Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Daredevil Girl Survives Fall
By Jacob Clifton | Season 5 | Episode 2 | Aired on 06.15.2009
Mexico, drunk, she goes through Esteban's office, finds a gun in a cabinet. It's only a bit before he'll show up; he always shows up. He pretends to be a cage, a tiger; he pretends to be uncertain so that she can never know whether she's falling or leaping, whether she's a daredevil girl or the knocked-up puta whore, who falls.
"What are you doing here?" he asks, when he arrives. Right on time. She presses her face up against the glass between them, making nasty faces. He's horrified: "Are you drunk?" She protests that she's not drunk; she burps. He's honestly confused: is that why she slipped his goon? To get plastered? To endanger his child and give sway to her stupider impulses? "So you do listen to your messages," she says resentfully, vindicated: there is no uncertainty, there was never the chance that they were just playing phone tag. He was ignoring her calls. That's a definite and a definitive, it's something to push against. It's a fact she can use.
Because those girls in the tunnel, they didn't own themselves, their bodies, their wombs. They were all cunt, weren't they? Yeah. And titties. It wasn't up to them, those girls, those little boxes, to say what went in and what didn't. This baby lies in her womb, her womb lies in her body, her body is her country, sovereign, hers to abuse. The baby, by the transitive property, is hers. Not his. And if it doesn't earn her life, then at least it earns her a choice. "Yes. I've been drinking. And smoking. And I had raw fish. Very high in mercury."
He puts his finger in her face. That's good; that means he cares. About something. That's a fact she can use. He's angry; she likes that. "You should be taking better care of my baby," he says, and she pulls another face. "What's the point? I can't live with this level of stress, it's killing my baby anyway. I'm Dead Mom Walking." She laughs. Just tell me a fact, a single definite fact, a definitive thing I can know and fear and walk to the door holding it in my hands and say, "This is a leap."
"When am I going to end up in a landfill," she asks. She begs. For a fact. For some measure of control, of choice. He holds her life in his hand, and it's worse than dying. He gets in her face; he's angry, she likes that: "I haven't decided." He's back on top.
She shakes her head and pulls the gun out of the drawer, muzzle pointed at her abdomen, holding it out to him. Decide, now. Make a choice. Dead Mom Walking or Daredevil Girl. And somewhere in there she's thinking, "White lady's having a time!" She's thinking that sometimes when she acts out like this, when she screams loud enough, when she gets self-destructive and crazy enough, somebody relents. They laugh and say it was all pretend, life isn't really this bad. She's thinking, what does she have to do to scare him badly enough that he'll love her again. She thinks there's a thing she can do. If she didn't, she'd already be dead. Houdini breathes out and the bubbles go up and he's chained down to the floor and nobody could mistake it for a leap.