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impertinences) wrote2011-09-12 08:37 pm
impertinences) wrote2011-09-12 08:37 pm
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Here we go, a rambling piece centered on Emere and Brando’s childhood/teenaged years. I still firmly believe that whenever I succeed in length, I jeopardize most of my figurative style. Seriously, I feel like this piece fell flat and is boring to read ;__;
I’ve been trying to work on forming a narrative, because it turns out that I’m so accustomed to a certain wife of mine already knowing the circumstances of my characters that if almost any one else reads a piece … they have no idea what’s happening. I have gotten used to not having to fill in the gaps since my main audience is already acquainted with the goings on of my characters.
Anyway, this is that attempt.
Guest appearances by: Maine, Seymour, and so many cigarettes. I’ve always liked the idea of Seymour being this helping figure for Emere, even if their friendship is supposed to be an AU time-line.
Also, let’s play Find the Wuthering Heights Quote.
--
“Are you going to drive this car, or what?”
His voice startles her; she’d forgotten he was there, having been following the path of highway so intently. Just a common streak of grey asphalt, but she has the feeling that it’s leading her downward - to something dark and fetid. A secret stretch of road that could, eventually, lead to somewhere inside of herself, a location with a deafening impact that she could ignore. Still, hating to be caught unaware, Emere glances sharply at her brother, the solid image of someone who shares her flesh, and contemplates burning him with the tip of her cigarette. This is what she has become now – a woman of angles and deceitful desires, of razor brutality and a hardened shell for skin. She flicks the cigarette out the unrolled window instead, presses her stiletto hard on the gas pedal.
Like a bullet, the BMW accelerates noiselessly and with immediate speed. It is an expensive car, the leather seats and chrome interior matching the pristine colorlessness of the inside of her home. This is another one of her adult developments – a compulsion to decorate herself in wealth, trying to further bury her roots.
“Shift into third.” Brando’s voice annoys her. It always has. It nestles inside the shell of her ear and refuses to be silent.
“I know how to drive a sports car, fratello.”
He smirks, an upward cutting motion his mouth makes, and it matches hers. Matches their mother’s. “Because I taught you.”
Anger blossoms in her chest, swift, and she shifts too hard, too quickly, making the gears protest. She’s going thirty miles over the legal speed limit, but she keeps accelerating. Out of the city, past the suburbs, further than the slums, there’s little traffic. “You worked under them most of your life.” Still, the words only come out as a murmur, and she’s happy he chooses a response of silence.
Arianna’s beauty is fading. This is the first thing Emere notices when the trailer’s front door opens, the second being that the drive to her childhood home suddenly feels too short. But her mother’s skin has definitely lost its luster and looks like cotton stretched over a skeleton. Her eyes are clear though, and a feeling of panic strikes Emere in the stomach. She settles it with anger, taking a seat in a chair she doesn’t remember and lights a cigarette.
“We don’t smoke in here.”
Mid-light, Emere stares at her mother before scoffing, speaking around the filter in a way that makes her look fifteen and cheap. “Because you’ve found Jesus?”
“Because it’s unhealthy, dear.”
“You live in a trailer that hasn’t been cleaned for twenty years. Everything here is unhealthy.” Snidely, she lights her cigarette fully, inhaling while the woman across from her lurches her shoulders, a sniffling noise strangling her throat. Emere makes an arching, all-encompassing gesture with her hand. “Including present company.”
Brando leans against the nearest wall and watches the shadows. He follows them down the small length of walkway leading to the back of the trailer to where the doors of the makeshift bedrooms can be seen. There’s a man back there, he thinks. Quiet and cowardly and probably still sleeping off a bottle’s worth of vodka. There’s a razor near the broken stove and dirty boots by the built-in-table, he notices. When they had arrived, he’d seen an old pick-up truck parked beneath a lone oak – barren, like the grass surrounding the thirty-foot plot. It had looked a bit like his.
“Mother?” He says, turning, interrupting the beginnings of an argument, and a flinch hits Emere across her jaw. She hasn’t spoken that word often, not in years, not since Juniper’s death. “We came for your birthday. Let her smoke. It helps her nerves.”
Five feet of space between them, and Brando can feel his sister’s glare. He ignores it and sits on the threadbare sofa, stiffly, leaving inches of fabric between him and Arianna. Still, when she places a startlingly frail hand on his knee, he lets it stay. She smiles, and it looks a little like a corpse resurrected. Watching, Emere feels excluded. A bristling desperation rises inside of her, and she chokes it down with a lungful of smoke. Their mother, ever shrewd, had played her two children against each other until age and wisdom and enough bruises interfered – she hasn’t forgotten that.
Emere places her fingers over her eyes.
“There’s a scorpion in you.” Arianna whispers, stroking her long hair almost without thought. Emere, at ten, leans a little into those fingers. “You will know cunning, cara mia. And loyalty.” Like a siren, her voice is soft, lulled by gin, but her fingers tighten in her daughter’s hair, making the girl’s scalp burn.
“Brando too?” Emere wants to move, to untangle herself from her mother’s closeness. It feels foreign.
Arianna laughs chidingly, a notch of coldness affecting her speech, distorting it into a mermaid’s tone of cunning. “He is too much like his father. A man always hurts. Harden yourself.”
And she tries.
At twelve, Emere feels like a traitor. Feels empty and confused, her hair too long and her feet blistered from months of wearing shoes a size too small. Her hips are starting to round, her body changing, and her mother is a ghost of a figure prone to haunting. She needs and needs and needs – an abundance of normal necessities that her mother’s diner-waitress salary cannot provide. Arianna is noticeably disdainful, eyeing the beauty that is her daughter as though the product of her loins had been poisoned and bittered.
So Brando, two years younger, she cradles. He is tall for his age, strength in his veins and jaw. There is something evasive about him that unnerves her. Her hand is still on the back of his young neck.
“Mom?” He uses a careful tone, a cautiousness bred from expecting the wrong inflection to end with a slap across his mouth.
It angers her, but she smiles and moves her hand, petting his shoulder absently. “I need a favor, figlio mio. A promise.”
“Emere says you break those.”
Her fingers curl, her nails sharp against his shirt, the pressure touching his skin. “Your sister is ignorant. She is too stubborn for this work, yes?” Slowly, she turns him till their eyes meet, hers a little wild and his a little uncertain. She cups his face between her palms, like he is a son worth treasuring, and his developing heart wants to believe that – wants to believe her. “You would not abandon me? I will need your strength for the wolves.” Her breath has a sticky, stale sweetness he is familiar with but too young to identify. Her words scare him softly, but he nods, thinking of craven witches and the cold snapping of broken branches.
Four minutes of Arianna’s bible talk, and Emere goes into the kitchen. A hunk of a few feet and cheap, stained linoleum. Her patent leather heels are already dirty, and she has to sidestep piles of old laundry and frozen dinner packages to find the loose cabinet by the sink. She pries it open with the tip of her shoe, the hinges so heartily loosened from the years of use that it practically falls off. Crouching down, her hands seek from muscle memory, pushing aside unused cleaners and empty bottles of alcohol. She has to shove though four liter sized bottles of gin before finding one that’s a quarter full.
Half squatting, half leaning against the bottom cabinets, Emere unscrews the top and drinks like a parched woman. Three swallows in, she catches a glance of her reflection from the shattered mirror above the stove and chokes, spits the remaining gin into the sink.
Against the eroded metal, it shines up at her like acid.
Their mother is a volcanic force.
As she grows, Emere tests her – constantly, defiantly. She slams the door at quiet hours, steals the alcohol to take inside herself, breaks glasses and drinks from the juice cartons. Arianna’s cigarettes will disappear, and Emere’s arms will be bruised the next day at school. She’ll wear long sleeves in humid spring heat and keep her mouth shut when the guidance counselor asks “And how’s your family life?” in a pitying voice.
She fucks boys in the school parking lot and dates a quarterback that uses his hands on and off the field.
Brando learns how to sleep inside a truck, how to pick locks and unhinge windows to get inside, and he realizes the meaning of the word ‘no.’ He becomes a reluctant caretaker, a vomit cleaner and argument-swayer. His arms learn the precise effort needed to lift his mother’s drunken and unconscious body from the hall to her bed. He is a silent, raging storm – kept in his chest and heard within.
He finds a junkyard connected to a rusted body shop connected to a dive bar. He comes to know a type of solace and a kind of preoccupied peace beneath the hoods of cars and when drinking bottled cokes with men twice his age.
At the same time, his sister meets a girl who wears heavy boots and whose hair is half shaved. Maine is inexplicably safe, and Emere feels so desperate for that knowing, grinning mouth that she gets sick in the locker room where Maine first smokes her up. “It’s okay.” Maine says around her laughter, barreling through the other’s thirty defensive walls in a second flat, all to hold her hair away from her face as she vomits. “I was so stoned last month – or year? – that I threw up on a guy’s dick when I tried to give him a blowjob.” Wetting some paper towels, she holds them to the back of Emere’s hot neck, tsking at herself in reminiscence.
Emere laughs until she cries and, when she can’t stop doing that, Maine takes her home to Juniper. She stays three nights in a row, borrows whichever clothes look the least punk from Maine, and lets Juniper make her hot chocolate while she does her schoolwork. When she finally goes home, Brando’s bottom lip is split and the money she hides inside her pillow is gone.
He shrugs, dark and stoic, staring at the magazine in his hands. “She didn’t know where you were. I couldn’t tell her since I didn’t know either.”
Brando finds her in the kitchen, hands on either side of the sink, her hair falling like thick molasses against her cheek. It hides her expression, and he wonders how long she’s been using her body as a mask.
“She wants you to come back now.”
“That cunt can want forever, for all I care.” She stays where she is, looking thinner than usual in designer jeans and a cashmere sweater, but she looks nicer too – out of exhaustion and the effort of maintaining her composure. Brando knows she’s gathering her battalions, thickening her stone walls, and he feels the old weary hate he was made to carry gather on his shoulders. But he tries to take her elbow when she does finally walk by and is almost comforted when she snaps her arm away.
“Like old times.” He says with an emotionless grin but laughs when she turns back to hit his jaw lightly in a quick, soft, smack. “You should learn to show your affection without physical violence.”
“How do you suggest I do that?” Emere raises her eyebrow, that purr of melody in her tone, and he shoves her forward like they're juveniles again.
She can be his protector, his comrade. She can offer her services to him, as long as he understands that payment is always expected in return.
She catches Arianna’s arm countless of times, stopping it from coming down with a force too strong for a woman so physically mild. When he was younger, she’d shoved him out the door and locked it, even though he could hear their voices raised like warriors and the sound of things crashing, furniture breaking. She slept in the pick-up with him occasionally, her head on his lap and her hair a blanket across his thighs. Most times, she remembered to pick him up from school, left money in the pocket of his favorite jacket before she would disappear for a weekend. Emere was the one that helped him with algebra and, before that, art assignments when his hands were too large for the intricate details or delicate cutting.
But Emere is unreliable, a wave in his life that arrives and retreats. And she is cold, a lone sylph, refusing to hold his hand and teaching him that preservation is self-interest. A burden, a cross he staggers beneath yet feels responsible for. A source of little visible delight.
She comes home drunk, like their mother, and presses herself into his bed, her breasts full and warm and unnecessarily against his back, her arms soft around him till Brando feels trapped and can’t get away from the smell of her. She finds a spot for her mouth on the back of his shoulder and lets her hands wander till he pushes away, wishing he could push her sober.
Emere laughs, low like molten lava, and taps his chest with her nails. She has the unfocused gaze of a rabid animal, a hungry shark.
“Go to your own room, for fuck’s sake. I’m not your boyfriend.”
She shakes her head till her hair whips across her face, dark slivers that should cut her skin but don’t. “Couldn’t, wouldn’t, shouldn’t forget you.”
“You don’t know who you. You don’t know who I am. Not with that much – tequila? – in your stomach.” Brando hates arguing with her, hates the slick way her voice sounds, almost as much as he hates how quickly she seems to be becoming his mother, transforming into a doppelgänger. He rubs his temple, flinches when she pinches his arm sharply.
“You are a Roman, good sir. A Polack. A wild one, on the waterfront. A French emperor.” She pulls his hair, dips his face forward. “A fish.”
“You know, when you ramble like that, you sound like – “
“Marlon!” Where her fingers had been half fondly circling his head, they now rap-rap-rap the side of his skull. In her drunken state, she still manages to roll her eyes imperially. “Get it? Marlon Brando? It was witty.”
He means to protest, but she spreads her fingers like lengthy spider legs, pulls him close and lets her mouth touch his. Soft and wet and quick, her lips open, the press of her body unbearably hot until she untangles herself smoothly, leaving him half gaping.
“See? A fish.” Tucking her hair behind her ears, she retreats to her own room, the suggestive sway of her hips and confident steps making her seem less drunk than before. In the morning, she’s already left for school. He has to call a friend for a ride.
Arianna is drinking iced tea from a glass rimmed in lipstick. Emere doesn’t sit again but leans her back against the front door, ankle crossed over ankle, cigarette burning in her hand. Brando stands by the dull window and notices the lack of birds in the sky.
“I remember when you two were young. There was so much noise here then. It isn’t like that now, now it’s metal grinding and – “
“I remember that you used to wake Brando up by burning him with cigarettes. I remember how you locked me outside when it was fucking fifteen degrees – “
“I don’t like your language, Emere. It makes you sound like trash.”
“ – and their was snow on the ground. That you used to make me brush my teeth until my gums bled, and you would laugh. I remember finding you standing over Brando’s bed with a pair of scissors while he slept and when I asked you what you were doing, you cut your arm. You had to get thirteen stiches, it was so deep. Remember that?”
At the window, Brando keeps his eyes on the gravel driveway. His mouth is set in a hard line and he feels a headache coming. He remembers Seymour and a feminine error.
A man at the dive bar has so much ink on his body that Brando thinks of Crayola crayons and vivid watercolors. He’s a lean but strong type, and he shakes hands with the bar tender in a friendly, unassuming manner. His jeans have rips and his shirt is faded, worn, but it looks intentional and his hands are clean. He sits beside Brando and doesn’t bother him about the fact that he looks too young to be there.
“Seymour.” He says, offering his hand after ordering a beer, even though Brando hadn’t asked for his name or made much eye contact.
“Brando.”
Seymour lights a cigarette, and they talk. About his band, Van Morrison, how scotch is better than vodka, and how the weather has been shit. Brando’s an uncaring person, and he finds himself stiff most of the time, a crude type of vulgarity in his insults when he uses them. He knows he has walls, that they’re just in different places than his sister’s. He’ll be an adult that is difficult to read, that cannot comprehend much sympathy, that feels cheated by his bloodline. For now, he tries to focus on the taste of weak beer and a conversation that is idle and thus comforting.
When enough time goes by, Seymour rubs the back of his neck. “You’re Emere’s brother, aren’t you?”
Brando can feel himself tighten, feel the ice trickle back into his voice, and he looks a little closer at the musician. A young man but still too old to be in high school, probably four years older than Emere, and he wonders what type of trouble he’s expected to liberate her from now. He wishes he had gone in the back and fallen asleep, that he didn’t have to constantly be picking up after women. “Yeah. Why?”
“Because, I – “
“Did you fuck her too? Half of the senior class has.”
Seymour laughs, whistling between his teeth in a catching fashion. “You’re not a liar, you’re definitely her brother. The two of you are about as subtle as a brick. Must be a family trait.” He takes a drink of his beer. “And no. No, sir, I have not.”
“What is this then? If you think she’s the type to let you rescue her, you’re wrong.”
“I imagine that girl is quite capable of rescuing herself. We’re … friends.” It comes out weak and awkward, and Seymour lifts his shoulders in a shrug. Brother or not, he doesn’t owe Brando an explanation.
“You must be talking about the wrong girl.”
Seymour laughs again, and he claps Brando on the back.
He shows up at the trailer a month later and only gets out of his van to open the door for Emere.
For two weeks, Brando has been waking up to the sound of Emere vomiting in the morning. The day before she had run from dinner, barely reaching the toilet, and the sound of her sickness turned him off of the pot roast. Now, she shoves clothes in suitcase, and he stands in her doorway. Arianna is at the diner, and Emere looks pale, looks tired, and he remembers catching a glimpse of her in a mirror’s reflection earlier, when she stared so hard at her stomach like she was hoping to make it disappear by will alone. When she sees him, she asks him to hand her the jacket by his feet, and he does.
“What are you doing?”
“Seymour is taking me to the city for a few days. He’s got a gig.” Her hands are shaking; she wipes them on the back of her jeans, her eyes darting around, unsure. She isn’t looking at what she’s taking for luggage – she has three pairs of pants, a cotton t-shirt he’s never seen her wear, and a pair of tights that must be Maine’s.
“Are you nervous?”
“Seymour can’t hurt a fly.”
He scoffs, sliding a calloused hand through his hair, staring at her and her weak pretenses. “Maybe you shouldn’t have taken so much dick.”
“You would know all about taking dick, wouldn’t you?”
Emere moves past him, a jumble of things in her arms, and slams the door when leaving. Brando feels the trailer go empty and still, settling into the silence that occurs after a storm. When she comes home three nights later, she is paler than before and he thinks he can smell hospital and the copper tang of blood. She sleeps in his bed the first night, and he doesn’t ask her to leave.
It ends how it always has – the echo of memories paired with the acoustic banging of doors. Emere sitting in the driver’s seat, her sunglasses covering her eyes, coughing from all the cigarettes she’s smoked in an hour. Brando takes his time walking back to the car, gets in quietly, and leans back in his seat, cracking his knuckles.
He places a hand on her knee and she knocks it off.
He has that slice of a grin again, reaching over to turn the keys and start the engine himself. “Yeah, like old times.”
I’ve been trying to work on forming a narrative, because it turns out that I’m so accustomed to a certain wife of mine already knowing the circumstances of my characters that if almost any one else reads a piece … they have no idea what’s happening. I have gotten used to not having to fill in the gaps since my main audience is already acquainted with the goings on of my characters.
Anyway, this is that attempt.
Guest appearances by: Maine, Seymour, and so many cigarettes. I’ve always liked the idea of Seymour being this helping figure for Emere, even if their friendship is supposed to be an AU time-line.
Also, let’s play Find the Wuthering Heights Quote.
--
“Are you going to drive this car, or what?”
His voice startles her; she’d forgotten he was there, having been following the path of highway so intently. Just a common streak of grey asphalt, but she has the feeling that it’s leading her downward - to something dark and fetid. A secret stretch of road that could, eventually, lead to somewhere inside of herself, a location with a deafening impact that she could ignore. Still, hating to be caught unaware, Emere glances sharply at her brother, the solid image of someone who shares her flesh, and contemplates burning him with the tip of her cigarette. This is what she has become now – a woman of angles and deceitful desires, of razor brutality and a hardened shell for skin. She flicks the cigarette out the unrolled window instead, presses her stiletto hard on the gas pedal.
Like a bullet, the BMW accelerates noiselessly and with immediate speed. It is an expensive car, the leather seats and chrome interior matching the pristine colorlessness of the inside of her home. This is another one of her adult developments – a compulsion to decorate herself in wealth, trying to further bury her roots.
“Shift into third.” Brando’s voice annoys her. It always has. It nestles inside the shell of her ear and refuses to be silent.
“I know how to drive a sports car, fratello.”
He smirks, an upward cutting motion his mouth makes, and it matches hers. Matches their mother’s. “Because I taught you.”
Anger blossoms in her chest, swift, and she shifts too hard, too quickly, making the gears protest. She’s going thirty miles over the legal speed limit, but she keeps accelerating. Out of the city, past the suburbs, further than the slums, there’s little traffic. “You worked under them most of your life.” Still, the words only come out as a murmur, and she’s happy he chooses a response of silence.
Arianna’s beauty is fading. This is the first thing Emere notices when the trailer’s front door opens, the second being that the drive to her childhood home suddenly feels too short. But her mother’s skin has definitely lost its luster and looks like cotton stretched over a skeleton. Her eyes are clear though, and a feeling of panic strikes Emere in the stomach. She settles it with anger, taking a seat in a chair she doesn’t remember and lights a cigarette.
“We don’t smoke in here.”
Mid-light, Emere stares at her mother before scoffing, speaking around the filter in a way that makes her look fifteen and cheap. “Because you’ve found Jesus?”
“Because it’s unhealthy, dear.”
“You live in a trailer that hasn’t been cleaned for twenty years. Everything here is unhealthy.” Snidely, she lights her cigarette fully, inhaling while the woman across from her lurches her shoulders, a sniffling noise strangling her throat. Emere makes an arching, all-encompassing gesture with her hand. “Including present company.”
Brando leans against the nearest wall and watches the shadows. He follows them down the small length of walkway leading to the back of the trailer to where the doors of the makeshift bedrooms can be seen. There’s a man back there, he thinks. Quiet and cowardly and probably still sleeping off a bottle’s worth of vodka. There’s a razor near the broken stove and dirty boots by the built-in-table, he notices. When they had arrived, he’d seen an old pick-up truck parked beneath a lone oak – barren, like the grass surrounding the thirty-foot plot. It had looked a bit like his.
“Mother?” He says, turning, interrupting the beginnings of an argument, and a flinch hits Emere across her jaw. She hasn’t spoken that word often, not in years, not since Juniper’s death. “We came for your birthday. Let her smoke. It helps her nerves.”
Five feet of space between them, and Brando can feel his sister’s glare. He ignores it and sits on the threadbare sofa, stiffly, leaving inches of fabric between him and Arianna. Still, when she places a startlingly frail hand on his knee, he lets it stay. She smiles, and it looks a little like a corpse resurrected. Watching, Emere feels excluded. A bristling desperation rises inside of her, and she chokes it down with a lungful of smoke. Their mother, ever shrewd, had played her two children against each other until age and wisdom and enough bruises interfered – she hasn’t forgotten that.
Emere places her fingers over her eyes.
“There’s a scorpion in you.” Arianna whispers, stroking her long hair almost without thought. Emere, at ten, leans a little into those fingers. “You will know cunning, cara mia. And loyalty.” Like a siren, her voice is soft, lulled by gin, but her fingers tighten in her daughter’s hair, making the girl’s scalp burn.
“Brando too?” Emere wants to move, to untangle herself from her mother’s closeness. It feels foreign.
Arianna laughs chidingly, a notch of coldness affecting her speech, distorting it into a mermaid’s tone of cunning. “He is too much like his father. A man always hurts. Harden yourself.”
And she tries.
At twelve, Emere feels like a traitor. Feels empty and confused, her hair too long and her feet blistered from months of wearing shoes a size too small. Her hips are starting to round, her body changing, and her mother is a ghost of a figure prone to haunting. She needs and needs and needs – an abundance of normal necessities that her mother’s diner-waitress salary cannot provide. Arianna is noticeably disdainful, eyeing the beauty that is her daughter as though the product of her loins had been poisoned and bittered.
So Brando, two years younger, she cradles. He is tall for his age, strength in his veins and jaw. There is something evasive about him that unnerves her. Her hand is still on the back of his young neck.
“Mom?” He uses a careful tone, a cautiousness bred from expecting the wrong inflection to end with a slap across his mouth.
It angers her, but she smiles and moves her hand, petting his shoulder absently. “I need a favor, figlio mio. A promise.”
“Emere says you break those.”
Her fingers curl, her nails sharp against his shirt, the pressure touching his skin. “Your sister is ignorant. She is too stubborn for this work, yes?” Slowly, she turns him till their eyes meet, hers a little wild and his a little uncertain. She cups his face between her palms, like he is a son worth treasuring, and his developing heart wants to believe that – wants to believe her. “You would not abandon me? I will need your strength for the wolves.” Her breath has a sticky, stale sweetness he is familiar with but too young to identify. Her words scare him softly, but he nods, thinking of craven witches and the cold snapping of broken branches.
Four minutes of Arianna’s bible talk, and Emere goes into the kitchen. A hunk of a few feet and cheap, stained linoleum. Her patent leather heels are already dirty, and she has to sidestep piles of old laundry and frozen dinner packages to find the loose cabinet by the sink. She pries it open with the tip of her shoe, the hinges so heartily loosened from the years of use that it practically falls off. Crouching down, her hands seek from muscle memory, pushing aside unused cleaners and empty bottles of alcohol. She has to shove though four liter sized bottles of gin before finding one that’s a quarter full.
Half squatting, half leaning against the bottom cabinets, Emere unscrews the top and drinks like a parched woman. Three swallows in, she catches a glance of her reflection from the shattered mirror above the stove and chokes, spits the remaining gin into the sink.
Against the eroded metal, it shines up at her like acid.
Their mother is a volcanic force.
As she grows, Emere tests her – constantly, defiantly. She slams the door at quiet hours, steals the alcohol to take inside herself, breaks glasses and drinks from the juice cartons. Arianna’s cigarettes will disappear, and Emere’s arms will be bruised the next day at school. She’ll wear long sleeves in humid spring heat and keep her mouth shut when the guidance counselor asks “And how’s your family life?” in a pitying voice.
She fucks boys in the school parking lot and dates a quarterback that uses his hands on and off the field.
Brando learns how to sleep inside a truck, how to pick locks and unhinge windows to get inside, and he realizes the meaning of the word ‘no.’ He becomes a reluctant caretaker, a vomit cleaner and argument-swayer. His arms learn the precise effort needed to lift his mother’s drunken and unconscious body from the hall to her bed. He is a silent, raging storm – kept in his chest and heard within.
He finds a junkyard connected to a rusted body shop connected to a dive bar. He comes to know a type of solace and a kind of preoccupied peace beneath the hoods of cars and when drinking bottled cokes with men twice his age.
At the same time, his sister meets a girl who wears heavy boots and whose hair is half shaved. Maine is inexplicably safe, and Emere feels so desperate for that knowing, grinning mouth that she gets sick in the locker room where Maine first smokes her up. “It’s okay.” Maine says around her laughter, barreling through the other’s thirty defensive walls in a second flat, all to hold her hair away from her face as she vomits. “I was so stoned last month – or year? – that I threw up on a guy’s dick when I tried to give him a blowjob.” Wetting some paper towels, she holds them to the back of Emere’s hot neck, tsking at herself in reminiscence.
Emere laughs until she cries and, when she can’t stop doing that, Maine takes her home to Juniper. She stays three nights in a row, borrows whichever clothes look the least punk from Maine, and lets Juniper make her hot chocolate while she does her schoolwork. When she finally goes home, Brando’s bottom lip is split and the money she hides inside her pillow is gone.
He shrugs, dark and stoic, staring at the magazine in his hands. “She didn’t know where you were. I couldn’t tell her since I didn’t know either.”
Brando finds her in the kitchen, hands on either side of the sink, her hair falling like thick molasses against her cheek. It hides her expression, and he wonders how long she’s been using her body as a mask.
“She wants you to come back now.”
“That cunt can want forever, for all I care.” She stays where she is, looking thinner than usual in designer jeans and a cashmere sweater, but she looks nicer too – out of exhaustion and the effort of maintaining her composure. Brando knows she’s gathering her battalions, thickening her stone walls, and he feels the old weary hate he was made to carry gather on his shoulders. But he tries to take her elbow when she does finally walk by and is almost comforted when she snaps her arm away.
“Like old times.” He says with an emotionless grin but laughs when she turns back to hit his jaw lightly in a quick, soft, smack. “You should learn to show your affection without physical violence.”
“How do you suggest I do that?” Emere raises her eyebrow, that purr of melody in her tone, and he shoves her forward like they're juveniles again.
She can be his protector, his comrade. She can offer her services to him, as long as he understands that payment is always expected in return.
She catches Arianna’s arm countless of times, stopping it from coming down with a force too strong for a woman so physically mild. When he was younger, she’d shoved him out the door and locked it, even though he could hear their voices raised like warriors and the sound of things crashing, furniture breaking. She slept in the pick-up with him occasionally, her head on his lap and her hair a blanket across his thighs. Most times, she remembered to pick him up from school, left money in the pocket of his favorite jacket before she would disappear for a weekend. Emere was the one that helped him with algebra and, before that, art assignments when his hands were too large for the intricate details or delicate cutting.
But Emere is unreliable, a wave in his life that arrives and retreats. And she is cold, a lone sylph, refusing to hold his hand and teaching him that preservation is self-interest. A burden, a cross he staggers beneath yet feels responsible for. A source of little visible delight.
She comes home drunk, like their mother, and presses herself into his bed, her breasts full and warm and unnecessarily against his back, her arms soft around him till Brando feels trapped and can’t get away from the smell of her. She finds a spot for her mouth on the back of his shoulder and lets her hands wander till he pushes away, wishing he could push her sober.
Emere laughs, low like molten lava, and taps his chest with her nails. She has the unfocused gaze of a rabid animal, a hungry shark.
“Go to your own room, for fuck’s sake. I’m not your boyfriend.”
She shakes her head till her hair whips across her face, dark slivers that should cut her skin but don’t. “Couldn’t, wouldn’t, shouldn’t forget you.”
“You don’t know who you. You don’t know who I am. Not with that much – tequila? – in your stomach.” Brando hates arguing with her, hates the slick way her voice sounds, almost as much as he hates how quickly she seems to be becoming his mother, transforming into a doppelgänger. He rubs his temple, flinches when she pinches his arm sharply.
“You are a Roman, good sir. A Polack. A wild one, on the waterfront. A French emperor.” She pulls his hair, dips his face forward. “A fish.”
“You know, when you ramble like that, you sound like – “
“Marlon!” Where her fingers had been half fondly circling his head, they now rap-rap-rap the side of his skull. In her drunken state, she still manages to roll her eyes imperially. “Get it? Marlon Brando? It was witty.”
He means to protest, but she spreads her fingers like lengthy spider legs, pulls him close and lets her mouth touch his. Soft and wet and quick, her lips open, the press of her body unbearably hot until she untangles herself smoothly, leaving him half gaping.
“See? A fish.” Tucking her hair behind her ears, she retreats to her own room, the suggestive sway of her hips and confident steps making her seem less drunk than before. In the morning, she’s already left for school. He has to call a friend for a ride.
Arianna is drinking iced tea from a glass rimmed in lipstick. Emere doesn’t sit again but leans her back against the front door, ankle crossed over ankle, cigarette burning in her hand. Brando stands by the dull window and notices the lack of birds in the sky.
“I remember when you two were young. There was so much noise here then. It isn’t like that now, now it’s metal grinding and – “
“I remember that you used to wake Brando up by burning him with cigarettes. I remember how you locked me outside when it was fucking fifteen degrees – “
“I don’t like your language, Emere. It makes you sound like trash.”
“ – and their was snow on the ground. That you used to make me brush my teeth until my gums bled, and you would laugh. I remember finding you standing over Brando’s bed with a pair of scissors while he slept and when I asked you what you were doing, you cut your arm. You had to get thirteen stiches, it was so deep. Remember that?”
At the window, Brando keeps his eyes on the gravel driveway. His mouth is set in a hard line and he feels a headache coming. He remembers Seymour and a feminine error.
A man at the dive bar has so much ink on his body that Brando thinks of Crayola crayons and vivid watercolors. He’s a lean but strong type, and he shakes hands with the bar tender in a friendly, unassuming manner. His jeans have rips and his shirt is faded, worn, but it looks intentional and his hands are clean. He sits beside Brando and doesn’t bother him about the fact that he looks too young to be there.
“Seymour.” He says, offering his hand after ordering a beer, even though Brando hadn’t asked for his name or made much eye contact.
“Brando.”
Seymour lights a cigarette, and they talk. About his band, Van Morrison, how scotch is better than vodka, and how the weather has been shit. Brando’s an uncaring person, and he finds himself stiff most of the time, a crude type of vulgarity in his insults when he uses them. He knows he has walls, that they’re just in different places than his sister’s. He’ll be an adult that is difficult to read, that cannot comprehend much sympathy, that feels cheated by his bloodline. For now, he tries to focus on the taste of weak beer and a conversation that is idle and thus comforting.
When enough time goes by, Seymour rubs the back of his neck. “You’re Emere’s brother, aren’t you?”
Brando can feel himself tighten, feel the ice trickle back into his voice, and he looks a little closer at the musician. A young man but still too old to be in high school, probably four years older than Emere, and he wonders what type of trouble he’s expected to liberate her from now. He wishes he had gone in the back and fallen asleep, that he didn’t have to constantly be picking up after women. “Yeah. Why?”
“Because, I – “
“Did you fuck her too? Half of the senior class has.”
Seymour laughs, whistling between his teeth in a catching fashion. “You’re not a liar, you’re definitely her brother. The two of you are about as subtle as a brick. Must be a family trait.” He takes a drink of his beer. “And no. No, sir, I have not.”
“What is this then? If you think she’s the type to let you rescue her, you’re wrong.”
“I imagine that girl is quite capable of rescuing herself. We’re … friends.” It comes out weak and awkward, and Seymour lifts his shoulders in a shrug. Brother or not, he doesn’t owe Brando an explanation.
“You must be talking about the wrong girl.”
Seymour laughs again, and he claps Brando on the back.
He shows up at the trailer a month later and only gets out of his van to open the door for Emere.
For two weeks, Brando has been waking up to the sound of Emere vomiting in the morning. The day before she had run from dinner, barely reaching the toilet, and the sound of her sickness turned him off of the pot roast. Now, she shoves clothes in suitcase, and he stands in her doorway. Arianna is at the diner, and Emere looks pale, looks tired, and he remembers catching a glimpse of her in a mirror’s reflection earlier, when she stared so hard at her stomach like she was hoping to make it disappear by will alone. When she sees him, she asks him to hand her the jacket by his feet, and he does.
“What are you doing?”
“Seymour is taking me to the city for a few days. He’s got a gig.” Her hands are shaking; she wipes them on the back of her jeans, her eyes darting around, unsure. She isn’t looking at what she’s taking for luggage – she has three pairs of pants, a cotton t-shirt he’s never seen her wear, and a pair of tights that must be Maine’s.
“Are you nervous?”
“Seymour can’t hurt a fly.”
He scoffs, sliding a calloused hand through his hair, staring at her and her weak pretenses. “Maybe you shouldn’t have taken so much dick.”
“You would know all about taking dick, wouldn’t you?”
Emere moves past him, a jumble of things in her arms, and slams the door when leaving. Brando feels the trailer go empty and still, settling into the silence that occurs after a storm. When she comes home three nights later, she is paler than before and he thinks he can smell hospital and the copper tang of blood. She sleeps in his bed the first night, and he doesn’t ask her to leave.
It ends how it always has – the echo of memories paired with the acoustic banging of doors. Emere sitting in the driver’s seat, her sunglasses covering her eyes, coughing from all the cigarettes she’s smoked in an hour. Brando takes his time walking back to the car, gets in quietly, and leans back in his seat, cracking his knuckles.
He places a hand on her knee and she knocks it off.
He has that slice of a grin again, reaching over to turn the keys and start the engine himself. “Yeah, like old times.”