“You were easier on him,” Bren said.
“He got his homework done, respected his curfews …”
“You let him stay out late!”
“Honey, you’re a girl.”
“It’s not fair!”
“Life is more complicated for — ”
“Bullshit!”
“Don’t talk to me that way! Don’t you dare!”
Whatever. Mom had never trusted her. Why? Because she wouldn’t stay home scraping dishes or baking perky little muffins and shit? “If it’s so great being a happy homemaker, why do you look like crap all the time?” Bren screamed at her one night. Dad poked his head into the kitchen. “Hey, big-mouths. I’m trying to watch the wrestling match. Keep it down, will you? Or maybe there’s more action in here.” Then they both got pissed at him.
And the saintly brother? Where was he? Off at college, hiding in musty movie houses. Hell. Bren knew the score. He’d hated it here. Midland was an oily, gaseous pit, no matter how sleek they made the buildings. Big brother had rebelled by withdrawing, keeping quiet, never calling attention to himself so no one would bother him. That’s how he always got ahead, plotting his moves under the radar. At the first chance he split, never to return. Oh, he’d visit, sure, but he was always aloof. Tucked inside himself. Long gone. There’s your loving son, Mom. He loathes the life you gave him, the life you lead.
Bren felt liberated only when dancing with her friends, singing along with Frankenfurter. One night, as the final credits rolled, she scanned the theater. Her girlfriends gossiped in the aisles; boys in leather coats hung at the back, leering, hoping to get lucky. She didn’t know what it was tonight, why she saw things clearly for a change. Maybe she wasn’t as stoned as usual — she’d been carried away by the dancing. Whatever it was, she saw the girls working hard to make something happen — fun, laughter, conversation. And the boys … the boys just slouched, the way Dad did at home, the way her brother used to do. They were drunk or fucked up, though that wasn’t the problem. They didn’t know what to do, or if they did, they didn’t have the balls to do it. It was who they were, the way they’d been raised, as if, relentless, the West Texas sun had paralyzed them, stunned them into waiting, staring, wandering out of one lousy situation into another. Now she pictured Mom in the kitchen, cooking for Dad, and she began to cry. Mascara stung her eyes. “Bren, what is it?” her friends asked. “What’s the matter?” “My mother,” she sobbed. “She thinks I hate her, but I don’t, I don’t. Do you understand? I don’t hate her at all!”
Now, weirdly enough, in La Loca Vida, it was Mom she thought of again as she and Earlene watched black men lean across pool tables, wriggling their butts, or slip their hands up ladies’ skirts, not in the lewd way of high school kids, but naturally, tenderly, no big deal. If Mom had had a chance to do this scene, who might she have been? Would she have married Dad?
Earlene started dancing on a chair. A walnut-colored man walked up to Bren, bouncing a yellow cue stick and gripping a can of Mad Dog. “Name’s Bobby,” he said. “How you doing, sugar?”
“So the woman we met in the mall,” I said. We bumped down a narrow dirt lane. “Who’s she?”
“Shirley.” Bren drove us past an electrical switching station. Wires hummed above us, a raspy, sore-throat sound.
“She was Bobby’s old girlfriend?”
“Just a pal. After I met Bobby that night, she was great, including me in parties, get-togethers. It was like … I don’t know, I’d been unfrozen or something. I was able to stretch, kick, move around inside a brand new world.”
“You and Bobby …”
“I don’t know how to put this … I mean, Jesus, you’re my brother, I can’t talk about … all I can say is, Bobby was more patient with me in bed than any man I’ve ever been with. There was something … it’s like he wasn’t there for himself. It was all about me, what I needed, what I wanted.”
How does Chip feel about this? I wondered. Does he know?
Earlene met a roughneck and moved to Oklahoma. Bren was on her own, then, across the tracks. She and Bobby dated for six months. “Shirley tried to tell me he was seeing other girls, but I. I couldn’t hear it.” It wasn’t just his cheating that screwed things up. “One Saturday night I went into insulin shock. I hadn’t been eating all day — I’d been waiting for Bobby to call, and didn’t know where he was. I got myself to the emergency room. They checked me into the hospital. Mom and Dad came and later went to my apartment to gather clothes, makeup and stuff. I’d forgotten I’d left a bunch of Polaroids on my coffee table — pictures of me and Bobby in bed. We’d been goofing around one day, holding the camera above our heads and taking silly shots of ourselves, you know? Well, when Dad saw them he nearly had a stroke. He never said a word to me about any of this. I learned it all from Mom. You know how he is, always joking. But he was so upset, he agreed to see a shrink for a while. Took sedatives to sleep at night.”
She turned onto another dirt road, past a pony-shaped oil pump with a Christmas wreath on its neck.
“Long story short, this gave Bobby the excuse he needed,” Bren said. “Instead of being straight about not wanting to settle down with me, he could point to Dad and tell me, ‘Your old man’s a bigot. No way I can be part of your family.’ And that was it. About three months later, I answered Chip’s ad in the paper.”
On the radio, turned low, Willie Nelson cried in the rain. Whatever I say, I thought, she’ll take it wrong. If I say nothing, she’ll figure I’m judging her. “I’m sorry, Bren,” I murmured.
“My life in this part of town … the ‘racial and class divide’…” She laughed. “Didn’t turn out so well.”
So she’d scurried back to Mom. Too hard, too hard. Everything I felt about her was much too hard. I stared out the window at tiny box homes — a far cry from the Bush abode or the house Bren and I knew as kids.
“Scene of the crime,” Bren said, braking. “Where Bobby first knocked boots with me.” She pointed to a square wooden building bathed in red lights. Painted on the wall above the door, LA LOCA VIDA — CLOSED SUNDAYS. She pulled the car over next to a vacant lot throbbing with cicadas, and we sat looking at the bar. “It was only six months,” she said. “But it’s like those songs you hear. He was the one. I knew it.”
“Was it just the sex?” I asked. Our new openness.
“Not just. But it didn’t hurt. What about you? Ever felt that way?”
“You know me.” I laughed. “I drive all my girlfriends away. Too judgmental. Too damn competitive.”
This got no rise from her. But it flipped my mood around. I’d never said such a thing, and I was dismayed at how true it was. Behind the bar, light bulbs lined the scaffolding of a sewage treatment plant. The bulbs glared back at the sun. It was low in the sky. Bren, looking paler than usual, checked her watch. “What the hell,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what the hell. We’ve got time.”
“For what?”
“You said you wanted to see my part of town. Here we are. I never thought I’d be back.”
“But — ”
She had already opened her door, moving faster than I’d seen her since her son was born. “Bren!” She was on the doorstep. I wished I could freeze her with a glance, but she was beyond me now.
Inside, La Loca Vida was murky and blue. Stale-smelling. A television on a shelf above a cigarette machine played a Bruce Lee video. Shirley’s bright hair lit the wall. She grinned at Bren as though she had expected her to walk in the door. “Well well,” she said. “Coming home to roost?”