I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl Read Online Free Page A

television. In front of them, I am convalescent again. He clicks on the table lamp. Some light hits the curtains from a street lamp in the parking lot. The TV’s a light too, with snow.
    I like that he has very long hair, as if he’s arrived from the past. We could be in the past. Before I gave Tommy away. Before hegot sick. But we aren’t—it’s March 1982. I try to stand up, but my muscles don’t feel strong enough to lift me an inch, never mind out the door. I’ve never had pot affect me like this—maybe there’s something else in it. I don’t ask. It’s after two in the morning. I scoot slowly backward across the thin bedspread until I feel my head rest on a pillow. Lift a lukewarm beer from the nightstand. I don’t know where it came from. Did I bring it? Take a sip, close my eyes. I’m glad the man is relaxed, glad we’re high. Godzilla stomps about—he was scary when they made this movie. It had been just a few years after the United States dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a magazine I’ve seen a woman giving a victim a bath in a round wooden tub. The victim missing limbs from the nuclear air. It might have been birth defects from the blast, the aftereffects. But all I can see is the woman who holds the injured one with tenderness, even the light is tender, yellow on her skin and wood and water. She looks like she’s singing, like her song is a bath.
    Godzilla’s a monster who slept through history, until a bomb was tested in the Pacific Ocean. He woke up, killing tens of thousands. Like a walking atom bomb. Something the people can see. Something the scientist can defeat with his Oxygen Destroyer.
    I open my eyes in the dark room. The front door has plastic slats open to the outside. The street light slips in. It can only reach so far. My heart is beating very fast, panicking. The TV sound is down. The picture’s too static-y to decipher.
    A lot of people think Godzilla breathes fire, like a dragon. It’s not fire. He has deadly atomic breath. He breathes radiation. When he does this, his dorsal fins light up. Kentucky Man gets up to put the air conditioner on. We listen to it, clacking. Racketyclack like cards in the spokes of a bike. I think of my son being old enough for a bike. Remember the tricycle comes first. “Wait,” I said, “don’t boys get wagons before that?”
    I keep having this problem at the train car restaurant where I work too, not knowing at what age things happen. I was a cocktail waitress until I delivered my son, nine months pregnant, and customers would give me extra tips, say things like, “Have a boy for me.” My back would hurt. After his birth, when I went back to work, I tried to be a regular waiter. It was more money. But I had to train for it, bussing tables. And the gray dish tubs were so heavy. I’d bleed lifting them. I wasn’t myself yet. I’d come back to work after a couple of weeks, too soon. The regulars keep asking me questions. Asking for pictures. I don’t even know at what age a baby starts to walk. To eat solid food. To talk. In line at the grocery store, a man behind me watched me open my wallet, saw the one photo I had of my son. He asked, “Is that your little helper?” There was no way to tell the customers, the extra tippers, the man in line behind me, that I’d given my son away to relatives, that he was very, very sick, and that I was not there for him. So, I tried to answer, and my answers weren’t right. I remember the confusion on one customer’s face.
    In the motel room, Kentucky Man looks confused too. “What? Wagons?”
    “Yeah, what did you have first?” His eyebrows up again. I’m looking for clues, information about my son.
    “When?”
    “When you were little.” He rubs his index finger along his temple. Brushes his hand across my cheek. He’s patient with me.
    “Why don’t you get some sleep?”
    In the brighter morning, the sun comes all the way in, striping the carpet. The carpet is gray, dinge on the