Girlchild Read online

  “When you play solitaire you’re playing against the Devil,” the Calle Grandmas say through false teeth, yella teeth, broken teeth, through pink gums hidden behind hands paused from stringing garlands of silver beer tabs. Hands that threaten to shuffle the spots off the cards, threaten to “smack you so hard your no-good daddy’ll fall outta bed” if you don’t stop interrupting the idiot box with your idiot mouth and see to that mess in the kitchen.

  Fifty-two pick-up. Suicide kings and one-eyed jacks face off on orange shag. Calle girls cry uncle through clenched teeth and past his shoulder the sirens flash redneck blues across the white-stucco, nicotine-yellow ceiling.

  boom

  Here’s how the Hardware Man makes the lights go out. I say I have to potty and he says that he will help me, and takes my hand, and we go to the back of the store through aisles of fan blades and boxes of electrical tape to the bathroom that is supposed to be for girls and boys, but I think really only for boys, because there are boot prints all over the tile and the soap is dirty. I can’t reach to turn on the light. The light is at the top of the ceiling and turns on with a chain that you pull once for on and twice for off, but it’s high above the sink and I can’t reach it even if I stand on the seat.

  The Hardware Man can reach it, though, and he pulls the chain once and closes the door. And he locks the door and undoes my pants, he says because I am little and I need help going to the bathroom. He always says that, just like he always says that good little girls like me should wear dresses. But I always wear pants. Mama doesn’t like dresses and he knows that but he also knows that I can go to the bathroom by myself so I don’t tell him anything. And then I forget all about having to pee because he is telling me to lie down on the floor and I think how the boot prints are going to get all over the back of my new favorite shirt with the rainbow on it but then he is telling me to be good, which means not to make noise, and I stare up at the lightbulb and the chain that is still swinging until the patch on his pocket that says Ace Hardware blocks it and then it doesn’t matter if he pulled the chain once or twice or how much noise I make because everything is dark and quiet, except for the word good. Good is in my ears over and over again, and sometimes it is cut up in pieces of a whisper and sometimes it has more o’s than it needs, and always it is so heavy I can’t breathe and my shirt is all ruined.

  the electric company

  “Does that feel good?” Carol asks me, and her friend Trina laughs and coughs on the smoke that comes exploding out of her mouth. “Does it?”

  Carol and Trina were listening to Meat Loaf and getting stoned, and I was sitting on the top bunk where I’m really not allowed to be until I’m “ten, if I’m lucky,” trying not to make any noise so Carol won’t tell me Get Down from There and that’s when Carol got up from the radio and said, “Let me show you something.” She was talking to Trina but coming over to me. “Come here, Ror.”

  She took my book and I watched it go, my page gone, and then she lifted me onto her hip. “Okay, watch,” she said, putting her hands on my bottom and moving me in circles against the hip pocket of her corduroys, against her hip, against her hip bone.

  I pretend like I can’t hear her asking. I keep my eyes on the top bunk, on the cover of my book, it has green cloth and gold letters, I read the words over and over to keep my eyes off the curly red bangs and the smoky cloud that hang around Trina’s laughing head, Girl Scout Handbook, it says, Girl Scout Handbook, and the outline of the trefoil behind it, the points of the promise.

  “Come on, Ror,” says Carol, “doesn’t that feel good?”

  “G-O-O-D,” I say, and grip the arms of my chair. The man, who is sitting at Mr. Lombroso’s desk even though he is not the principal of Roscoe Elementary School, smiles and makes a note with his brand-new pencil.

  “Gear,” he says.

  I swing my legs.

  “G-E-A-R,” I say back to him, and swing my legs higher so they come out straight, so I can see them. I’m wearing a skirt today. It has gray flowers and three ruffles and lace. I hate this man who treats me like I’m a great big insect in his very own mason jar. I like my new skirt.

  “Theme.”

  “T-H-E-M-E.” I have to dress up for this man with the new pencils and briefcase whose leather is almost as shiny as the gold locks he flipped open at once, SMACK!, when Mr. Lombroso brought me in. I have to dress up for his briefcase.

  “You’re doing very well.” He smiles at me. “Queen.”

  I spell to the wall behind his head. I swing my legs after every letter, “Q-swing-U-swing-E-swing-E-swing-N-swing.” I will for his pencil to break, for one of my tennies to fly off and hit his round wire glasses.

  “Wash,” he says but I can’t hear him right.

  “Wash or watch?”

  He is delighted. “Can you spell both?”

  Carol is babysitting Timmy and me together. Carol is Timmy’s aunt. Like the same way the Hardware Man is my uncle. Not in real life.

  It is Timmy’s bath time and Carol turns on the water in the tub. She calls me into the bathroom.

  “Get undressed, Ror,” she says, as she pulls down Timmy’s pants. Timmy is barely five years old and I am almost eight. Timmy’s still stuck on the kindergartener’s side of the playground. Timmy is holding a Lego and licking it.

  “But I already took a bath,” I say.

  “Get undressed.” She coos at Timmy as she moves the Lego out of his mouth so she can pull off his shirt.

  “Carol, I took a bath.” I did. I just took a bath.

  “Took a bath!” Timmy yells. “Took a bath!”

  “Do it,” she says and there is metal in her voice. I start to cry. I unbutton my pants slowly, quiet, like the way I’m crying, my mouth wide and silent, spit stringing. I push my pants down. I put my thumbs on my panties but I can’t push them, all my strength is in my stretched mouth, my tight-closed eyes. But Carol is sitting on the toilet seat so she can keep an eye on Timmy, who is splashing in the bathtub, and me at the same time, and she yells into the hallway, “Now. Rory.”

  In the bathtub I can’t have any toys and she won’t let me play with Timmy’s because she says I am too big for that. She won’t let me have a washrag because, she says in a copy-catter voice, “You already took a bath so you must be clean.” I’m not allowed to do anything but sit cross-legged next to Timmy, who is used to me crying, and motorboats his Lego through the water and laughs. Carol sits on the toilet seat and stares at me until the water finally grows cold enough to make Timmy start to fuss and then she lifts him out of the tub. She starts to dry Timmy off and as she wraps him in the towel and takes him out of the bathroom she says, “Get in bed.”

  The lights are always going out now. It happens when I’m with Carol a lot, but never at school and never with Viv. Mama is working nights at the Truck Stop, and when she’s not working there she’s working graveyard at the Primadonna so I’m almost always with Carol. I must be saving all my electricity to use during schooltime, I think, and that’s why Mr. Lombroso learned my name and why people with briefcases started showing up in his office to ask me the same questions over and over and why I got a new skirt and why Mama, when I do see her, started looking at me like I’m going to lay an egg.

  outlier

  “Wait,” the Briefcase Man says.

  “Verb or noun?” I say, and swing my legs and wish for a harder question. I want a question that takes all the electricity I’ve got and blows me into a million pieces.

  “Wait,” the Hardware Man says. He tells Sonny to watch the counter at the Hardware Store because he’s going to take me for burgers. Sonny’s always talking about how he’s ready to man the counter himself but he never looks happy when the Hardware Man says he’s taking me to pick up lunch. He stands at the door with his arms crossed, watches us get into the truck and drive three stores down to Pete’s Liquor where the Hardware Man leaves the engine running and goes inside.

  I do not swing my legs in the Hardware Man’s truck. The floor i
s covered with empty cups and beer bottles and hamburger wrappers and junk and the seat is covered with cloth that is stiff from being spilled on. It’s hard where it should be soft and I try not to touch it. I don’t want to touch anything, but still, when I see the Hardware Man through the window with his back to me, I reach down to the trash under my feet and turn over a piece of glossy paper. A lady’s face stares up from between my fingers. Her flat face is all O’s. O’s around her blue eyes and on her pink cheeks, and the red that makes her two lips is a big empty O. Her picture is in a bad kind of magazine, not for play and not for kids. I know what it is now, but I’ll forget again as soon as it gets dark.

  When I told Mama I wanted to get rid of my dolls and only have books, she was thrilled. When I started keeping them in ABC order, she called Grandma to tell her even though she hadn’t dialed Grandma’s number in so long I thought she’d forgot it. I wanted her to do something that had less to do with pride and making telephone calls and more with worry from seeing that all these letters can’t be lining up to spell anything good, that I should be getting invited to sleepovers instead of getting perfect grades, but that was all she did. Act proud. Like all there is to getting by in life is knowing your ABC’s.

  “Enough.”

  That’s what Carol says and she says it mean. Even though I’m always way over on the edge of the bed and not making noise and breathing through my mouth and letting the snot run onto the sheet so I don’t sniffle, she says it.

  “E-N-O-U-G-H,” I spell to the Briefcase Man.

  I am pushing against the wall because I don’t want to touch her and I don’t want to feel the Hardware Man touching her and I don’t want his big dirty hands pulling my hair. Carol says, “Wait,” even though the bed is already sunk from his weight and I’m squeezing into the crack that is growing between the mattress and the wall, growing bigger and bigger with each push he gives on top of her, she still says it. She even says, “No,” somehow, and sometimes it has an echo at the end of it, the o’s rolling back. And sometimes the echo goes on so long I think that she is the one crying and I am the one getting pushed, pushed silent, like a k.

  “No.”

  “K-N-O-W.”

  flicker

  uncle

  The metal smell of Ace in the mornings makes you sick, leaves you coughing up last night’s gin and tonics on the bathroom floor while the grease spots on the tiles turn the colors of a little girl’s rainbow T-shirt. You become a dervish with mop and bleach to erase the colors from the floor, but then the smell of bleach is too like your own smell and you are sick again, crouching, trying not to ruin the knees of another dark uniform with circles of bleach that remind you of what you should have already learned by heart, having taught the lesson so well: There’s never anyplace to hide in a bathroom.

  You’ve done a thing you can’t clean up, found a place you can’t reach with mop or apology. The forever you’ve created branches like the hairline fracture in a pelvic bone, hides like a dirty Polaroid shoved under a mattress, rises like hot blood to burn cheeks pretty with shame. Places you didn’t even know you were signing your name will always be marked with your hand, but despite every new day’s resolution to never do it again, you will. You’ll look away from your own face in the mirror, pull the chain twice to hide from yourself in the dark, and when it’s all over you won’t fucking say anything. You won’t fucking say anything to anyone ever.

  ma bell

  Mama and Grandma must’ve made up the day she called to tell her about my book rearranging because our schedule got rearranged right after that, and now I’m allowed to stay at Grandma’s again after school and when Mama’s working nights. And they must have agreed with the Briefcase Men that I’m getting pretty smart too, because today Grandma said I could go to the playground if I stop by the Truck Stop before and after and check in with Mama. She calls Mama to tell her so, they sound easy on the phone, and before they hang up, Grandma says, “We’ll get her back yet.” I guess they’re worried I won’t come home but I’m going to follow the directions perfectly so I’ll get to go again.

  On the way to the Truck Stop, I’m passing the Hardware Man’s house and I just slow to look in his windows when someone pokes at my shoulder. I shouldn’t have lagged, I think, now I’ll never get to go to the playground by myself again and I love the playground when school’s out, when it’s no one but me and the swings.

  But when I turn, it isn’t the Hardware Man’s face, or Carol’s, like I expected. It’s Viv. She pulls my arm. “Come on, R.D.,” she says, “let’s go swing!”

  “Viv!” I haven’t seen her for days since the Bucks don’t have a phone so I couldn’t call and tell her about staying at Grandma’s. I’ve been walking to school by myself again and I’m so excited to see her that I’m using her exclamation points without even realizing it, POP!, “I have to stop into the Truck Stop first. You can say hi to my mama!” Viv has been pulling my hand, making us run, but when I say this she slows.

  “I’m not supposed to see nobody.” Viv doesn’t say things wrong like Calle folks, she’s good about double negatives, so I know this means she really doesn’t want to go.

  She says, “I’m not supposed to go into drinking establishments.” That’s the way she talks, formal, like a book from a long time ago, and I think her family must all talk like this, like her house is still in black and white with dinner on the table and no phone ringing.

  “The Truck Stop is a bar,” I tease her, “but you can wait outside while I run in. Okay?”

  This works. “Okay, but be quick so I don’t catch it,” she says, and we run on.

  At the Truck Stop I’m barely in the door before Mama’s on the phone with Grandma and giving me the thumbs-up for coming straight down. I climb up on a barstool and give her a kiss and hop right down like I’m supposed to, but when I see her start making me my usual, a Shirley Temple with more than the legal limit of maraschino cherries, I say, “I’m not thirsty, Mama. Besides, Viv is going to the playground too, she’s waiting outside.”

  Mama is surprised. She stands there frozen, the jar of cherries in her hand.

  “You remember Viv, we walk to school together.” I turn to the door and shout over the music from the jukebox, “Wave, Viv!”

  I see the flutter of her dress as she steps in the doorway and waves quick, “She’s not allowed inside ’cause—” and just then I learn that what Grandma says about Dennis is right, he’s the true gentleman of the Calle.

  “A friend of R.D.’s doesn’t only deserve a wave, she deserves a bow,” he says, and he does it, leans down from his barstool and bows at Viv’s shadow in the screen door. I hear her giggle. “And a flower.” Dennis hands me two toilet-paper flowers this time, one for me and one for Viv, and Mama seems to relax.

  “Remember the rule, one hour and stop by here on your way back so I can call Grandma,” she says; her hand is already on the phone to call Grandma again as I wave my flowers and run out the door.

  Viv is careful with her flower all the time she’s swinging, she says it’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever gotten, but when our hour’s up she asks if I’ll keep it at my house since her uncle will want to know where she got it. I do, of course. I have a garden of Dennis’s flowers on the shelf by my bed, and when I get home I put Viv’s right in the middle.

  okay bouquet

  I pluck Dennis’s flowers from the shelf, one by one. I hold them when I sleep to keep my mouth shut tight, but in the morning my mouth is red from the Truck Stop’s cheap toilet paper, which is good at folding into the shape of a rose but hard on soft skin. I pick another flower to hide the red and carry it all day.

  shoot

  I’ve been keeping my mouth shut but this morning the silence isn’t my fault. There’s no school today and no Grandma’s either because snow snuck down quiet and deep last night, buried the roads and our front porch and there’s no driving until they’re cleared. No matter what, I haven’t told Mama anything because the Hardware Man sai
d not to, and even though he’s gone I know he meant it. And I’m not telling her now because I don’t want to start an avalanche, don’t want to shake all that we’ve built up out from under us, send us sliding back to where we started. If she thinks everything’s all right, everything is all right, and so I keep the words in but they curl tight in my throat and under my tongue and sprout out of my lips like bean sprouts twisting up from the egg cartons on Grandma’s windowsill. I keep holding my hands over my mouth, watch TV over my fingers, go to bed with both hands under my nose in case one falls away and the truth comes pouring out in my sleep, but I must have Grandma’s green thumb too because red blossoms around my lips, and when I wash the red skin off the new skin grows back too fast to hide and the new red speaks louder than the words I won’t say no matter how much TP I hold over it. I stay in the dark and talk down to the linoleum, hide behind books and under the covers, but the secret climbs up like tomato vines until this slow morning with time to spare and early light. Mama grabs my chin with one hand and spills her coffee cup all over the dining room table with the other. “Rory Dawn, what is wrong with your mouth?”

  I want to tell her the truth because her eyes are wet with it anyway, but her hand stays strong as iron around my chin, and the truth will be too loud for the soft clean snow pushing up against the window, too dirty, and so I only tell part of it, the part that she already knows from looking at me, “Just scabs.”