How to Wrestle a Girl

by Venita Blackburn

  Parthenogenesis

  Somebody thought it was a good idea to take a family vacation after Mama tried to kill herself: San Diego. By some miracle of incompetence no one came for me and T right away, to take two nearly grown teenage girls from the jaws of maternal dysfunction. T said that level of extra was for white kids. So instead we ended up on a two-hour road trip south. San Diego, the yellowest city I’d ever seen, totally sun-bleached, all the buildings, old and new, dipped in Mission-style architecture like an ice cream in adobe sprinkles. It was ridiculous.

  T had been acting like a snatch-face c-word from the start. I’d never seen her so eager to go anywhere since before Daddy died. This was going to be our first vacation with just Mama, and knowing that woman I did not expect great things. But T, my goodness, the rushing and the shouting—get in the shower, put on your clothes, don’t leave your hair like that, brush your goddamn teeth, help carry the cooler! Mama never touched me unless it was to tug and twist on my hair until it looked somewhat satisfying to us both. When she heard T yell at me she came over with a jar of product and a comb. It hurt the usual way and then it didn’t. I wanted to cut it all off the way women do when they get divorced. I wanted to divorce my mother and her genetic code and her self-hate and her addictions and her disregard for her own beauty, her own body. I was done before we got in the car.

  Things were going well for me, I had a wrestling match coming up, friends, more than friends even, and the two of them just plucked me out of it, root and all. Eventually we stopped talking, turned the radio off in the car, and just rode into the resort driveway in complete silence. I got out first for some fresh air. It smelled beachy and tropical, the artificial tropical that comes in tubes of sunblock or a tray of mai tais. All-inclusive, the receptionist repeated, whatever that meant. Mama had a lot of insurance money to spend and no idea what she was buying, apparently. There were other families checking in, men in khaki shorts and women in sunglasses so large they looked like giant flies wearing sundresses. Short brown and pink people struggling with luggage and no sense of direction, and that one Viking-looking couple that walked out of the elevator and out of the sliding glass doors to some other destiny. Then there was us: cranky, saggy eyed, hungry, grieving, and alone. With all T’s shouting we still looked terribly unprepared for family fun by the beach. I had on a sweat suit with socks and flip-flops, T had on enough jewelry to use as armor in a war, and Mama had on a faux-leather jacket. Everything about us said we did not know what the hell we were doing. The receptionist said all-inclusive for the twelfth time to clarify a point Mama refused to embrace, then recited a list of amenities, including six restaurants, a spa, an indoor space simulator, and an aquarium.

  T packed all those sodas and water like we were going hiking at a park with Daddy. We didn’t need any of it here. We ate horrible burgers that came with an unrequested pineapple on the meat for no goddamn reason, then went to the aquarium. A guided tour was in progress that we joined just in time to reach the manta ray exhibit. Six or seven little stingrays wide and flat as dinner plates scuttled along the sand. Guests were allowed to touch the little guys, which I thought a bad idea. A little blond boy insisted on trying to poke them in the exact manner the guide told him not to and had to be forcibly removed by a similar-looking man, a pattern he’d walk his whole life. Me and Mama looked at each other and rolled up our sleeves, then reached in hands flat like we were supposed to. The creatures came to us and slid like beaded glass under our fingers. She almost smiled then, eager to touch this strange little thing in this faraway place, and I realized I didn’t know her at all. T didn’t touch the stingrays and was glad to move on to the shark tank, which I will never forget.

  Apparently there is a thing that can happen to some animals, spontaneous births, parthenogenesis, right out of ancient mythology, Zeus and Athena, the guide said. Their tank held only female sharks, but one Sunday evening a shark gave birth to eleven babies all on her own. The guide spoke as if it were science, nature, the divine, and a curse. For a second lots of the women chuckled and nudged their men and felt a kind of pride where I felt immense terror. The thin guide in her bright-orange lipstick continued, parthenogenesis is a kind of self-cloning, the babies are identical to the mother genetically with minor differences here and there. Unfortunately, the babies are usually not well. I felt it coming, the grand joke this kind of singular motherhood represented. The babies are usually deformed, the guide said significantly, or stillborn altogether. Call it a panic attack, call it the heebie-jeebies, whatever it was I couldn’t breathe well, even the feel of fabric on my abdomen made me shudder, and I had to leave before hearing anything else.

  The hall between the shark tank and the hands-on exhibit was peaceful, dark, and empty. Someone spun me around so fast I almost put them in a choke hold, but it was just T. She held me by the collar and was at the point of crying. I got scared, figured Mama did something crazy again. In an instant I imagined her keeled over at the bar or half-submerged in the shore like a seashell, mouth and nose filled with sand, or in the shark tank, naked and drowned, wide-eyed with head and limbs tucked close to her like a fetus. But it was none of those things. Mama was just beyond T, gazing like she always did, quiet, locked in whatever past drove her to this moment that she couldn’t go beyond. And there was T, looking at me like I might not be there. The shark talk messed you up too, I said. She laughed a little and let me go.

  San Di-fucking-ego, a whole-ass mess. I’d come to find out that all-inclusive meant you got to eat and drink anything all day—crab legs, shrimp, steak skewers, chicken tacos, ribs, lasagna, and if you flirt with the young attendants they’ll bring you endless piña coladas on the artificial dock at sunset while your drunk mother and sister cry on your shoulder, everyone not knowing which of us came first or if anyone would live through the night.

  ’Tis the Season

  This was our first Christmas without Daddy, and living through all of the days leading up to it felt like marching up a rocky hill in flip-flops. T and I cried our hardest on December 4 while Mama was passed out on edibles. We loved Christmas and thought we would have to say goodbye to all of it because Daddy died and didn’t leave us instructions. He was our Christmas guru, hanger of lights, cooker of hams, dancer to Motown carols sweet and salty like a mall pretzel on the last shopping day of the year. Now we were walking into haunted houses, ghosts everywhere.

  Around December 10 we were handling things our own way. Mama got sentimental and invited Auntie Tammy all the way from Alabama to have dinner with us. T became a kitchen bitchhole, obsessing over cookies and dinner planning. She forced me to taste-test raw batter and sauces every evening after school. The salted caramel chocolate chunk cookie batter was the best. I did the lights. I tried to do the lights. The month was half-spent and I had only two bushes, a tree trunk, and a blinking train set working on the front where there used to be an enviable display of American holiday dick swinging. Ms. Holland spotted me struggling to set up a ladder and called to me from across the street.

  Ms. Holland is a witch and sells candy to the neighborhood kids all year long, even during Christmas. She will fuck you up if you try to steal from her, though, no matter your age or size or your parents: bam, open palm to the ear. Open palm because Ms. Holland couldn’t make a true fist. She had fingernails eleven inches long on each hand, even the thumb. When she was younger she had them way longer, multiple feet, broke a record. There’s a picture of her in a book somewhere with her two grown sons and daughter standing around her like a queen’s court or something.

  When I heard Ms. Holland call, I knew I had to get down from the ladder and go over to her. She wouldn’t tolerate a conversation in muffled shouts across the street even though I still had forty thousand unplugged strings of lights to identify, separate, and curse. I crossed the street and stepped around the huge nearly dead palm tree absorbing her front yard. Ms. Holland didn’t celebrate Christmas, far as I could tell, no fake garland, no paper Santa, no Styrofoam hol
ly that chips so much it looks like cereal, no smell of collard greens or mac ’n’ cheese or buttery dinner rolls or cranberry sauces slick from the can ever came from her house. I was surprised when she gave me a basket of assorted meats and cheeses, then said it was for our family. I chocked it up to late death food. Better than a casserole any day, except the sausages looked better than they tasted. Ms. Holland offered to have one of her sons help me with the lights while she supervised, which I accepted. She also offered to read my cards, as in tarot cards, which I declined. She said tarot is an important science. I thanked her for the basket.

  Actual Christmas dinner went as well as expected, meaning a fistfight and broken table. We had Auntie Tammy, Uncle Lou, and their two sons John and Isaiah. John and Isaiah were sixteen-year-old twins with bad attitudes and really good manners. They called Mama ma’am all day long and me and T couldn’t handle it, so we avoided them as much as possible. Auntie Tammy insisted on taking over the kitchen from T and made chitterlings (aka shitlins). I thought something had died, they smelled so bad. Everyone except me and T did not seem to notice that the entire house smelled like literal poop. Auntie Tammy apparently did not make enough chitterlings because after a brief pause in conversation we noticed Uncle Lou staring at Isaiah and Isaiah staring back, then Uncle Lou grabbed Isaiah by the shirt and they went tumbling together across the kitchen. Everyone stood up away from the table when they crashed into it. Everything on the floor, including whatever personal battle they’d probably been fighting since birth the way men and sons do sometimes. Me and T went outside and ate cookies on the porch. She told me the lights looked nice, and we didn’t feel like crying the way we thought we would. The steep hill to Christmas Day wasn’t all that bad, kind of plateaued when T figured out the salted caramel chocolate chunk recipe. We ate our ghosts and settled our nerves, watching the neighborhood blink to life.

  When Daddy was alive we would watch that barefoot Bruce Willis movie and eat strawberry ice cream on the floor before going to bed. Needles from the live tree that dried out too soon scattered on the carpet. I don’t know why they call it a live tree when it is so very dead that it’s decomposing before our eyes. Sometimes I would wake up already in bed and not remember being carried in there. It was frightening to lose time and space like that even though later I figured out what had happened.

  I don’t know if I’ve seen that picture of Ms. Holland or I imagined it. I’ve seen her kids, grown men but still kind of simple. They’re always bringing her packages and groceries, running her errands while she sits and opens doors and arranges candy. They never seem that happy, though, but kind of locked in their routine like they couldn’t leave it if they wanted to. I had a dream of Ms. Holland running her long-nailed hands along my head. I’d been shaved bald and she spoke of ghosts and sausages and I was running an Olympic marathon.

  Answer Sheet

  DOWN

    2.  Watching Coach exercise in the morning when no one else was on campus yet became a mystical experience like watching this creature close-up in flight, should not be possible according to physicists, but there it is, natural as a rainbow: bee.

    3.  The thing each girl on the softball team possesses but can’t find without me and T: asses.

    5.  Those who liked being told what to do by Coach under any situation: girls. Don’t be trashy, Brooks. Find a can for that can, Smith. They loved being called by their last names, found it challenging or endearing.

    6.  How I used to feel in the mornings before a game: new.

    7.  The most primitive, universal, timeless, essential, and risky exercise: fucking.

    9.  The boys were jealous and studious. They studied Coach’s movement and imitated him, causing this and testosterone to explode in the air like swarms of midges: sweat.

  11.  An act performed during PE and lunch. A territorial marking done through motion, declaration of being, a summoning of bodies together, the most accurate test of physical intelligence: dance.

  12.  The number-one thing I missed after quitting softball with my sister, T, to avoid Coach—the careful washing after practice, the cold cycle to preserve the color, the hand-drying and ironing, the green stripe down the side with not a single ripple: uniform.

  14.  The outcome of most games when T and I played: win. The team looked impeccable, performed much the same. T had the image, I the strength.

  ACROSS

    1.  The boys’ nickname for Coach. They mocked his hairline, low to the eyebrows, quick to point out something bearlike about his face, a dark nose set in a brown backdrop: Chewbacca.

    4.  Because his upper body significantly outweighed his lower limbs, Coach resembles this bird while running, chest puffed, arms tucked close to the torso like he held important files there: pigeon.

    8.  When talking to the counselor about Coach’s inappropriate/criminal behavior I could tell she wanted to smoke. Her eyes reminded me of these pointy tools of sinister men in white who can see a child bleed and cry and suddenly feel they’ve done a good job: needles.

  10.  The type of people who found Coach attractive: stupid.

  13.  According to T, this is most similar to sex with Coach: influenza. “It’s like being hot and sick under a huge blanket.”

  15.  Coach treated the girls like these animals, which are sometimes eaten or mutilated by assholes with more power than cuteness; they get drowned by sociopathic preteens or develop mange or when lucky lose an eyeball to a flock of braver-than-most seagulls in an alley, fighting over a corn chip: kitten. They are very cute, and cute can get you killed.

  16.  The energy that surrounded Coach could not be dismissed among the girls and boys; it got hold of you from the inside out like a drumbeat stuck in your head: sex.

  Ground Fighting

  Esperanza and some of the old softball team were at the taco shack, so I gave them a head nod. They did the same. I missed her. The fries and tacos are made-to-order, so it takes for-goddamn-ever. Except for the one time Esperanza came to visit me in the hospital, we weren’t ever really friends. Poly High in Long Beach looked like a commercial for a PG-13 teen dramedy full of colorful faces and the scent of coastal California: special episodes for the homeless epidemic, rampant STDs, minor race wars, and socioeconomic inequality.

  Esperanza liked to be weird and mysterious. She was into Care Bears, alien conspiracies, and watching men sting themselves with the world’s most toxic insects online, so her behavior made sense at the time. She had heavy black hair, wore V-neck T-shirts unraveling at the hems. Her eyes fell too deeply in her skull so she always looked skeletal in photographs. Still, a V-neck is the opposite of secrecy, so I thought I knew everything but was still surprised in the end.

  I’m not sure if it’s obvious, but I’m not that into people. A person is fine. Sometimes a person is fine, but people are a problem. They’re loud and have a lot to say that usually doesn’t add up, and it’s confusing. Then I realize they’re confused and to explain it all would be a lot of energy best left for anything else.

  At the taco stand I make eye contact with objects, the gum streaks on the concrete like acne scars, lots of shoes, the sparrows ticking their heads to get a view of fallen scraps one eye at a time. Esperanza has a picture of a red-haired white woman on a key chain swinging from her backpack. The woman looks severe but knowing and wears a black blazer. I assumed she must be a singer from some blazer-wearing Swedish pop band.

  The girls feigned interest in the boys’ conversations about people with unique abilities, how some humans have not evolved and still have prehistoric tendons that allow them to climb better than others. I knew the stories the girls would tell later when the boys were gone, whose dick had skin tags, how to get Vicodin for really bad cramps or just how to get Vicodin, or how one girl’s boyfriend always fingered her till she bled. Every time. The girls usually pretended to listen but found this particular conversation interesti
ng enough to begin checking out each other’s hands. I found a good spot to stand alone and wait for my order. All the voices and conversation began to muffle into chirps no different than birds organizing their day from the tops of trees. I started to imagine Esperanza dancing to weird accents and Irish crooning in her bedroom among all the hip-hop and mariachi that thrums in our neighborhood and smiled to myself like an idiot.

  “You think that’s funny?”

  A random boy appeared in front of me and repeated the question. I recognized him. He played junior varsity basketball and baseball. I asked what was happening because I sincerely wasn’t paying attention. Then I felt Esperanza grab my wrist and pull it to her face.

  “She’s the one!” Esperanza yelled.

  My former teammates cheered and started clearing off a table. The boy sat down on one side, and put his arm up for a wrestling match.

  “Me?”