Campbell, Grace

English

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42 
 
 
 
THE RED TOP 
Grace Campbell 
 
When Friday comes we are going to get those shoes I need. I can't think about 
this right now, my mom says with a quiver of bent bobby pins positioned be-
tween the lips that usually tell me plenty about what she's thinking. She teases 
the augmented hair up into cathedral bangs with the plastic Goody brush and 
reaches for the Aqua Net. Then everything from dust-speck fruit flies and split 
ends to our struggling interaction is suspended mid-air. 
§ 
My mom strikes a few pins into the fraught tease and then there's enough room 
for more words to venture out. Friday we'll do it. Kay? I promise you.  
§ 
Through the paned bathroom mirror she looks over and makes eye contact, 
which is her preferred way. The eye-bounce off the inanimate thing. The vis-
ual ricochet. I'd rather not with the look but I know this is part of what she 
THE RED TOP                                                                                                                                                        43 
does, and I know she needs me to see her doing it. I don't have my mind made 
up solidly about what constitutes a lie, but either way, maybe believing her is 
the least I can do. I promise you, Margot, we will do it.  
§ 
Her glance settles on mine with the same awl of register I feel when someone 
says, I bet you one hundred bucks you won't. And I wonder: Will I? And I 
wonder: Do they even have a hundred bucks? Who has a hundred bucks to 
bust on a dare? Not me.  
§ 
My mother's eyes are made up in satin tints; colors whose names promise we're 
all on a vacation in Maui. Which is what the screaming slash of high-volt blue 
across the mini tank of Aqua Net suggests as well. And her lotion: a shimmery 
coating of chemicals made to deliver the wincing smack of coconut, and maybe 
mango. Something that makes her feel far away. Even her dress. Gauzy layers 
of sheer material dipped in a confused ombre of pastel, seemingly designed to 
unpetal on a gust of beachside wind. I have never seen the dress before, and I 
wonder where she is going and where she will spend the night and how she'll 
possibly stay warm because I know she will not be back before the evening 
becomes un-Mauiesque. 
44                                                                                                                       VALPARAISO FICTION REVIEW 
§ 
She pushes the bleeding eyeliner off her lower lid with a hand that suggests 
doubt in the entire endeavor. The skin below her eye tugs itself along like it's 
also reluctant to be part of this whole thing she has going on; like the eyeliner, 
I too have no language besides a smear of some unsatisfactory color with which 
to close the deal on this thing we both suck at. 
§ 
Friday comes, and she stops at the bank to deposit the paycheck from the job 
too fresh to remember, whose name is in the upper left-hand corner. Straight 
from there it's to the liquor store to snag a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label 
because it's the new boyfriend's favorite. Or is it Red Label? Or is he really that 
new a boyfriend? We both have this separate life situation going on. I think 
she mostly loves this boyfriend because he is not my father and I don't have 
my mind made up about whether or not that's a terrible thing, though all an-
ecdotes point to the boyfriend as probably being a terrible person. I think a 
few slugs off that slender bottle for myself might make it easier for me to an-
swer these questions, or to not care either way, but I'll find my own. Answers 
and whiskey. 
 
THE RED TOP                                                                                                                                                        45 
Friday arrives, and my mother makes it home two hours after the five o'clock 
whistle with shopping bags from the fancy boutique in the village, and she's 
already got the new earrings in and she says, Put on your shoes we're going to 
get foot-longs and curly fries and milkshakes at The Red Top. My little sister 
Gloria yelps like she might pee, which works properly into my mom's desire 
to send Gloria out the side door and leave her there for a while. I put on my 
shit shoes and we go. 
§ 
An hour and a half later our stomachs are begging for mercy and we're drunk 
on chocolate milkshakes and I don't even like that flavor. But what's important 
is that my mother slides it across the table of the Red Top and says, Look, it's 
better than Easter and Halloween, which tells me the flavor is already decided 
and the flavor is This Is A Delicious Thing I Have Bought For You. I wish I 
could save it somehow. Vacuum seal it in the back of the fridge for three days 
from now when she's been gone for 72 hours and there's nothing else in the 
kitchen to eat, which her current display assures me is a thing that isn't really 
happening and never does: No Johnny Walker, no restless man who waits 
somewhere in the suburbs for its arrival. 
 
46                                                                                                                       VALPARAISO FICTION REVIEW 
Gloria and I are doped on corn syrup and Crisco and the solidified but uniden-
tifiable meat composite smothered in sauerkraut and spicy mustard. Before we 
can nudge ourselves away from our food hangovers, there we are at Putt Putt. 
We play through seventeen holes of miniature golf while Top Forty tunes seem 
to blast from every surrounding building at once. The teensy scale lighthouses 
and turf-covered goat ramps stress me out almost more than my mother bark-
ing to hurry up and hit the ball because people are waiting behind us, Jesus 
Christ. She thunders into that quick-snort laughter whenever she says Jesus 
Christ. She wraps her nails around my shoulder and reminds me every sixty or 
seventy seconds that we're having heaps of fun. I fail again and again with the 
sweaty metal club and win at demonstrating, for the thousandth time in my 
fifteen years, my total lack of coordination in front of another group of wait-
ing, watching strangers. I wish again for the possibility of pulling Jesus aside 
for a moment to ask him if he ever meant his name to be like some syrup of 
Ipecac that brings up thick bubbles of humor. I wish again to be blessed with 
any physical acumen. I wish to be the kind of girl that believes in grand pur-
pose or Jesus but I'm really just a run-on sentence in dead shoes with a belly 
full of someone else's fantasy meal.  
§ 
THE RED TOP                                                                                                                                                        47 
Then I mention about the shoes and my mom says that hot pretzels at that 
little pagoda by the Gap in the mall sound like a great idea and let's do it. And 
I say again about the shoes and she reminds me there's a shoe store right next 
to the Gap, and Gloria and I match our upended eyebrows together and my 
mother sees this and insists there is and has always been a shoe store, well, 
maybe not right next to the Gap but very close. At least, on that side of the 
mall. The side with the hot pretzels. She says again about the little pagoda. I 
feel her hand and her laughter still clamped to the side of me and can't tell if I 
want her to try harder or much, much less. 
§ 
We hustle out of Putt Putt, take our paper scrips for little prizes that we don't 
have time to collect and pack our bodies into the white Hyundai. My mom rips 
the car into action and the second the cracked dashboard ignites, she sees the 
clock and look what time it is and we'll never have time to make it to the mall. 
Gloria says, We're on the same road, all you have to do is go straight. Then the 
salvo from my mom's mouth about traffic, do we understand traffic is a thing, 
no we don't because we don't know adult things. Do we understand red lights 
and speed traps and speed limits? Gloria squeezes the side of my leg like a fistful 
of tickets that can't go anywhere but into some urgency that will be traded 
48                                                                                                                       VALPARAISO FICTION REVIEW 
later, in service of that delicious thing our mother paid for. There's also that 
fistful of tickets substantial enough to have my mother's name printed in the 
local paper under their annual Village Citizens with Most Unpaid Traffic Vio-
lations shame column. But my mother's smack-back through the rear-view 
mirror, eyes wet with Don't You Even reminds us those tickets and their out-
standing fees are not a thing that have ever happened.  
§ 
Finally: the Hyundai down the hollow lonely of the unincorporated town 
roads. Under-inflated tires over potholed streets bent in odd, unreliable angles 
that we trust only through some half-registered tuck of familiarity which may 
or may not actually be trust. Back toward our house. Gloria sighs and skids her 
finger down a small pool of mist she makes with her mouth on the passenger 
seat glass. She adds some zigzag work and it becomes a crown. Then a princess. 
The same one she always makes with the same barbed eyelashes, same empty 
cradle mouth. Gloria's own happy ending for every time we are coming home 
worn thin and prizeless. The streetlights will make her imaginary royalty glow 
for little blips of time. She plunges her elbow into my arm so I will look over 
and pretend the face is brand new to me. I'd rather not with the fantasy but I 
know this is who Gloria wants us to be and she needs me to see it before it 
THE RED TOP                                                                                                                                                        49 
evaporates. Even though all signs point to us being decidedly un-fancy, I don't 
want to make Gloria's mind up about it, so I nod vigorously to close the inter-
action. 
§ 
We stop at the swinging red light at the edge of the neighborhood we have 
skimmed our way into calling home through financial half-lies on paper. I 
know these things because I am cursed with the capacity to pay attention, Jesus 
Christ. Through the pocked silence of the gritty AM dial, my mother clears 
her throat. I said maybe, Margot. I said maybe we would get those shoes. She 
says about the paycheck, where did we think that money was going and what 
about the chocolate milkshake and the footlongs and the Putt Putt but no we 
didn't think, and how much money does she have, not that much and she's not 
made of money and Gloria says, Plus all those speeding tickets while I wonder 
what exactly our mother is made of.  
§ 
My mother gives Gloria the visual ricochet through the mirror and says, I'm 
trying, Jesus Christ. No follow-up laughter, no badly needed Ipecac, no hand 
on the shoulder, no heaps of fun. Just trying. Then she taps the eyes forward 
again and says nothing else. The tropical tints on her eyelids have gone tepid 
50                                                                                                                       VALPARAISO FICTION REVIEW 
with the balance of the evening. Tomorrow, the words Final Notice and the 
balance owed will spread across a pink-tint letter whose color will not ombre 
even when the nights without heat grow decidedly un-Mauiesque.  
§ 
I look down at my shoes and can't see them, though my toes throb, spent in 
the blowout of Friday night paycheck Fun Time. The breath-cast royalty 
cameo has evaporated from the window beside Gloria because princesses bail 
on you, faster than restless boyfriends in the suburbs. Silently I count out the 
weeks remaining in the summer and divide it by how many days I can realis-
tically go barefoot. I red-light at the intersection where I might turn and think 
about purpose because we, all of us in the Hyundai, are not religious people. 
§ 
But, this: Some things should pass quick as the consistent strobe of streetlights 
and sometimes they're busted out from their own separate life situation and I 
get that. Suddenly, through the mystery composite of silence, my mother asks 
again if I remember that she said maybe and here I thought new shoes had 
become a promise the flavor of this never happened. I flash back to the bath-
room interaction but remember mostly the eyeshadow, the typhoon of Aqua 
Net, the tropical entreaty to which I am not invited. Then like the quick slice 
THE RED TOP                                                                                                                                                        51 
of a bobby pin through a complicated mess of something highly augmented I 
remember the eye-volley. I know she's looking at me right now inside the half-
broken car, waiting for me to look back but I don't. Then I wonder if I should 
try harder or much, much less.  
§ 
From the folded up little scrip of my mouth I say I remember.  
§ 
I remember when I was smaller and we would pass Putt Putt and I would tell 
my mother that miniature golf seemed like a thing rich people did and my 
mother saying, Some time we'll go there and do that place to the nines. I re-
member the rapid exchange misfiring, the compulsory nodding, the sour di-
gestion of the fact that sixteen of seventeen rounds in any sport was a few zip 
codes beyond the neighborhood of my interest. I kept a running list of the 
things I supposed rich people did, was all. 
§ 
A truth I wear around like the eviscerated lining of shoes that were cheap 
knockoffs to begin with: impostors, a functional thing that tries very hard but 
ultimately misses the point. A thing you can definitely not run in. At least, not 
for long. After a few more blocks I add, It's okay. I feel the clasp of the visual 
52                                                                                                                       VALPARAISO FICTION REVIEW 
ricochet around me and I slide it back toward the front seats, a thing I decide 
is not nor has ever been happening. 
§ 
I can't think about this right now, I tell myself. What matters is that Gloria is 
beside me settling her arms around my stomach and is it not full, is it not 
happy? I think about the Putt Putt universe delivering fake sphinxes and Eiffel 
towers ready to be conquered by a deft swivel, some skill you might not possess 
but at least you get to try. This is a delicious thing I have bought for you. Re-
ally, who cares that none of us are on that beach or in that desert or under a 
massive steel structure in the middle of Paris. The volt of blue slashed across 
the side is nearly the real thing.  
§ 
I don't have my mind made up about what solidly constitutes a lie, but don't 
these things mean heaps of fun? Don't these things unpetal on a gust of bor-
rowed adventure? Don't these things mean that my mother is someone who is 
trying? I am paying attention, I remind myself, like a fistful of tickets for prizes 
I will not have the chance to claim. 
 
--- 
THE RED TOP                                                                                                                                                        53 
Grace Campbell is a founding editor and writer at Black River Press. She is a 2018 June 
Dodge Fellow at The Mineral School. Her chapbook, FWIW, was a finalist for the Turn-
buckle Chapbook Competition at Split Lip Press. She was awarded third place in the 
Atticus Review Flash Creative Nonfiction Contest (2018). Her work has appeared in 
Gravel, New Flash Fiction Review, Spry, Jellyfish, Chagrin River Review, Two Hawks 
Quarterly, The Santa Ana River Review and other places. She enjoys tinted lip balm 
and extremely sharp scissors. 


The Red Top

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