“Mars Invades.”
We both look up.
II
It is a moment near the end of things, a point at which, seated in a lawn chair amid the vast emptiness of a Kmart parking lot, Jane is forced to reflect. Her husband is giving driving lessons to her daughter, who loops circles around Jane in the old Caprice they are now reduced to driving. The circles are big and slow, impending as Jane’s thoughts, which come to focus on the notion that Ruthie’s sixteen, and Bill should have taught her this a year ago.
The Caprice stops, backs up, parallel parks between a pair of worn yellow lines somehow chosen from the thousands in front of the closed-down discounter. It’s just like Bill, she thinks, to worry about lines when there’s not another car for miles. Jane lifts her hand and the sun disappears. In this brief shade she notices the moon, too, is up there.
Check your mirrors, she can hear Bill say, even from here, as he trains her daughter to always, always be on the lookout. But Jane knows Ruthie’s come to be on intimate terms with her blind spot. It’s one of the few things they share these days.
Behind her their small rental store is empty. These days, the final ones, he has a VCR running all day in the shop. Over her shoulder she can hear the melancholic coo of Jailhouse Rock—Bill’s choice today — and it feels like it is their whole history looming behind them: the mom-and-pop store, those liberal-arts dreams, their own let’s put on a barn dance notion of being their own bosses, here, in a strip mall. She has the cordless phone with her, but it doesn’t ring, has not in we don’t talk about how long, and Jane reclines some in the heat, points her feet toward the horizon.
Look out, Bill yells, you just hit a Volvo, and slaps the dash for effect, leaving Ruthie momentarily breathless: she swivels her head to see the chrome and glass she must have missed, but there is only forty acres of empty parking.
The sun swoops low, Ruthie pedals off to junior-varsity swim practice, and no, Jane says, not The Treasure of Sierra Madre again. On the counter before them are two dozen bulletproof vests frayed to the point that they wouldn’t stop slingshots and sixty or seventy videos Bill got cheap when the Video-Utopia store closed three stores down. And here’s where we are, Jane thinks, between a Chapter 11 pizza joint and a store that has made the switch from water to spirits. This is the place we are at, around the corner from the drive-in theater where she and Bill spent their youth, a place she won’t even look at because these days, even worse than hope, nostalgia is her enemy.
Bill shrugs his shoulders, lights a menthol, and pops in Viva Las Vegas, as if Elvis can soothe her anymore, as if Elvis wasn’t 187,000 miles away.
Jane begins to toy with the register, hitting no sale, no sale, a sound she knows can wound him. But Bill’s busy doing “R&D,” as he calls it. First he thought bulletproof teen wear would save the business, and he made Ruthie wear a “training” vest to school for two years to drum up business. Now she won’t take the vest off for her life.
His ongoing obsession is a bulletproof baby carrier, something he’s reworked twenty times, and if there’s anything that offends Jane more than the grandeur of his optimism, it’s the notion of wanting to make infants bulletproof, of fusing the two ideas into the same breath. The whole idea is fatally flawed, she knows as she teases the few remaining twenties in the register. It’s not what’s out there you need to look out for, but what’s closer, what’s making your cereal crackle, what’s tinkering in the garage, or crashing all around like unseen cars.
Bill tugs the straps of his Kevlar carrier, trying to simulate every force that could come between a mother and child. Then he begins stuffing the carrier with videotapes — Clint Eastwood, Annette Funicello, Benji — until, he seems to decide, the carrier takes on the mass and weight of a small person, and he is off on tonight’s R&D, running laps around the abandoned drive-in to gauge the carrier’s give and take, its ability to cradle a baby at full speed.
Now that he is gone, Jane unfastens the chest-crushing vest, and it smolders off her with all that body heat. She pinches the sticky shirt from her side, runs her hand underneath, over creases in the skin she knows are red. She wakes up some nights, thinking the oven has been left on. She can feel the coils glowing downstairs, but she won’t go check, she won’t give it that. Now she pulls the twenties, tens, and fives from the till, for safety’s sake, she thinks, so she can feel the lightweight cash in her pocket.
Wandering, she strolls along the grit-worn sidewalk, stares at stars through holes in the Kmart awning. This way it all looks black up there, the occasional star the rarity. There are bullet holes in the masonry between her and the old Godfather’s, and she stops to twist her pinkie in the lead-traced pocks. Mr. Ortiz, the Filipino who owns the liquor store, has started keeping a gun in his register, she’s sure. She hasn’t seen it, but there’s a weight in the cash drawer that nearly pulls the register off the counter when he makes a sale.
There was a day when she was scared of guns, when the vest store seemed like the right idea, a public service even. Jesus, they had really said that to each other. Though she has never touched a gun, she’s confident now she could heft one pretty handily, squeeze off a few rounds, rest it warm against her cheek and smell the breech.
Where the masonry meets glass, she thinks she gets a glimpse of him reflected out there, an aberration in the dark lot. Behind her, she’s sure it’s his arms glinting, racing nearly invisible in a sheen of black Kevlar. But she does not turn to be sure.
At the pizza joint, she sees through the window her daughter stretched across the empty bartop, drafting two beers into Styrofoam cups. Ruthie’s hair is still wet from JV swim, and she wears loose-hanging jeans over her red Speedo. Now she’s got her trauma plate pulled out and is using it as a lipstick mirror, drinking between applications. This is something Jane has never before seen, Ruthie so loose with her trauma plate, and this makes Jane stop outside and stare.
There is a boy, one of those big Ortiz kids it looks like, and he and Ruthie are drinking hard and fast together. Jane looks at them for some time through the soap paint on the window, an interstellar pizza scene. Ruthie laughs, they drink, something is said to her, and she punches him hard. He thumps her back, there, in the chest, and then she’s holding him again, cupping his chin in the open throat of her palms, the Vulcan oven glowing behind them. She holds him, they dance three slow steps, he spins her. They drink, they laugh, they box each other’s ears, they drink again, laughing till fine mists of beer shoot pink from their mouths in the neon light.
This is a careless spirit Jane has forgotten. As she sees them whisper, she remembers a time before Bill, and tries to read her daughter’s lips. Ruthie rubs her forehead against the jut of this boy’s cheekbone, whispering, and Jane almost thinks she can make it out—let’s make a break for Texas, her daughter might be saying, and I want my Monte Carlo back, Jane thinks. She imagines a car she will never see again, enters it under maroon T-tops, feels the rocking slosh of dual fuel tanks, smells the leather, hears the spark plugs crackle to life, and swivels in custom seats to see it all disappear behind her.
Later, after she has dropped Ruthie off at home, Jane steers the Caprice the long way back to the shop, where she will wait out the last hour with Bill before closing. He will want to make love tonight, she knows — Westerns always do that to him, especially The Treasure of Sierra Madre—and that’s okay with her. But there’s one stop she needs to make.