Fucking Goddamn Story

Sometimes my mom drives me to work, and when she does, she takes the freeway. This is on days when she’ll need the car while I’m working, and on those days I get to work faster because I will only drive on surface streets, since I’m afraid of rush hour traffic. So it works out for both of us. On the mornings when my mom drives, I get to sleep in for maybe an hour, which is nice because it seems like I’m tired all the time now. My mom will laugh and chalk it up to some vague illness, seasonal affective disorder or sleep apnea or narcolepsy. I nod in agreement even though she’s just kidding, we both know I’m not sick. Sometimes I’m not nodding my head to agree, though; sometimes my head falling forward is what wakes me up. I go to bed earlier and earlier and it doesn’t seem to help. Nothing’s wrong with me. I’m just growing up. And I swallow yawns all day and rub the shiny mauve patches under my eyes, and my favorite daydream when I’m at work or school or in line at the supermarket is finding a bed right there in the middle of everything and just curling up like a cat. My mom says I need to get over myself. She says it in good humor, but she means it. “You’re not a teenager anymore,” she says. She says, “Welcome to real life. Get used to it.” “You can’t go running around all night and expect to get up in the morning,” she says. I just nod and tuck another yawn under my tongue. She’s wrong on that last point. I don’t expect to go running around like a “wild young thing” anymore. I couldn’t even if I wanted to. My friends have flaked off like old paint to new schools and faraway internships and better jobs with two-hour commutes. There isn’t anyone left to sit up and shoot the bull with until we get hungry at odd hours. Taco Bell closes at ten in most locations. The drive-thru’s open til midnight, though. Jack in the Box is open til midnight. The drive-thru’s open til three. Carl’s Jr. closes at two, but the drive-thru’s always open. McDonald’s and Walgreens and Food Mart and gas stations and Super Wal-Marts are open 24 hours. I learned all of this during senior year of high school. This information was our bread and butter at the time. Now I know this: Regular Wal-Marts open at six. Fred Meyer’s and Ralph’s and most other grocery stores open at eight. All-around stores like Target and K-Mart open around ten. Specialty shops and local businesses open whenever they want to, but florists and dry cleaners as a rule open before insurance and medical billing offices. Most department stores don’t open til eleven, but malls unlock the main doors at seven so people can walk around and wait and sometimes get a cup of coffee from one of the stores in the empty food court. I used to know the buses stop running at eleven at night. Now I’m equally familiar with the fact that they start running again at five in the morning. When my mom drives me to work, I get to sleep in til almost seven. Those are the best hours of my week, probably. They’re the only hours ever, no matter how much sleep I try to get, that actually make me feel better. Those slow gutter hours of the morning are the only hours in which I have dreams. I work in a toy store, the one with the anthropomorphic giraffe. I am usually a morning-to-afternoon cashier, although there are exceptions for the Holiday Season, and I always get to work the full shift on Black Friday, or at least I have for the past two Black Fridays. I assume I will continue to do so. My Holiday Season hours led to the events of last Christmas, which I’ve been told about many times. I should remember, I was there, but I don’t. My aunts and uncles celebrated Christmas two days late to accommodate my schedule. I dozed during dinner. I fell asleep while everyone opened presents. I cannot confirm this, but I’m pretty sure I was unconscious when they took the tree down that night, because one minute I remember staring at the twinkly lights reflecting off the tinsel, and the next minute that corner had a coat rack in it again.

It had been my mom’s idea to change Christmas so that I could come. When I protested, she said I was the only young person in the family, I was the reason most of the aunts and uncles came, I was the light in the eyes of all our relatives. I was always the life of the party. After Christmas break was over, I signed up for an economics course at the community college. It is an evening course. I take notes, lots of notes, not because I’m ever going to review them but because I immediately forget everything I hear. The teacher asks me a question and I go turning through the past ten pages of my notebook and patiently hunt down the simple answer. Or sometimes I’m too tired. Then I keep my eyes closed behind my sunglasses and say, “I don’t know.” “But we were just covering this,” he says. I say, “I’m sorry. I don’t know.” My mom is very supportive of my job and my part-time education and my plans to save up for an apartment. It is more than partly due to her own layoff. She used to work as a surveyor, the person in an orange vest standing in the middle of the road, holding a stake or measuring apparatus or whatever. Sometimes when she drives me to work, and we take the freeway, she points out places where she’s stood, back when she helped to build the freeway. They’re always very improbable places. She points to the midpoint of an overhead arch and says, “I stood there.” She points to the tons-heavy concrete median in between the speeding vehicles and says, “I laid the rebar in that piece before it was poured.” She points out a pedestrian catwalk and says, “I chalked off intervals on that when it was a six-inch-wide steel bar.” I say nothing and nod and keep my sunglasses on all the time so people aren’t surprised when I walk around with my eyes closed. My mom got her job with the Highway Department in 1976, when she was nineteen. She did not have a lot of school but it was considered more than enough. She was hired as part of an effort by the Highway Department to hire minorities, mainly women and American Indians. Women were considered minorities even though most humans are female. It was a big enough deal when she was hired to what was thought of as a man’s job that she was mentioned in the paper for being such a pioneer. She tells me, “They would much rather hire me than an Indian.” She had this same job, which was steady and uncomplicated, until one year and three months ago, when the Highway Department made a number of cuts because of a lack of funding. She was retired early with benefits, much better than many people got, as a nod to the fact that she had been a pioneer. When my mother talks about working, she talks about the early years, how coarse and hard the people were. It is clear when she speaks about it that she considers this the best time of her life. I can only assume that it was on the job out in the middle of nowhere that she met my father. There is a picture on our fridge, covered with fuzzy dust that sticks to the kitchen stains. It shows my mother when she was maybe twenty-two or -three, sitting at a table in a bar somewhere. She looks petite and benevolent. She has just set down a bottle of beer and turned towards the person taking the picture, her eyes dilated and a fuzzy, easy smile on her face. Her hair is long and flat and woody auburn. My mom has aged since then, obviously. Her nose, which was long and narrow, is now a little too bony to be feminine. And for years her hair was like straw from standing outside in the wind all day. She kept it short but it was still tangled all the time. But now she’s growing it back out, and using good conditioner that smells of cucumber and makes it smooth. Her hair is still auburn, and now the texture is so solid that it looks like fine-grained wood. I can imagine my mother, who was truly beautiful when she was high and smiling like in the picture on our fridge, standing in the levelled-off field that will one day be the freeway. I imagine her holding a stringline while someone far off

measures the angle of incline on the slope. I imagine her sharing a joint with the man who will eventually be my father. And I can only imagine that when this pretty young woman stares off into the middle distance, she is imagining a cozy bed to curl up in. I have never smoked even a regular cigarette. For one thing, it grosses me out, and for another I was on the track team in high school and feared for my lung capacity. But from my mother’s stories I can imagine what it’s like being wasted on the job. And now I’m getting a better and better idea of it everyday. One day I took my lunch break in the furniture store next to my work. I guess I sat down on one of the display beds in the back of the store. I sort of remember holding my sandwich in its saran wrap and not opening it. The next thing I remember is a sales girl peering into my face. She was asking me if I’m alright. I’d fallen asleep sitting up with my eyes wide open. She’d thought I’d had an aneurysm or something. She held the store phone in her hand, ready to call 911. My job isn’t all that bad. The kids are usually happy to be there, at least, and there aren’t as many brats as you’d expect. The only annoying part is the parents, sometimes. Their kids will ask them for something and they say, “Put it back, this lady isn’t going to let you have that,” and then they smile conspiratorially at me over their kid’s head. And I look down at the kid who’s all expectant and smile in a “tough break, man” kind of way, but I don’t say anything because it’s not my job to tell kids what to do. When I complain about my job, which isn’t often, my mom will remind me I should be thankful to even have a job. And I am. I’m very lucky. Like I said, my mom supports me. She has very little to do other than help me out, and sometimes she’ll even pack my lunch for me. She is quite creative as a cook, and she’s learning more every day because while I’m gone, she often spends a few hours watching the Food Network. She loves the chefs on there. She loves to summarize the shows for me. I don’t mind; I’m not really listening but I love hearing how happy her voice is. From time to time she still scolds me for things, like when I drink a soda with my late dinner and she reminds me it’ll keep me up. I just smile at her, and I can feel my teeth clicking a little because the caffeine keys up my nerves, so I clench my jaw tight. Every morning she brews coffee and I pour it into a tall silver thermos. Whether she drives me or I drive myself, I bring that thermos along and sip slowly from the hole in the black rubber lid. Coffee just tastes like hot bitter water to me, but I need it. So I’ll take a sip and then another and listen to my mom as she tells me stories, and when she points things out I’ll look at them and then nod. And she says things like, “Lighten up, you’re only young once,” and I know she means it by the way she glances at me and laughs. She laughs more every day.