Premanent Ink

Permanent Ink          



“We could go on like this forever, her and I.”
         “Do you want me to talk to her?”
         “I don’t think it’d do any good. I feel like I am the reason everything turned out like this, if I would have just showed her more instead of telling. I’m always telling her, telling, telling, telling, we never communicate otherwise.”
         “There’s more to it than that. She wants to think independently.”
         “And that’s what I keep telling myself.”

*          *          *

         Maggie was turning seven, her Mother, Annette, was thirty-two; one quarter of a century separated their births but in some regards it could very well have been on the same day. Maggie was eyeing to play a game of oversized darts; balloons scattered on the freshly mowed lawn with folded pieces of paper inside revealing the gift that would be won upon popping. Bright, colorful light bulbs streamed through the air becoming more prevalent with every turn of the carrousel while the fading sun pulled its rays down behind the invisible horizon. On Daisies Aces, children’s legs were flailing back and forth like puppets on strings as they gripped the padded iron harnesses and screamed in delight. A mother held a sweaty baby to her chest and pushed a twisting, empty stroller across the uneven grass. A thin man in a plaid shirt, sucking air through a gap in his teeth, looked down at Maggie.
         “It’s a dollar a dart; most you can have is three at a time.”
         Maggie ran back to her Mom and Dad who were intentionally staying a few slow paces behind their eager daughter. “Mom, I wanna play that game, I can hit one of the balloons, some of them are huge.” She held to her Mother’s hand and swayed her shoulders back and forth, gently shaking the hand.
         “Hold on Mags; let’s go check it out.”
         When they approached the game the wiry man was flipping a lawn dart and catching it by the sharp end, sucking air, in melody, through his teeth.
         “Are those the darts you throw?” Annette asked, staring at the gratuitously large dart.
         “Nope, there the darts you throw, for a dollar a piece.” His eyes never left the rotating instrument. He had a pleased demeanor that only seemed to perpetuate his disgust.
         Annoyed at his retort, Annette turned to her daughter and held up a hand toward the balloons. “This isn’t a safe game.”
         “Why not, I can throw those things?”
         “Mags, they are as big as your whole body. Let’s go find something else to play.”
         “I don’t want any other ones I want to play this one. I can do it.” Maggie took a serious and insistent tone that a child acquires at the pivotal turn from six to seven.
         Annette craned her head to the side and looked at her husband. With two bags of cotton candy in one hand and a mustard dripping corn dog in the other he shrugged.
         “You’re a big help.” She turned to her daughter, “You really think you can throw that big thing?”
         “I know I can.” She said with a smile.
         Annette looked up at the sinewy character, now licking his greasy fingers, flipping through a stack of ones. “Alright Ace, we’ll take one.” Annette’s husband smirked at her condescending tone and hoped, for his sake, that the man didn’t provoke her. If it is true that hell hath no fury like a woman’s scorn, Annette, despite her loving disposition, had hell licked.
         “Well, alright then. One dart for her majesty.” He slightly bowed as he offered Annette the dart, holding onto the heavy metal needle with the dull tip pointed toward him. Annette gripped onto the dart slow, and with a quick jerk, pulled it from his soiled, wet hand. Ace, as Annette so delicately referred to him, drew his hand up to his face like a wounded animal. When there was no sign of injury he stepped back against the wall of hanging stuffed prizes and waved his arm toward the board and turned around, “Throw the damn dart.” He perched himself on an old bar stool in the corner and awaited the toss.
         “Here you go Mags. Be careful, this things pretty heavy.”
         “I know. I got it.”
         She bounced the dart in her hands, trying to get a feel for the weight. She pinpointed which balloon she wanted to hit, a green one in the middle that didn’t move as much as the others in the evening breeze. She cocked her body back and with all the strength and elasticity within that seven-year-old arm, she whipped the dart forward, barely missing her ear with the point of the dart but the sharp, plastic feather sliced her skin high on her cheekbone, just under the eye; the dart fell a few feet short of the target.
         She felt it graze her face but didn’t feel the cut; as the blood started to run down her face like tears, she turned to her mother and asked for another dart.
         “My God, Maggie, your face,” her mother fell to her knees and fished through her purse for some tissue. She pulled out a small stack wrapped in plastic, ripped them out of their cover and gently but firmly pressed them up to her daughter’s eye. “We have to get you to the hospital.”
         Dennis had dropped the food in the grass and offered to carry Maggie. She nodded, holding the tissue to her face with her little bloodstained fingers.
         When the doctor stitched up her eye he proclaimed her as one of his “bravest patients. I don’t think I’ve had any little boys in here that wouldn’t cry with a cut like this, and you haven’t even made a peep. This is just something else,” the portly MD said to a nervous Mother.
         “Will there be any scaring?” Her eyes focused over the Doctor’s shoulder.
         “I think in a few short years you won’t be able to see a thing,” the florescent light buzzed against the pale tile. Doctor Welling slid across the glowing floor with the ease of a dancer, each time returning to the drawer for tools, gloves, gauze he moved the soft, focused lamp that Maggie could feel on her tender face. Each time the light swayed close to the wound she would wince; each time Doctor Welling guided her chin back, sewed and snipped the stitches and disposed the excess into a trashcan labeled biohazard.
         The ride home was for the most part silent. Maggie peered through the window with one eye blurry, irritated from the eye drops the doctor administered. Two turns before the street their house was on, Annette smiled with her eyes on the road, “You look beautiful Mags.”
         “No I don’t.”
         “Sweetheart, the doctor said in a few years you won’t be able to see a thing.”
         “I can see it now.”

*          *          *

         “She’s going to be nineteen and leaving in three months; I don’t want you two at each other’s throats until then.”
         “I know Dennis, I’m not trying to provoke her but you saw that shit on her skin.”
         “Annette, lower your voice.” He said with his finger to his mouth as he stepped toward to his frantic wife. Over the years he had learned where her limits were, where even she wished she had stopped. He moved closer, put his arms around her hips as she leaned against the bar in the corner just above the lazy susan, her arms remained folded. “I’m sorry. I don’t like it any more that you do; but it’s done. There is nothing we can do about it now.”
         “Why do you think I’m so upset?” The spinning fan looped gaps of light on Dennis’s shoulders. She gently unfolded her arms and slipped them around his neck; standing up strait pushing her stomach, chest, face into him as she stood on her toes. She blinked through tear-blurred eyes while her hair tickled her forehead from the fan’s breeze. Annette pulled her left arm down and pressed it around his body, under his arm and took him in. She sobbed in a way that Dennis could not remember. He had not embraced his wife like this in too long. He guided her, pulling his arms in and touching her in love and empathy; funneling an outlet of emotion learned between two friends, lovers, only in time.
         Upstairs Maggie went through little regret. She played one of her dad’s old records on a vinyl player inside what looked like an old AM stereo. The top slid back and forth; one side to store records, and in the other sat the record player with its glowing dials and stiff robotic arm. The light in the bathroom and the lamp next to the bed were on, leaving a dull haze throughout the room. She moved back and forth and glanced at herself in front of the mirror, being sure to never look too close. Every time she stood for more than a moment she would glare at herself, looking at her own eyes, repeating the things she had said to her Parents.
         “I hate this house”, “I got the tattoo cause I knew you’d hate it.”
         These words sounded childish to her when she thought about the reasons she told her friends for getting the tattoo. “I want something that I can look at my whole life and will put me in a good mood. Something I will love to see.” She chose two nipple piercings and a tattoo of a single rose wrapped in ivy, just inside her left hipbone. Both her ears were gauged and she thought about getting one in her tongue; after some obscene advice she received from a male friend she decided against it.
         She tried to ignore the words running like boxcars across her mind. Each word presented itself in perfect clarity with impeccable recall of tone and timing. The way she emphasized hate; she could have said the word hate a thousand times and it wouldn’t have come out like it did this time. As much as she detested hearing the words in her own head she wished that they tormented her parents as well. Perhaps then they wouldn’t be as intrusive in her life; perhaps they could see that now she was able to think on her own.
         She pushed these thoughts away, laid some clothes out on her bed and undressed to her underwear. She walked into her bathroom and with the door open, finished undressing and wrapped a towel around her body. She pulled her hair back so it tightened the skin on her forehead. With her eyebrows raised and working her lathered fingers in a circular motion, she washed the oily make-up from her skin; some eyeliner, lipstick and eye shadow used to accentuate her pale, listless face.
         She stood up after rinsing the cleanser off, grabbed a towel and dabbed her face; careful not to scrub too hard on her exposed skin. She turned the shower on and pulled a black, elastic tie out of her hair, letting it fall to her shoulders. She was about to let the towel drop when the door in her room crept open, allowing the hall light to slip in, inch by inch.

*          *          *
         
         “Come on Mom, let’s go.” Maggie sat up to the bar swinging one of her legs in anticipation, she passed a saltshaker from hand to hand over the smooth granite surface. Her straight hair hung plain and static as she followed the condiment with her careful eyes. Her skinny legs were starting to take length like a woman’s; she lacked the full curves of a woman’s body but stood only a couple inches shorter than her Mother that was five foot nine. Her shoulders curled over her stomach; she developed a slouch that awkwardly pushed her toes out when she walked. She had her mother’s narrow shoulders and shapely hips. Annette, now at forty-one, still held her figure and carried herself with a poised disposition as she clicked her heels with the black strap across the taupe tile floor.
         “Mags, sit up strait. Did you grab Dad’s glasses?” Her head tilted as she fixed a pearl stud in each ear; pacing throughout the house, locating exactly what she needed and where it was.
         Maggie momentarily pulled out of a slouch, “He won’t need them; I can drive home from his office too.”
         “Well grab them just incase he does have to drive.”   
         “Fine.” Maggie walked over to the key holder shaped like a cat with a dangling tail and took the car keys off the black plastic body. She walked over to the stack of advertisements, Have You Seen Me’s and discarded credit offers from obscure banks and picked up her father’s glasses shut tightly inside a hard leather bound case. She opened it and looked at the glasses, then snapped it shut like a handheld bear trap.
         “I got ‘em Mom, now can we go?”
         “I’m here, I’m here.” Annette glided around the corner with her purse held firmly under one arm and a briefcase swinging from her other, following her daughter out the garage door. “Do you want me to back it out of the garage?” Maggie rolled her eyes and was already taking her seat on the driver’s side.
          Maggie would be sixteen in two months and was preparing for the test to be allotted her driver’s license. She could parallel park and reverse out of angled spots with ease but she had a habit of cutting right hand turns too sharp. In one instance her Mother was forced to jerk the steering wheel to avoid hitting a gutter drain that was missing its metal grate. Upon entry into their driveway, Maggie would repeatedly run over a small section of lawn, adjacent to the mailbox on the other side of the drive. Her Father calmly insisted she pay closer attention and Maggie said it wasn’t her fault; that it was the back wheels that were doing it.
         “So the plan is; we pick up Dad right now, you drive me down to my office and then if Dad doesn’t care you can drive home from there.”
         “Dad’s not going to care,” she said as she rolled out of the garage with pristine alignment, “you’re the only one that makes a big deal out of my driving.”
         “I don’t make a big deal; I just want you to realize how many people die in car wrecks every year and I don’t want you to be one of them.”
         “Nobody is going to die.”
         “I sure hope not, and you’ll have a better chance of living the better you drive. Not to mention our insurance will skyrocket if you start getting tickets.”
         “I’m not getting tickets and I’m not going to die; I’m just going to pick up Dad, so relax and enjoy the pleasure of being escorted.” Annette passed a dissatisfied glance.
         The ride over to pick her Father up was effortless; hands at ten and two, blinkers turned on at appropriate locations and full stops made at stop signs. When they reached Dennis, waiting outside of a mechanics shop, he had a big smile and waved with his hands still stuffed inside the pockets of his cardigan. He didn’t try to assume command of the wheel; he opened up the door behind the driver’s seat and stepped in.
         “Getting some practice in honey?” Maggie smiled and nodded into the rear view.
         When her father got into the car the slight, ever-present tension between mother and daughter ceased; Dennis’ presence brought a middle ground between these two combatants. Annette loosened up and sunk into the beige bucket seat and Maggie started driving with ease and confidence.
         “What did they say?” Annette turned around to look her husband in the face.
         “They said it would be done in a couple hours. I guess the squeaking was just an old belt.”
         “How much is it going to be?”
         “Eighty-six altogether.”
         “That’s better than what I thought.”
         “Yeah, I didn’t think it was anything major; I’m just glad it wasn’t the power steering pump.”
         “Thank god for that.” Annette was checking her teeth in the vanity mirror for any smeared lipstick. “Do I look okay?”
         Dennis pulled himself up with the two front seats and poked his head between them. After quickly looking over his wife and with a terrible Sammy Davis Jr. impression said, “Marvelous baby, absolutely marvelous,” and leaned in close to kiss her cheek.
         She delighted in his touch wished she wasn’t needed at work on a Saturday. She was acting as a legal representative for a growing company needing the assistance of an advertising firm. She drew up contracts, pointed out key points in the deal and crossed all the T’s over the whole procedure. She was a business attorney and quiet successful in being so.
         “So what are you two going to do while I finish this contract?”
         “I hadn’t thought about it. What do you want to do honey?” Dennis reached up and squeezed his daughter on the shoulder.
         “I don’t care.”
         “Whatever you do, pick me up at six and we can all go get something to eat. Is that okay?” she asked.
         “Yeah, that’s fine.” Dennis replied.
         “Oh Mags, turn right up here, we can cut across Baker St. at the light.”
         Maggie gazed ahead at the line of cars and pulled to the right side of the lane; no right-hand-turn lane had been provided and a tight space was inevitable. When she slipped in between the detailed Audi and an old Buick Skylark parked in the gutter, her mom held her breath while she smiled into the rearview at her father.
         She stopped at the sign and she saw that the cars had taken a vow of indecision, four drivers waiving their hands at one another, each trying to be more cordial than the next. The black mini-van next to Maggie started to take the initiative and she followed its lead. She turned right and used the minivan as a shield incase another driver got antsy and went out of turn; the patience of cross-town traffic is rarely had and quick lived. Maggie excitedly stepped on the gas and gave an excessive spin of the wheel. This particular curb and gutter had a hole big enough to store a tire in and was found menacing to drunk drivers who frequented the local tavern around the corner. Maggie made the turn like pulling the car into her own driveway and the rear right tire slammed into the cavernous gutter.
         “Goddamnit Maggie,” Annette cried, as their bodies settled from the recoil of the halted vehicle.
         The solemn pitch and tempo of the word, “Goddamnit,” made Maggie’s arms jolt and left an imprint in her mind that couldn’t be blurred even through her tear filled eyes. She started to cry more profusely and with her hands still gripping the steering wheel she turned back and looked at her father.
         “Are you okay?” he said.
         She nodded, through convulsive breaths managed to let out, “Yeah.”
         “I knew I shouldn’t have let you drive, I should have taken the keys and…”
         “Annette!” Dennis put his hand on his wife’s shoulder and tried to calm her with a touch.
         “It’s okay, at least none of us were hurt.”
         “How could we be hurt we were going five miles per hour?”
         “Annette, calm down.”
         She tightened her lips and emphatically pushed open the door. When she stepped out Dennis followed to give an ignorant assessment of the damage. The rear wheel had been pulled away from the CB joint and fit nicely, crooked, in the gutter. Maggie sat in the car, her hands still holding the steering wheel.
         “It doesn’t look too bad.” Dennis said.
         With her hands on her hips Annette glared at him and turned away.
         The car was towed to the same shop they had just left; Annette took a cab to her meeting and Maggie and Dennis rode to the shop in the tow truck. The driver smelled like old oil and was spitting sunflower seeds out the window that was half rolled up. Saliva dotted the murky window and Maggie stared at the layer of dust on the dashboard. Country music was softly played and the driver filled in the words when the engine revved too loud for it to be heard. The twill seats were permanently stained and squeaked when the passengers bounced up and down as the truck’s stiff suspension hammered into potholes. Each time the wheels dipped into a hole the truck made a loud bang, reminding Maggie about the wreck, about the words her mother said.

*          *          *
                            
         After Annette stopped crying her husband offered to fix her some tea.
         “That would be nice, I think I’m going to shower first though.”
         She left the kitchen and went into their bedroom. Dennis prepared some water to boil and placed some lose leaf tea inside a cheesecloth and tied it off with a string. When the water was ready he poured it into a clay teapot and dropped the teabag inside to steep. He retrieved a matching saucer and cup from the glass cupboard and brought it into their bedroom and set it on the nightstand for his wife. Annette was in their bathroom, already in her bathrobe. She was about to turn the shower on when she heard the water hum through the pipes when Maggie turned hers on. She stepped outside of the bathroom and saw Dennis.
         “I’m going to go talk to her.”
         “Do you want me to come?”
         “No, I need to talk to her.” Dennis nodded and stepped out of the doorway.
         Annette walked down the hallway and thought about what to say to her daughter. She thought of the usual standard retorts Maggie would present; she thought of the typical arguments she herself would make. The conversation would start off being apologetic; requests for forgiveness would be made, then, as each one of them got more comfortable in a controlled conversation, the thick-headedness of each would prevail, leaving the dilemma unresolved.
         Annette did not want to go through the routine again. She wanted an instant understanding with her daughter, to just blink her eyes and have a solution for all of their disagreements. As she approached the door to Maggie’s room she felt flush and almost turned around; instead she gently turned the knob and slowly opened the door, letting the light from the hallway creep in, inch-by-inch.
         She walked into the room, turned and saw Maggie standing in the bathroom in a towel with a portentous look. Annette approached the bathroom and leaned up against the doorframe, her arms folded. Maggie leaned over and with a quick slap of her hand shut the water off. The mellow light in the bathroom touched her hair and left no shadow on her face; her eyes fully exposed, her lips pale and pink. Annette looked at her daughter and said nothing; the conversation she acted out in her mind didn’t happen. She just stood and looked. Maggie watched her mother and raised her eyebrows in provocation.
         Annette pulled away from the doorframe, stepped toward her daughter, reached out and put her hands on her shoulders; she turned Maggie’s to face the mirror and stood behind her. She held her daughter by the arms, wanting to say something. 
         Maggie’s expression relaxed and she felt a comfort in her mother’s touch. She forgot what they were fighting about, or that they were fighting at all. She stood still as her mother reached around her chest and unfolded the towel, letting it drop to the floor, revealing all at once the piercings and the tattoo. Annette untied the belt to her robe and slid it off her shoulders. Standing naked with her daughter, Annette saw again the tattoo and for the first time looked at the metal rings. She looked at them and was calm; there was no exclamation, no scolding, no anger. The light pressed up against their bodies like the soft albedo of a dying sunset. The tone of their skin found a harmony and blended like a chameleons. Annette reached her right arm around her daughter, covered up both the rings on her breasts and lifted her small rounded shoulders back; she gently pressed her other hand over the tattoo, entangling her body like ivy. Twenty-five years separated the two women, but under the warm lights their age, their scars, their birthmarks were all lost into one woman.
         Maggie looked at her reflection; the lines in her torso, her angular shoulders and narrow chin, the definition in her abdomen and her protruding hipbones. In the mirror she saw someone that resembled her mother, but as she looked long upon herself she saw someone new, someone completely different.
         “See how beautiful you are?”
         Maggie forced her eyes shut and tried to swallow the swelling in her throat. She opened them and tears fell. With both her hands she reached up and took her mother’s forearm. “I love you Mom.”
         “I know Maggie.”