Trailer Park Triptych
I. Imposters
I was a contortionist. I kneeled on the carpeted mall floor, bent at the waist, my arm snaked inside the Big Grab claw machine all the way up to my shoulder, pushing past the metal flap.
A few years earlier, the most 1980s thing to ever occur took place mere feet from where I now kneeled. A Michael Jackson impersonator put on a show in the indoor mall, dancing with his glittery glove and patent leather shoes on a temporary stage erected in front of Biggs, the first mega grocery store to land in Cincinnati. Patrons bagged their own groceries to keep costs down, looking on as they dropped eggs and bread loaves into plastic sacks while my best friend waited in line with her grandparents for an autograph.
Now, my hand, no glove, aimed for the black-and-gray costume of Batman, for the brown felt paw of Scooby Doo. I snatched one, and then the other, between two fingers, yanked them over the metal edge of the Big Grab pool and guided them out through the trapdoor where normally the toys would fall with a soft thud after inserting money and skillfully maneuvering the grabber’s three shiny metal prongs. I didn’t have money. I inserted myself and skillfully maneuvered five fleshy fingers onto an oversized head or protruding leg too close to the edge. It was a game. My mom sat watching from a food court table, smoking and laughing at my follies, finishing with a mild scold and a flash of pride that brightened the tip of her cigarette before she gently rubbed it out, tucking what was left back into her cigarette case.
The King of Pop impersonator signed a piece of paper, sequined glove glimmering in the mall fluorescents, and put it in my best friend’s third-grade hand.
Chatty and grinning, I walked out with two plush characters tucked under my arms.
Holding her grandmother’s hand out to the parking lot, my best friend alternated gripping the paper close and glancing down at it. PYT, it read. Love, Michael.
Years apart, we walked out of there as winners.
II. Opportunities for Advancement
We stole shit. We didn’t consider it stealing, of course. But we stole. We were thieves. A Goodwill store and donation drop-off were located directly behind our trailer. And when I say directly behind, I mean I could throw a rock from the back of my trailer and hit the building if I wanted to. And sometimes I wanted to. Sometimes I did.
The drop-off point was closest to us. We watched people drive up and plop garbage bags full of clothes, cardboard boxes of household goods, bikes, Big Wheels, and furniture onto the gravel. We leaned out the back door, peered out the bedroom window, or stood in the side yard to see what they were leaving for us. When the sun went down, my mom and I would scurry over to the pile of treasures along with a few neighbors and dig around to see what we might want. And we took it.
I wanted the toys. My mom wanted the household items, the decorative stuff she could sell at the flea market. Nothing was valuable in a very precise way. And we bought items from the Goodwill store all the time. My grandmother would flash her Golden Buckeye senior discount card, so the cashiers knew her by name. But those items left after hours? We stole those. Not all, but some. So we could sell them. Or play with them. Or put them to use in our house.
Until they erected a six-foot chain link fence between our backyards and their parking lot to keep us out. Or to keep their donations in. Or both.
III. In Line at the Winn-Dixie
A year after my mother died, after I’d spent years away from her on purpose, I waited to check out at the Winn-Dixie. In front of me, a sinewy bleached blonde in her late 50s or early 60s dropped a few items onto the scuffed black conveyor belt. As I rounded the front of my cart to start unloading, I caught the woman’s fragrance. It was a signature scent my mother had worn so many years, each layer of it building on the last, deepening into her skin until it became her and she became it. It only smells this way when it’s been worn for so long, ceaselessly. It only smells this way when a body is surrounded by it, when it’s held close by living room walls or car windows. Like layers of thick paint on canvas, it builds.
As a child, I would crawl up next to my mother on the couch and tuck myself in next to her. After tiring of whatever traipsed across the television screen, I’d take her arm, bare in summertime, and pull it to my mouth, press the fleshiest part to my lips, inhale the air we occupied deeply, and blow. I’d fall apart in laughter at the tremendous fart noises I could create. Juicy, squeaky, deep and rumbling. I’d try all variations until she would snap herself away from me, grab one of my arms at the wrist and bang my hand against my own head or side or face, laughing and repeating, “Why do you keep hitting yourself? Why do you keep hitting yourself?” until I’d wriggle away and tumble off the couch.
I inhaled the air the blonde and I occupied and dragged in those decades of the same brand of cigarettes, embedded in the woman’s stringy bleached hair, trapped beneath her yellowed fingernails, her skin tone deepened by tannins. With a can of corn suspended halfway between cart and conveyor, I closed my eyes and kept sucking in that sharp singe left after the cigarette is stubbed out, the scent of burnt tobacco soured on skin.
Why do you keep hitting yourself? it asked. Why do you keep hitting yourself?
Amy Bailey (@ItsWenzday) recently earned her MFA from Miami University where she served as Oxford Magazine's nonfiction editor. She won the 2018 Jordan-Goodman Award in creative nonfiction and received Honorable Mention in the 2018 Atticus Review Videopoem Contest. Her work has appeared in The Florida Review's Aquifer, PMS: Poem Memoir Story (now known as NELLE), Blotterature, Voicemail Poems, and Revolution House, among others. Amy also hosts the newly-launched podcast Girls Who Became Writers which features interviews on craft with women who write nonfiction.