Page 30 - the Noise November 2017

Connie Can by Jen Turrell
After the divorce, Alice Tillbirth’s mother became a real estate agent. She was surprised by how easy it was. A course and an exam earned her a license, then she set about setting up shop. The first thing she did was change her mar- ried name back to her maiden name, back to the Chinese name she left behind: Khan. Connie Khan.
“Why don’t you change your name to Tillbirth, Mom? Then we could have the same name.”
Connie’s eyes, usually bright and shiny as pebbles wet from a stream, turned into two dull, dry stones, the way they always did when Alice said anything about her father.
“No,” Connie said with a final- ity like death. “That is a name I will never claim.”
Alice dropped the subject like a hot lava rock. But secretly she wished they had the same name. It was a pain to explain why their names were different. At the same time, she never wanted to be a Khan. The name made her think of the second Star Trek movie. That scene when Khan put the horrible larva in Chekov’s helmet. Chekov bled from the ear as it crawled inside and controlled his mind. Alice shuddered and turned her attention back to what her mother was saying.
“The important thing in this game,” Connie said, “is name recognition. Just you wait, I have a strategy all worked out.”
Alice listened and nodded but said nothing. What else could she do with a statement like that? After all, Alice was a high school senior, head cheerleader, newspaper editor, class vice president and probably valedictorian. She had worries of her own. She didn’t have time for her mother’s midlife crisis. And yet, just like driving past a car crash, Alice couldn’t turn her head away.
The next thing Connie did with her settlement was give herself a make-over. She joined the gym and bought work-out clothes that made Alice do a double-take every time she saw her mother getting out of the newly leased SUV in double striped track suit bottoms and a spandex halter top.
In her former, pre-divorced life, Connie was modest. Not just modest in terms of her body, but modest in terms of how much space and time she took up in the world. She lived her life as one big apology for living. But now she was taking up space and time. She was speaking loud, being direct and asking for attention. She was even showing off her body, which was in fantastic shape for her age, but all this was so entirely new that Alice worried she might be going too far too fast with her changes. Especially when she cut her hair.
For all of Alice’s life, Connie had long, single-length, Asian- straight, deeply black, streaked-with-grey hair, which she had always wore in one of two styles. Either it was in a low bun at the nape of her neck for work and house work, or a high bun on the top of her head for special occasions. Without warning the long hair got chopped, layered, bleached and dyed several shades of highlighted red. Her finger and toe nails, which Alice had never seen colored, were suddenly a very shiny shade of vampire red. Even the shape and size of her straight, full, scowling eyebrows became thin and arched, giving her face an always surprised look. The day she came home from the salon with the new hair and nails, she also bought a complete line of make-up for her face. In her old life, Connie Lansdale hardly if ever wore a bit of powder on her nose. When Alice came home from school she was shocked speechless by the sudden transformation. And still more was yet to come.
At least she wasn’t wallowing in post-divorce depression anymore, Alice told herself. She seemed to be getting over Curt. Curt Lansdale. That was his name. He was tall and broad with thinning brown hair, rugged weathered features and hard, sharp, icy blue eyes. From the start Alice thought there was something a little bit cruel about his eyes, like he could watch a puppy drown without changing his expression. But her mother never saw it. Three months after they met they were setting the wedding date. Three months after that they moved into his big house on the hill and left Alice and his two children, Trevor and Lacy, in the care of an elderly neighbor to set out on their two-week honeymoon to Hawaii. They came back tanned and relaxed. Connie Lansdale looked truly happy at the time, so Alice kept her dislike of Curt to herself. After all, she wasn’t the one marrying him.
She also kept her wariness of Trevor and Lacy to herself. Something about them both- ered her. They were always so nervous. All eyes and skinny limbs. She felt them quietly watching everything, spying on everyone, hardly ever saying a word. It was creepy. During the 6 years of her mother’s marriage, Alice rarely saw the family for meals when they could all sit down together. She kept herself busy with ballet, cheerleading, other after school ac- tivities, or she stayed alone in her room to read and do homework. She couldn’t remember even once spending an evening in the living room with Curt and his kids.
Alice thought Curt was a hard mean man so she avoided him as much as a step-daugh- ter can. Trevor and Lacy bore the brunt of his foul temper. As they grew over the years they both seemed to fold in on themselves, to become more hunched instead of taller, as though they were trying to be smaller, less visible, harder-to-hit targets. Alice felt sorry for them, but never enough to involve herself on their behalf. After all, they were his kids, and she had enough to worry about just making herself scarce.
Sometimes Alice used to worry about her mother when she heard them fighting in the big master suite up on the 2nd floor. Up to a point it always seemed that Connie could hold her own. Alice would hold her breath, lying in the bathtub, trying to catch her mother’s witty retorts, while keeping score. Verbally her mother always scored higher, but eventu- ally she faltered emotionally and once she started crying, the battle was lost. Alice hated the sound of her mother crying. It sounded so helpless and pathetic. She wanted to shout up, “Stop crying! Stand up for yourself!” Instead she usually turned on the tap to add more hot water to the bath. Sometimes she could still hear Curt shouting through the sound of rushing water. He hated Connie’s crying even more than Alice did. It spurred him on to greater cruelty.
At least Curt was hardly ever there. He owned a small chain of Mexican food restaurants, one fancy sit down place and three others with booths and drive-thrus. He was a wealthy man who trusted no one, especially not the Mexicans he employed, so he spent most of his time going from restaurant to restaurant, trying to micro-manage all four businesses him- self. Connie immediately chipped in and started working all hours at the various locations.
Once the honeymoon was over, the honeymoon was really over. Because of the high turn-over rate at all four of his restaurants, Curt and Connie both were constantly filling in for people who didn’t show up and scrambling to hire new unskilled workers to come in and replace them. There was forever a help wanted sign up at all three of the fast food plac- es. Curt’s few romantic gestures from the early days of their dating disappeared instantly upon their return from HawaiI and were replaced by foul moods, rough language and no small amount of late night drinking. Connie was sometimes more of an unpaid slave than a wife, but she always focused on the fact that they were building the business for their fu- tures, so she worked hard and did not complain. When things were going badly and Connie was closing up one of the restaurants, sometimes Alice wouldn’t see her mother for days on end. When things were going well Connie spent all her time catching up on the books from when things were going badly. But Connie and Alice both liked living in the big house, and when Alice turned 16, Curt helped her buy and finance her first car. As much as she disliked him overall, she had to appreciate him doing that for her.
But now all of that was over. The very day Connie told Curt she was leaving; she went straight out and rented a crappy trailer in that awful trailer park in the cheap part of town. She also went straight to the bank and withdrew three months’ worth of rent and living expenses and opened an account in her name alone. For a moment, she was tempted to take more of the money with her, but was worried that it would look bad in court. At least she had his adultery on her side. If it hadn’t been for catching him in the storeroom with that little bitch of a waitress, she might have put up with the humiliation and insults forever. Being cheated on was one thing Connie would not stand.
What really upset her was that since the divorce, Connie had seen them out in public together. He actually took her out in public, dressing her up, pulling out her chair, looking at her all smiles and warmth, showing her off, treating her well. She’d even heard through the grapevine (after all, it was a small town), that the bitch wasn’t even working in the restau- rant anymore, that she’d moved in with him and wasn’t working at all. All those years that Connie worked in every possible capacity in the restaurants, covering for bus boys, wait- resses, cooks, dishwashers, and here with this perky little 26-year-old with streaky blonde hair and an IQ to match her bust size, taking Connie’s place. But instead of working her ass off for the family’s good, she got to sit home and play princess. Just the thought made Con- nie’s blood boil.
All those years at the restaurant, Connie never seemed to care what she looked like at all, and now all of a sudden, this. A brand new Connie, out of nowhere.
“Presentation of the person is just as important as the presentation of the house. You’ve got to look good to sell homes in this town.”
Connie got her tiny, tea-stained teeth whitened. She bought a whole new set of profes- sional work clothes, and started some sort of skin treatment that slightly puffed out the skin of her face and neck. Alice could see that it pushed out the age lines, but it also left her looking a little swollen.
Connie looked younger and started acting it too. Suddenly she wanted Alice to be her BFF. She tried to gossip with her about male movie stars and men they saw around town. She even suggested they have beauty days together.
“After all, we are two single girls living without men.”
It all made Alice wonder what Connie was like when she was her age. What had she been like as a teenager? Something like this? But no, Alice remembered quickly that Connie had lost both her parents around the same age that she was now, and only a year or so after they moved to Guam. Her mother cleaned house for the family of an office on the base, and they kept Connie with them when she was orphaned. She wasn’t out on the street, but Alice knew that her life had not been carefree and easy. Alice also knew that if it weren’t for Guam, weren’t for the fact that she had been born on US Territory soil, the two of them may never have ended up in the US at all. Maybe this was her mother’s time to finally get to act like an American teenager.
30 • NOVEMBER 2017 | the NOISE arts & news | www.thenoise.us