Sleeping in Yesterday's Clothes: a semi-autobiographical fiction sketch

She wakes muzzy headed and hungry in a room that she's never been before. The room is brown-toned-- the walls used to be white but now claim that sepia tone left by ancient nicotine and dust. The bed is lumpy, the sheets smell clean but the bedspread is itchy black wool. When it was clear that the night was going to be a late one, her mother sent her up here the night before, to sleep, since it was a school night. There was no babysitter, so the girl had to come to work with her mother, who bartended at the dark smokey bar nestled beneath a walk-up hotel filled with drunks and hookers.

There is a window with a flipping torn gauzy curtain that looks out over the street, red-brick facaded buildings that have seen better days, some with old five and dime stores and dirty windows, others a funeral parlor, the goodwill store where you could pick through piles of musty clothes while the "slow" always-young man at the counter stared aimlessly at you. Most of the buildings are empty, with crude graffiti sketched in dust on the boarded up, sometimes broken windows. Just past the building across the street you could, if you were high enough up, see hints of the beach that waited a few blocks down, salt air and seawater making its presence known by smell and taste. This room is not high enough to see the beach.

At some time during the night, her mother had joined her in the hotel room, sleeping in her clothes, smelling of the bar and cigarettes. The little girl woke to see it was morning, time to go to school. How would she get there? Maybe she wouldn't go today; she relished the thought of a day off when other kids had to learn about dinosaurs and practice cursive writing on lined grey paper that tore easily.

Her mom wakes to tell her to brush her hair and get ready to go to school. The girl still wears the jeans and t-shirt from yesterday, wrinkled from sleeping. There is no toothbrush, and the bathroom is down the hall. Her tummy rumbles. What about breakfast?

You'll get breakfast on the way to school. You're going with Tiny in his cab. Any other time, riding in the yellow cab hearing the radio squawk directions on which fare needed picking up next, dirty seats filled with newspaper and crossword puzzle books would be fun for her. But the little girl visualizes arriving in the line of other cars dropping off kids, brown station wagons and grey-blue pickup trucks vying for space with the bright yellow of the taxi for hire. She knows eyes will look to her curiously. Why is she in a taxi? The will wonder. She doesn't know, exactly, that having slept in her clothes in a cheap walkup hotel is sort of sleezy, but she senses there is something not quite normal about it.

On the way to school, they stop at a convenience store and Tiny buys her a cinnamon bun and milk in a carton with money her mother thrust into his hand before he drove away. Mother has to work another shift at the bar, cleaning and getting ready for the afternoon, but for a while, she will sleep in the hotel room that the girl has, mostly alone, spent the night.

Her dirty-penny copper colored hair is still sort of ratty from the ineffectual brushing she did that morning, and she spends the day frowning over her letters, hands tangled in the knots of her shoulder length bob. They work on capital cursives, and her eraser bores a hole in the page filled with "L". She can't get the loop on the top of the "L" right-- it's too big, too empty. It doesn't look sleek and flat like the examples.

At lunch, standing in line along the hallway, pressing her cheek against the cold green institutional tile, she talks to her "friend." The friend points out the crust of sleep along the girl's eyelashes. Since the bathroom mirror was so high above the dirty rust-stained sink, the girl has not seen herself all day. She scrubs the sleep from her eyelashes and wishes for a warm washcloth. After lunch, standing again in the hallway, the girl's class is passed by the "special" class kids. She sees one kid wearing a blue, battle scarred bike helmet. He stops for a moment and bangs his head against the tile where the girl had lain her cheek earlier. She feels a tummy-ache, and the vegetable soup tries to come up a little bit.

The class returns to their desks, in a room that smells of the paste little kids like to eat, sweet, but drying crusted and cracked. For much of the afternoon, they listen to a recording about dinosaurs: "The Tyrannosaurus Rex was a very mean king, he terrified the countryside and made the giant reptiles hide. Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom."

They go to the library, and the little girl checks out a book that has a short, three-lined poem on the first page. She loves the poem. Memorizes it, running the sound of the words over her tongue.

Very soon I shall be gone,
For I am just a morning glory,
A fading flower at dawn.

There is a picture on the last page of this book of a spider in a web.

When the day is over, Tiny picks her up in the dirty yellow taxi. His bulky stomach protrudes over the steering wheel, and after a day of driving around, the taxi smells like sweat and stale french fries. He drives her home, where her teenaged sister is home from her day at Job Corps, and waits to babysit. Her sister gives her a Snickers bar, but begs a huge bite out of it. Her mom does not come home until after she is in bed, dreaming of dinosaurs with pointy crowns.