in a whole other league. He made small pop-pop noises with his lips as he guided Picachu through the electronic universe. Pocket monsters, Russian mobsters – it was all just sensory input to Christopher.

Jessie cast desperately around for something to say that would make the world seem light and frivolous again. "Did you hear that? They were talking Russian."

"Speaking Russian," said Mark through clenched teeth. He looked as though he wished he could be speaking it too. That way, at least, he wouldn't be related to her.

"It's a rather lovely language, don't you think?" asked Jessie. "All those growly back-of-the-throat sounds. Tchaikovsky. Rachmaninoff. Dr. Zhivago."

"Mom?" asked Anna.

Here come the hard questions. "Yes, sweetie?"

"Were that woman's boobs real?"

"Shut up!" said Mark.

"You shut up," said Anna. "I saw you looking."

Mark stopped kicking the can and turned around to confront his mother. "You should have called the cops."

The shopping cart clattered loudly. Jessie looked down. Her hands were shaking. "Sometimes, sweetie, calling the cops makes things worst."

"How do you know? That's just an excuse. Dad would have called the cops."

"Dad?" The headache had lodged bilaterally in the lymph nodes on either side of her neck. "Dad doesn't need to hear about this, Mark."

Christopher, sensing the tension in his mother's voice, chose this moment to look up from his GameBoy. "Mommy, I love you."

Jessie beamed. "I love you too, Chris."

"Will you buy me new game for my PlayStation?"

"Christopher, what did we talk about this morning?" said Jessie. "Mommy doesn't like it when you're always asking for new toys."

Jessie often found herself using the third person in conversation with her kids, as if she weren't their mother at all but some kind of unpaid baby-sitter generously donating her services until such moment as their real mother returned from her extended vacation to Alpha Centauri. None of the parenting magazines she read said anything about the use of the third person. It worried her. Being a single mom was no stroll in the park. She loved her children, of course, and often fantasized about them coming into harm's way so she could fling herself in front of that speeding car, that exploding power plant, that Luger-clutching madman, interpose her own body between death and their infinitely sweeter selves.

It was one thing to fantasize. Another thing entirely to run across Magnum force in the parking lot at Costco.

The worst thing about being a parent was the certain knowledge that at some point in their lives, your children would feel pain and that pain would separate them from you. And there wasn't a fucking thing you could do about it.

And then, you started feeling it from all directions. Feeling it when you didn't want to feel it. Last night at La Clínica de la Misericordia in Salinas where she worked as a nurse practitioner, she'd done intake on pair of four and a month old babies. Perky little things, girls, with bright simian eyes and silent monkey grips. Twins. They'd each weighed six pounds which was slightly less than they'd weighed when they'd been born, and when the blood work-up failed to turn up anything metabolic, she rang the doc on call.

"Starving your children is a form of child abuse, Jessie," Jack Gruber reminded her gently.

"I know, I know, but I don't think she meant to starve them," Jessie said.

The doctor sighed. She could hear a pencil tapping impatiently. "If you don't call Child Protective Services, I will."

So she made the call. And broke the news to the mother.

The mother was Mexican. Large, flat, Mayan features, broad pear-shaped body, tired eyes. The lusterless skin of someone surviving on a diet of fats and saturated carbohydrates.

"[Spanish: The doctor thinks it would be best if we take care of the children for a little while]," Jessie told her.

The woman was too exhausted to cry. Tears leaked passively from her eyes.

Jessie felt it keenly then, the awful injustice that was being done. The mother hadn't had any intention of hurting her babies. But they were so quiet and the other children were so loud. And she had so little money. Two other little girls and a boyfriend a lot like that joker in the maroon car who rifled through the envelope in which she kept her monthly AFDC pay-out. Looking at the Mexican woman, Jessie had a moment of pure telepathy brought to her courtesy of the universal sisterhood of breeders. She saw the woman in the shabby motel room where they all crammed together and called it living. One of those dumps way the hell out on North Main, a single light bulb on a frayed cord, a dirty pot on a hot plate with yesterday's refried beans. The woman was counting out her money. Three twenty-dollar bills. She was happy when the twenty-dollar bills had knife-sharp creases. Crisp bills were better money somehow than old, worn-out, wrinkled bills –

And see, right there – that was the problem. Jessie knew the woman was on AFDC but she didn't have a clue about anything else. For all she knew the woman operated a thriving methamphetamine cottage industry out of her garage, drove a Cadillac, lived in luxury in one of the pre-fab houses that had sprouted up like mushrooms after the storm on tracts that had only a year ago been lettuce fields. Jessie's over-active imagination was feeding her mixed messages and she was fed up. Tired of the people who extorted her compassion. Exhausted by all the detail work that went into paying attention. She had her own problems. She didn't want to channel other people's problems.

The half-naked woman in the red shoes. A hooker. Jessie had no doubt she'd stumbled across a pre-arranged assignation though why it had been set up for the parking lot in front of Costco, Jessie couldn't imagine. Maybe the john wanted to duck in afterwards to stock up on bulk KY Jelly. Was customer service the latest marketing ploy among pimps? Like pizza places: we deliver…

There'd been something about the woman in the red shoes. She'd been charismatic in that way that only very beautiful, very damaged, very selfish people got to be. Jessie had once entertained her own modest aspirations along those lines – hanging out in rock 'n' roll bars, throwing back shots of Jack Daniels, smoking the occasional reefer in the VIP room: an angel who didn't fear to tread. She'd looked like a young Ingrid Bergman then, a real heart-stopper – guileless blue eyes, wide strong face with high cheekbones, sun-streaked bronze hair she could sit on. A big-boned , buxom girl with long tan legs and a tiny waist.

She was still approximately the same weight and proportions – religious about setting the alarm for five AM every morning so she could go for her run before the children needed to be awakened, groomed and served their breakfast. But the face that greeted her in the bathroom mirror as she dutifully brushed and flossed her teeth reminded her of some Kosovo refugee stuck at the very back of the breadline. There were lines on her forehead and around her mouth, dark circles under her eyes. Though she was only thirty-eight, gray hairs had begun to sprout with alarming regularity in the fair hair she now wore in a short, utilitarian bob. She liked fashion in the abstract, frequently parked herself in the longest line at the supermarket so she could thumb through Vogue while waiting to pay for her gallon of low fat milk. But when she wasn't at the clinic, she always wore the same thing – jeans, running shoes, one of Mark's cast-off tee-shirts.

"Your crowd noise suit," Mike had called it once. "You wear it because that way you can be sure no guy will ever look at you and want to have sex."

Same fight she heard about the Other Woman for the first time.

Looking anonymous had certain advantages, of course. No one would ever be able to pick her out of a police line-up. But sometimes she thought she wanted nothing so much in this world as to have someone see her and realize she was still the person she'd been at twenty, the exact same configuration of mind and affinities, only packaged differently, packaged wrongly.

The real reason she loaded up the kids in the car over their oh-so-vocal protests, Jessie knew, was because she was afraid if she got in the car alone, she'd keep on driving. Big Sur, Mexican beaches, the coast of Costa Rico. Being a good mother did not come naturally, and that was the main reason why Jessie took it so seriously.