pearl

     I’ve brought seven glow-in-the-dark stars along with us, keeping them neatly wedged in the pages of my book. I read in a magazine article that seven is a very spiritual number. That it means perfection. So I’ve taped them up on the walls and ceilings of the places we’ve stayed, all the motel rooms we’ve lived in, close to all the things we’ve done. Because we’ve been everywhere and done just about everything, Danny and I, and everywhere doesn’t come with a guarantee of perfection. As long as I bring my own . . . we should be fine.
     This room where we are right now has a picture of Jesus above the bed. He is on a hill and raising his arms lazily towards the sky. His eyes are droopy and his face weak. I want to tell him to stand straight and eat something. Nothing about that picture seemed spiritual so I’ve put my seven stars around it. They are stuck to Jesus now, making his face glow in the dark as they do. He is much more easy to look at with his face all glowed up in the light of my seven spiritual glow-in-the-dark stars.
     I look over at Danny now. His face isn’t glowing much. Just enough so that I know it’s because of the moonlight. He doesn’t look very spiritual either, but that just might be me . . . I don’t think that I love him enough to be going nowhere with him. My eyes are beginning to hurt. I’ll look at Danny once more to see if my vision is cleared, to see if he is glowing now . . . . Maybe I should stick a few stars on him . . .
     She rubs her eyes and stands from the motel chair. Danny is laying on the motel bed, left arm drooping over the edge and right hand resting on his rising and falling chest. Rise. Fall. Rise . . . fall. She sighs, looks up at her seven stars and takes two steps to reach him. One step: over a magazine, next step: over Danny’s jeans. She curls her body next to Danny’s. He positions his body to mold to hers and encircles her waist with his right arm.
     She sighs.
     Their chests rise and fall out of rhythm. She closes her eyes and sighs again, catching his rhythm and making it her own. She opens her eyes and stares at the black of the small TV set. She can see their reflection and the reflection of her stars. Danny cups her breast with his hand, and takes a deep breath at her neck. He smiles against her skin and she turns her body to face his. He trails his fingers over the curve of her hip and she thinks his face is glowing now.

     She bites her lip and then her fingernails. Her knees are bouncing up and down as she flips her hair and picks up her pencil in the dark:
     Writing like a mad woman in this dark room, the white of the paper is beginning to hurt my eyes. This room smells of piss, dust and forgotten hope. It’s suffocating. Could go outside . . . with the rain and that old man smoking his pipe, but there is something itching at my eyes, so I can’t see where to go. I still can’t breathe in the room, it still smells like piss, dust and forgotten . . .
     Danny went to get dinner. He’ll come back with a pack of cheap beer. Yes, that is how it will happen.
     He’ll come walking up to that truck that we’ve taken this far, with his right hand stuffed deep into his jean pocket, his left hand loosely holding onto the beer. He’ll probably notice the old man sitting outside of the next room. He’ll talk to him because he is like that. He’s nice.
     The old man won’t really want to talk to him though, because people at places like these (places where no one lives), just don’t talk to young, good-looking guys at one minute past the horrifically bright beginning of the day.
     He will eventually realize this and sigh as he leans on his foot, covered snugly in his cowboy boots, and taps on this room door.
     I’ll still be here. On the inside. Waiting.
      Of course, being as pissed off as I am, I won’t answer immediately. I’ll make him wait, because that will teach him. It’ll teach him that when he took me away, he should have realized that I’d want to go somewhere, not just to empty motels, with empty jobs in empty diners.
     He should have realized that I didn’t bring enough tape to keep sticking up my stars . . . .
     And after a few minutes of his tapping, and of my inner reassurance, I’ll begin to get thirsty, and make this an excuse to open the door of this motel room and let him in. I won’t really be thirsty. No, (there is actually a bottle of cheap wine in my suitcase. Some wine I’d forgotten about until just now). So, I’ll open the door and stare into his eyes . . . and then he’ll smile and know just what I am thinking. He’ll kiss me the way he kissed me the first time, and he’ll drop the damn beer and carry me into the room, kicking the door shut behind our entangled bodies. There will be fire and sweet mutterings into each other’s ears. He’ll breathe into my neck and I’ll like the way my seven stars look on the popcorn ceiling.
     Then after that, I won’t have to keep reassuring the adolescent voice inside of me, that this is what I have always dreamt of.
     She stares up at the blue of the TV set, watches the images flash before her, bites her lip, and then squeezes out a tear:
     Letterman isn’t doing his job.
     I have never wanted to cry as much as I do right now, in this motel room in . . . San No Where and Never Going to be Somewhere. The images of New York, are laughing at me.      Chuckling. You silly fool, it grins, what’d you think? This boy was gonna take you somewhere? You’ll have to take this nowhere . . . .
     Wipe the salt from my eyes and paint them on my cheeks as I look down at my feet. My small weak feet. Couldn’t take me anywhere but this here, and this now, and with this man. I’ll curl these pathetic feet up and under the covers . . . Damn feet, damn small pinky toe, damn chipped nail polish holding me further back the more I study it. All I have now is this damn stupid journal with damn well worn pages, holding my damn stars. Damn.
     Letterman said something funny. I’ll force a smile. Maybe if I force it long enough, it’ll be true. Forcing, forcing, forcing—
     There is a tap on the door. She throws her book down and leaps to the door. She throws her arms around Danny’s neck. He walks into the room with her dangling on him like she was a prize. He kisses her cheek and lowers his head, bringing her to the ground, then opens a beer. She does too.
     They don’t say anything. Not one thing.
     She gulps at her beer and watches the glowing TV for a few minutes before turning her head slowly towards Danny. He is holding the beer between his thighs and staring at the TV, his mouth is slightly agape and he is beginning to snore.
      You’re asleep, she tells him. Then she sets her beer on the floor and peels her jeans off, and stands in front of him, wearing just her white cotton panties and his black Led Zeppelin tee shirt.
     Hello? She calls out to him in a whimper.
     There is only the echo of the room.
     She crawls into the motel bed and wraps the blankets around her body. She knows that she’ll have to make her body warm because Danny will soon tire of his nodding head and wake enough to crawl into the bed with his clothes still on, and grab for her warm body in the night.

     Danny is in the motel bathroom now. She is sitting on the motel bed, Indian style, and staring at the bathroom door. Her seven stars are taped on the door in a lazy, crooked circle. She blinks twice at these stars before grabbing for her book, and stretching her body to grab her worn pencil. She flips to an empty page, doesn’t matter where, and quickly moves the pencil across the clean paper.
     Danny woke in the middle of the night. He had an urge to say sorry. He woke me to say sorry. He sat on this motel bed, pulled me up with him and held my hands as he apologized. He said he was sorry he had taken me this far, without taking me anywhere. He told me that he had never meant to get side tracked, that he really did mean to take me to New York. He really did mean to . . . .
     I didn’t know he was side tracked.
     Yet there he was . . . holding my hands, and saying he was. He was saying how sorry he was. He was so sorry. And then, I suppose as a reaction to my silence, he wept. He wept. He was grasping my hands and weeping. I reached for him then, and held him. I rubbed his back and kissed his neck, whispering that it was okay. It was alright. That we’d only been on the road for a year. That wasn’t so long . . . really. It was fine. Just fine.
     I told him that. And he kissed my cheek and smoothed my single tear over his fresh kiss. As if to seal his kiss there. To seal this night right there, on my cheek. Forever. This night, when I told him that what he was doing was fine. Fine. Then, after he sealed this night onto me, he sprang for the bathroom to collect himself. . . because he was still weeping.
     And now, as I write in this book, I want to let it be known . . . now it is I who am sorry. I let the chance go. It’s gone now . . . just gone. I told him that everything was fine. Perhaps I am not that sorry though. I do not feel a need to weep. I do not feel a need to clear this up with Danny. Right now . . . I think I am just trying to feel.
     I touch that sealed promise now, and wonder how strong motel soap can get.

     She is sitting on the hood of Danny’s truck, picking the body parts of bugs off the windshield. She studies them each as she holds the pieces between her fingers, then she sticks her tongue out in disgust as she flicks the pieces away from her.
     Danny is inside of the small market at this gas station, buying nonsense items such as pretzels and gummy worms. She looks over to see him through the glass window of the market.      He’s studying a bag of chips. Her attention is drawn to a car that has just pulled up to the pump on the other side of Danny’s truck. A man hops out of the car and smiles at her. She squints her eyes and turns to watch Danny walking towards the truck, with a small bag. Danny tosses her the bag and winks. She looks back at the bugs on the windshield.
     Through the windshield she can see the magazine she was just reading. She bites her lip and looks back at Danny. He is starting to pump gas, as is the other man. She slowly slides off the hood and crawls into the truck through the opened passenger window. She picks up the new magazine and flips through its glossy pages. She raises her feet out the passenger window and studies a page in the magazine, then looks away from it. She looks at her book now. She pulls her knees up to her chin and presses her dry lips on her bare knees. Then she sets her magazine beside her and twirls the abused pencil in her fingers:
      I think I was reading one of the Brontë sisters when I fell in love with Danny. I saw a Heathcliff, believing there was a dark, intelligent, deeply brooding man in Danny. Because, well, in a certain light, Danny could look like just that. When I first saw Danny, there was a warm, soothing light playing in the background (by way of some Christmas lights hung up for the party we were at), so with this image in my head, I believed that I had no control of it. It was all him. All him. He came up to me at some party in some dirt backyard, and that was it. He just walked up, leaned against a thick eucalyptus tree and smiled at me. Three minutes, twenty-one steps and two smiles later, I was letting him fool with my breasts and kiss my neck while I leaned against his truck. To see this in writing, it seems I must be a sleaze, a slut, a floozy girl.
     Well, maybe just a weak woman.
     I’ll agree with that. I’ll agree because I like the burn of a crisp tan in the middle of July, so long as my boyfriend licks his finger, presses it on my tough skin and makes a sizzling hiss from his teeth and tongue. I also like reading about my relationship in the latest issue of Cosmo, so long as I can tell my girlfriends how they can save their relationship, as I go home to a man who knows about as much about me as he knows about the seven moons that circle Jupiter. I even like watching my dreams on a big screen, next to this man, giggling stupidly afterwards about how much of a silly chick flick it was.
     I have to wonder if I am only accepting of these facts in absence of my perfection. This morning, as I packed to leave the nowhere where we were, and head to the anywhere we are mapped to go to . . . I counted my seven stars. But, I found only six. Six of my seven stars. One was missing. Six. I counted them six times. Six.
Danny called me with the honk from this truck and I wedged my six stars into this book. I didn’t really even try to find the seventh. Now, looking back on it, I suppose I was just too damn tired from counting them so many times . . . .
     So, here I am now . . . reading an ‘Is He Ignoring You?’ article in the latest Cosmo, with my feet sticking out of the passenger side window in Danny’s truck, so as to tan away the imprint of my socks. I’m sure that it is only by putting myself outside of this truck that I could see my tanning, reading and ignoring my life away with this man, as he fills the tank so we can continue our voyage to the greatly covered territory of nowhere. But this seat is so comfortable, so familiar and I’m almost completely sure of what it’ll give to me
So I’ll continue to scribble away my nonsense, if only this pencil had some lead left. All that is left of it is a shallow, shell of wood. I bite on the tip of it and reach the little bits of lead that it has left to offer me. I look at Danny in the side mirror, between my white feet with chipped polish. He’s talking to a guy on the other side of the island. They’ve both got this easy body language that comes from a man who has it all, as they nod their heads and hold a hand to their hips, and laugh about something.
     Push my sunglasses up further on my nose and turn my attention to the woman in the other man’s car. She too is reading a magazine, her feet sticking out of the window. She brings her long manicured fingers to a Styrofoam cup with a straw standing perky and willing from a plastic lid. She bites on this straw and begins to suck the drink from it. She sets the cup back on the dashboard and turns the page of the magazine. She then extends her manicured fingers to grasp a pen from somewhere. She makes notes on the margin of the magazine. She’s taking notes. She’s trying to learn from her magazine. Amazing.
     Watch her man get into their car, and she smiles sweetly at him, folding the magazine away. She reaches for the cup again and bites on the straw before she sucks from it. He turns on his Johnny Cash and she smiles and leans over to him. She’s whispering something to him. He nods and kisses her cheek tenderly. Then he turns the station. Dolly Parton sings out from the speakers. The woman smiles and he tenses in his seat as they drive away--
     Whatchya reading, Pearl babe? Danny asks her as he hops into the truck.
     She jumps a little and then smiles. Nothing, she tells him as she tucks away her book, filled with thoughts and her magazine, full of empty margins. He turns the key and Neil Young blares from the speakers. He lowers it and gives her a side smile, asking if she minds listening to this one song. She bites her dry lip and then nibbles on her fingernails. Neil Young’s voice gives her a headache, but as she looks at her bitten off fingernails, she smiles.
     Of course we can listen to it, she says.
     Danny smiles, and as he drives them away from this nowhere, she reaches to turn the volume up.