Fifty-Seven: White Mystery
Fifty-Seven: White Mystery
Winter brought Tulsa five snowstorms that year- the most I’d ever seen in my lifetime. Gabrielle and I named each one. There was “Midwestener’sDon’tKnowHowToDriveInSnow” in the middle of January- the night of my baby sister’s birthday party- and “EvenMy4WheelDriveGivesUp” a week after Valentines Day.
We didn’t celebrate Valentines Day ourselves. Take a guess why. Valentines Day, according to my girlfriend, is not only commercialized and consumer driven, but reinstates outdated gender roles. Apparently bringing your girlfriend flowers and taking her out to an upscale restaurant is more or less equivalent to beating her and, cold beer in hand, demanding she heat up your pot roast.
We went out for tapas that night, which she treated me to, of course, and then went back to her apartment to watch The Omen- a movie about a possessed child. While I generally enjoy movies about possessed children, in a less than healthy way, I couldn’t get the idea that it was Valentines Day out of my head and we should be doing other more exciting, sensual things, so I bitched my way through the whole movie. We of course did not have sex simply because it was Valentines Day. Sometimes I wonder why I’m in love with someone that is such a ruthless bitch sometimes. I say that in the nicest way.
Sometime around my birthday we went to visit her mother for lunch. It had been almost a year since I’d seen the bitch and to that day I could not seem to like the woman- not even for the improvements she’d made. She was still living in that old house, still sleeping with a worthless bastard, although he wasn’t there when we stopped by. She served us hamburger helper without the hamburger and although I should have appreciated that it was nice of her to make lunch for us, and it was nice of her to take Gabrielle’s food preferences into account, I couldn’t. I sat at the fold out card table in their kitchen eating the mushy pasta trying to keep myself from asking her all the things I’d wanted to know. Why had she fucked up so badly when Gabrielle was a child? How could she let men control her happiness like she did? What kind of person lets their life get worse than fucking lifetime movie.
When we finally left, I left with an understanding that I hadn’t come to before. I left for the first time really understanding why Gabrielle was such a crazy feminist nazi. It was because her mother was not.
Amy Carter met Gabrielle’s real father while she was waitressing at the hotel of a Red Roof Inn in 1983- the year I was born. They fucked on and off for a few months when he wasn’t sleeping with his wife until one day he said he was done. His wife had found out he was having an affair and she’d given him an ultimatum- stop fucking around or get out. He didn’t have more than a few dollars to his name and no desire to get out, so he told Amy goodbye and wished her well. A month later she was pregnant and according to Amy, it was his child. We’ll never know if Gabrielle was his, or some other sucker that walked in and ordered a stack of pancakes and one loose waitress one morning, but the consensus between Gabrielle and I is that we really don’t care. Amy got pregnant to get him back, and when it didn’t work, she spent the rest of her life trying to make up for it with any man that gave her the time of day.
I’d always known this, but sitting there in that oak paneled room, choking down the flavorless pasta, I really processed it. All of the feminist quirks Gabrielle had, all of the stupid beliefs about Valentines Day and pulling out chairs, finally were completely fine in that moment. I’d never completely minded. I’d always appreciated those quirks as part of Gabrielle, but as I appreciated them, I generally rolled my eyes inwardly as well. Sometimes I had fantasies of her cooking me dinner in high heels and sometimes I had to repress the desire to provoke her with questions about if she would be a stay at home mom when she had kids one day or if she thought it was fair for a woman to abort a baby who was defenseless. Sometimes her feminism irritated me so badly that I wanted to provoke a screaming political fight between the two of us. But that day, somehow I just let go. I closed my eyes, took a moment to understand it all, and I let go any dark thoughts I had about it and for the first time really accepted- that’s just how she is.
Gabrielle was in a strangely sentimental mood that day as we were heading back towards her apartment. She was pointing out trees on her street that she used to climb as a kid and a gutter where she’d dumped her mother’s Wild Turkey one night when she was so drunk she couldn’t see straight.
We ended up at Jimmy’s Smoke Shop.
“What the hell is this place?” I asked, beginning to climb out of her passenger seat. She’d insisted on driving because she said it wasn’t fair how I always had to. “Are we buying weed?”
She climbed out and smiled, beginning to walk towards the door. “You wish.”
“I do…” I mumbled, following her. I’d only had a few tastes of weed over the years, but I’d definitely approved.
I followed her inside and looked around. Surprisingly enough it was more of a tiny grocery store than a smoke shop. “What’s with the ghetto name of this place…” I muttered.
“They sell a lot of cigars and stuff,” she said, pointing towards the large cigar selection.
I raised an eyebrow at it and licked my lips. “Well don’t mind if I do…” I said, walking towards it. My brothers and I had always had a bit of a sweet tooth for Cubans. We used to sit around the studio when we were in our teens with producers who’d be sitting there puffing on big old cigars and somehow they became a novelty for me.
She pulled on the back of my t-shirt. “I know you think it’s manly and sophisticated, but unless you’re Leonardo Dicaprio on the Titanic, it’s really not attractive,” she said, pulling me back. She pointed towards the guy behind the counter who was sitting there watching Deal or No Deal on a small portable television. “That used to be my job.”
I smirked. “You used to work here?”
“For two years I worked here. They paid me 4 dollars an hour when I was 14,” she said.
“Is that even legal?”
“You think they care out here? This is the hicks of West Tulsa. I’m surprised I got 4 dollars. That was considered a lot. I used to wash dishes for this bar down the street when I was even younger and they gave me 75 cents an hour,” she said, walking over a shelf of candy and picking up an Airhead.
I walked up behind her and wrapped my arms around her waist, resting my cheek down on her shoulder and looking down at it. “I would have been fired for stealing these things…” I said, taking the green apple Airhead out of her hand. “I was an Airhead addict as a kid. I didn’t like this flavor though… I always made Zac trade with me.”
She took it back from me and flipped it over, reading the nutritional info on it. “Before I worked here, my Mom used to make me walk down here and buy cigarettes for her and they’d always let me take one of these. I haven’t had one of these in almost 10 years… and I hope I never do again. I can’t believe I used to actually like them.”
I stepped away from her and dug into the basket they were in, sorting through colors. “Well we’re getting one then. 10 years without an Airhead? That’s inhuman,” I said, holding up a white one. “The infamous White Mystery Airhead. Oh what would the 90’s have been without it,” I smirked.
“I could never figure out if the White Mystery one was it’s own flavor or one of the other flavors mysteriously hiding in the white wrapper,” she said.
“I think it’s one of the other flavors- you just have to guess which one it is. I never could.” I paused and then reached back into the basket and began getting one of each flavor, piling them into my hands.
“One of the great mysteries of this world… who created stone henge and what is the white mystery flavor…” Gabrielle said.
I started walking with all of the flavors to the front of the store. “We are going to find this out once and for all,” I said as I dug into my pocket for my wallet.
She walked after me. “You’re going to buy that many airheads? That’s going to get expensive,” she asked as I pulled the two dollars out of my wallet to pay.
We ended up outside sitting on the curb in front of her car, tearing open the Airhead wrappers and beginning to conduct the experiment. After 15 minutes of testing our, results were inconclusive, leaving us torn somewhere between kiwi-strawberry and blue raspberry.
“It’s like the old tootsie roll pop commercials,” she said. “The world may never know.”
I smiled. I’d forgotten about those commercials. God those were a token of childhood.
“I want to show you something,” she said once we’d thrown out all the wrappers. I stood up and began to follow her around the back of the store. “Don’t you ever shove this in my face… do you swear not to?”
“Shove what in your face?” Now I was intrigued.
She walked around the back of the store and smiled faintly, looking around. “I told you how my Mom used to send me down here every few days to buy her cigarettes, right?” she asked, walking towards a big brown dumpster behind the building.
I walked after her. “Right.”
“Well one of those times, when I was 13 or so, I brought along some extra money and I bought two packs- one of her, one for me. I stuffed the Marlboro reds in my pocket to bring back to her, and I took the Marlboro lights back here and sat on the ledge,” she pointed to the curb around the back parking lot, “And lit one. Then I put the pack and lighter under there,” she said. She pointed towards the bottom of the dumpster. “And every time she made me come back for more, I came back here until the pack was empty.”
My mouth was agape a little. Gabrielle was the bitchiest person in the world about smoking. She felt the need to constantly remind you that you were destroying your lungs and vocal chords and was one of those people that used that fucking annoying term- “cancer stick”. This was shocking.
I smirked. “So you’re a closet smoker.”
“Let me finish,” she corrected me. “When I finished the pack I made a choice. I had been beginning to hang out with some girls who lived on my street. They’d sit on their front porches at night and smoke cigarettes and drink cans of Miller Light. One night when I was out feeding this cat that always hung around our house, they called me over and I started going over there a bunch of nights that summer. They were girls I knew from school, but not very well. That summer I listened to their stories about who they’d slept with and watched them pass around lip gloss they stole from the IGA. I knew that girls like me had two choices, and almost all of us made the same choice. You could be exactly like your mother, and you would never get out. You’d rot in that neighborhood till the day you died- get knocked up as a teenager, move from man to man, end up empty handed every time. Or you could get out. It wouldn’t be easy to get out but you could if you cared enough to.”
She walked over and bent down, peering under the dumpster before standing up. “I guess I almost expected to still see that lighter I left under there years ago. I looked a year after I left it there and it was still under there.”
I sat down on the curb she’d pointed to and squinted up at her before pulling my sunglasses down over my eyes. “I guess I always thought you always knew that was your choice. I guess I never thought you even considered being like your Mom.”
She walked over and sat down next to me. “Well I did. Sometimes it seemed impossible that I could even get out. It didn’t seem like college was a possibility and it seemed like I was destined to live the same all the other girls were going to live. Somehow that day, looking at the empty pack of cigarettes, I kind of knew if I went back into the store and bought another one, I was binding myself to that life. I really wouldn’t have a shot at getting myself out there. So I thought long and hard about it that day before I tossed the empty pack into the dumpster and headed home with just my Mom’s reds in my pocket. That school year I started talking to my school psychologist about plans for college and we started coming up with a foul proof plan for making sure I would not have to rot in that neighborhood if I didn’t want to.”
I slid closer to her and wrapped my arm around her waist, pulling her closer to me. I liked her as close as possible, unless we were arguing, and even then sometimes closer was better for yelling. “What happened to the other girls?”
She squinted, beginning to slide my watch around my wrist to face up. “I’m not sure exactly. This one girl, Stacy, she had a baby senior year of high school. The rest dropped out of high school I think half way through.”
I thought for a few moments before I smiled faintly a moment later. “So… tell me the truth, is this a fabricated story meant to prove that cigarettes alone can destroy your lives?” I said, looking over at her. “And I better quit before I lead to my own destruction?”
She smiled. “I didn’t make it up.”
“I have a hard time believing you were a smoker.”
“For like the month of August.”
“Still.”
She smiled and shrugged. “I swear to you, I’m not lying.”
I sat there staring at the dumpster for a moment before pulling away from her and leaning back against my palms. “You know, as much as I would like to see you light up… and lighten up every once and awhile, mostly just to save myself from the wrath of your tobacco kills speeches, I have to say I’m pretty glad you went the way you did. The nerdy but hot feminist role suits you much better than the ‘I lost count of how many STDs I’m carrying’ role would.”
She smiled and leaned back against her elbows next to me. “Oh yeah?”
I smiled. “Oh yeah. Plus, teenage pregnancies are so overrated…”
“Oh they are?” she laughed.
“Mhm… the 3 am feedings and 200 dollar monthly diaper budget are not nearly as enjoyable as they’re made out to be.”
She smiled and was quiet for a moment before saying, “Wow… I feel bad for the people that thought they were.”
“I know, what assholes…” I said in my best serious tone, but then smiled a moment later.
It was good we could laugh about it- the mistake that changed our lives. It was funny how a mistake I made, with a completely different woman, had changed Gabrielle’s life, but it had whether I had meant it to or not. Laughing about it assured me we were moving on. The past would always be there, and that was okay, but for the first year, in many years, there was suddenly not just a past but a future too.