Girlchild Page 3
Mrs. Hendrix reported that the absent father had given her $10 over Easter, and again the worker used this as a basis for the argument that Mrs. Hendrix would be better off financially as well as emotionally by getting out of the home and beginning to do for herself, not depend upon meager sums from Mr. Hendrix. Mrs. Hendrix will call the office as soon as she and the Department of Employment Counselor have formulated a plan.
V. White:wr
4-15-69
We Hendrixes have long been concerned with a number of important things that relate to the Welfare Department, concerned with these things and this department in the same way a hungry dog is concerned with the mood of its master and the whereabouts of the can opener. Some things we look forward to, like food stamps. Some things we celebrate, like the sweet feel of that envelope on the first of the month and the ever-loving sound of the postman’s keys on the fifteenth, and some we avoid, some we speak of only in whispers, like Child Protective Services, an agency whose name carries such a fearful odor it stays with you longer than the knockout stench of a bare mattress soaked through with a child’s urine. V. White was responsible for the bringing forth or stemming of these ambivalent forces. She kept the record of what my family deserved and what we didn’t. This record begins and ends before I was born, begins a few months, even, before the appearance of the bearded man bearing onions, who I feel certain is my pops, and soon after Mama’s first stint in the town that would later become our home. It begins like this:
CHRONOLOGICAL RECORD
HENDRIX, Johanna Ruth
116 Holway Drive
Santa Cruz, California
Dates of Contact
Office 2-3-69
Home 2-5-69
Office 2-6-69
PRESENTING PROBLEM
Mrs. Hendrix, the mother of 4 children, returned from Reno 5 days ago after obtaining a divorce. She was gone for 6 weeks, which was the time required by Nevada law to complete divorce proceedings.
tilt
Grandma couldn’t always be trusted to remember anyplace else she might be needed on the days when the slot machines called. She’d say she would be sure to do a thing, be here or there, all of her intentions lining up as sweet as cherries promising a jackpot, but then she’d forget.
If the sun set on a payday without Grandma’s van back on the Calle, Mama and I rode to the Silver Dollar or the Monte Carlo or the Primadonna, wherever there were nickel slots making promises even quarter slots couldn’t keep. She would take a long last drag on her cigarette before suffocating it in the ashtray and reaching around me to lock the car door, saying, “Do not open up for anyone. Even with a badge.” And then she would go in and get Grandma out before her paycheck was going, going, gone.
Paycheck by paycheck Grandma grew to forget more and more, until finally a day came when her forgetting meant more to Mama than any other, when she left me waiting at the school gate and Grandpa Gunthum, in Reno from Sacramento to gamble his pension away for a weekend, took his chance to see me then, the last one he ever took. No matter how much Gun might have changed into an old man bent with regret, Mama’s opinion of him never would bend at all, and it wasn’t a good one. That Grandma allowed him this near to us was too much for Mama to forgive, so a long silence moved onto the Calle and settled down between Grandma’s house and ours, and Mama moved me from Grandma’s to the Hardware Man’s house on nights when we needed a sitter. Mama, already deaf in one ear, was temporarily blind with rage on top of it, unable to see that the Hardware Man’s house was no place for her child, and there was no one to talk sense to her since she’d stopped talking to Grandma and Grandma had stopped talking right back. Even though I wasn’t allowed at Grandma’s then, I could still hear them both loud as day, their angry blood pounding, cigarettes stubbing, Grandma’s crochet hook slipping.
When they became sudden strangers, Grandma hung up her babysitting shingle, said if she wasn’t good enough for her own granddaughter, she wouldn’t be watching any of the “Calle strays.” The duties of caring not only for me but for all the Calle children under latchkey age landed smack on the curved and sorry shoulders of Carol, the Hardware Man’s daughter. Carol, whose shoulders bent forward in permanent defense of breasts that grew too big too fast and forced her to grow up along with them. Her posture didn’t change much when the Hardware Man wasn’t around but her attitude would, became more like his, greedy and cruel as a casino pit boss: heads I win, tails you lose.
feebleminded daughter
The feebleminded are easy prey. That’s what Carol knows as she leads me through the trailer in the dark, shushing my questions and peering from window to window, our trail through the house shadowing the car that has pulled onto my street and is slowing right before my driveway. I’m nearly climbing up her leg I’m so scared, and not big enough really to look over the window ledges without a chair, even if I could get brave enough to let go of Carol and drag one over. For the most part I keep my eyes on her, on the flash her glasses make as they reflect the headlights from the car that is now, she says, parking in front of my house, the car that isn’t supposed to be there because Mama is working and Carol, who’s been my babysitter for four months already, since I was five and she was thirteen, never has her boyfriend over here, so the person in that car outside can only be a Stranger. A Stranger who can’t read because he didn’t bother with our NO TRESPASSING signs. But Mama said our signs would bring about as much luck as a twice-used keno ticket in keeping us safe, so maybe this Stranger does know how to read, I think, and Mama was right about the way luck has of running itself out.
Carol and I’d been sitting in front of the television watching M*A*S*H when we heard a motor rev outside, and Carol got up so quick out of Mama’s chair that its wooden feet thumped and the chair kept rocking even after she turned off the television to hear better, even after she went into the kitchen and looked out the window.
I was right behind her, on my tiptoes, not scared yet but feeling prickly. “Is it Mama?” But I knew I wasn’t talking sense because Mama’s truck was in the driveway and Mama was down at the Truck Stop, and besides, Mama doesn’t have to drive when she’s been drinking. There’s plenty of men on the Calle keeping their tanks full for her.
Carol shook her head no and reached for the light switch. She took my hand in the dark and we went back into the living room where she slid the chain closed on the front door, me asking all the while, “Then who is it, Carol? Who?” and her saying, “I don’t know, Rory, but we should be very quiet. It could be a Bad Man. Let’s be quiet and see if he goes away.”
A Bad Man and a Stranger don’t have regular names because they don’t do regular things. There is something about being alone that brings a Stranger and there is something about the dark that brings a Bad Man and there is no arguing with either one of them, so when Carol said “Shhhh,” that’s what I did.
I know Stop, Drop, and Roll, I know 9-1-1, I know how to call Mama and I know she will come, especially if it’s a Stranger because Mama doesn’t go for that. But none of these things seem like the exact right thing to do when Carol and I are huddled in the hallway and I’m feeling the possibilities of all the windows and doors of the trailer on my skin, as if they are all wide open and the Stranger outside, in my driveway now, maybe in Mama’s flowerbed, is just choosing which door or window he would like to crawl through according to which part of my body he wants to start with.
I don’t tell my ideas to Carol because some part of me knows that Carol might be playing. That’s what she always says, “I was just playing.” And that same part of me knows that when Carol wants to play, it doesn’t mean don’t be scared Rory, but it does mean don’t get any ideas about 9-1-1 and calling Mama, because only stone-cold dummies get ideas like that. So I keep quiet, but I get them anyway. Maybe it’s the feebleminded part in me mixing with the crazy part. The part I get from Mama and the part I get from Grandma tangling up inside my head.
Carol lets go of my hand, she tries to, so she can g
o into the bathroom, but I don’t let her. “Ror,” she says, “I’m just gonna look out the window, you stay here,” but I won’t. I won’t stay in the hallway alone, in the dark, and I won’t let her go in the bathroom either. The bathroom has no way out, the window’s too tiny to crawl through, only big enough to see out of, and then only if I stand on the ridge of the bathtub, the metal groove for the shower door cutting into the soles of my feet. And if we’re too late and the Stranger’s already inside, we’ll be trapped in there. At least from the hallway we can crawl quick into my bedroom, or Mama’s, hide under beds and in closets, and then out a window. There is never any place to hide in a bathroom.
Carol whips her arm, trying to get me to let go, so I grab onto her with both hands. She is still trying to shake me loose but when I hold tighter she just drags me with her, into the bathroom and over the side of the tub so she can see out the window up by the shower. I start to climb up on the edge of the tub so I can see out too but Carol pulls me back down, my feet landing against the plastic with a boom that makes us both go quiet and hold our breath until she lets hers go in a whisper: “You’ll just get scared. You’re already crying. Stupid baby.”
Carol hates when I cry. I hate doing it even more, but it’s the only thing that makes her stop, and then it only works sometimes, usually at my house, and I think that’s just because my face gets splotchy and swollen and stays that way. I’m pretty sure Carol’s afraid of what Mama would do if she found out that I’d been crying my head off, and worse, if she found out all the ways Carol likes to make me cry. Carol would be in big trouble and she knows it, and I know it too. Sometimes the only reason I don’t tell Mama on Carol is because I’m afraid of what Mama will do to her. It’s like I heard the Hardware Man say once when he was telling Carol to be sure I wasn’t late for school or she’d catch it: Mama may be feeble in mind but she’s loaded for bear in the balls department.
But I’m not, I’m scared as a rabbit, and when Carol steps down onto the tile and says, “Let’s hide in the hallway” and “You better stop blubbering or else,” I hop right after her and hold back my tears because I’m afraid if I keep it up she’ll find her own place to hide and leave me. And that’s when I hear Carol make a noise that sounds like choking, almost like a laugh, and I figure that she must be gonna cry too and then I’m really scared. I tighten my grip on her hand and I’m forcing myself to say just one of my big ideas, that we should go hide in Mama’s room, pull the phone with us under the bed, but before I can get it out, Carol shushes me.
And the shush she makes has listening in it and fear and the air in the hallway gets slow and distant to make way for the sounds I’m struggling to pull into my head with ears like magnets. And then there’s a knock on the door.
All the air in the hallway rushes close together again and pounds against itself like the noise in my ears of my heart pounding because now it’s happening and it’s at the door and we never called 9-1-1 and we never called Mama and we never found a place to hide. Carol starts for the door, dragging me behind her because I’m too afraid to talk and too afraid to walk, but I’m too afraid to let go too and when I fall on my knees she grabs my wrists with both hands without missing a step and we’re over the metal ridge that separates the linoleum in the hallway from the linoleum in the living room and we’re past Mama’s chair, still now and empty, and we’re in front of the door being beat on by a Stranger.
Carol unlocks the deadbolt. I try to get away, scoot backward, tugging my hands away, but Carol’s hand tightens around my wrists as she unlocks the second lock and then the chain and pulls the door open.
Through the screen I see the blue workpants with the creases and the tarnished belt buckle and the blue work shirt with the white patch with the blue letters over one pocket and the scratchy black and grey whiskers and the stubby, pitted nose and the metal eyes of the Hardware Man.
“Hi Daddy,” Carol says.
“Why are the lights out?” the Hardware Man asks as he comes in, his boots on the rug in front of me where I’m still kneeling, even though Carol let go when she saw it was her own father on the porch and left me to rub the memory of her grip from my wrists.
“We were just playing,” Carol says. She grabs my hair, twists it around her fingers. “Get up off the floor, Ror. What are you doing down there?”
recoil
Grandpa John Gunthum rarely came through the Calle and always only in hope of connecting to a family who would have none of him, but his reappearance the last winter he was here cut a path between Mama and Grandma the same as he’d done years before, when Mama was a girl herself. Mama never explained her anger when she left work that night to find that I wasn’t being babysat at Grandma’s, that I wasn’t there and neither was she. Grandma was at the Comstock in the throes of a gambling fit and I was waiting in a pickup on the Calle, the cab lit up so that Mama saw me immediately as she turned her worried headlights toward home, Grandpa saying, “Go on now, child, get,” as soon as he saw them.
I was jumping out of the truck even as Mama’s tires squealed to a stop behind us, and before Grandpa had barely turned the corner Mama was squeezing my chin. “Look at me,” she said, ripping the new doll he’d got me out of my hands, squeezing her too. “Did he do anything to you? Tell me!”
I couldn’t keep my eyes off the doll, her dress fluttering, and I said no no no no no no until one of my no’s traveled down her arms and into her hands, and she let both of us go. The doll went into the ditch and when I leaned down to get her Mama’s voice came out hard and dry, “Rory Dawn Hendrix, I’ve never been so close to slapping you as I am right now. Leave that doll.” And so I left her there in the dirt, left both of them, and ran on home.
babysat
The metal flash of a pair of wire strippers, the unexpected shine on a Phillips head, these things cause the same fear in me, the same gut-tightening, ass-puckering panic as the midnight gleam of a switchblade. Chain locks have the same effect. And lightbulbs. You can find all of these at your local hardware store.
Sometimes Carol goes with Tony to Guido’s Pizza and leaves me at Ace. Tony is her boyfriend and he says having a six-year-old around all the time cramps their style, but I don’t like him anyway, because when I’m with them he either hogs the Close Encounters game or he hogs Carol and I never get a chance at either one.
Ace smells like orange hand cleaner and WD-40, and I pretend not to hear the adult talk that passes across the counter between the men of the town about certain women of the town as they pay the Hardware Man for their wood screws and drill bits. I also pretend like I never have to go potty. Because I don’t need help, but the Hardware Man will want to help me anyway. And when he helps me, the lights go out.
bandages and how to use them
Two girls are separated by a wooden fence from a double-wide trailer. The next lot has a single-wide and a boy climbs the steps of its porch, his leather jacket looks wet in the sun. The girl with long, white-blond hair lies flat on her back and her corduroys have hiked up her legs revealing that her socks don’t match. The girl in a gingham dress and loafers crouches in the weeds. The fence vibrates and is still.
“You knocked your wind out.”
When I open my eyes the bird’s-eye picture rushes away, but what takes its place still feels like a dream. A girl’s face is above mine, her smile almost hidden by the kind of curly hair that Mama tries for with the giant metal rollers that just end up giving her a giant headache.
“You fell backwards, right on your back.” She crouches over me in the stickers and weeds and waits for me to answer. When I don’t, she says, “Ain’t you ever done it before?”
I’d just climbed the fence, the Girl Scout Handbook tucked into the top of my pants so I could sit and look like I was reading there and not waiting for my neighbor Marc to see me, to maybe say hi to me when he got home, but I couldn’t keep my balance when I pulled the book out and now I’m on the wrong side of the fence and my lungs feel like they’re the wrong
size and Mama is probably wondering where I disappeared to. I don’t know if this girl is asking if I ever climbed the fence before or if this is the first time I fell off it or even if it’s the first time my lungs and mouth stopped agreeing about breathing, so I just shake my head no.
“Don’t worry. You’re not broke, just empty,” she says. She’s wearing a checkered dress with a lacy collar that is gray and stringy and I can see past her big, brown shoes and up her dress where her panties are big like shorts with no elastic at all. I start to blush but she must not know I can see her weird underpants because she stands up and says, “There. You’re getting your color back.” She puts out her hand.
“I’m Viv,” she says, and helps me up. “Viv Buck.”
“Rory Dawn.” My lungs are working right again. I take a deep breath and stickers poke at me through the back of my shirt. It feels funny and proper to say my last name but I add it because she seems to be waiting for me to, like she did. “Hendrix.”