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By Elizabeth Gonzalez James
She was watching an old rerun of Three’s Company when the power went out. The television snapped off with a slight fizz, and John Ritter’s smiling face greened in the electric afterglow before fading to black. The ceiling fan above the living room slowed and stopped. The air conditioner cut off and its rattle echoed through the ductwork like an old, stuttering car going around a bend. She pushed buttons on the remote, jiggled cords, flipped switches, raised and lowered the little plastic lever on the thermostat in the fantasy that she could bring the AC back, that she held any dominion over the circumstances in her parents’ house.
She poured the last of a pitcher of blue Flavor Aid into a plastic cup and drank it in the dim kitchen. It wasn’t yet eleven in the morning. Her parents’ shared Buick wouldn’t screech its way onto the cul-de-sac for seven hours. Already her forehead sheened and the skin below her small breasts was humid under the drape of an oversized shirt. South Texas summer seeped around the aluminum frame windows, stole through the places where the walls were coming apart from the ceilings, surfaced through the carpeted floor, leeched down through the asphalt roof tiles, and filled the still space of the house unacknowledged but threatening, like pretending not to see a man holding a gun.
Seven hours. The words darkened long shadows over her like a prison sentence. She dropped the cup in the sink and opened the refrigerator again, sifted through the cans and packets in the pantry. Once and only once she had discovered a half-eaten bag of gummi bears thrown in with the spices, and she liked to imagine it had been left there by a traveler from another time, a little gift just for her, a magic hand reaching through the void to show her that magic was real, and that she was not alone. She believed that if she peered hard enough into the space between the cans of tomato sauce and the plastic tub that held the french fry oil, she could discover worlds, things unseen, delights beyond reckoning. But today she saw only the stippled surface of the pantry wall, an archipelago emerging out of choppy waters, and nothing more.
The coffee can where her parents kept their spare change sat on top of the refrigerator. When she emptied it onto the kitchen table she was disappointed to discover it had already been gleaned of its quarters and dimes. One dollar and twenty-seven cents. A Dr. Pepper and a Blow Pop. Maybe two. She squinted through the window at a thermometer hanging off the worn wooden fence: ninety-seven degrees. And Circle K was at least a mile up the road.
She slipped on one of the training bras her mother had forced on her the previous summer, before she started sixth grade. It wasn’t that she was embarrassed by the bras or by her lack of breasts, but it was the way her mother looked at her whenever she mentioned things like bras and tampons and birth control pills—with a raised eyebrow and a gravid smile like she was getting initiated into some great society. Even at eleven she was smart enough to know that any community built on shared genitalia was going to be thinly allied at best.
The sun was blinding white outside, like the phosphorus her science teacher had burned once in a demonstration of reactivity. She felt that her skin might spontaneously ignite, too. Her brown hair clung to the back of her neck and she brought it up and down off her damp skin in a meek attempt at fanning herself. Her bike had had a flat tire for months and no one knew where the needle for the pump had rolled away to. She rode the bike down the driveway anyway but only made it past her neighbor’s mailbox when she jumped down and gave up. By the time she got the bike back in the garage she saw red splotches in front of her eyes and her forearms tingled with burn. She looked back at the front door, but she already knew the shape the day would take in there.
She put the zippered wallet with one dollar and twenty-seven cents in her back pocket and turned left to leave the cul-de-sac. She felt like a character in a choose-your-story novel. If you go to the store turn to page 42. If you stay at home turn to page 9. She imagined herself splitting from herself, one version turning left while the other went back in the house and drifted listless as a hot ghost from room to room. She’d always used scraps of paper to keep track of her place in those books so she could read through each storyline, know every possibility contained at the end of each forking path. It was thrilling to imagine how many outcomes could be contained within a life, but also unnerving, the difference between commanding a space fleet and dying in the stomach of an alien hinging on no more than the turn of a page.
She wished she’d brought a hat. Sunglasses. A paper fan. Her family had only lived in Corpus Christi a year, in this neighborhood of dead end streets beaded like grapes off arterial stems. A hot wind drove down the street and blew her hair straight back and she closed her eyes to pretend for a second she was at the beach, that it was ocean waves she could hear instead of the distant whoosh of traffic on the highway. The cul-de-sacs were like islands she thought, each one ending abruptly on a vast and fallow cotton field, little teardrops of civilization marooned inside neat brown flows of dirt spilling to the horizon. And the neighborhood of cul-de-sacs was itself an island, floating far down from the main road. Driving to the mall the Buick always sailed past miles of identical fields containing identical dollops of neighborhoods, a pattern that seemed to repeat no matter the magnification, zoomed in or out.
She had a brief fright wondering if somewhere not far away there was an identical neighborhood where an identically sweaty middle schooler walked to an identical Circle K to buy an identically foolish lunch. She’d meet the other girl along the road. The other girl would ask her where she was headed. They’d walk together. The other girl would be cagy with details—her name, address, parents’ occupations—but she’d be so deft at changing the subject, so flattering and interesting, that by the time they’d arrive at the store and select their drinks they’d be best friends. Then they’d walk back the same way they’d come. At the turnoff to the correct cul-de-sac, the fifth on the right, the other girl would stop and say something like, Well I’ve got to go home now. See you later. And the two girls would discover they were both heading for the same house. They would fight—My house! No, mine!—and the other girl would push her to the ground and run inside and emerge with her parents who would stare at her unknowing, asking Sweetheart, where do you live? And then the story would be over, the other girl having succeeded in unseating the original and stealing her home, her parents, her life. But where would the original girl go?
She loved stories that had a delicious strangeness, like lying in bed and seeing an eerie blue light outside your window, but knowing you could call your parents at any moment to come see what it was. But most stories always ended before she knew for a fact what would happen next. She could guess, but she felt it was so much better to know. If she ever wrote a story she decided she would tell the reader exactly what happened:
After losing her home and her parents the original girl would wander the cul-de-sacs for the rest of the night, making absolutely sure she hadn’t gone to the wrong house. She’d doze a few hours on a pile of cardboard out back of H-E-B and in the morning take a bus downtown to the bayfront. She’d beg change from tourists and at nightfall would sneak onto a shrimp boat. She’d live like this for years, vessel to vessel, shrimping and fishing, catching tarpon and black drum, but one night a storm would overtake her boat, and her last thought before she sank beneath the waves would be a question: Would the other girl die at the same instant, the two of them symbiotically linked, two ends of one string?
One, two, three, four—red vinyl yard signs dotted the road, BUSH COUNTRY ‘94 declared in tall white letters like church steeples. This was a neighborhood that loved signs and sigils, banners proclaiming Spring, another SuperBowl win for the Cowboys, a daughter on the JV cheerleading squad, love of Jesus Christ the Redeemer, mini billboards advertising the dearest identities uniting the people inside all the identical brick houses. Corpus Christi, body of Christ. Something about living in or on Christ’s body made people wish to declare themselves. It still surprised her how the names on the big vinyl signs had changed since they’d left Zapata and moved east. Lopez was now Wheatley, Salinas was Kocurek, Ortega was Diffenbach. And the girl found that she had changed in the move, too. With blue eyes and freckles she’d been called a white girl in Zapata. But with a father born on the southern bank of the Río Grande, and a last name originating in Andalusia six hundred years prior, the girl was informed by her new classmates that she was Mexican. Something they had too much of already, said a boy with small eyes and a cruel little mouth like a plastic elf. She’d rolled her eyes and told the boy to shut up but she worried ever since that whether she was white or Mexican would always be up for public debate, subject to the shifting breeze of popular opinion. But as she didn’t know the answer herself, she felt she couldn’t really complain.
Dogs periodically gambolled down driveways to bark or sniff her ankles, but she saw no one else. The air was thick with humidity. Like breathing through a wet washcloth, she heard her mother say once. Cicadas trilled overhead, interspersed with mourning dove coos that sounded to the girl like mothers calling their children back home. Sweat ran into her eyes and rained down her cheeks like tears. Imagined water pooled in street corner mirages and she could taste the bubblesweet joy of a Dr. Pepper on her tongue. But every time she looked up the Circle K sign was still so far away, like the wind was blowing her back towards home, like the space between her neighborhood and the main road was expanding, like she and the sign were two rafts on a deep sea circling, circling, never getting nearer.
She passed a brick house with sour green trim and tried to peer into the windows, but all the blinds were sealed tight against the day. The girl who lived there wore real gold hoops and let her welita braid her brilliant black hair in the mornings before school. She’d sat with the braided girl on the school bus and the two had shared Pop Tarts and divulged which eighth graders they thought were cute. They went to the skating rink and sucked blue jawbreakers that stained their lips and teeth. They passed notes in the hallway and waited for each other at their lockers before lunch. Then the braided girl went to visit cousins in the Valley over spring break and came back in overalls, purple lipstick, and one wisp of hair curled and shellacked to her cheek like a jetty. I don’t do that baby shit no more, the braided girl said loudly one afternoon at lunch. Why don’t you ask some fifth graders to go roller skating with you? The braided girl hadn’t said, White bitch, perhaps hadn’t even thought it, but the girl heard it now bellying in the soupy air, a sustained bass note that drowned out the cicadas. She imagined the braided girl sitting on the floor of her bedroom watching cable and eating cookies and painting her toenails with glittering polish and the thought made her pick up a rock and hurl it toward the front door. She took off running down the street before anyone could answer.
The sun was lower. It hung directly behind the Circle K sign so that she could no longer see the logo, only the suggestion of white and red against a blinding orange halo. If the original girl drowned, she thought, then the other girl would certainly die too. Their lives depended on one another, as though they were each made of two disparate halves that couldn’t survive without the other. Maybe the girls wouldn’t fight over the house. Maybe they would find a way to share the same life, taking turns, one sleeping in the bed while the other hid out in the backyard. A mysterious twin would really be the greatest thing that could happen to a person, she thought. Someone who shared your whole life, your every thought, who knew you down to your DNA. If she saw her twin standing down at the end of the street she’d run to meet her, she’d shower her with attention, bring her back to her house and give her first dibs in the closet every morning. Two ends of one string only meant the string might be tied to something.
The sun was still dropping, the day swelling into a hot, windless night. The sky was a lustrous swirl of orange and purple, red and blue. Street lights buzzed awake. Her mouth was gummy with thirst and there was a burning, gnawing feeling seeping up her stomach into her breastbone. Still she was no closer to the store. The sign shone in the darkening sky like the North Star. She thought about going back, that her parents must already be home, that they must have gone down to the power company and paid the bill and that the air conditioner was at that moment slowly filling the house with frigid offering. But she didn’t turn around. She kept walking with limp hair plastered to her forehead and neck. The night unrolled shapeless before her in a million directions.
She could see someone in the shadows coming toward her, heard their sneaker feet crushing dead cottonwood leaves. No cars came and went out of the driveways, but inside the houses televisions clicked on, wan blue light spilling from behind every blinded window. A skittering breeze turned into a great gust that shook the proud vinyl signs, flattening their words to the ground. But they straightened a second later as the gust continued east and away, and the cul-de-sacs were quiet again save the white words screaming from the signs and a trace of canned laughter echoing out of the blue screens like tropical birds high in their island trees. She thought it was beautiful to imagine living in the body of Christ. And didn’t that mean deliverance was always there, wanting her to grab it?
The person was paused on a corner, waiting. She couldn’t see their face. They were only an interruption to the darkness, black upon darker black. If you keep walking, turn to page 77. If you turn around, go to page 8. She pushed her hair off her forehead, licked her dry lips, and jogged down the street, eager to catch them.
Before becoming a writer Elizabeth Gonzalez James was a waitress, a pollster, an Avon lady, and an opera singer. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Idaho Review, Ploughshares Blog, The Rumpus, and elsewhere, and have received numerous Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. Her debut novel, Mona at Sea, was a finalist in the 2019 SFWP Literary Awards judged by Carmen Maria Machado, and is forthcoming, Summer 2021. Originally from South Texas, Elizabeth now lives with her family in Oakland, California.