Minimum Security

by Tina Royer

Sandra Cisneros tells me that when I’m one age, I’m really all the other years I’ve lived, too. When I’m 15, 14 is still penned up inside, and sometimes she comes out. But what she didn’t tell me, what I had to learn on my own, is that when I’m a certain age, I’m sometimes also all the years I haven’t lived yet, too. When I’m 20, sometimes 30’s bitterness makes an appearance, or sometimes even 40’s wrinkles or busted dreams.

I was only 15 the first time my mom went to jail, but I think 25 emerged. Mommy, when are you going to come to my house to visit me? crooned from the mouth of my two-year old sister at the end of Sunday visiting hours at the women’s facility was enough to make my mom cry and promise that this was it. No more I’m done with drugs.

She got out of jail after only nine months and earned the privilege of house arrest. I was the dorm trustee. I even helped the other women comb their hair for lice. She must have been good at it since all she had to do to finish her sentence was go to work every day and show up for pee-tests on Saturdays. And pass them.

The first two or three were O.K.—but not without some finagling. I gotta drink a gallon of water at least an hour before I test. Maybe there was a water shortage. Maybe her piss was just too intoxicating. Maybe the police showed up the next day and towed her out the door.

I can’t recall if any of us cried when the cops cracked in with a set of handcuffs and buzzed out with my mom’s dependent wrists in them.

But even at 15, I was ready for 25. I’d lived it before. The spirits brought it out early.

Just like sometimes all of the years I haven’t lived show up, sometimes all of the things I can’t see make an appearance, too. I haven’t always believed in spirits—at least not outside of the ones with size four sneakers who run around on Halloween. I’ve managed to survive surrounded by spirits my whole life, but I didn’t recognize them until a few years ago. I think I was always too intimate with them to notice them. These spirits breathe inside people; they hide there; they touched me there.

The man with the limp housed one of these spirits, and a whole lot of other people in his neighborhood were landlords to its brothers.

And the man with the limp’s penis wasn’t. The spirit showed me that.

I can’t remember if he started kissing me and Tonia before or after he helped us rob our friends. But once Gertie moved out, someone had to babysit us while Mom worked the graveyard shift. And who better than him? And who worse? All I wanted was a grilled cheese—or even a cold cheese. Can’t get into the kitchen without the password. And I knew what that was. I closed my eyes and leaned forward, hands behind my back, waiting for the smooch. But this time he poked his heavy tongue into my mouth and I let him and I hated it but I liked it.

Out of all the spirit hosts in my life, he was the last. We moved from the infested city after the landlord kicked Mom out for not having sex with him. Tell your mom to come over when she gets home. His bald head wobbled the entire walk back to his own trailer.

But the man with the limp never tried to do more than kiss me. Kiss me like your sister does I heard him tell Tonia later that same night. I don’t know if she did. And I don’t know how I got up the nerve to tell him to stop. I know what you’re doing and I don’t like it, leave me alone.

But I know I didn’t move when Scotty poked his penis around only months before, rubbing my face with it. Even though his hair tickled my lips, I kept my eyes closed and my mouth shut. I wanted him to part my lips with it. I think.

Scotty was my mom’s best friend. Had been for years. He was older than she was, and he was good to us for a lot of years before he started expecting us to be good to him. Mom met him when we still lived in Phoenix, and the four of us spent most nights crouched in her bedroom playing the Ouija board. I say playing, but I’m not sure that’s what it was.

We always began by trying to figure out what kind of spirit we had on the line. Are you a good spirit or a bad spirit? If you’re good, move the slider to the sun, and if you’re bad, move it to the moon. One night Mom and Scotty were using it, and the spirit they contacted said he was a good spirit. This spirit moved to the sun and then immediately began chanting or cursing or something scary enough to make my mom’s hands fly off the board. Even evil spired spider it spelled again and again and faster and faster. Mom got the feeling that if she’d have let the spirit spell it out a few more times, it would have come through the slider. No telling what would have happened then. The spirit could have even entered her. Maybe it entered me instead.

We didn’t use the board for a few weeks after that. Mom was convinced that we couldn’t trust any of the spirits we contacted with the board. But the next time she used it, she contacted a little girl who had been killed. The dead girl wanted us to help her. She told us the name of the man who murdered her, and we learned all about her death. Kidnapped. That’s how it all started, and wasn’t that what my mom always told me? Don’t go near strangers—you never know. The little girl didn’t survive the first day.

Tina Royer teaches at American River College and is working on her M.A. at Cal State Sacramento. This is her second time in print. E-mail: tleeroyer@aol.com