Gringa by Sandra Scofield

hitchhiked into town, thirty miles away, just to walk around and spend two quarters on a cheeseburger. Once he came home after dark, stinking of beer and my mother Lenore hit him across the shoulders with a broom. My father Bud took the broom away. When he did that, I felt invisible; he’d never have stood up for me. As for my mother—well it was her we caught hell from in the first place. She had no soft looks for anyone. She looked lost in her own head, with cigarette smoke curling around her chin and up into her hair. She spent hours in bed, or in the bathroom with her shoebox full of cheap toiletries. I knew what she wanted. Paved streets and curbs, a house with proper closets. Our trailer was stacked with cardboard boxes and plastic buckets and chipboard shelves over our heads; she wanted everything in its place.
    The trailer had only one bedroom. I slept in a corner of the main room with the kitchen things, the table and chairs, and a vinyl couch with horse-head armrests. Kermit slept on the floor on a wad of quilts, and he could lie down in the midst of any noise and fall right away. I was the last awake, lying with my eyes fixed on a slice of night sky that showed through the window above my head.
    My mother had been talking about moving to town all year, while my father talked about the coal fields and ranches up north, in states with mountain ranges and winter snow. Lenore’s complaints provoked Bud’s; he didn’t like it that he got up so early and that his pay was so low, that he often had to swab floors like a green-gilled high school boy. Before Hadicol we had lived in other camps, where women sometimes cried for days or ran away and left their babies, and I had always seen our moves as random events set off by things that happened at the wells and made the work go away, so that my dad was let off when nobody else was. I was beginning to understand that my parents had something to say about these things, that there was a chemistry between them that came of discontent. For Bud it was dry holes. He hid bits of money away and got in on wonderful deals that never worked out. For Lenore, it was Bud, it was life. Nothing bothered me; what would have been the good? I had seen girls at school weep over the placement of their desks. I didn’t care about school. I didn’t care that Lenore yelled at me when I’d done everything she’d said. I thought growing up would take care of everything; the future floated in front of me. Kermit had a sharper sense of a life to come. He knew, for example, that he would have apricot jam in his house, and not cheap grape, that he’d have a real house with a built-in shower. He didn’t say ten words a week to my mother. Lenore took it out on Bud: his drinking and lack of ambition, the way he chewed on toothpicks and cut cheese with a pocket knife, and walked around the trailer in his shorts. Kermit could leave the table with his dishes dirty at his place. He could pee with the bathroom door left open. And Lenore didn’t speak. Once, though, he put some of her rouge on, for a joke, and when she saw him, she hit him on the head with a pancake turner to which bits of potato still clung.
    There were two families in the camp that year that made me think about my own. One was the Wellers, next door. Mrs. Weller wasn’t much more than a girl, and her baby cried all the time, but she was always smiling and moving slow. She sat out in front in the evenings on a folding chair, with the baby in her lap, and her husband sat on the step and smoked, and they talked in low happy voices. My mother said it was downright peculiar to sit out like that and watch bugs. My father said it was because they were young and the baby was new. Lenore said, “When did we ever talk like that?” The Wellers-this, and the Wellers-that: they kept coming up, a stick my parents tossed back and forth. One morning Kermit stepped out of the trailer in time to see the