Left
This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live. We are wrong, of course, but it doesn't matter. It's too late. At least on the edge of my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my town, it's much, much, much too late.
-Toni Morrison
To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.
-Sylvia Plath
While waiting outside for a ride to the funeral, I saw a bird fly into a closed window in the upstairs of our house. The Kansas landscape was stark and unforgiving, a black bruise in the morning -- stopped dead at eight o'clock by the bird that had thrown itself at our glass window.
I knew then that this was my fault.
Two weeks before my father had taken me out in the field with him to show me how the crops were failing. "I don't know what's going on, Reese," he said to me. "It's like someone's poisoned the corn."
I didn't know what to say. The sky stretched, so wide and unblinking above me, and it formed a cup over our slice of land. Corn stalks reached up, finally met the sky at the horizon. Withering and sick, the plants pricked my arm as I went by. And I didn't know why my daddy was telling me these things. It seemed to me that he should have been telling my mother.
And on the morning of the funeral I crept over to see where the bird had landed. It was dead and still, its crooked wing reaching for the sky, its feet retracted, its head rolling over to the side. More bad luck. This bad luck was my fault -- I had brought it on all of us. On New Year's, I'd gone out first despite my mother's protests. "Let your father go out first," she said. "It's bad luck for a girl to go outside on New Year's Day before a man." But Cecilia and I had decided to go anyway, taking pots and pans to bang loudly so that passing cars might hear us -- or even the neighbors who lived a mile and a half away.
And then I had opened an umbrella in the house in April. And Ceel had started coming inside through our bedroom window. Bad luck soaked the foundation of our house, made the weather turn bad, made the crops go foul. And then it hit my dad -- one day out in the field he went into insulin shock. We couldn't revive him.
So on the day of the funeral, I brought a newspaper out to cover the dead bird, so that the relatives might not see. This was my sin -- inviting bad luck into our lives that year. When you grow up in Kansas, you learn that life is just stretches of luck, good and bad, changeable and fickle as the Midwestern weather.
Neo asks me what's wrong. He's been lingering over me, watching me work for the past half hour.
"You're so quiet," he says. "You know, you don't have to be so quiet."
"You and Tank have done great work on this mapping project," I say, pointing to the computer monitor. Despite his being the One, I'm still his superior. "I'm quite amazed by it."
He comes over and bends down, hugs me from behind and whispers in my ear: "That's not what I mean."
Later, when we're in bed together, I'm drifting off to sleep when his arm reaches out and wraps around my waist. It's as though he's pulling me back to him. "Trinity. What do you want?"
"I want what you want," I say resolutely.
"I want to give you what you want."
But what do I want? For a long time I simply wanted him, I thought that might solve everything. But here it is, months later, and we're only a little closer to winning the war. The oracle told me that this would take time, probably years, but I'm restless. I cling to him, my leg still aching from a recent injury in the Matrix.
"You know you can tell me anything," he whispers in my ear. I feel his lips against my cheek. "Tell me things. In the Matrix, who were you?"
I try to inch away from him, but the bed is small. "That doesn't matter."
"Trinity." He tightens his grip around me. "I need you. In that other world, shit, we could have walked right past one another. Have you ever though about it?"
I shake my head. "No. We couldn't have known each other."
"Why not? Give me a good reason."
I try to roll over and turn away from him, but he stops me. "You're trying to trick me into talking," I say.
"What's wrong with that?" He's smiling in the dark. "Look -- you know everything about me. You watched me, you saw how I lived. And I love you. Don't you think it's time you told me where you came from?"
"I'm Trinity," I say. "I've always been Trinity. It doesn't matter where I came from."
I feel him draw away from me. And oh God, I've hurt him. "Neo . . ." I say. After a few minutes of silence I inhale and decide to begin. I suppose it's time to level with him. "I grew up in Kansas. On a farm. My father died the summer I was twelve. My mother died shortly after that. My sister and I --"
"Wait --" he says, "how did they die?"
I take a deep breath and try to slow down. "My father was a diabetic. One day, out in the field, he had some sort of the seizure. He went into shock and died." I close my eyes, trying to shut out the image of his gold tags flashing in the hot sun as we tried to revive him. "I don't know how my mother died," I said quietly, though I do know. "One day she just didn't wake up. The paramedics came and took the body away and never told me anything." I'm glad it's dark because I don't want Neo to see my face. This makes me sad -- I've rarely thought about it during these years here.
His hand reaches up to touch my face. "I'm sorry."
All these years I've tried to convince myself that they weren't really my parents. But what were they, then? "My sister and I were sent to live with our aunt in Los Angeles. She wasn't that great. Within a year she'd left us to go off with this motorcycle gang. So my sister and I tried to take care of things for a while, but the bills piled up and the neighbors knew we lived alone. Someone called social services. And that was it," I finish.
"What happened?"
"Not much," I lie, "just a lot of foster homes. And Morpheus fished me out when I was sixteen."
"Foster homes?"
Now I'm the one reaching up to touch his cheek. "They're not as bad as everyone says. Some were actually nice. Don't believe all the horror stories you hear." I kiss his eyelid and settle back down in bed. I pretend I'm sleeping until I hear his breathing grow steady beside me. But my mind is still spinning. I'm thinking of all the things I didn't tell him about, all the things I left behind.
Cecilia was the talkative child, the shining performer, and I was the one who mainly stayed in the background. People thought I was slow and stupid, but when I was in the background I was counting. Counting the bricks on the wall, the ants on the pavement, the books on the shelf. I had no use for books -- only for numbers, and behind my eyelids I imagined numbers that stretched off into the distance with no end, just like our land. Without a pencil or calculator, I figured the number of circles on our wallpaper and the number dots on my ceiling. For fun I multiplied or divided everything by my age.
I was nine when I figured the amount of fertilizer we'd need to keep our crops healthy. I took my ruler and measured a small piece of land, then looked up how much land we had in all. Using my standard plot, I figured out how many corn plants we had, and how much fertilizer they needed. I wrote the number, in pounds, on a slip of paper and gave it to my father. He studied it.
"Reese, where did you get this?"
I shrugged. "I just figured it out."
"Is this some kind of math project for school?"
"No," I said and told him in detail how I'd gotten the answer. He asked for my figuring sheet and I told him I didn't have one. I did everything in my head.
That night I was sitting in the living room pretending to watch TV. I was really listening to my parents as they discussed me in the kitchen.
"Annie, I think Reese may be gifted," my father said.
"Gifted? Our Therese? How could that be?" My mother put dishes in the sink to let them soak overnight. "She gets all Cs in school. The teachers are always writing notes about how she doesn't apply herself."
He showed my mother the slip of paper. "She came up with how much fertilizer we need simply by measuring a few plots of land."
My mother waved her hand dismissively. "Oh Tom, she probably went through your papers in the office and found the number."
"Reese," my father called to me. I looked up. "What's sixteen times twenty-three?"
I waited a second before answering. "Three hundred and sixty-eight."
My father walked over to the drawer and took out a calculator. "She's right," he said after punching the numbers in. He showed my mother.
"What's forty-one times a hundred sixty?"
"Six-thousand, five-hundred and sixty," I answered, this time without waiting.
My father showed the calculator to my mother again.
"I'll be damned," she said. "When I was a kid I hated math."
The teachers were skeptical at first too, until my father came in and made me show them what I could do. They still didn't buy it. So they gave me some kind of test and I got all of the math questions right.
My dad thought I should be skipped ahead in school, but my mom wasn't so keen on the idea. "Reese has a hard enough time as it is," she said. "She has no friends."
The teachers wouldn't hear of it. "She may be an advanced math student," the principal said, "but she's reading an entire level below her current grade." The principal twirled his pencil around his fingers and looked oddly pleased. They weren't going to move me ahead, or even give me special math lessons.
My father was distressed to hear that I was doing poorly in reading and writing. That summer he took me out into the field with him -- as a result I learned how to handle most of the farm equipment and tend to the crops. Out there, where no one could hear us, he recited poems and stories. "Season of mist and mellow fruitfulness," he sang, "Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun." At night he read to me as I drifted off to sleep, imagining the corn as it grew and ripened on the stalks. In my mind I could see the stalks, then the husks, and then the kernels as I shucked them off, piled them in golden hills, perfect like sunlight.
When school started again I was reading at grade level and my father decided to have me transferred to a private school twenty miles away on the outskirts of Kansas City. "I want to go to a special school too," Cecilia objected. She was eight, a year younger than I was.
"We'll have to send them both," my father said. He was a great proponent of fairness. Despite my mother's protests that the tuition would be too expensive, my dad made arrangements and had the bus swing by our farm. At six o'clock on the first day of school, my father waited with us down the road, carrying Cecilia in his arms because she was still sleepy.
In the new school I didn't make friends, but I got along okay with my city classmates. They were used to hearing cars go by at all times of the night and neighbors who kept them awake with slamming doors and barking dogs. They saw cornfields only when their travels took them outside city limits. I had nothing in common with them.
I had less in common with them when I was put in with sixth graders to take my math class. The sixth grade boys jeered, the girls smirked and whispered about me. But that was okay -- I was in my glory, learning about how numbers could be broken up into fractions and decimals. I quickly picked up percentages, and hurriedly rushed to learn negatives. Numbers didn't just go on forever into infinity, they went backwards into infinity too. I imagined them rewinding themselves like the tapes in our new VCR.
By fifth grade I was doing pre-algebra, then some algebra. I took classes in the summer to start on geometry. When I was eleven I started working at the store my parents managed. It was down the road from our farm. I helped the customers and took inventory. Without a calculator, I balanced the books and kept track of our earnings. "There's nothing she can't do," my father told my mother. "Reese is brilliant."
"Lonely though," my mother said. This was another time when they thought I wasn't listening. "Cecilia has so many friends! Therese is so busy with her school work that she hardly takes the time to talk to us."
"Give her time," my father said. "Reese will come around and show everyone what she's made of."
I loved my father more than anyone, loved him for the faith he had in me. In the summer I helped in the fields and my skin turned brown, while my sister stayed inside and put on plays for our parents. When my father didn't know I was there, I watched him as he wandered into the fields each night. He always went to the same spot and looked up. I figured he was counting the stars as I liked to do -- I didn't know what else he might be looking for. Now I think I know.
When Neo and I are apart, I count the seconds. Never are seconds and minutes so long. The night passes us quickly and then we are separated during the day -- the waiting begins. We have to get things done, after all. I have to force myself to put Neo out of my mind, forget the nights we share together.
Sentinel attacks are the worst when they come at night. Frightened and shaking, we have to pull on our clothes and cross over into that other world. That's what's it like, another world. When Neo and I come together, we're in our own world. Everything else falls away and I finally understand who I am. But when sentinels come, they ruin all of that.
Last time I was afraid. I stood in the cockpit with Morpheus and Link, watching as the machines searched the murky depths for our ship. I could feel Neo's breath on my neck. He stood behind me. I shut my eyes, so afraid for him. I couldn't look at those machines anymore because I knew what Neo was up against. Terror. Tyranny. I can't stand the thought of losing him -- it makes me physically sick.
He found my hand, his fingers tentatively weaving through mine. "Relax," he whispered, his voice barely audible. "It's going to be okay."
Things weren't okay the summer I was twelve. First my father died, dropping off his tractor in the mid-day heat and going into shock on the ground. I was there. I ran to the house, screaming, trying to get help. Mom called the ambulance and I ran to bring him some juice, but I was too late. Cecilia wailed the entire time, as if she had been the daughter who helped in the fields and ran the store. I could do nothing but stare at the sun, shocked and open-mouthed, waiting for an explanation. On the morning of the funeral when I saw the bird throw itself at our window, I knew it was my fault.
The night after the funeral I couldn't sleep. I got out of bed, padded down the hall and heard my mother crying. I stood in the doorway. "What is it?" I asked.
My mother looked up, papers in her lap. "Maria Therese." My full name. "It's nothing. Just go back to bed."
"Is it about the money?"
She looked up as if she was seeing me for the first time. "Yes."
We were running low. In March a storm had destroyed our barn and we had to dip into our savings to replace it. Then there were the crops, the bad weather. The plants' leaves had dark spots on them and the corn was growing all wrong. Rotting on the stalk. I knew these things. I was the one who helped my father with the expenses.
"Ceel and I will quit going to the city for school," I said. "I'll put in more hours at the store so you can lay off the help. We can take out loans."
My mother shook her head, her face worn with lines that had appeared overnight. "We have a bad credit record. And no one's lending these days."
I crawled into bed with her that night, and when I woke up her hands were curled up under my chin.
A week later I was working at the store in the afternoon. A blue car pulled into the dirt parking lot and a man and a woman in suits stepped out. I held my breath. We never got customers who looked like that -- maybe they'd buy out the whole store.
They stepped inside and took off their shades. "Hello, young lady," the man said to me. "Is Tom Martindale available to talk to us?"
I shrugged and went back to sorting price tags.
The man tried again. "This is the store that belongs to Tom Martindale, right?"
I stopped sorting and looked up. "He's dead," I whispered.
The two exchanged long glances and hurried whispers. The man spoke, "Well, I'm certainly sorry to hear that. Are you his daughter?"
I nodded slowly. "Who’re you?"
The man pulled his lips into a small grin. "We're from the city. We need to talk to your mother. Is she around?"
I turned and pointed. "She's up at the house. Why do you need to see her?"
The woman and man turned to leave. "It's a private matter," she said.
After they left I closed the store early. I knew that something wasn't right. By the time I'd walked up the road and back to the house, the blue car was pulling away, leaving tracks in the dust. I ran inside to find my mother bent over the sink. "Who was that?"
She turned to look at me, her face stained with tears. "The IRS."
I felt the air leave my chest. "What do they want?"
"They were here before your father died as well," she said. "He wouldn't tell me what it was about." She took me by the arms. "Therese, no matter what they say, I want you to know that your father was a good man."
"What? What are they saying?"
"It's about the store. They're saying he didn't pay what he owed."
"Jesus, Mom," I said, able to cut through the bullshit. I clenched my fists to keep from sobbing. "They're saying Dad cheated on his taxes?"
She nodded. "For the last seven years."
I shook my head. For the first time I felt the tears start at the back of my eyes. "No, it couldn't be--"
"Therese, try not to think of this. Just remember that he loved you."
I backed into the counter. "No Mom, there's no way. No way. He was so honest. I watched him at the store and when he balanced the checkbook. I kept track of things." I tried to wrench away from her but she kept holding onto me.
"Honey, sometimes people do things because they want the best for their families."
"No," I said and tore away from her. "I knew him! He wouldn't do that!" I hit the back door and kept moving, running to the fields to cry among the corn stalks. In a few minutes I stumbled across my sister, balled up in the middle of the corn and crouching on the ground.
She looked up at me. Her face was as wet as mine. "What?" she said. "You thought you were the only one who ever came out here to cry?"
I sat down next to her and traced my initials in the dust.
"Well?" she said. "Aren't you going to tell me what all this is about? Why Mom's so upset? Why those people came to our house?"
I inhaled the dust. It was loose and dry, crumbling like clumps of hardened sugar. Bad dirt for growing crops, the type of dirt that could give way and swallow up your whole house. "They're from the government," I explained. "The store is getting audited."
"What's that?" Cecilia asked.
"It's when the tax people show up and ruin your life."
We watched them then, watched them take everything. If the IRS didn't get it, the bank came and made sure it got taken. They got the car, the TV. Shut down the store. Cecilia looked terrible, her blond hair tangled and wrapping around her unhappy face as we watched from the field. We put a sign up in front of our house: For Sale. Autumn arrived and we harvested nothing from our wide fields. We were selling the farm, planning to move to the city. My mom applied for some kind of welfare. Now we were going to be poor.
"I don't want to be poor," Cecilia whined as she put her old dolls into a box. Our old transistor radio played the Eagles.
"Tough it out," I said. "In the Soviet Union everybody's poor."
"Not everybody." Ceel paused to look at herself in a hand held mirror. At eleven she was already sneaking make-up from our mother's bathroom. She was going to be pretty, the sort of shining, petite prettiness that boys liked. She had pale hair that hung down in layers, framing her face. Her eyes were wide and green. We couldn't have looked less alike.
"Are you finished packing?" I said. "It's your turn to make dinner."
"Oh Reese," Cecilia groaned. "I'm too tired to cook. Why doesn't Mom cook anymore?"
Our mother had confined herself to her room during that dark season. She only came out at night to supervise what we had packed during the day. I dumped a bunch of old records in a box, sick of my sister's complaining. "Fine," I sighed. "I'll do it. You owe me two night's of cooking."
I stalked down the hall to see if my mother wanted me to thaw the fish sticks that we hadn't eaten the night before. Her door was slightly ajar, and I could see the green of her bedspread. I pushed forward and stepped into the room. My mother lay on her side, her back towards me, her figure covered in an old blanket. She was inert. I didn't even hear breath, and I knew something was wrong. "Mom," I whispered and went to the edge of the bed. "Mom." I shook her shoulder and her arms spun outward. Her right hand clenched an empty bottle of sleeping pills. From her left hand, a rosary fell. I slipped the empty bottle in my pocket and went to tell Cecilia to call the paramedics.
My world unraveled. Bad luck turned to bad memories. In my memory, everything about that time is grainy and undefined. I seemed to sleep for days and wake up only for the necessary, important things. I opened my eyes to see my aunt's small, rotting house in Los Angeles. I shut them again when my caseworker said good-bye. Then my aunt was yelling at me. I'd let her skinny dog out and he'd jumped the fence. I'd ruined dinner by leaving it on the stove for too long. I didn't pick up her boyfriend's shoes, so she tripped on them and nearly broke her neck. That time she swatted at me, her sweaty hand nearly coming in contact with my face.
There were loud parties at our house. During the night I kept the door to our room locked and told Cecilia there was nothing to worry about. But I was afraid, afraid of the drunk men and what they might do to us. I might have grown up on a farm, but I wasn't naive. I gave the bed to Ceel and slept on the floor with an old blanket. Knees pulled up to my chest, I gripped my mother's rosary and cried quietly, only allowing myself to sleep when things grew quiet and people left the house. I didn't know how to pray.
I slept all day at school, quickly falling behind, barely blinking when grades came out and I had straight F’s. Math wasn't even fun anymore. What was the point? I'd done these exercises two years before, sweeping through entire texts without much effort. Now the teachers wanted to tell me that I didn't even know how to add the duckies and subtract the bunnies. My mother's face rose above my history book. She had never hit me or blamed me for letting the dog run away. And my father . . . I put my head down on the desk and tried to conceal the fact that I was crying.
Next thing I knew, I sitting in the guidance counselor's office, wearing my mismatched thrift store blouse and skirt. I stared at my cheap pair of canvas keds.
Mr. Silverman had a soft, assuring voice, but that didn't make me want to tell him anything. I'd been summoned to his office because of my academic problems and lousy conduct. Now he looked over my records. "Your former teachers in Kansas City speak highly of you," he said. "You want to tell me why you don't want to work at our school?"
I just stared at my shoes.
He gave me a test -- the same test they gave me in fourth grade when my father went to the school and insisted that I was gifted. Some IQ test. I breezed through it in less than fifty minutes and gave it back to him.
The next day he pulled me out of my assigned seventh grade classroom. The kids jeered and made noises as I walked to the door. I knew what was coming and I didn't care.
"Therese," he said when he had me in his office. "They call you Reese, right? Well, your score came back from the test you took yesterday."
I raised my eyebrows.
"I don't know what to say. I'm extremely shocked. You're a very bright girl -- actually, 'bright' is putting it mildly. You shouldn't be in seventh grade, but in high school already. You need to be challenged." He took out my file again. "My goodness, geometric proofs in the sixth grade." He leafed through the file, scrutinizing things that he'd barely glanced at before. "What happened in reading and English?"
My mediocre grades in the humanities. I got straight Cs in history and Bs in reading and English, only thanks to the time my father devoted to coaching me in those subjects.
I shrugged. I wasn't stupid -- I simply disliked books. Books dealt with people and people were messy. All of those emotions and thoughts running all over the place. Not like math, where everything was in a straight line, everything was perfect. Six always came after five, there was no other way. The only stories I like were the ones my father had read to me as a child, stories about Alice on the other side of the mirror and Dorothy spinning around in her house like a top. These characters lived in different worlds -- they didn't have to live with their aunt in Los Angeles and go to school where only a fourth of the students had English as their first language.
He put my file down on the table. "It must be awfully difficult for you," he said kindly.
I tried not to pay attention. If I let my mind wander to my problems, I might start crying in front of the counselor. I couldn't do that.
"I understand you live with your aunt now," he said. "How's that?"
"Fine," I answered, trying not to choke.
"Does she treat you okay?"
"Great."
Mr. Silverman sat back in his chair. "I'm going to see what I can do about getting you into some high school math classes. Maybe some extra tutoring. The high school is right across the field, so I don't see why we couldn't arrange something for you. I’m afraid putting you in a gifted class would still not be challenging enough." He looked up at me again. "Are you sure there isn't anything else?"
I took a deep breath. "I don't eat lunch. I mean, I want to, but we don't have any . . . my sister and I . . ."
"Oh, that's the problem," Mr. Silverman said, reaching in his drawer for a slip of paper. "That's no big deal. Many of our students are on an assisted meal plan. Take this paper home and have your aunt fill it out."
He handed me the sheet and I glanced over it. It needed the incomes of the primary providers of the family. "I can't do that. My aunt -- she'll never fill it out."
Mr. Silverman glanced at me suspiciously. He took the form back. "Don't worry, Reese. If that's the case, I'll straighten it out."
Two days later I was walking home with Cecilia and she pinched me on the back through my shirt. "Thanks a lot, Reese. Now I'm a charity girl."
"What the hell are you talking about?"
"You couldn't just live with it, could you? The counselor got me out class to give me a free meal ticket. I coulda survived without lunch, but I guess you couldn't. I just didn't want to be a charity kid."
But she wasn't the one who stayed up all night. I needed to eat.
All of this was a really long time ago. You see why I can't tell Neo. He'd take it out of context, maybe even feel sorry for me. Besides, we've all had rough lives. You just have to let it go and keep moving if you want to accomplish anything. I made a pact with myself years ago that I wouldn't let the past affect how I live my life in the resistance. Tank and I are close, but we've never even talked about our former lives. Morpheus knows more than anyone about me, but he came into my life later. We certainly never talk about it.
Sometimes I watch Neo when he's not watching me. He doesn't know I'm there. He'll be bent over the center counsel, studying the code. I wonder how it looks in his eyes. I wonder how he sees me -- how I look in the real world as opposed to the Matrix.
Yesterday he spotted me out of the corner of his eye. He was alone in the core, working on one of the computers. Without looking up, he asked me, "So what happened to your sister?"
I took a breath and stepped forward. "What?"
"Your sister. You told me you had a sister."
I lingered over one of the chairs. "Did you have a sister?"
He hit one of the screens and it resigned itself to darkness. "No. I had no brothers or sisters."
I nodded and pressed my hand to my stomach. "I don't know what happened to her," I said quietly. "I'm sure she's done just fine without me."
"Don't underestimate your effect on someone, Trinity."
I dropped my hand and turned away. "I'll see you later," I whispered and left the core.
Aunt Sarah was what my mother would have called a hard woman. She drank constantly and smoked several packs a day. The scent of marijuana was part of the house, something you smelled immediately when you hit the door. The couch was dusted with it.
I don't know what Aunt Sarah did. She got money for taking us in, but she certainly never spent any on us. "I think she's a truck driver," Cecilia said.
"Don't be ridiculous," I replied. "She's home too often."
"UPS, I mean. Or maybe she works at the post office."
Her boyfriend, Wayne, was a constant fixture at our house. He had a ponytail and left his shoes lying in front of the room while he watched TV and slept on the couch. Because he worked at the liquor store, he was able to smuggle out a few bottles each night for Sarah and his friends. They came over and drank, then took off to ride motorcycles. I was a bit horrified to be related to Aunt Sarah -- I didn't understand how we might share the same genes.
School was my escape. Though it was horrible, I found peace in the library or in unoccupied classrooms. Once a day I walked over to the high school for my math lessons. Now I was up to trigonometry, which I enjoyed. Though I'd previously turned up my nose at the thought of using a calculator, I now understood that using one could save me time.
At home I cooked baked beans and hamburgers. Once a week we went out for McDonald's or fried chicken. Once every few months, if we nagged her at the appropriate time, Sarah took us shopping for new clothes. Ceel and I were growing quickly and in need of new shoes and pants. "You're going to be tall," Sarah said. "It'll be a pain in the ass finding things that fit you." We got things from yard sales and thrift stores. If we were lucky, we got to glean things from the outlet nearby. My sister and I traded clothes that almost matched. Usually we looked terrible. We looked poor.
Cecilia and I learned quickly that if we wanted anything done, we had to do it ourselves. No one would iron our clothes unless we did it ourselves, and if we didn't do the dishes on a regular basis, they would pile up in the sink and attract roaches. If we wanted to eat, we searched the cupboard for something edible -- usually tuna and potatoes. More than once I snuck a few bills from her wallet so I could go on a field trip or buy a few groceries. My father cheated and stole, I thought to myself. This is just who I am. But one day Sarah found me sneaking a greasy five from her wallet. She twisted my arm around and slammed me against the doorway.
I no longer thought of my parents as the safe beacons of my past. They had done this awful thing to me -- this was their fault. My father had made us poor, and my mother killed herself so as not to own up to the consequences. They had abandoned us. Inside I railed against them, anger prickling around in me like sour milk.
That spring I was thirteen. A few times a week I wore a yellow sundress Sarah had gotten for me at a garage sale. It was hopelessly skimpy and hadn't been in style since the late '70s. Kids sneered at me when I wore it, but I had little else to wear. One day I was washing dishes in the kitchen when Wayne came in from work. He was lugging the usual bottle of hard liquor in a paper bag. I pointedly ignored him, as usual. When Wayne noticed me he either stared or asked stupid questions.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"Dishes," I said quietly. I moved over to the counter to dry them, and suddenly Wayne was standing behind me. He grabbed me fiercely from behind, mashing his hands against my breasts. I felt his breath on my neck, could smell the grease on him. I wrenched away and ran out of the kitchen. And then I was in the bathroom, closing the door and locking it.
Wayne started banging on the door. Oh shit, I thought, because no one was home but me and Wayne. Sarah was still at work and Cecilia was going for groceries. Neither one would be home for a while. He could kill me, he really could. Put my body in a bag and toss it in a dumpster behind some Hollywood club. I panicked and began clawing at the bathroom window. It was sealed shut.
"Let me in!" he shouted. "If you don't want it, who the hell is the dress for?"
I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. The yellow sundress. I opened the medicine cabinet. I couldn't kill Wayne, he was far too big. He'd kill me first. I'd rather kill myself than have him kill me. I'd never been my mother's daughter, but I would become so very quickly. I started rooting through the drawers for a knife, some heavy sleeping pills, anything. Could I hang myself from the shower curtain rod?
I came up with a pair of old rusty scissors and looked at them. They'd have to do. But wait -- I hadn't thought of smashing the mirror. I could take a piece of shattered glass and ram it in his face, his neck.
Then I noticed that Wayne had stopped pounding. Everything was quiet. But I didn't want to leave the bathroom. I stared at myself in the mirror until I stopped breathing so heavily. I looked at myself, really looked. My hair was in my face so I brushed it aside. I hadn't looked at myself in a very long time, but now I thought I might be pretty. Almost pretty. I'd never entertained that notion before, but now I was horrified. I picked up the scissors again.
When Cecilia came home I let myself out of the bathroom and went to our room. She was in the kitchen starting to cook dinner. I took off my sundress and shoved it in the trash. I put on a pair of jeans and an old t-shirt. Air Supply, it said. That's what I needed. I took a few deep breaths and tried to stop shaking so hard.
The door opened quietly. "Reese, do you want a hamburger or peanut butter and jelly?" Cecilia asked. Then she looked at me. "Oh my God, what did you do to your hair?"
"I cut it."
She frowned, still standing in the doorway. "Why? I could have trimmed it if you'd asked. You know I'm so much better at that stuff than you. It looks terrible."
"Who gives a shit."
Her eyes looked up at me, wide and surprised. I suppose I'd never taken that tone with her before. "I'll even it up after dinner, how's that?"
I nodded quickly and turned away.
Sarah was home for dinner, but Wayne insisted on sitting close to me. He pulled his chair around so that our legs were touching. I tried to move away but he put his hand on the back of my chair.
"Your hair looks like shit," he whispered. "You do that for me?" His hand was on my leg and I was glad I'd changed into jeans. When he reached for my crotch, he only got a crease of denim.
I excused myself from the table to vomit. Later on that evening I sat on the floor in my room and allowed Cecilia to even up my hair. "With a curling iron," she said, "you could curl it under and make it look cute. Like a bob."
"That's okay," I said. "I don't care."
"You will." She gathered up my hair in an old newspaper and threw it in the trash.
That night as I tried to sleep on the floor, I heard a slight noise outside the bedroom door. I sat up and squinted to see in the dark. I kept the scissors under my pillow. They were rusty. If they didn't kill Wayne when I stabbed him, they would surely cause him to get lockjaw.
I saw his silhouette in the doorway and held my breath. Wayne was standing there. I smelled whiskey.
"Wayne," a voice said. Aunt Sarah. "Wayne, you come away from there. Don't touch those girls. You leave them alone."
The shape disappeared from the doorway. I lied back down but felt my blood pulsing around my limbs. A tear squeezed out of the corner of my eye. That was the only favor Sarah ever did for me. A week later she and Wayne packed their bags and left me and my sister without an explanation, taking their motorcycles and all the money in the house. People were after them. They'd crossed someone, I heard. It didn't surprise me, and I didn't care. I didn't expect anyone to stay anymore.
We tried to keep things together. For a little while we succeeded. Cecilia and I were used to taking care of ourselves, doing the laundry and getting ourselves to school. The first day they were gone, we went through the cupboards and pulled out all the food. A few cans of soup, beans, tuna. Stale bread, still edible but not great. Some crackers.
"That's it? We're going to starve," Cecilia said.
"No we aren't. We still have our free meal at school, remember?"
"We can't survive on one meal a day, even if it's a good one."
She was right. When I went to school, I took to pilfering a few extra cookies from the line, stuffing them in my book bag. Eventually I was shoving sandwiches into my pockets. Someone noticed and snitched on me. They took my food away and wrote me up, gave me a detention.
So I started stealing after school. I'd go into the grocery stores on the corner and shove things into my book bag. For dinner Cecilia and I would put peanut butter on crackers, or eat tuna out of the can without mayonnaise. Bread was too difficult to steal, so we went without it. Even though this situation worked, I knew it would only last for the time being. Bills were piling up and although I understood them, I didn't have access to money to pay them. House bills, car bills, utility bills. How long before they showed up to take the car or turned off the electricity? Inside I shuddered. I was reliving Kansas.
One day the skinny dog jumped the fence and ran away (we had no food for him anymore; it was just as well). A neighbor brought him back, a kind elderly man we knew as Bumble. He lived down the street.
"She home?" he asked, meaning Sarah.
"She's on a trip right now," I said. "She'll be back next week."
Cecilia watched from the doorway, her mouth pulled into a frown. She looked like she might cry.
"She left you girls alone?"
"I'm thirteen," I grumbled. Bumble was nice but too nosy.
"I haven't seen that aunt of yours in a while. Ain't right of her to leave you girls for so long." He took out a handkerchief and wiped his face. The southern California sun was searing and bad for the skin.
After he left I put the skinny dog in the backyard and tried to ignore the sounds of his hungry yelping. I felt the same way, my stomach clenching like a fist. It shot pains throughout my abdomen.
Cecilia was crying in the kitchen. For supper we'd eaten peanut butter out of the jar. We had no crackers, I'd have to go stealing again.
"Stop whining," I said.
"We should go to the police, Reese. I'm tired of being hungry. The police could help us."
"No they couldn't," I replied. "They'll take us and put us in a home. You know what those places are like?"
She sat at the table and turned her wet face to look up at me. "What?"
"Horrible. Much worse than this."
She began to sob. "Nothing can be worse than this. This is awful. Reese, I'm starving. I can't even see straight anymore."
"In the Soviet Union --"
"Who cares about the Soviet Union!" Cecilia pounded her fist on the table. "Reese, I can count all my ribs." She pulled up her shirt. I could see her training bra, the one Mom had bought for her before Dad died. A full year later she didn't have anything under it.
"Okay," I said sadly. "We'll go to the police."
But it turned out we didn't have to. The next day people from the county showed up early in the morning. I figured Bumble must have called them. Cecilia and I packed our bags without much objection, taking our thrift store clothes and canvas shoes. I remembered to take my mother's rosary from underneath my pillow on the floor.
Neo and I are together in the mess hall, holding each other quietly, but we quickly separate when we hear shouting in the hallway. "You can go to hell!" Nala screams. "I hate working with you!"
We exchange glances. It's Tank and Nala, fighting again.
Tank bursts into the mess hall and quickly shuts the door. "Jesus H. Christ," he says, "that girl is crazy."
Tank doesn't care that he's interrupted us or that he's the third wheel around us. He pours himself a bowl of slop and sits down on the bench across from us. "So what are you doing?" he asks. "Other than making sick puppy dog faces at each other."
"Getting ready for that trip to the Matrix tomorrow," I tell him. "I'm not going, but Neo is."
Neo grins. "Guess I get to take Nala. Show her how to take a SWAT team. This mission shouldn't be a big deal."
"Don't get cocky," I say. "Any time you go into the Matrix it's a big deal."
"Especially for the agents," Tank says. "They don't quite know what to make of him yet."
That's not a surprise. Neo can fly, stop time, and instantly delete anyone who gets in his way. Now we're just trying to figure out how to take that to the next level -- meaning the beginning of the eradication of the Matrix.
"Just be careful," I tell Neo.
"Aw," coos Tank, "isn't that sweet. Like a mother hen." He smiles a little and swallows a spoonful of slop.
"I was talking more about Nala," I say. "She's still new at this."
"I'll look out for her," Neo replies quietly.
"If you ask me," Tank says, "that girl doesn't need anyone to look after her. Her stare could drop an agent at forty yards."
I get up to put my things away. "Tank, what were you fighting about?"
He shrugs. "She was mapping and she missed one of the codes. I told her and she flew off the handle. She's impossible to work with. I mean, most of you guys are cool about stuff like that. But Nala? You look at that girl sideways and she goes into a fit."
"Were you patient?" I ask. I know Tank -- he likes the fact that he knows more about the code than anyone else.
"Of course!"
I leave the mess and go looking for Nala. She's in the bathroom, seething. At nineteen, she's a pretty girl but either angry or completely silent. But she and I understand each other. I understand angry women, women like Switch who could cut through your bullshit pretenses with one hard look. And I look at Nala and see what I could have been. Last year we found her in Zion, sleeping in doorways and living on cheap booze. She's Matrix-born, but her first crew was killed in a sentinel raid. She landed in Zion and they forgot about her, forgot to give her a new assignment. If circumstances were different I could have been Nala, drinking rotgut and giving hand-jobs for spare change.
"What's going on with Tank?" I ask.
Nala's standing in front of the mirror, running her hands through her straight brown hair. "Not much. Same as usual. He thinks he's the bomb, wants me to do stuff I don't want to do."
"We all have to do things we don't want to do."
"Whatever, Trinity. Most of us aren't getting laid. There's like, no incentive." She brushes her hair aside and studies her face. "Should I pluck my eyebrows?"
"What's the incentive?" I reply. "You're not getting laid."
Nala looks over at me and grins wryly. We know how to talk to each other. "Tank," she says, "is an asshole. I couldn't figure out how to map this one part of the construct. 'Oh,' he said to me, 'it's probably because they're still on Linux where you're from.' I don't need that shit. He can go stick himself for all I care."
I try not to laugh. It's like a flashback to my own early dealings with Tank, when I was the young upstart and he was the new external communications operator. "Just try your best to get along with him. He needs a new friend."
"Why? Because everyone else died?"
"Yeah," I say slowly. "He lost his brother."
"And don't I know it." She moves away from the small mirror. "He goes on about him all the time. His brother was the best, he knew everything, he was everybody's friend, never fought with anyone, blah blah blah."
I move in front of the sink to wash my hands. I can see why Tank and Nala really don't get along. "How were things on your old ship?"
Nala shrugs. "Okay. Not that exciting. God, don't ever tell anyone, but I really like this place better. I like everything but Tank."
"He can be trying, but he's really not so bad. He knows what he's doing. You know, he graduated from the Zion Academy of Technology and Training when he was seventeen. That's like graduating from West Point."
Nala turned away. "Big deal. Things like that don't impress me. If I'd stayed in the Matrix, I'd have gone to West Point."
"I'm sure you would have."
"Except that I was Canadian," she says.
I sigh and wipe my hands on a spare towel. "Nala, you're one for the historians to figure out."
Now she smiles. She doesn't smile too often. "That's what my mother used to say. Speaking of that, Trinity, when are you going to have a baby?"
I feel like my stomach’s just dropped out of me, I really do. I can feel the color drain from my face. "Who said anything about having a baby?"
"Oh, no one important," she says. "But really, when are you two going to get the show on the road and have a kid?"
"Nala," I whispered incredulously. "That's ridiculous. This ship, this war -- it's my life."
"But who said that meant your life had to stop for the war?"
I shake my head and look away. Have a baby? My breath catches in my throat. I haven't thought about children with Neo -- the idea is simply preposterous. We can't raise children in the middle of a war. Neither one of us is convinced we have a future beyond the war. What would a baby imply for us?
"I want you to have a baby," Nala says thoughtfully. "Believe it or not, I actually like babies."
My mind is racing. I'm thinking about Neo, what he wants. What does he want? Have the others been talking about this? Has he said something to them? Dazed and smarting inside, I reach for the door.
"Trinity!" Nala exclaims. "I -- didn't know this was . . . I shouldn't have . . . I'm so sorry."
I force a smile. "It's nothing. Don't worry about it." I leave her in the bathroom and wander back to my quarters. My heart is beating in my ears.
Neo wakes me up in the middle of the night. "Trinity?" He's shaking my shoulder.
"Neo, what time is it?"
"It's late. Trinity, you were crying in your sleep."
I taste the salt at the corners of my mouth and Neo moves from the bed. He goes over and turns on the light. I squint. Sure enough, there are tears on my cheeks and on the pillow. I hastily try to wipe them away. Neo's staring at me, I figure my face is red and puffy. Not a great way to see your lover in the middle of the night.
"You're shaking." He crawls into the bed and pulls the blanket around my shoulders.
"I'm just cold."
He wraps his arms around me and runs his finger down my cheek. "What's wrong?"
"Bad dream, I guess."
"You were talking in your sleep. You said something about a baby."
I shake my head and try not to throw up. "I don't know."
"Must have been some dream. Do you remember anything about it?"
"No," I say quickly. "Nothing." That is a lie, of course, and it disturbs me more than the dream I just had. It's becoming too easy to lie to Neo. Things just slip out. I'm covering my tracks, hiding things from him. Is this how deceit begins? I wonder.
"Well, just try to relax. I'll hold you," he says, and he's so good and so kind I feel like crying all over again. I want to tell him everything. "Is everything okay?" he says. "You haven't been yourself lately."
"I haven't?"
"No. Usually you seem pretty happy."
I smile to myself. To him I seem happy. I always thought that happiness was some obscure goal, some feeling of being in love with the world. As I get older, I realize that happiness is simply not being afraid anymore.
But I am afraid. I fear losing him. I'm afraid of how it might go down, of watching my world end. Our private world crumbling to ash and dust.
"I want you to be careful tomorrow," I tell him.
He says okay, his arms curling around me. He tries to stay awake so he can comfort me, but I feel him drift off. I am awake, and now I'm the one watching him sleep.
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