Elizabeth Brus: LINA AND NINA • Cleaver Magazine

Elizabeth Brus
LINA AND NINA

When I sucked on Tiana, pulling the skin up in my mouth like Fiona told me you do it, it left a mark that was darker than even her skin was, black against brown like a blob of mud. Her skin felt different than mine too, creamy and smelled, not in a gross way but smelled like mine didn’t. I told my mom she smelled different, and my mom said I shouldn’t tell anyone that because it wasn’t right to say. I said, well, it’s true, and she said, Jasmine, do not let me catch you saying that to Christiana’s mother, or you’ll be in big trouble. Fiona, my positively annoying sister said, yeah, deep shit, Jas, and my mom had made her lips real tight together like she does, before shoveling some peas in her mouth.

Tiana had sucked on me too, a hickey Fiona called it, something Fiona does with Mark behind the fence in the backyard. She put her lips right above where my nips were, because I knew my mom would yell, so I pulled my shirt down some so she could do it where it would be covered up. I layed down flat on my bed and she crawled on top of me, and we giggled for going on ten minutes, maybe even going on fifteen before she did it.

Tiana comes from the city, like she says it the city. She says she’s going to leave this stupid town one day and go back to see her dad. She lived on the ninth floor and took an elevator every day just to get to her room. She was only a block away from Central Park, but when I told her I didn’t know what that was, she laughed at me, laughed You don’t know what Central Park is? Shoooot, she said that all the time, slowly and quiet. Shooooot. She said it the first time she came over to my house, her arms crossed over her chest, standing on one leg with her purple sneaker on her knee like a flamingo, Shoooot, this neighborhood is just like Ohio. Her aunt lives in Ohio and she and her mom had been there once, Ohio, and it was just like this, with the yard and the big street with no traffic.

I’ve been to the city, only once, with my mom and dad and Fiona, to see the big Christmas tree, and we even took a cab. Tiana said I didn’t know anything about the city, and she had been all the way from her house on a hundred something street to the roller skating rink in the Bronx. She had seen people who sleep on the street because they can’t even get in a house and she had seen crackheads and smackheads who are people that do drugs. She had seen bloods. Bloods are the names for people with red handkerchiefs on their heads, and she had seen them.

◊

This was the third time Tiana had come over in a week. My mom says she likes Tiana coming here more than me going there, cause there’s more room. Tiana lives above the U-Wash U-Wear Laundromat, which is a place where people who don’t have their own washers in the basement can pay to use the ones there. It’s run by these really really weird Chinese people, and we make faces at them sometimes before we go up, pressing our faces against the grimy glass so they can see. It’s only three blocks away from our school, next to the shoe store and the stationery store where we steal spider rings when the man isn’t looking. Her house is all on the third floor, and you can even go on the roof, where you can spit on the people on the sidewalk if you duck back real quick. She has this see-through silver sheet thing that hangs down from a ring and covers her bed, like a princess, and a massively massive Barbie Dream House, and a whole trunk full of Barbies and Barbie cars. My mom won’t let me have Barbies or dolls. Fiona says they give me a bad self-image, but she won’t let me have G.I. Joes neither. I have lots of Legos.

Last time she came over was when we did the hickeys, like a couple of days ago. They were faded now but you could still see them. Today was the first time Tiana could stay for dinner, so my mom was making spaghetti with meatballs, what Tiana liked, and none of the gross fish she served sometimes, with the eyes. Tiana had done a little dance when I told her it was spaghetti, saying like this, spa-ghet-ti and meeeeaat balls, spa-ghet-ti and meeeeaat balls, dipping her head back and forth and shaking her shoulders. Soon we could have a sleepover, and if we got to do that, we were going to sneak to the woods behind my house at night and have a say-once where you get to talk to the dead, and I was going to talk to my cat.

I was trying to take apart my Lego ship, and Tiana was standing by the mirror, with her shirt pulled up to her shoulders. It was my shirt, pink with Dream Girl written on it in black. It looked more pink on her than me. She was pinching her nips, trying to pull them away from her chest.

“I saw my ma without her bra on once,” she said.

I tried to picture Miss Regina all fleshy like the woman in Fatal Attraction, this secret illegal movie that Fiona let me watch with her and Mark one night only if I promised not to tell no one. “Really? What’d it look like?”

“Like they do on TV, but these stick out more and are more stretched out.”

She pinched them and jumped a little, giggling. I went up to the mirror and pulled my shirt up too, and tried it.

“Ow.” I rubbed them like her.

“Don’t look at mine, you perv. Shooot.” She pulled her shirt down and turned to face me, her arms crossed, her eyebrows pushed together.

“Perv,” she said again, louder, and pointed her finger at me, pushed it on my chest so it hurt.

“Quit it.” I pushed her finger away. “What does perv mean anyway.”

She put her hands on her hips and pulled her head over to one side.

“It means, dummy, a person who looks at another person in a creepy way.”

She stepped forward quickly and grabbed my cheeks, too close, squashing my cheeks together. “Pervpervperv!”

She giggled and opened her eyes real wide close to mine. I shrieked so loud I almost didn’t hear my mom calling, “Dinner, dinner, you two giggle girls!”

◊

Dad was quiet at dinner. Fiona had on a turtleneck and kept pulling it up. Mom pulled a chair up next to mine for Tiana but didn’t move my place setting over, so she was squashed in between me and Dad. We ate on the front porch with the screens, cause last weekend Dad glazed the table over with shiny stuff to protect it, but underneath these sharp pieces would stab you in the leg if you weren’t careful. I hate eating on the front porch cause here’s where the terrible crickets live, and you can hear them crying all around you. I never ever come in the front door, but when I do come in the front door I can make it in two large leaps if I run. When I was five and lying down on the couch that used to be in this corner, a cricket burped real loud and jumped right on my face, massively big, and stayed there for going on five minutes. Tiana says there’s no crickets in the city, only some bugs that can’t jump, which sounds a lot better.

“Do you want any salad, Chris-ti-a-na?” my mom asked.

She said all the spaces evenly, like that. Tiana shook her head. I stepped on her foot. “No thank you,” she said, into her spaghetti.

“Jasmine doesn’t like salad, either. She won’t eat anything green, no matter how much we try.” My mom laughed. “Can you believe that! Do you eat your vegetables, Chris-ti-a-na?”

We all had to wait while Tiana finished chewing and swallowing her meatball. She had sauce on her lip. Mom was leaned over the table, smiling really bright like she does, waiting for her response. I saw Fiona roll her eyes and jam her fork into her plate, causing the edge to tip a bit.

“Watch it,” my dad said to Fiona, in the voice that means he’s looking for someone to smack. “You’ll clean that up if you spill.” A cricket burped loud, right behind Fiona.

Tiana wiped her mouth and looked like she was thinking hard. “I like carrots,” she said finally. I pulled my feet underneath me on the chair just in case the cricket was coming closer.

“Well, that’s better than Jasmine here!” My mom leaned back and smiled again, and we all chewed. She was too skinny, my mother, even though she ate bowls of ice cream every night and wouldn’t let me. Her boobs were like saggy tennis balls, not like Miss Regina’s, up high and bigger. Sometimes my dad yelled at her, but not a lot. I tell people my parents don’t kiss each other just so they’ll look at me sad, but it’s not true cause he kisses her all the time, big ones all over her face.

My dad shoved a massive meatball bite in his mouth, out of the extra big ones my mom makes for him, because he works so hard and puts the food on the table she says, even though he just comes and sits down and she’s the one who puts food on the table. He took a big swig of his Coke and then banged it down.

“Hey, did Michael Jordan come today, Mom?” Any time now the Halloween outfit was supposed to come in the mail, with all the colors, and the cape.

She put her fork down. “Jasmine, don’t call him that, don’t be silly!” Her voice was too high.

“Wha,” I said with my mouth full, trying to swallow. “The mailman?”

“Yes, you know better than that, our mailman—that’s just—” She shook her head real quick back and forth to stop her sentences. Tiana sighed but I don’t think she got it neither. “Why can’t I call him by his name?” I asked.

Fiona was taking a gulp of her drink and choked like you do when you’re laughing, and the Coke dripped on her sweatshirt, down on her shoulder. “Damn it,” she said, grabbing her napkin.

“Fiona! We do not curse in this house!” Mom glared at Fiona, and then snapped her head real quick to me.

“It’s not really his name, Jasmine. Michael Jordan is a very talented basketball player.”

I frowned. “But we call–”

“Jas, just shut up!” Fiona stared at me mean, and I think she looks like a frog when she makes that face. Fiona the ugly frog.

“Well then what is his real—”

“Jasmine.” My dad used that deep voice that made everybody shut up, and we did.

◊

“Your dad is scary,” Tiana whispered as we stood up from the table. Fiona had raced up on her giraffe legs to her room like usual, and my parents were in the kitchen. “And Fiona has yellow teeth.”

I giggled and almost dropped the plate on the floor and so I giggled more, and then Tiana raised her hand up like she was going to throw her plate down too, her other hand over her mouth to make her laughing quiet.

“Be careful with those dishes, giggle girls!” My mom’s voice was too squeaky, like we were practically four or something. I pretended to throw the dish down again and we both mashed our hands against our faces. I could hear my dad’s mumbling voice and my mom’s shhh, shhh over it.

“Girls, you better be acting good. Come in and put your dishes on the counter, and go back outside to play until Tiana’s mommy comes to pick her up.”

“O-kay…” I called and put my finger over my lips to Tiana. We walked in like we were nuns, slow and holding out our plates in front of us. We put them on the counter and then clasped our hands together like nuns on TV do and bowed to each other.

“Girls,” said my dad in his smacking voice, so we hurried out.

I got an idea though, so we banged our feet like we were leaving the porch and slammed the porch door, only we stayed on the inside to listen. We knelt down real quiet, and I was brave even with the crickets, and Tiana pressed her hands over her mouth so hard her shoulders were going up and down laughing, so I pressed my hands over her too.

“…I know, Gwen, did I…”

Gwen was what my dad called my mom. It was hard to hear them talking, so we walked like crabs on our hands across the floor, looking back and forth for crickets. Tiana’s shoe squeaked once and we froze, but they didn’t hear so we came closer. I squeezed Tiana’s arm so hard she made an ow face, and my heart sound was all the way up in my ears and my head.

Then I had to laugh so hard I started gasping, and Tiana waved her hands at me trying to get me to stop, so I was going to crab back to the door to the yard, and my dad said, “Okay, fine, that’s fine, all I can say is when she’s older, if she ever brings a Black boy home, it better be to mow the fucking lawn.”

His laugh bumbled deep and long in his throat. My jaw dropped just like people’s do on TV, because he said the f—

Tiana’s grip on my arm loosened, and I saw Miss Regina was there to pick Tiana up, on the porch. She had her arms crossed over her chest.

◊

At school the next day, Tiana had what Miss Roberts, my teacher, called a sour face, because her mouth was all together like she ate something sour, but what it really means is a sad face. Her mom dragged her away so quick I didn’t even get to have my shirt back, her purse swinging around when she moved her arm, saying that f-word all over the place, saying to herself white trash big-utts, which Fiona says means racist, which she says means I won’t get to see Tiana no more. And then she couldn’t sit next to me like regular in class, and Miss Roberts pulled me aside and said that for now we were not allowed to talk.

I ate my lunch in the bathroom instead of in the cafeteria, because I couldn’t sit with Tiana, and Ellie Henderson wouldn’t let me sit next to her neither, because I wrote her a note last week that said Dear Ellie, we’re never speaking to you again for the rest of our lives because you always wear the same pants everyday, love Jasmine and Tiana.

So for a week or a month or something I ate my lunch in the bathroom, and Tiana and Miss Roberts both knew it, because Tiana came in one day and saw me, and Miss Roberts came in to check on me every day but didn’t make me leave. It smelled nasty so I sat on the window sill to look out and breathe, and I could see Tiana playing kickball with Marisol and Julia on the blacktop, who lived in a house all on a third floor too, above the Central Diner. She picked Marisol always for class pairs, and I got stuck doing math with many sceperosis boy who walked with his leg turned all the way in, or Mallory who didn’t talk and who rolled down the lawn by herself during recess and sometimes came into class with grass all in her pockets.

The only good thing about that terrible, terrible, terrible time was that annoying Fiona was nicer to me and even let me sit in her room with my Legos a few times when she was doing homework, as long as I didn’t ask her any questions.

◊

Then Tiana came into the bathroom one day and faced me, her sneaker on her knee like a flamingo, and waited.

“What is it?” I said finally, because she wanted me to talk first.

She scratched her scalp, real hard between the braids that stayed on her head. “I’m not mad at you anymore. Are you mad at me?”

I licked the mayonnaise off my hand. “I guess. I dunno.”

“You can be my best friend again if you want.” She put one foot down, then put up the other one.

“What about your mom?”

She shrugged. “I don’t care about her.”

I thought about that as I crunched up my lunch bag and kicked it off my foot. She came and sat up on the ledge with me, and pushed her shoe into my knee to leave the prints on my legs, and then leaned in real close to my face, like she does.

“She says we can’t be friends again, ever. She says if she hears I’m talking to you or your stupid father, she will smack me right across the face.” I looked down at the scab on my ankle, dug my fingernail into the end of it, and I could feel her stare at me. My dad’s not stupid, I thought inside my head but without saying it out loud.

“Marisol has crooked feet, anyway,” she said. I didn’t say nothing but ripped the scab off, and it stung, oozed pink.

“I don’t want to be friends with no one else anyhow, just you. This place sucks anyway.” I looked up. I was still mouse-quiet, so she leaned in even more and said:

“Want to come with me to the city?”

I put the scab top in my mouth and ate it.

◊

Tuesday was the day we picked, the day we would leave this town forever. Tiana says soon our faces will be on milk cartons and our parents will cry every night and day and night. They will hug each other, saying If only we had given Jasmine and Tiana more Barbies and strawberry bottle pops and let them watch music videos. Jasmine could eat all the sugar and butter batter she wanted if she would just come back. But it will be too late. Tough for them. Tuesdays Tiana didn’t go to after-school but was supposed to stay at home by herself with the key her mom gave her until she came back from work. I walked into every room in my house, saying goodbye in my head but not out loud, even the laundry room, only not to the cricket porch or to Fiona’s room. Fiona was supposed to walk me home, but I told her, Miss Roberts needs to see me, and she’s gonna drive me home. Lying was a cinch, a cinch.

In my backpack, I had three loaves of cinnamon bread, string cheese, Fruit Roll-ups, $20 from my mom’s hiding place under the lamp, $27 from Fiona’s underwear drawer, some shorts and shirts, and my machine that separated coins that I got for Christmas.

Tiana had extra jeans, a sweater, Saltines, Cheerios, $40 from her mom’s wallet, a map with Connecticut on it (the only one she could find), and a card she said was for taking trains.

I didn’t even bother to write down our homework in class. I put my pinkie on my nose to Tiana behind Miss Roberts’ back, which was our secret message to each other. She put her thumb on her forehead, wiggled her ring finger, and nodded.

After the bell rang, I let Tiana leave first like we planned and then raced out of the school by myself, taking a big circle to avoid the eighth grade classrooms where Fiona was. I pictured her crying later to the police, If only I had known that was the last time I’d see my little sister, I would have given her a hug, or even my garnet necklace. My feet ran into town, twice knocking into people who yelled after me, but I couldn’t hear them I was running so fast, practically so you couldn’t see my feet touching the ground, practically flying. I ran under the underpass where the train was above, and up the stairs that said “To New York.” I sat down and waited on the bench with the cigarette ad at the top to wait for Tiana, like she told me. Quick, I pulled my dad’s winter hat with the earflaps and Fiona’s pink sunglasses out of my coat pocket and put them on so no one would recognize me.

My heart noise came back into my ears and head again. An old woman with a red handkerchief on her head next to me was eating a sandwich, real slow. A blood, I thought.

We were gonna take the train all the way into the city, and if anyone asked us where our parents were, we would say they were meeting us and we weren’t allowed to talk to strangers, and then get out in a station with stars on the ceiling, Tiana said, and then take the underground train like in the movies, she said, the uptown train would take us to where Tiana used to live. We would see if her friend Jannelly was home, her best friend before me, and if that didn’t work we would go to the gray building with the glass pieces on the door with a 7 in the number, where Tiana said her father lived, and she had even seen him once, in a Yankees hat, when she was five-and-a-half.

A man in a suit slowed down as he walked past me, staring. I looked down and up twice, but he was still looking.

“Perv,” I called, and he turned away.

I pulled out a string cheese, just half though to save it.

I already couldn’t remember my family maybe, and could forget them all together, and then lay out in the sun real long so I’ll look like Tiana and people will think we’re sisters, and if the police ever come get me to say, where is your family? I won’t say mom or dad or even Fiona, I’ll say, this is my sister, and this is my dad with the Yankees hat, and maybe even call myself something else like Lina, and Tiana could be Nina, and I won’t remember the cricket porch or my old room or even the name Jasmine, but I’ll live way up like on the ninth floor or higher, and take the elevator up, and press all the buttons.

She’d be here any second now, any second now, and the train whistle cried loud, it said, I’m coming, I’m coming.

Elizabeth Brus is a writer and recovering teacher. You can find her work in New Orleans Review, The Evergreen Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Fiction International, The Normal School, and elsewhere. Returning to writing after a long hiatus, Elizabeth worked in education for almost fifteen years and still side-hustles as a tutor and curriculum writer. She served with The United States Peace Corps in Lesotho from 2005-2007 and lives with her family in Brooklyn, NY. Find her on Twitter @ElizabethBrus or on her website www.elizabethbrus.com.