Hop
by Roberto Ontiveros
Last time I came to see my folks, this time with a girl named Renee who had a five-month-old baby girl named Stoli, named after the vodka I thought but was not sure and would not complicate my date nights by revealing that I knew nothing about her, I was amazed at the fences everywhere: wooden planks linking up to aluminum chain links, scores of corrugated metal spikes threatening trespassers and walkers alike, and even good old Mexican brick with what looks like glass shards, broken bottles/broken mirror bits cemented along the top layer so no one gets on to get over without getting cut, and anyone looking at the glinting lips of barricade can just imagine the punctured palms, the scrape-shred over chest and kisser when the aspirant trespasser falls onto the grass, bloody, one might imagine embarrassed by failure.
Renee asked, while looking at the light refracting glass teeth that fanged along the fence: “What would anyone want from those people anyway?” Because she thought I knew everything about this street, because, in the five days we had known each other, I was always ready with a quick answer for her every query, and because this was supposed to be my hometown, the place I wanted so much to move away from and yet was forever revisiting and recalled for every Renee I ever met.
“There are gazelles on the property,” I said to Renee. “There are these expensive animals that no one is ever supposed to see. The lady who lives there right now, she used to court these petting zoo plans that never materialized, make her home a sanctuary for unpopular snake farm creatures: sick baboons, and toothless tigers. But I recall a time when she was busy with the purchase of rare beasts that were not yet past their prime. I remember the cages showing up and the shouting from her pool area with whoever she employed, whoever she was in love with or had partnered up with, whoever she shared her entrepreneurial ideas with, whoever bailed on her and her plans to keep this kind of creature coterie. And now, a spinster amid her aging menagerie, the woman never leaves home. She takes care of her beasts, and nobody else pets them, and they die with a degree of comfort, and she alone tends to their burial.”
Renee wanted me to talk about the place I came from, that’s why we were here walking the old neighborhood and she wanted to talk about herself too: “Jeez, when I was nine, this girl next door had a python she called Monty, of course. My parents wouldn’t let me sleep over when I cried like I had nightmares about watching it eat mice, that snake that my friend kept in a dry aquarium, a terrarium I think is the word, she let Monty out a lot when I came over. But I really liked the serpent, telling my parents I was afraid was a way for me to get out of a birthday sleepover with this girl who I didn’t want to be friends with anymore, and there were other kids coming over for the night, kids from class, and I had discovered early that summer that I did not want to know kids I knew from school – kids from the day, daytime kids – I didn’t want to know these kids at night. Didn’t want to even see them at night.”
When I was a kid there weren’t any glass shards on the fence behind our house, and I never tried to hop it; now, decades later, I was absolutely compelled by the idea of doing this, and doing more than this. For miles in this tight subdivision that constricts against tighter subdivision, all the houses are a fence hop apart now; the last time I was here I leapt atop a cement column and saw how easy it would be to walk, even casually, from plank to construction site porta potty, to trash bin and scaffolding structures along the homes turning their garages into dens, like my parents had briefly considered doing to my room when I moved out. I did not so much as talk them out of the renovation as I just kept coming back home every other month and they never knew when it would be and soon enough the transformation of my old room into some second stage for their last stage started to seem like a losing idea. You could get to the other side of town this way, hopping off the last fence that got you to an alley that gets you before this café where I used to like to eat plates of cucumber sauce and pita bread and baklava and sip from blue ceramic cups of Turkish coffee or green glasses of mint tea, and mineral water and just read Vermillion Sands or the The Book of Sand over and over, like I had all the time in the world, and I told Renee this epiphany I had about traversing my old town, because it sounded like some line of fabrication, even as I was walking her baby with a Babybjorn baby strap-carrier that kept Stoli to my chest. “I never wanted to jump a fence when I was a kid, now that is my preferred method of traveling from alley to alley, going fence by fence,” I said aloud to Renee who didn’t add any of her own stories of fence hoping.
I visited my parents all the time now, once a month at least, for sometimes three days a shot, with a different girl every time; Mom and Dad do not even try to connect with any of them now, whereas for the first three visits last year, Dad kind of thought they were the same person, because Judy and Gillian and Lynn all had the same kind of blond hair and tennis player outfit, because I had a type that Spring, and worked at the recreation center of a gated community where I had no choice but to keep bumping into this type. Dad even tried to link information about each guest at the dinner table; so I changed it up, brought home a brunette who smoked clove-spiked spliffs and read aloud to me from Krishnamurti and Ram Dass and now my parents don’t know what to expect from me ever – except that I will be home again, and stay in my old room again, which they never bothered converting to anything anyway, the way that always happens in comedy shows some guy all sad that his childhood room is a sewing room now or a gym when he just wants to lie in his old bed, no never happens and will never happen to this old boy, and I experience my old unchanged room as a place of rest and refuge amid a world that is fast and always over, like that Beach Boys song I only first heard in my thirties, like a guy who went to college and dropped out but not before taking in a very liberal and overreaching reading of Nietzsche’s concept of Eternal Return. So Dad just thinks I make friends easily, and suspects that there isn’t even any romance involved. Some nights he might even be right. Not this night.
“Oooo, look at that!” Renee pointed toward a turquoise and teal-hued house a block down the street. “Did you know anybody that lived there, like you knew someone in that house with the flower bed of colored bottles?”
I didn’t know anybody who had ever lived there. “Yeah, maybe I do,” I said. “This kid named Joel who used to have these blue-gray eyes that everyone thought were so pretty. He could speak English but was so lousy at it that around the seventh grade he kind of went back to using this eight-year-old Spanish he’d mastered or he didn’t say much. He used to sell those glass bottles of Coke-a-Cola at the door, for fifty scents that his mom would purchase by the green crate in Reynosa, so we’d skateboard to his house and ask for a couple of Cokes and he wouldn’t even speak a word though we knew he could, in English or Spanish, tell us something about his day.”
“You think he’s still there?”
“No, no I don’t. You know, now that I’m thinking about it, that might not even be his house. He might have lived like two or three houses down, lots of these places look the same. I’ll let you know when I see it coming up, Renee.” Baby Stoli, hanging from my neck like a huge Cabbage Patch Doll medallion, kicked me in the balls, alive and happy. Renee put her arms around my shoulder. “Let’s get back to your place. Your mom said she’d watch Stoli for a while. I want to see those old pictures you were telling me about.”
Mom was, of course, fine with watching baby Stoli, doesn’t know when she’ll get to play with her own little one, and used to even say that aloud to get at me with shame whenever she could, but not any more, she doesn’t say it and maybe she still thinks about that void in her life, but keeps the sentiment to herself.
Renee saw all the pictures: the baby albums, the third grade class photos, the skateboard phase that I cut out of quick, and home movies of me yucking it up with cousins I don’t speak to anymore and kids I would only speak to for a school year. I don’t know how this has become what I do on my first serious overnight, right-before-breakup, dates with anyone, but it is what I do now, and my folks kind of treat it with the delicacy of intruding upon a true romantic event.
Renee and I met at the post office – a place I go to all the time since I use a P.O. Box exclusively for bills and correspondence now that I live out of hotel rooms when I am not just living with someone – and we kept seeing each other at paper stores, and Hobby Lobbies, the both of us being very into decoupage, or she’s into decoupage, I just scissor everything into my blue notebook like it’s going to be some map that will save me, or instructions that will help someone find me one day when I am lost. And that’s the first thing we ever talked about and was the first thing we did on our first date, get on the floor and select images from magazines that have been donated to the senior center where Renee did community service, and start to assemble worlds of order in one of those oversized white wedding albums she got for 70% off at a going-out-of-business Ben Franklin’s. My pages of glue and newsprint always looked like what most people think art is supposed to look like: two or three pages of Max Ernst irony, or that minimalist glow of buried worlds, homeopathic evidence receding; yawn surrealism, I’d like to call it. Renee’s notebooks, on the other hand – and this is why I was fond of her, outside of her recalling some brassy-haired version of my second grade crush Bernadette Peters who played the grifter’s strung pearl-palming girlfriend on Annie, and talking in a way that seemed as if she was forgetting words as they came to her, or reading the words from cue cards, making her seem overly thoughtful, and cautious, which are traits I do not possess but so do envy – looked like the places she would like to live in, the places she would like to build a life in: houses, families, vacation spots, configuration of dogs and dinner times and trips to the beach that led to her feeling overjoyed and wanting to talk about the future. Renee loved to talk about the future, not just hers, really anybody’s future. “What do you think happened to her?” she asked as we walked out of this action movie about a genetically modified young woman who had been orphaned in Alabama, found her long lost siblings in an underground missile silo, and had to escape into a carnie world in order to survive for a part two adventure. Renee was always asking me what I thought happened to characters we saw on screen or on the street. What do you think happened to that girl after the credits rolled? What do you think happened to that guy we saw rubbing his hands together outside the pharmacy like it was cold? What are you going to do when we get back home?”
Renee and I drank Walgreens wine and watched cartoons that my Dad had checked out for me from the library when I was eight and that we never returned: Mickey’s Trailer and Gerald McBoing Boing on 8 mm. And Rennee and I fucked as the film flickered and whipped off its reel, a white projection before us, and the whole time I kept trying to not think about that penultimate scene in that Annie movie where the hero child is dangling from a skyscraper, waiting to be embraced by Punjab and met into the safe world of Daddy and his Warbucks.
I loved the way Renee smiled after sex. It looked like she was very pleased with herself, and very pleased with the world. I told her I would go get her baby girl, and we could all sleep in the room together and she nodded and looked like she was getting so tired.
My mother handed the child over to me and frowned. She had been happily playing with the five-month-old and now looked lost giving her back. “I like Renee,” she said, “and I like this little baby, Zoe – did you say her name was? She’s a good little girl, so alert, always looking and then smiling; she dreams a lot, you can tell.”
I held the baby up and said, “You guys can visit more tomorrow. We’ll be off around noon. I want to get back to the apartment by dusk.”
Mom kind of nodded, understanding that she wasn’t going to see Renee again after tomorrow, and wasn’t going to see this baby again, but knew that I would be here in a few weeks.
She held up a plastic Pluto the Disney dog toy that was mine once, and that she used to keep for me, but had recently started letting any kid accompanying any Mommie play with.
I didn’t say anything.
“Are you going out tonight?” Mom asked.
I nodded and said, “For a walk. Down a few alleys, A walk to clear my head,” I said putting my right hand in my pocket to feel for the garden gloves that would protect me from any bits of cemented glass should I come across any shards.
I left her in the den and turned up the TV, which she had turned down when I brought the baby in. There was an old Tin Tan movie going, something about an heiress who had to marry or lose everything.
I walked over to my old room where the woman I had known for less than a week was sleeping in a bed that I had slept in from the age of six to nineteen, dreaming maybe of the walk we had taken together, the fences we had seen, dreaming of a boy who sold Cokes who I made up who was also real, who I’d seen and even gone to school with, but never knew a thing about even as we had been neighbors for decades, or dreaming of a gazelle and a recluse that didn’t exist, that never existed, or dreaming of the true vision we saw together, as we drove down to the place I am from, of a man wringing his hands together outside of a pharmacy as if he were cold.
BIO
Roberto Ontiveros is a fiction writer, artist, and journalist. Some of his work has appeared in the Threepenny Review, the Baffler, AGNI and TheBeliever. His debut collection, The Fight for Space, was published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press, and his second book, Assisted Living, was published by Corona/Samizdat Press.
