MARTians Read online

  I click the remote and turn away from the blank screen.

  I’ve already had so much time to think today, and the stuff I have to think about is so . . . shapeless, sleep is most attractive. I stretch out flat on the tile floor of the kitchen. It’s the coolest place in the house. So that’s where my AnnaMom finds me, asleep on the kitchen floor, when she comes home hours and hours later.

  AnnaMom is holding a big bag with the Yummy Bunny logo on it, and good smells of ginger and garlic are escaping, even though I know the lids on the food are sealed tight.

  Yummy Bunny is my favorite. It is also more expensive, so we only get takeaway in the big bag with the red-checkered bunny on it on very special occasions.

  “Thanks, AnnaMom! When did they tell you?”

  AnnaMom pauses and looks at me. “Tell me? Tell me what?”

  “That I’m graduated. Graduated! Really! I’ve got my e-tificate of graduation and my first job referral. Surprise!” I don’t have to tell her to be surprised. I can see that she really, really is. She isn’t pretending for the sake of celebration. She would never have dropped the bag full of dinner on the floor unless she was genuinely shocked.

  “Zoë, baby, what?” says AnnaMom, and she holds her arms open. We lock each other into a hug that neither of us wants to break, but I notice that there is a trickle of soup leaking out of the bag, which is wasteful — and messy — so I give the little extra squeeze that signals hug:over and then gather the food up onto the counter while AnnaMom blots the wetness from the floor.

  She looks up from the tiles, which are shining and so clean a person could eat right off them, if they wanted to, which would be a weird thing to want. “Really, Zoë,” says AnnaMom. “Did I hear you right? Did you say you are graduated? With a job referral?”

  “That’s exactly what I said. Two invitations to apply, actually.”

  “Wow! Fantastic! This is huge.”

  I open the lids on the containers and snap the disposable chopsticks apart so we can use them. There is so much food: rice balls and soup and noodles and two boxes of tempura . . . and sticky pickled plums and tiny pink sweets to enjoy with cups of green tea. It’s a crazy feast. A big family celebration. And it’s also confusing, because my AnnaMom didn’t know that I graduated today, so we must also be celebrating something else. The house! The house! We must have sold the house. I wait for my AnnaMom to say it so we can hug again, and probably hop around while we are hugging because Wow! We sold the house.

  But that isn’t what she says.

  “I’m moving,” says AnnaMom.

  “We’re moving?”

  “Tomorrow,” she says. “I’m moving. I was worried, you know, about how it would be for you here, alone, trying to finish school, but . . .”

  “. . . now we can go together?”

  “. . . now it’s going to be so much less complicated. For you. Here. I’m not worried.”

  Me. Here.

  “Eat some tempura before it gets soggy,” says AnnaMom.

  So I do. I pick up a big piece of tempura between the tips of my chopsticks and transport it to my mouth. I’m chewing, but I can’t taste anything. I could be eating a wad of toilet paper deep-fried in a lovely light batter.

  “This way, you can stay here, rent-free, until the foreclosure. And you can keep the flowers green and everything lovely, just in case, you know, the market improves suddenly. Soup?”

  I swallow and take the soupspoon she holds out to me. I can be trusted to live alone but not to feed myself. Ah, AnnaMom. It would be funny if I weren’t so scared.

  We sit together on the slightly uncomfortable couch. We used to have a very comfy couch, but Jyll, the home stager, said it reeked of routine low expectations and had to be replaced immediately if we wanted the house to sell. All furniture tells a story, according to Jyll. When people see a couch like the one she provided, they imagine fun family togetherness. That’s a story that will sell, sell, sell.

  Only it hasn’t yet. So we need to change the story. I assume that Jyll will show up and haul the couch away, because the story of family togetherness, fun or not, has been canceled. I assume this will happen because I have seen the moving vans come and empty out the other houses on the cul-de-sac. AnnaMom and I just sit and don’t say a word about our circumstances.

  We do not say, either of us, what we both know is true: She is the reason we are in this situation. She made a choice a long time ago. She chose life, me, Zoë. And now we are both living with the consequences.

  Anna Meric was a few months older than I am right now when she came to the conclusion she was pregnant. She had tried to come to every other possible conclusion — deadly cancer, anorexia, just losing track of time — but motherhood was headed her direction like a truckload of radioactive bricks, and finally she had to admit it. She admitted it several times, in fact, because confession is good for a person.

  About twelve hours after the last time she confessed it, I was born. A couple hours later, Anna Meric, now my AnnaMom, was filling out forms that would shift the responsibility for me to someone else, who wanted it. This was the course of action proposed by the people in charge, and Anna could see the advantages, really she could. But she refused to sign the papers. Her act of defiance surprised her-own-self as much as anyone. Instead of doing what was obviously the best thing for everyone involved, she demanded the forms that would confirm that I was her daughter and she was my mom. While she was at it, she named me. Zoë, that makes sense; it means life. The Zindleman? That she just made up. It was not a name she borrowed from my father. I did have a father, but his approach to the whole matter of me was to admit his part in this fiasco of irresponsibility and then waive all rights.

  His name was Ed Gorton.

  Gorton isn’t a very musical name.

  I like Zindleman better.

  In some alternative universe, I suppose Ed and Anna got married and I was the first of many children. In some alternative universe, I was never conceived at all. But in this universe, I’m Zoë Zindleman, whose biological father, Ed Gorton, isn’t in the picture.

  Anna Meric started over, although her decision to keep me was a complicating factor. It is hard to make a good impression when you walk into a job interview trailing a streamer of toilet paper. It’s even harder when the toilet paper isn’t stuck to the bottom of a shoe, but is tangled up in the elastic of some barely there underpants along with the hem of a businesslike suit. Anna Meric had the social disadvantage of walking around with her carelessness exposed.

  Somehow she managed to overcome that first impression. She got a job. She worked very, very hard. Then Ed Gorton got kicked in the head by an ostrich. It killed him. It’s an unusual way to die, but not unheard of. The papers he had signed in the hospital established me as his sole beneficiary. We had money enough to move into this fine house in an excellent neighborhood and live happily ever after. If anyone asked, Anna Meric could honestly explain why the daddy wasn’t in the picture with tragic death, which is respectable, although I think she left out the detail about the ostrich.

  “Hey! You! Last girl! Yes. You. Who else?”

  “What?”

  “That bus. It isn’t coming anymore. The bus you are waiting for.”

  “How do you know what bus I’m waiting for?”

  “We rode that bus together for eight years. I lived across the cul-de-sac.”

  “Which cul-de-sac?” I say. There are a thousand, two thousand, three thousand cul-de-sacs. Saying that we lived on the same cul-de-sac — it sounds personal, but it might sound personal to a thousand, two thousand, three thousand girls sitting in bus shelters.

  “Terra Incognita,” he says. “You lived in the beiger house; it is more beige than the other beige house. I lived in the white house.”

  Our house — my house — where I will live alone until I sell it, is painted a color called Aged Pages. It is, I suppose, beiger than the other beige house. I hadn’t really thought of it that way, but then, I hadn’t really tho
ught of the other houses on the cul-de-sac very much at all. There is a white house too, bone white. So he might be right, but I still have no reason to believe that he knows me or that I should listen to what he has to say about the bus.

  “You don’t believe me,” he says. “That’s okay; ask the driver of the next bus. That bus will come in half an hour. That’s fifteen minutes after you should expect the bus that used to go to Terra Incognita but doesn’t go there anymore. There is no bus to Terra Incognita.”

  I do not look right or left. It is broad daylight. I’m in a bus shelter outside the doors of AllMART. There are people all around me who will, I hope, intervene if this crazy person who insists he knows about me does anything more disturbing than talk about the color of house paint.

  What I really hate is that he seems to be right about the bus. The scheduled time comes and goes. AnnaMom’s shoes hurt my feet and her third-best business suit is a sweltering sweatbox. But I look perfect, that’s what AnnaMom said: You look ready for the world, Zoëkins. It’s all about the clothes. I’m not worried. Twirl around. I study the bus map to see which bus I might take that will get me as close as possible to home.

  “That map’s way out of date.”

  I don’t look around. I do not acknowledge him in any way.

  “I can give you a ride. I was going to drive back there today anyway — to pick up some stuff.”

  The bottoms of my feet hurt. Sweat escapes my bra strap and trickles down, down, down until it soaks into the waistband of the tailored skirt.

  “Okay,” I say. It may be that I won’t last one single day on my own in the world. It may be that I have just accepted a ride from a murderous maniac. But it’s a sure thing that I don’t want to stand here in this bus shelter, breathing fumes belched out by buses that are never going to where I want to be.

  “Did you interview with AllMART?” The maniac is making small talk. It’s probably a page in the maniac serial killer handbook: Small talk puts your victim at ease. . . .

  “And Q-MART,” I say, which is true but is also code for “Lots of people will notice if I go missing”— which isn’t as true.

  “Wow. You’re set, then. You get to choose. Choose AllMART. AllMART is the best. He fishes in his back pocket and pulls out an employee ID badge with the distinctive AllMART logo.

  “You say that”— I squint at the name on the badge — “MORT, because you work there. If you worked at Q-MART, you’d think that was the way to go.”

  “Call me Timmer,” he says. “I’m Timmer.”

  “Why does your badge say MORT, then?”

  “It’s an AllMART thing — there’s a system. At work, I’m MORT. To my friends, I’m Timmer. And to prove I am your friend, I’ll tell you two things. First, do not badger the AllMART badger. It’s a bad idea to badger the badger. Second, trust me when I say AllMART is the better choice.”

  “Despite the name badge thing . . .”

  “Despite a lot of things. I’ve been working there for months. I know. I’ve seen.”

  “So, you didn’t graduate yesterday?”

  “Actually, I did. Just like you, but I’ve been working for a long time. The graveyard shift, mostly — and weekends. I got a family hardship waiver.”

  “What’s a family hardship waiver?”

  “Things got hard; they waved. Seriously, you know how it goes.”

  Yes, I do. When I shut my eyes I can still see my AnnaMom waving her tiny everything-is-normal-and-good wave at me before she looked over the steering wheel and said, I’m not worried. I’ll call when I get work. Then she drove away and left me standing by the doors to the employees’ entrance at AllMART.

  He parks in front of the white house on Terra Incognita. The door to that house is wide open.

  “Thank you.” I’m in a hurry to be gone. I don’t look at MORTimmer, but I listen in case his footsteps follow me while I hurry toward my own house. When I get to my door, I glance back. The door to his house is still gaping open, but I can’t see him anywhere. I do not stop to pick the dead daylilies. I do not stop to collect the junk mail. I just hurry to press the buttons on the lock and shut the door behind me.

  Honestly, the house isn’t any emptier today than it was yesterday. The only difference is that today my AnnaMom will not be coming in the door. I am not just alone now; I will be alone, maybe, always. I kick off my mom’s shoes, but I do not carry them upstairs to place neatly on the shoe rack in her closet. Doing that would only remind me that these shoes are alone too, because the rest of AnnaMom’s shoes are gone.

  I have spent the day in AnnaMom’s shoes, and it sucks.

  AllMART is on one side of fourteen lanes of traffic, counting on- and off-ramps. Q-MART is on the other. If the stores were gunfighters, which they aren’t, they would be squinting at each other, waiting for the other one to flinch. There is no flinching in mega-merchandising.

  When I interviewed, I had to go from one store to the other.

  It would have been easy to go from one store to the other with a car, but AnnaMom and the car were far, far away. After my first interview, I set out across the parking lot. First winding through row after row of parked vehicles, then straight across the shimmering desert of empty parking, and up and up and up to a pedestrian bridge suspended like a spiderweb over the interstate. I felt so tiny, like an ant looking for sugar. Did others like me really build all this? The lanes, the lazy-loop curves of the exit ramps, the stores full of everything we want?

  When big trucks with trains of three or four loads swept under the pedestrian bridge, they pushed hot wind up and under my skirt. Commuter cars scooted along bright and light as crumpled candy wrappers.

  I remembered being in the car with my AnnaMom and feeling the gusts of passing trucks. We came here to do our shopping every week, but I never noticed the bridge. I never looked up and saw any people marching like ants from the AllMART half of the world to the Q-MART half. I never looked up and saw an ant person like me, creeping along meeting other bedraggled, trudging ants. None of us smiling. All of our faces smudged with sweat and diesel soot, all of our steps made on sore feet.

  I wondered if the others considered jumping off, falling into the traffic. I had those thoughts, but it wasn’t even possible. The pedestrian skyway is built inside a wire-mesh tube. The dirty wind and the hot sun can get in, but nothing bigger than a butterfly can come and go as it pleases.

  Before my second interview, I wiped my face, straightened my back, and pretended there were no blisters on my feet. After the interview, after I stepped out the door and into the parking lot, I gave up. I cried, with good reason. I had to cross the bridge again. I had to cross the bridge to get to the bus stop.

  So I cried. I cried the whole way from one side to the other. And then, when I got to the bus stop, MORTimmer told me there was no bus to Terra Incognita.

  I climb the stairs and go into my bathroom. I peel off the third-best suit and drop it on the floor in front of the shower. I skin off my underwear and toss it into the sink.

  During both interviews, I was complimented on my professional dress. It expressed maturity and seriousness. Very positive. However. However, the dress code for an entry-level person with my qualifications is not so rigorous. The uniform is black slacks and white polo that has the AllMART/Q-MART logo smack over my heart. Heels aren’t recommended. In fact, they are discouraged — workplace safety, yes?

  Oh, yes, health and safety, very important.

  They drew blood. First AllMART from my left arm, and then Q-MART from my right arm. I watched the vacu-tainers fill up with me, dark, red, liquid me. The cells inside will whisper about what I ate for dinner and if I have a secret inclination to be diseased. Corporations have the right to know those things about me, just like they have the right to my school records, aptitude test scores, and psychological profile. The little tubes were whisked away. Then gloved hands (lavender at AllMART, green at Q-MART) pressed a cotton ball on the place where my secrets leaked out and patched me up
with elastic tape.

  The possibility that I wouldn’t be hired for an entry-level job — that was never mentioned. Still, I suppose it might happen. And if it does, I don’t know what comes after that.

  These are, again, uncomfortable, shapeless thoughts. I step into the shower, and the pinging needles of water drive them away. My shampoo smells of oranges and ginger, just like it did yesterday and the day before that. And my washcloth still has pink and white stripes.

  I wrap myself in the old towel that we hide away in case someone will be viewing the house. The towels on the racks, like the little soaps by the sink, never get used. They are props. I’ve smelled the soaps shaped like roses, and I’m convinced that using them would give a person a rash, so I don’t feel deprived. And as for this towel, it has been to the pool and had a lot of other adventures the perfect towels never will. Right now, this adventure towel gets to be what I wear instead of clothes.

  I hang the suit in my closet. At least there it won’t look as abandoned as it would stranded in AnnaMom’s empty walk-in. She used to laugh about how the bedroom she had when she was a kid was smaller than the closet she had now. But now she doesn’t have a bedroom or a closet; she is in some place, driving down the highway. If she sleeps in a bed, it will be a strange bed. She is between homes, homeless.

  I have been in that place too, but I don’t remember it. I was a baby back then, when Anna Meric left that other home where I had grown from a bean into a significant burden.

  I think maybe Anna Meric always had more confidence in the future than I have. She’s invented a new life for herself, found a new home, a couple of times. But I was always just along for the ride. I never had to decide what happened next. Even now, all I have to do is put some clothes on, go downstairs to the kitchen, and pull last night’s Yummy Bunny leftovers out of the fridge, but I’m just standing here wrapped in an old towel, wishing I would hear the rattle of the garage door as it opened. And then AnnaMom would come in and say, Zoë, baby, I’m home.

  “Whoever was knocking at the door didn’t want to stop.”