Girlchild Page 5

  “Too bad,” he says. “You better stick to playing Girl Scouts with your new friend.”

  I look around for Viv, but we’re the only kids here and he laughs. “Oh, she’s not here, huh?” he says, as he puts his quarter in. “Too bad.”

  Marc rode past me and Viv on our walk to school together and I made sure he heard us talking about the Girl Scouts by saying extra loud how everyone will want to join our troop. He finally knows something about me, he remembered it, and I almost feel proud, but the way he says “friend,” like Viv’s a big joke, makes me even more embarrassed than I was before. It’s because of her clothes, I know it, because she wears the same dress every single day, but Marc wears the same thing all the time too and I can smell cologne coming off the collar of the leather jacket he’s wearing. It’s his dad’s, and I know he takes it without asking because I’ve heard his dad hollering from the porch for it, watched him through my kitchen window as he stands at the railing in a T-shirt and curses at Marc when he rides his bike up the driveway and throws it at him. The jacket’s sleeves hang so long on Marc that I can’t see his fingers as he presses into the machine’s buttons, already racking up a bigger score on his first ball than I did in my whole game.

  double vision

  When we get home, Mama heads for the couch before I’ve got the door locked, and I’m reaching for the chain when there is a quiet knock that just about gives me a heart attack. I look over at Mama and she is out, her good ear in the pillow and the ear that doesn’t work so good turned to the room, so I know she didn’t hear. I stand on my tiptoes and peek out the window, scared to burst. At first I don’t see anyone, I think it was my imagination, but then I see a head jumping up to see inside and I recognize the curly hair.

  It’s Viv.

  I open the door quiet, and she comes inside like she’s been there a million times before. “Viv, you scared me to death,” I whisper, and point to the couch and Mama there.

  “She’s got her shoes still on!” Viv laughs when she sees Mama curled up in her coat with her boots still on but fast asleep. When I shush her she just laughs harder. “I thought your Mama was a mute.”

  I’ve never heard anyone use that word before. “She has a bad ear,” I say, and I don’t want to add that she’s drunk so I ask, “What are you doing out?”

  “Uncle went out and so I ran over to say hi!” She’s so loud, like the loudest thing that’s ever been in our house, and I’m worried about her waking Mama, when sure enough, just then Mama rolls over and sits up.

  “Freezing in here,” she says, before she realizes we’re there, and when she finally looks over at us, she blinks. “R.D., what are you doing standing there with that door open?”

  Viv says, “Mrs. Hendrix, it’s nice to meet you. I’m Viv Buck.”

  Mama looks from Viv, where she stands in front of our open door, to me, her forehead crinkling enough to let me know that if she wasn’t drunk I’d catch it for having a friend over after dark and talking in the doorway. But tonight she just reaches for the end of the couch where her quilt is folded up and says, “It seems like it’s time for all little girls to be tucked into their beds, safe and sound. We’re not heating up the whole damn Calle.” She turns back over onto her good ear and pulls the quilt up. Her coat and boots are still on, and Viv still thinks this is funny, and I’m glad she does, since Mama was just rude in a way I bet Viv’s family never is.

  Viv smoothes it out, makes it easy like she does everything. “I better run on home then,” she whispers this time. “See you tomorrow morning!”

  She salutes and I salute back. I lock the door after her, and as I’m pulling off Mama’s boots, for the first time ever, I laugh at how silly she looks.

  a letter

  2 October 1989, 10 o’clock on a Monday a.m.

  Morning Pretty Lady!

  Bright & sunshiny here in Portola—hope it stays that way—we can sure use it! Warm up the old bones & maybe keep the old hands working! Many times when feeling old & tired & “what’s the use-ish” I remember & take heart from your Ma’s spirit. She gave much of herself to many. Even her old Ma! Jo is still with both of us, Child. She gave you your self —by giving you her self. Strength, determination, courage to do. I know you’ve got these best parts of her and a thought strikes me—being her mother & yours once-removed, so to speak, I remember her earliest years & then her teen yrs. & I remember her struggle with the whole concept of “Mother.” The 21/2 years of our initial (& the most important) bonding was greatly “muddied” by the event of our being separated & the sudden replacement of me by a “father,” at that oh so dependent age of three. In the space of a few courthouse hours, John Gunthum took over as both father and mother, almost beating us home from city hall to get the few of her things he would deign to take. I became history to her & as time passed I became “his story” of me—almost! At eleven she underwent another sea change, when by the grace of God and the State of California, I got her back. Still dependent & insecure about what “mother” meant, in four years’ time she entered the irrevocable state of becoming mother herself. Fifteen years old, only a few months younger than you are now and one grade behind. I would & could tell you much of those times, but want to see you settling first into this age with no one’s problems on the table but your own. You need to figure out where you’re going from here first and what of this history is coming with you. Now it’s enough remembering Jo mothering four boys, clumsy at first, Lordy so was I, like a bright five-year-old dusting the furniture. Each time she prayed for a girl—her own little girl! Maybe to give that child what she had missed? From this advantage of time, it seems likely. You, Ror, were her dream & you fulfilled it—you are still doing it—you always will! Know it, Child & be glad & proud (a little!) & happy! When it is time for you to hold your own child you will automatically—

  and interruptions

  It always seems Grandma is fooling in this letter, one-too-many gin beers leading her to trite talk about the dead, about the type of mother Mama might have been if she’d become a mother on purpose, maybe, or gotten a later start at it, or liked living well enough in the first place that introducing the option to a little face not unlike her own would be a fine idea. Grandma’s thinking is that when and if my time to be a mother ever comes, I will step into the role that terrifies me more than any and with some confidence that I know what it means. Mother. That’s what all Grandma’s underlines and exclamation points are for, to try to make me believe a thing I know she lost faith in a long time ago, as if extra ink can make up for using the wrong words in the first place, can turn a lie into the truth or blot out all the mistakes a Hendrix ever made in caring for her children and letting them go. Grandma couldn’t hold on to Mama and her sisters, Grandpa’s pathologies hid so much more obediently than did hers, hiding and biding their time. The State awarded Grandpa all four of his daughters, in gingham dresses and throats collared with lace, and he grabbed on to them with both hands, tore them apart, and put them back together so confused that by the time Grandma had pushed the custody papers through every in- and out-box of the State of California to get them back, her girls thought she was the enemy. Their mother’s return shined a light on their pain, and like little girls always do, they thought this meant she was the one to be feared while the man with the big hands, who had used them in ways they would spend their lives struggling to overcome, was thought of with longing as dirty and chewed as his fingernails.

  Grandma couldn’t save them so she’s trying to save me. Mama couldn’t do it. She might have thought she was ready after raising four boys, but the reality of having her own little girl and all I reminded her of deafened her to the real dangers that surrounded us, so Grandma tries to make up for that, but too late and at too great a distance. Mothering is not this family’s strong suit. The missing places at the table prove it. Mama’s got four sisters she wouldn’t talk to, a brother she wouldn’t talk about, and I’ve got four grown brothers of my own who show up here only when dri
ven by crisis or guilt, their eyes red from staring down the lines of the highway. My brothers are like all the men in Mama’s life, mostly memory to her, blurred as the postmarks on the random Christmas and Mother’s Day cards sent from Sacramento and Frisco and any city that held them far away and safe from what happened to them under Mama’s roof. I know the stories about Grandma’s failures in the mothering department, and when it comes to Mama I could tell plenty of my own, but my brothers’ story tops them all.

  Still, as much as I have thought about this, used these failures to dismiss the very idea of bringing any more Hendrixes into this world, Grandma succeeds in reminding me of one thing, a small thing that lets me know that she is telling a truth in there somewhere. That there is a tenderness that runs quiet but sure in our blood and reveals itself as dependable as bedtime. It is the memory of Mama tucking me in at night, a name she had for me in the darkness. In the mornings when she woke me for school, I was always Sunshine, but at night I was always always girlchild.

  I could include a letter here from Mama to prove it. I’ve got stacks of them, ones she wrote me on late nights by cigarette light, after the words we tried to use out loud gave out. Torn apologies on the backs of envelopes, her hand as shaky as her spelling, stubbornly stacking up words to put out the fire of the night before. They were letter writers, correspondents, these women, besides being high school dropouts, unwed mothers, welfare moms, alcoholics, gamblers, smokers, ragers. When Grandma finally moved off the Calle, in part to escape these definitions, obvious as stained sheets on a line, her letters to me started to arrive. But no matter when or where they put pen to paper, Mama’s and Grandma’s handwriting echo each other. I see the same strokes in my own hand, the same tilt, but unlike Grandma Shirley’s proper capital I’s, Mama’s are all lowercase, and unlike both of theirs, mine are long, slashes on the page. And while Grandma called me “Dearest R.D.” and “Sweet Ror” and “Rory Dawn Rising Bright,” Mama’s letters to me bore no greeting, but began with just that word, her word, girlchild.

  The letters are sitting right here, bound in dirty string so they can’t come open too easily, so they can’t steal my nights as I look for secrets in their creases. Mama developed Grandma’s preference for onionskin paper too, and felt-tip, I wait for this to happen to me, I’m certain it will. The only way to tell the difference between Mama’s letters and Grandma’s at first glance is that Mama’s stay bundled up so tight the string rips into their pages and Grandma’s are loose and open, all over this table. I keep Mama’s letters closed, keep their edges close together like a cut that needs force to heal. I’m all wrapped up in there, jumbled with her, small i’s and slashes, her story in my story at every turn.

  “Look at me,” Mama says, it’s early morning and her eyes are clear, on level with mine, but all I feel is the tightness of her hands around my wrists and the pull of the skin on my forehead. We’ve just finished fixing my hair. She brushed it back into two tight ponytails with pink yarn in bows, and my tummy hurts from the cussing and pulling and yelling to “sit still” and “do you want to do this or not.” Mama is no good at fixing hair but today is picture day and pictures mean I get my hair yanked and pictures mean I have a dress on and dresses mean we have the talk.

  She shakes my wrists. “What is the rule?”

  I want to cry from the stupid words I have to say and the pull of the stupid rubber bands on my hair and how stupid she is for not knowing how to make a stupid ponytail without stinking up Christmas with cusswords and cigarette smoke, but instead I say it, I make myself say it, “Never let anyone touch me where my bathing suit goes.”

  One of my arms is released as Mama reaches for her cigarette. “I’ll kill anyone,” she says, through her fingers as she brings it to her mouth, “who tries,” and I believe her, because of the way her eyes squint as she takes a drag, take the measure of a thing I have never been able to see but that she can never seem to get away from. That dark thing that loves bare legs and bathing suits and makes us say these words to each other to fight it off. The words don’t work, they haven’t worked yet, but Mama seems to think they do, seems to think they will, so I keep saying them even though they make my skin prickle up, I say them, and I feel air coming at me as if I didn’t have a dress on at all, as if I was actually standing there in my bathing suit, skin cold from the water dripping off of it.

  It’s all triangles, top and bottom. Two triangles meet on my chest and make me nervous. They slip easy and I don’t notice sometimes because I’m underwater and underwater I can move fast or slow and I can have the longest legs but no one can see me and say, “Look at those long legs,” or talk about when I get older and how far up my legs will go. Underwater they are just my legs and my bathing suit can go all around and in and out and it doesn’t matter. The Hardware Man doesn’t matter. When he comes to the lake I run to the water and take cover and even as he’s backing his boat up onto the sand I float on the waves he makes and even when he’s parking his truck and taking Carol out for their first run I lie back, safe, in the warm trail left by his exhaust. Mama watches from the shore and I know that she is busy with sandy cans of Coors and trying not to worry about the water, trying to remember that she wants me to do things she never could. As the gas and oil mix with the water of the lake I feel her worries brush across me, leave a trail of chicken skin.

  Mama never learned how to swim. She can’t hear out of one ear and gets turned around underwater. She’ll kick all the way to the bottom, thinking she’s on top. She won’t even sit in an inner tube, even if I tie it to a tree and the water only comes up to my tummy, even if I hold her cigarettes and beer so she can get in. And she won’t set foot on a boat, anyone’s boat. I’m allowed though because she says one difference between her and me will be, when my time comes, I won’t have any fucking idea how to drown.

  Grandpa had a gun and it ruined Mama’s hearing. He was an angry man and he liked to celebrate it. He liked best to have Mama and her sisters dress up, line them all up, and make them stand close while he’d fire his shotgun off, the blast cracking through the air above their heads as sure and painful as if he’d emptied the barrel right into their bones. She still has dreams about it, gingham and butterfly-collar nightmares that scream through the house. She dreams about it sometimes when she’s awake too. She talks to the thing I can’t see, mistakes the Christmas tree for it, or the coat rack, and tears it down. I can’t get in there with her where she’s fighting, kicking out at whatever’s pulling her away. I wait for her to come up for air, I put her to bed, put the Christmas tree back up, pick up the coats, double-lock all the doors, and tuck myself in.

  wings

  “What’s your house like?” I ask Viv, and push my arms and legs to make deeper marks in the field where we are lying together and making dirt angels.

  Viv already said she’s not allowed any company and told me, “You wouldn’t like it, Rory Dawn, because Uncle gets meaner the longer the days goes on. He says I’m so stupid the only scout troop I could ever belong to is one that troops off a cliff, says I’m feebleminded like all the women in our family, like all the women in the world!”

  I’d tried to imagine anyone calling Viv stupid. “I got an uncle like that,” I’d said, and she’d nodded.

  She said she knew that I did, and when I asked her how, because I never talked about the Hardware Man, she’d said, “I could just tell, that’s probably why we’re in the same troop!”

  Ms. Hyatt has just taught us about exclamation marks and how they do the same work as a period but in a bigger way, to show emotion. Every time Viv talks, I feel an exclamation mark, POP!, in my head, like her sentences all end this way. It’s a way that makes me feel like we’re really true friends, best friends, like Stephanie and Jena-with-one-n who get to sit together, and how if we were in the same class we’d sit together and write BEST FRIENDS 4-EVER with a hundred exclamation points like the ones Viv uses to answer my question now.

  “My house is like yours but sunk in th
e ground so it can’t go anyplace. Not like your …” she pauses before she says it, she’s still getting used to not calling it a trailer, “house!” She swings her arms and legs fast, pushing like me but harder. “Your house could go places!”

  “Nope,” I say, finishing my wings and getting up, careful not to mess my angel’s skirt. I help Viv up, and we brush twigs off each other and check our work, two angels flattening the sage. “It just looks that way.”

  stucco

  Single-wide, double-wide, a house with a hitch. Single mom, gravel drive. Propane by the gallon, generic cigs by the carton, and solitaire round the clock. Cousins and animals multiply like cars in the front yard. Nothing around here gets fixed.

  The Calle is not a through street. The road is paved with uncles. Smokey, Barney, Johnny Law, Pig, uncles with their badges, with their belt buckles, say, “Hey Sugar, Toots, Sweet Thing, is your mama home?” hand already through the already ripped screen door, finger on the latch.