Girlchild Read online

  It is the stupidest lie I ever told, because I’m crying so hard there’s no way I’m honest, and now Mama’s crying too. Her eyes shine brown and bright and it’s scarier than any screaming fit she’s ever thrown. She doesn’t cry like me at all, her face doesn’t crumple or splotch. Mama sits still and straight and starts talking in a low voice about heaven, hell, and the Hardware Man, and that’s when I know I fucked up. I must have said something because she knows.

  They grew fast under my fingers that won’t stop picking and tearing at skin whose redness reminds me of hot breath and stubble, and then it comes to me that “Just scabs” are the first words I remember saying since school started this year that weren’t to Viv or about her, the first words that aren’t “I feel sick” at Ms. Hyatt’s desk. But maybe I’ve been talking other times. There must be words I’m losing with all the time that gets swallowed in the dark. Maybe words have been slipping out the whole time, too quiet to hear except in my own mama’s ears, and this must be right because she takes my tissue away and hugs me, good and soft and not like metal. She pulls me in like she never does, says words that I’ve never heard, that I can barely make out through tears and held breath and her voice in my hair.

  Mama’s “shhhh” sounds clean like cotton and it works away at my apologizing until the morning’s quiet again like she likes it, except this morning for the sound of her voice, the drip of her coffee onto the linoleum. “This is my fault.” Mama’s kisses fall cool on my torn skin and she says it again, “This is all my fault and I’m going to take care of it,” and then she says “girlchild.” My night name hums in the morning air like the sound of the refrigerator coming on during a scary dream, gives me something to grab onto, something that makes sense, because what she says next sure doesn’t. Mama hugs me harder and her words turn hot as prayers on my neck, her words burn into my skin, “You’re my heaven and hell-flower, girlchild, and you’re gonna grow anyway.”

  flicker

  The hardware man’s house is empty. carol is gone and now i stay at grandma’s when mama is on swing and grave

  the hardware man’s house is empty and his truck is gone. and now i go to grandma’s during mama’s shifts and there is nothing wrong with me if i just would stop covering my mouth all the time but under my hands there are scabs but the scabs would go away if i just stopped covering my mouth all the time

  i did not say good-bye i did not say anything to anyone but can i go to the nurse and grandma has bag balm in a green tin with red roses and ms. hyatt is soft with me when i ask can i go to the nurse and the nurse is soft too takes my hand down from my mouth holds it in hers when the thermometer makes me cry i want to go home

  they stay away from the whole swing set because i’m there and i hold one hand over my mouth and swing with the other hand. i rise away

  opening my fist she throws away my tissue gives me a new one from the box and i am hot. i will throw up. the thermometer under my tongue. there are phone calls. mama comes and she is worried but she misses work too much misses too much

  the hardware man’s empty house his truck gone carol in it and me at grandma’s when mama is working swing and grave but when the nurse calls mama comes

  i will hold my breath i will throw up i will fall down i will pee my pants i’ll bite the thermometer in half and eat the glass i’ll do whatever nurse needs to pick up the phone and bring mama here.

  surge

  The lights in my head start staying on long enough for me to see that Mama’s forehead is covered with lines and the girls’ bathroom is covered with words. The tiles say i hate Rory D. in black marker but I don’t know what the lines on her face say. I don’t know all I’ve missed, what made the Hardware Man disappear, what I did. When I go pee at school my eyes move from the lock on the door to the words on the wall and when I pull the toilet paper I think I hear the door handle moving. When I go to sleep I dream of the alphabet and black markers, but when I’m awake I don’t fucking say anything. I don’t fucking say anything to anyone ever, especially not to Viv because I haven’t seen her since we went to the playground together to swing, since I must have got her in trouble by making her go to the Truck Stop and she probably doesn’t want to be my friend anymore.

  School is the same, except it’s third grade now, and we are only supposed to write cursive and the letters on the bathroom wall are in cursive too. I write the alphabet in one curling line and my letters bend in a way I recognize, the slash I see in Mama’s notes to Ms. Kohler saying, Rory still isn’t up to talking much please understand, thank you. It’s the same slant I see on Grandma’s clippings from the Reno Gazette. Her angry scratch in the margins: Can’t believe this shit! and Who gives a rat’s ass?! My penmanship is pure Hendrix for sure, I bet even my blood runs wrong.

  The toilet paper rolls and I pull up my pants quick when I see that the letters slipping across the tile, wrapping around faucets and pipes, the letters making the words i hate Rory D. are Hendrix letters. The slants and slashes, even the little i, are all mine.

  stall

  For years I dream of the bathroom door not locking, of toilets surrounded by panes of glass, toilets in the center of the living room, of dirty stalls occupied by strangers, by couples already intimate, of finding a bathroom only to learn that the bulb is burnt out, there is no door, that it would be a far better choice to just go ahead and piss myself. In waking life I resist all euphemisms, especially the diminutive, the potty, the little girls’ room.

  green thumb

  Grandma grew things. Whatever the climate wherever she moved, a garden soon followed after her, tomato seeds went down, a fence went up, and on the Calle I was Grandma’s Chief Gardener. My Chief Gardener’s duties were comprised of deciding which garden hoses felt like snakes to bare feet in the dark pools of slow moving water that puddled in the desert sand too stubborn to swallow it and holding funerals for the birds found dropped dead, exhausted from flying without rest through a land without trees. Discovered by Grandma’s rake and shovel, the birds were buried in the dirt beyond the lot’s edge and Grandma’d stand still long enough to amen my silent prayer over their cardboard coffins.

  Grandma set me loose on all this make believe, but her work was real. She bent her back before its time, pulling weeds and planting seeds. Whatever Grandma got in the way of surplus food and government cheese was supplemented by something fresh from the ground, ground that she coddled and coerced, encouraged and berated, just like she did me.

  Grandma could make things grow in the desert climate, she could read the dirt’s tells, knew if it would prove barren or rich. She watered in the moonlight, and again just before dawn, sweetening the soil with sheer persistence. Mama inherited that ability too, to make things grow in spite of herself, her gladiolas surprising the teachers at Roscoe Elementary spring after spring, and Mama’s and Grandma’s children, some of us grew too.

  cut off

  The Hardware Man had worked a disappearing trick. Once Mama and Grandma got to talking again, she followed a nagging worry she’d had, pulled me from Carol’s babysitting shifts, and sent me back to Grandma’s, and as suddenly as she did that, the Hardware Man decided to take a little trip of his own. But when he got back, it was Mama’s turn to work some magic. She had promised to kill anyone who hurt me, who dared to reach those places kept safe by the double knots in bathing suit string, and she may not have kept that promise to the letter but I’m pretty sure she kept it to the number, because soon after the morning of heaven and hellflowers, the morning the scabs on my face told the tale I couldn’t tell, a tale Mama heard clear and true as if both her ears worked perfectly, soon after that, the Hardware Man found himself eighty-sixed. That was the official word, but I’d heard rumors of the truth and I started to put them together.

  The word molestation and the phrase sexually abused are heard once a year around here, in a short presentation given by Mr. Lombroso as he hands out the pamphlets with the hotline number we’re supposed to call should anyone touch us
inappropriately, and for the entire eight minutes of his speech none of us looks each other in the eye. But no one has trouble with phrases like son of a bitch and touched my kid, and I imagine Mama had no trouble looking the Hardware Man in the eye when he got back and she said them. Our authorities may deal with trespasses in their own way, but the line the Hardware Man crossed is drawn as hard on the Calle as anywhere else. The words carried all the weight of a judge’s gavel, especially coming from my mama, and some of that weight was put behind Calle fists. When the Hardware Man was one fist short of requiring an ambulance, the punches stopped, but the hits kept coming. He soon found he’d lost his regular barstool at the Truck Stop, walked into the bar to find silence, his seat taken, his tab run dry, and not just on Mama’s shift either, because bad news rolls like tumbleweed through the Calle, silent but sticky. Soon enough none of the bartenders, at the Truck Stop or Hobee’s, had what the Hardware Man ordered, if they could remember that he’d ordered at all. The tumbleweed rolled along, and pretty soon after that, the folks down at Ace figured that Sonny could handle the counter by himself. When the Calle took its final turn on him, the man, who was just a man then, with no uniform to hide behind, no counter to look over, no drill bits to catalog, that man used the last speck of sense he had, packed up his home and his daughter, and went to lose himself somewhere else.

  It took a long time to sink in. That the Hardware Man’s trailer was empty as a keg at closing time, that the sounds that woke me at night were really only the hands of the clock ticking the hours through, that the shapes the shadows took outside my window were really only Mama’s gladiolas growing up to meet the desert sun. When I finally understood all that, I took a long, deep breath and stopped hiding my mouth from fear of spilling a secret that was already out.

  tattletale

  Bird God. Here is another one of your children that got caught in the jaws of the world and shook hard. She’s dead, a long time ago it looks like, so you’ve probably been wondering where she went. All that’s left under one wing is pink and bone, things we’re not meant to see, Grandma says. Please take her back into your nest and make Bird Heaven stretch ready for her with lots of trees in case her new wings get tired, the ones you’re gonna give her because Grandma says you are. I wrapped her in an orange shoebox by the propane tank. It’s our last shoebox and I chipped my tooth trying for a perfect bow this time. The string snagged between my front teeth and I pulled too hard. I lost my baby teeth already, so if you could fix it before anyone notices, that way I won’t get in trouble and have all the adults popping out their dentures at me asking do I want to look like them. The bow is lopsided but it’s tight, waiting for your scissors to undo it and let her free. If it was up to us, we would’ve let her fly forever, and it’s really mean how you do that, let your creatures get torn apart, feathers everywhere, and don’t ever send enough shoeboxes, and then make teeth so fragile we can’t make things right for saying good-bye. Grandma says you’re never supposed to do that, leave a mess for others to clean up, she has a sign above the stove that says YOUR MOTHER DOESN’T WORK HERE and I’m pretty sure this means you too. So if you’ll just take this one more bird home, I won’t tell my grandma on you.

  mirror image

  On the night I discovered mirrors, I was at Grandma’s in the bedroom of her single-wide Regal, a bedroom I’d shared with one graveyard-shift-abandoned child after another. Mama had been working worried evenings at the Truck Stop, worried because of the quiet that still had such a hold on me, because I should have been getting old enough to watch myself but still seemed to forget how. Because I forgot to walk myself home, or walked myself to the wrong house, to the Hardware Man’s empty trailer, pressed my forehead against the windows, and whispered apologies to Carol’s shadow, sure as I was that she was getting all the punishment I deserved for not keeping my mouth shut, for not keeping the secret about her bad daddy in the safe, silent dark. Because I’d sit on the porch waiting until Mama found me there and, without saying a word, took me home or to Grandma’s. Because Grandma, despite her own record of forgetful tendencies when her gambling hand itched, was once again the best bet for childcare on the Calle, so there I was in her back bedroom, her mirror in my hand, and Timmy was there too, playing with his favorite toy truck on the floor.

  The mirror was a red-handled plastic affair, and I watched my face in the square glass, blue eyes, near-white hair, and a closed mouth, no wide red hole, a mouth very closed against the redness that still traced around it from the scabs I had made keeping myself quiet. I was running my tongue over the few scabs left, seeing which were loosening, and then, suddenly, over my shoulder, little Timmy. I was surprised that this could happen all at once, my face, my blue, my blond, and his face too, his lips vibrating with the noise of his truck’s motor. I could see him without turning to look, so I took a tour through the rest of the room too. The permanent beds for the temporary kids separated by the nightstand that had the lamp coming right up through holes in its two levels, the light switch always too far for one of us to reach without getting out of bed to turn it off. Above the nightstand I could see the window whose curtains were always tied open because it faced the empty back lot. I tried not to look out there at night but the mirror made me feel brave, so I did. And that’s when I saw that someone was looking in, watching us.

  It was a girl with big curls and a lace collar. Viv. She looked different, though, and I saw why, a stiff Girl Scout sash full of patches ran from her right shoulder to her left hip. I’ll never catch up, I thought, seeing their number, all the different shapes, and how proud she looked, and then she raised three fingers, her thumb and pinky joined in her palm, and touched her fingers to her forehead. When I saluted back she waved at me, and it looked like she was waving good-bye.

  “Viv!” I dropped the mirror and ran to the window, barely missing knocking over a scared Timmy who’d gotten so used to not hearing my voice since the Hardware Man left that my scream had stopped him still. He sat cross-legged on the floor, one hand still on his truck, its wheels come to a sudden stop on their imaginary road.

  “Is there somebody outside?” he asked me in a quiet voice, a voice too small to ever power a truck over Grandma’s carpet. It was a voice I recognized for how low it got, like it was getting ready to crawl under the bed, trying to hide itself and its owner, and as I looked out the window, trying to see around the reflection of the light and my face in it, to see a dress running away in the darkness, a sash’s tail flowing behind, I remembered Carol. I thought of how she would’ve answered Timmy now once she’d caught wind of his fear, how she would have kept scaring him and kept scaring him until he cried with it, just like she used to scare me.

  “Nope,” I said, making myself sound very sure even though I wasn’t. “Just my imagination.”

  garbage

  It’s duck duck goosestep till the bell rings: I march from can to can, take the orange peels from today’s lunch out of the trash when no one’s looking, and drop them one by one on the ground behind me, a trail from swings to slide, monkey bars to water fountain, circle around the tetherball, cross the four square, through dirt and over cement, orange marks the spot. That’s how you make things grow, garbage in the ground, it makes dirt strong. Grandma understands the dirt and what’s good for it and so do I. And when the Recess Monitors finally see me, because they don’t notice me unless I’m taking tests, because they don’t notice me unless the alphabet is dancing out of my mouth, my mouth still red like a clown’s, like bad lipstick around my lips and no washing it off, they miss the connection. Because they don’t like to look at that either. When the Monitors finally see all the orange peels spread out over the white desert dirt of the playground they blow their whistles and ask who did this. But it’s too late, there’s no way to tell where it began except for the orange smell on my hands but no one gets close enough to know. No one could tell now that it was me.

  Now, if anything grows out of the Roscoe playground dirt it’ll be because of
what Grandma taught me. If the sand won’t accept them and the orange peels dry and curl in the sun and blow away, nobody will look at them and think of me ’cause I never get in trouble, because I’m the star student at Roscoe and as long as I can spell and recite, multiply and divide, and comprehend every last word I read, it doesn’t matter how quiet I am or how weird I act and I won’t get in trouble for anything, not even for i hate Rory D. on the bathroom wall. Star student or not, nobody washes that off and nobody corrects it either. There’s a difference between trash and trash, that’s what Grandma says, and learning which is which is the best education you can get, but nobody ever writes something nice about Rory D., even though I leave a marker there so someone can, so they can add just one why not, one reason why anyone shouldn’t, and that’s because the only friend I’ve ever had has gone away.

  Children run from swings to slide to water fountain on a white dirt playground. Adults blow whistles and point to a trail of orange peels littering the ground. The trail moves in a cursive line and takes the shape of three letters with an exclamation point at the end: Bye! The girl with the white-blond hair stands alone by the trash can, orange peels fall from her hand.

  revoice

  Timmy and I walk to the playground. Timmy’s running ahead, pulling his truck along on a string behind him, so he doesn’t see an odd patch of green against the desert dirt of the walkway. It’s a green, folded-up bill, a one-dollar bill. George Washington’s face is wrinkly and his forehead is huge and he’s not smiling but I’m not putting him back. I stuff the dollar into my pocket and run after Timmy. When we play on the swings, Timmy holds his truck on his lap and I check my pocket after each new height to make sure the dollar is still there.