“Oh, she loves being Grandma.”
“Sure. If I didn’t bring him over, she’d throw a fit. But now she gets the satisfaction of seeing him and thinking of me, ‘I knew you were going to screw things up. Didn’t I tell you? Why couldn’t you have been more like your brother?’”
“Bren — ”
“Anyway. I miss my old life sometimes.”
I didn’t know what to say. We settled the bill and walked back to the car. Bren pulled her blood sugar kit from her purse, pricked a finger with a needle, and tested the blood. “Little high. You’re probably right. I should have watched what I ordered. You know, there’s sugar in French fries. They put sugar in everything. It’s killing us.”
The parking lot was a little less jammed than before. Bren squeezed into the traffic stream. “Have you seen W.’s childhood home?” she said. “It’s near where we used to live.”
“Probably. I don’t remember it.”
“Chip’s on the board for restoring it — they want to turn it into a presidential center or something, with papers and computers and things. A historic plaque. You want to see it?”
“No, that’s okay.”
“I’ll swing you by.”
“Mom’s waiting.”
“It’ll only take a minute.”
Stalling so she won’t have to deal with her son. No no, I’m being too hard on her, I thought. We’re finally spending a pleasant day together, talking openly for the first time in years. I’m happy to prolong the afternoon and she is too.
She drove us into the old neighborhoods south of Midland High. When I was six or seven, Dad had bought us a house here. I used to stand in the front yard in the evenings, squishing my toes into just-watered grass, watching fireflies, searching for the first stars or tracing meteors, listening, from a few blocks away, as the high school band practiced: silly pop tunes set to ragged marches. The Jacksons, next door, owned a trampoline. Next to them, the Elams kept a billiard table in their basement. They’d converted the small space into a family room. If it rained and the trampoline was off limits, Bren and I would challenge the Elam kids to eight-ball, and we got pretty good at it.
The Wilco, back then the only tall building in town, rose high above flat desert streets. Dust-colored, it cut a rectangle out of the sky. KCRS’s broadcasting towers gleamed in the west. Around our neighborhood, new car lots opened with spotlights and helium balloons to celebrate their fall and winter sales. Stores on every corner sold golf clubs, tennis rackets, riding boots. Oil production had made Midland one of the richest towns in America, but all the money in the country couldn’t hide its ugliness. I liked escaping to my neighbors’ windowless basement, hunching over a cue stick.
On Ohio Street, a nondescript, tree-shaded avenue, a sign in front of a modest one-story house proclaimed, CHILDHOOD HOME OF GEORGE W. BUSH, FORTY-THIRD PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. Like our father, George Sr. had come to Midland in the early fifties to drill for oil and gas — though our dad had worked for men like Bush. W. was a few years older than Bren and I, but for a while he’d gone to the same public schools we did.
She parked across the street from the house. “Doesn’t look like much,” I said. A white, rectangular chimney, small windows.
“In the old days, I guess it was quite the place. Chip tells me the Bushes bought it for about nine thousand dollars in ’51. It’s going to take over seven mill to restore it and turn it into — ”
“Disneyland.”
“When W. was campaigning, he’d tell the press there were no racial or class divides in Midland when he was a kid. ‘Racial or class divides.’ I laughed my ass off. Oil was his bathwater. Privilege his soap. What the hell did he know about race and class?”
“I want to see it, Bren.”
Others slowed their cars to view the house. “You’re seeing it,” she said.
“I mean your part of town,” I said. “The places you hung out.”
On the radio, a three-chord country waltz. Love gone terribly wrong.
“My secret life?” she said.
“Will you show me?”
She sat still. Then she put the car in drive and took us south, past tumbleweed lots, empty, burned bodegas, bailbondsmen, tattered billboards — KRBC, YOUR COUNTRY CONNECTION — rows of Arco oil tanks. They looked like a fleet of flying saucers. Across the interstate and the railroad tracks, a drive-in movie screen leaned toward scrubby weeds. “When’s the last time you saw Rocky Horror?” I ventured.
“God knows. Terminator II was pretty cool. You catch that one? Chip really liked it.”
“Missed it. My favorite film this year was the David Hockney one. About the master painters, their use of camera lucidas and optics.”
“Hm.”
We were quiet after that. We crossed the tracks onto Cotton Flat Road, past a Popeyes chicken. It was draped with a sagging line of Christmas lights, red and white, only half of which worked.
1997. She’d quit the Blue Star Inn, Exxon, the Stall Brothers A-Plus Auto Parts, Lodle Oil and Gas. At the Stall Brothers, she’d met Earlene, the only good thing ever to come from a job for her. Earlene was short and squatty, loud and fun. Her parents, from Oaxaca, had crossed the Rio Grande one night when Earlene was a baby. “Screw money,” she told Bren. “There’s always another shit job. Don’t sweat it. Let’s have a ball!”
And they did, night after night, crossing the tracks to the places Earlene knew: La Loca Vida, Jimmy’s, the Dog House Pub. Beer, weed. Darts and pool. Bren couldn’t keep up with her friend. She’d drag home at dawn, barely conscious. Had she wrecked her damn chromosomes, dropping all that acid in college?
But then, no one could keep up with Earlene. The boys kidded her — she could drain Jimmy’s fish tank, a twenty-gallon monster, in less than two minutes. “You fill that fucker with Coors, I’ll suck it in one!” The bartender should have taken the bet. The mollies had long since died.
When we were kids, Bren had never mixed with Chicanos or blacks. At Midland High, plenty of kids were bused from Cotton Flat Road, but they kept to themselves, the Mexicans in one niche of the sour cafeteria, blacks in another, rags on their heads, all badass and cool.
At supper one night, Bren’s sophomore year, Dad told her, “I guess I’m a racist. I think your education is being ruined by all this busing.” It was one of the few times he dropped his happy mask. “The school’s lowering its standards to accommodate these kids, and the smart ones like you will suffer.”
“I’m not smarter than they are, Daddy.”
“Sure you are.”
“I’m not! The schools they come from, over in that part of town, you know … they aren’t as up-to-date as Sam Houston or San Jacinto. They still don’t have money for soccer balls or overhead projectors and stuff — ”
“Doesn’t matter. The blacks can’t keep up with you, Brenda, and you shouldn’t be forced to share with them.”
Hopeless. He was racist, she thought. But she didn’t feel easy with colored kids, either. They were sneering, vulgar, always grabbing their crotches whenever a white chick walked by. The foods they brought from home — peppery chicken, whipped eggs — were greasy and rank, like something you’d find in the alley behind Bi-Mart. Bren kept her distance, but she imagined Mom and Dad’s reaction if she brought home a black boy. Wouldn’t that chap their rears? They were always on her for staying out late, doing the Time-Warp with her pals. Pathetic. Dad feared confrontations and never would scold her. Instead, he’d make bad jokes — “Your skirts get any shorter, I’ll have to sell my stock in the cotton industry”—trying to shame her. With Mom, it was always, “Your brother …”