What Girls Learn

by Karin Cook

  He lit a cigarette and leaned against the railing. I looked at the hair on his stomach and his back and then away. I knew Uncle Rand slept buck naked. That’s what he called it. He said that the difference between being naked and nekked was that nekked meant you were up to something. Being up to something was the same as touching yourself, I thought, because of the way he said it. The guys in school called it beating off. They made signs in the air, moving one hand up and down in front of their flies. It was the way they said good-bye as the bus drove away. Boys could draw attention to themselves like that and get away with it.

  We stood against the railing for a while and stared into the darkness before I started back toward my room, yawning. Uncle Rand followed me, stopping briefly at the foot of my bed.

  “Hey,” he said, “you know, Tils, you don’t have to keep stuff from me.” He walked to the door, stopped for a moment, lingering, and then left.

  I flipped my pillow to the cool side and waited. I felt lucky to have a new grown-up friend. Someone wiser about the world who I could confide in without the risk of rumor or the danger of punishment. Later, when Elizabeth returned up the staircase and attempted to sneak by me, I sat up and startled her.

  “Come here,” I demanded.

  She climbed into bed next to me, her feet wet and skin clammy. She was nervous and out of breath; her face was pinched with panic.

  “Where’d you go?” I asked.

  She said nothing at first, just smiled nervously. I poked her hard with my elbow.

  “Promise you won’t tell?”

  “Promise.”

  She lifted her shirt and showed me her skin which was spotted with hickeys, linked together like a chain around her midriff. They looked like bruises.

  “Jewelry,” she said proudly.

  “Jesus Christ! Who did that?”

  “Who do you think?” She was silent for a moment, all sly smiles, and then grew serious. “You shouldn’t say Jesus’ name like that, you know—”

  “Oh shut up. You better cut it out or you’re going to get caught.”

  “By who?”

  “Uncle Rand.”

  “He doesn’t notice what I do.”

  “What about God?” I pressed, mocking her.

  “It’s not that big a deal,” she said, “as long as I remember to do penance.” She turned her back to me and folded her arms up under herself.

  I ran my hand across my chest and stomach, my fingers cool, my skin electric. What was it like to be touched that way, all groping hands and wet lips? Elizabeth and I fell asleep in the same bed, our backs together, Elizabeth braced for morning and me mashing my mouth against the fleshy part of my arm.

  There had always been birds around the place, but until Uncle Rand hung the feeder, no one seemed to know their names. I took a bird book out of the library and stood with Mama at the kitchen counter to watch as cardinals, mourning doves, and red-winged blackbirds settled around the feeder, popping seeds and splitting shells. They scattered in the afternoon when the crows descended, striding across the lawn with upright bodies on long, angled legs.

  Nick liked the idea of having a central spot in the yard for bird activity. “Maybe now I don’t have to spend all day washing bird crap off the cars,” he said, lowering his voice a little for the word crap.

  But the barn swallows wouldn’t cooperate. They built a nest, like a mud hut, in the corner of the overhang on the garage near the floodlight. They zipped back and forth over the TransAlt lot with the speed of a dart, their sleek forked tails buzzing in their own breeze.

  Between the garden and the bird feeder, the backyard became a hub of activity. Elizabeth and I met to depart from the picnic table and Mama gave small tours to the rest of us from the kitchen window, pointing out new buds and birds.

  “It’s like Grand Central Station out there,” Nick said, pausing to check the rain gauge on the window.

  Later that week, I woke in the middle of the night to Uncle Rand striding through my room and bounding down the back staircase. I leaped out of bed and followed him to the backyard in my bare feet. When he got to the storage shed under the house, he threw open the door. Even in the dark, I could see Keith Rogers pushed up against the cement wall like one of the rakes, Elizabeth kneeling near his crotch, her hands cupped around him like a praying mantis. Uncle Rand didn’t skip a beat; he held the door open with his foot and with one hand snatched Elizabeth up by her hair. With the other hand, he cupped the back of Keith’s head and sent him scrambling into the yard.

  “Never again,” he shouted, his face contorted with fury.

  Keith nodded his head without looking up and hurried home across the lawn. Elizabeth walked backwards toward the stairs. She looked disheveled, her hair wild, her shirt untucked. I could smell alcohol on her breath. The house remained still, with no lights, no sign of Mama anywhere.

  “I’ve never hated anyone as much as I hate you,” Elizabeth hissed as she passed me.

  “I didn’t say anything. I swear I didn’t.”

  She ignored me and marched up the stairs toward the bathroom. Uncle Rand went after her, his eyes narrowed, his jaw clenched. I had never seen him so serious. I followed them, my heart racing, and stopped just outside the bathroom door.

  “We can go two ways with this, Elizabeth,” he said as he sat on the edge of the tub, “either you swear that nothing the likes of this will happen again or else I go straight to your mama.”

  Elizabeth sat on the bathroom floor and pulled her hair back from her face. She folded it up, making a little pillow, and leaned against the wall.

  “And,” he continued, “I know I don’t need to tell you that this is not what she needs to be thinking about right now.”

  He waited for a response. Elizabeth curled her bent knees up to her chest and clutched them to her.

  “Do we have an understanding?” Uncle Rand asked.

  Elizabeth flopped her head up and down and then braced herself against the toilet. “I feel sick,” she said.

  “I’ll bet you do.” Uncle Rand took her face in both hands and looked into her eyes. “What’d you have?”

  “Nothing,” she started to say, and then caught herself. “A wine cooler.”

  “Just one, huh?”

  Elizabeth nodded, her mouth red and loose. “Maybe one and a half.”

  Uncle Rand sent me to the kitchen to get some bread. When I returned with it, Elizabeth’s hair was sticking out from the top of her head like a unicorn. Uncle Rand had helped her dunk her head in a sinkful of cold water to try and straighten her up. The hall smelled sweet and pungent.

  “Looks like we’ve got a case of real bad food poisoning,” Uncle Rand said. He looked at her sternly and raised his brows. “Understand?”

  I stood in the corner of Elizabeth’s room as he put her to bed with a pan by her side. Her eyes narrowed at me.

  “I hate you,” she said. “You’re fat … and ugly.”

  I walked away, aware of my skin under my clothes, my belly pinching against itself as I got into bed. No matter how many times Elizabeth said those words to me in a fight, I could never prepare for how terrible it made me feel.

  Before tucking me in, Uncle Rand made sure to tell me that he thought I was beautiful. “You’ll look just like your mama,” he said. “Besides, Elizabeth will probably get cellulite on her arms and elephantitus ankles.” He smiled a big smile and moved to kiss me on the cheek. He missed though, his springy lips pressing near the edge of my mouth.

  I slept well that night, trusting what he had imagined for me.

  • • •

  The next morning I heard Mama’s voice in the hall outside Uncle Rand’s room. “The last thing I need is you teaching my children to lie,” she shrieked, pacing back and forth, nearly hysterical.

  “Relax, Frances,” Uncle Rand said. “Everything is under control. Besides, I doubt she’ll be in a hurry to do it again anytime soon.”

  “You’re supposed to be helping me,” she said, “not m
aking things worse.”

  “I was helping,” he said. His voice dropped to a soothing murmur, “I took care of the whole thing so you wouldn’t have to.”

  “I know.” She softened a bit. “I just don’t understand why she would do such a thing.”

  “It’s not the end of the world,” he said. “Things like this happen at that age. Do you remember the night Daddy got a call about me and Lucy Saddleman? Trust me, it could have been much worse.”

  “I think I liked it better when she was praying and going to church.” Mama let out a long sigh and walked down to the kitchen to fix a breakfast tray.

  I slipped out of bed and went to check on Elizabeth. She seemed glad to see me, motioned for me to join her in bed. I noticed Elizabeth’s pink rosary beads in a dusty heap on the floor and gestured to them. She shrugged, indifferent, and leaned in close to whisper to me. “Do you think Mama knows?”

  I nodded, secretly pleased.

  A dark look crossed Elizabeth’s face. “How come she didn’t punish me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t you think that’s kind of weird?”

  I shrugged. Mama only knew about the drinking. Keith Rogers’ crotch was the part that had stayed with me. I wondered how far Elizabeth had gone. Had she held that rubbery flesh in her mouth? There were rumors about some rock star who needed to have his stomach pumped from doing it too much. Samantha told me that that stuff was harder to digest than bubble gum.

  “You didn’t swallow anything, did you?”

  “No way,” Elizabeth said, quivering all over. “I barely even touched it.” She seemed suddenly like her old self.

  Mama brought up a tray of bland food—soup, Saltine crackers, and ginger ale. There were carrot curls and parsley floating on top of the broth. Mama raised her hand to Elizabeth’s cheek and then her forehead, touching each place with the back of her hand and her wrist. It was an automatic gesture, left over from another time, but they both played along—Elizabeth sniffling slightly and Mama shaking down the thermometer.

  PART IV

  SPELLING

  In October, I was chosen to represent the seventh grade in a county spell-off. I was one of five advanced students, but knew, even then, that I had been chosen more for my interest than my talents. Every week, the school librarian had seen me check out the limit from the library. I read aloud to Jamie Sanders after school while he worked in the lot and kept the books stacked by my bed at night. They felt good to hold, the smell of those cool, slippery pages, the weight of a hardcover in my hand.

  On my own, I was an impatient reader, quick to leap off the page into my imagination. I could not be counted on to remember the characters’ names or the plot. But the story always took me somewhere outside my surroundings and was transforming that way. Enemy threats, rough seas, fragile limbs. Danger, it seemed, was everywhere. Sometimes, while reading one book I would hold another between my legs, squeezing it, the spine hard against my privates, the words in the other, open book, blurring into a line—not distinct and separate the way words were meant to be seen, but wavelike.

  This was shameful, I knew, and never told a soul. I had done it with Death Be Not Proud and Lord of the Flies. I had done it to Salinger—both Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey—and also with Fahrenheit 451. Returning each of them to their place in the canon, their spines broken. I did it once with the dictionary, that strong red Webster’s, while reading My Ántonia and imagining myself as a woman alone on the Plains.

  Around that time, Samantha came up with the idea to use literary names to refer to sex organs. That way, we could talk about our privates in public without giving it away. “Personification,” she called it, which I knew was inspired first by the character of Ralph in Forever. But Samantha distanced herself from the Judy Blume books by naming her vagina after Jane Eyre.

  “What’s yours?” she asked.

  “How about Hester Prynne?” I offered.

  “Who?” Sam asked. She brought her hand to her mouth, thinking. “Wasn’t she some kind of slut?”

  “She had a secret baby,” I said, “with a priest.”

  Sam looked disappointed. I could tell she wanted to trade her Jane for my Hester.

  “I can’t spell,” I confessed to Samantha when I was named to the county team. We stood in front of a bulletin board with a list freshly stapled in all four corners to the cork. Samantha dropped her chin slightly and flipped her hair back, to one side and then the other, like swatting at a bee. This was a new, junior high gesture meant to prove that it was possible to have both brains and beauty. It made me wish for long hair.

  “You can too spell,” Samantha said, pointing to the list as some kind of proof. “Besides, spelling is easy. They should really test us on vocabulary.”

  She didn’t know how hard I studied in secret, writing the words over and over, committing them to memory, only to lose them the moment I took a test. Sam could hold words in her head, barely needing to study, even for the cumulative tests at the end of a quarter. She would see those same words out in the world, on signs or the front pages of newspapers locked behind glass. She was always dragging me toward a word and pointing it out. The spaces between letters were as pronounced as the ink itself. She’d grown up playing Scrabble and doing crossword puzzles. The Shaptaws had whole conversations about words over dinner.

  What worried me most about the spell-off was the format. I imagined myself sitting in an unfamiliar auditorium in front of an audience, trying to see the word as it was spoken. I wondered whether we would be allowed scrap paper and pens. It worried me that there was no way to study, no way to prepare.

  Also, there was no way to cheat.

  Cheating was what teachers called it, when really it had always seemed to me more like checking. There was an assumption that it was something that problem students did, because they were the ones who always got caught. They didn’t understand how to stagger their progress, would shoot for 100 if they could get it. They leaned into the aisles, shamelessly peering over a smarter kid’s shoulder. Samantha didn’t believe in doing that. She blocked her work with her body. When the tests were handed back, she never told anyone her grade.

  When the teachers got smart, making us skip rows or alternate seats on the day of a test, the cheaters got smarter. Some girls, private about their ambitions, held carefully folded papers under their thighs—almost a form of origami—with all the necessary information printed in tiny words, making patterns. It was the boys who got caught. Their methods were too blatant and usually brought the teacher to their sides, snatching up tests and demanding that they stay after class. Meanwhile all around the room, resourceful girls had answers written discreetly on their skin, codes on their fingernails or secret memory tricks along their wrist like a bracelet.

  I had tried all of these methods in an attempt to make sure my work was as good as it could be. But doing well meant something for me beyond grades. It had something to do with who my friends would be, whether I would be liked, and what kind of girl I would become.

  Jamie Sanders didn’t cheat. He must have sensed that no one expected too much from him. I could see his resignation, how uninterested he was in approval, how relaxed he was about his homework when we gathered after school on the couches in the garage. Even Jamie, with his oil-black hair and stained clothes looked clean against that background. He loved to hear me read, lacing his calloused fingers together, cradling one denim knee, and rocking slowly as I read aloud from Orwell’s 1984—a favorite of ours. At the end of each section, he sat up and switched legs, kicking one out and folding the other into him. He once told me that he’d never been read to, not even as a child.

  Deep into the book, Jamie raised his brows at me. “Big Brother is everywhere,” he warned.

  “Cut it out,” I said, marking the page with my finger and smacking him on the thigh with the hard edge of the cover.

  “What would you do if I could read your mind?” he whispered.

  It c
hilled me. “That could never happen,” I said, imagining my most private thoughts broadcast over loudspeakers.

  We fell away from each other and listened to the radio. West Westerly predicted cool, crisp air—the kind that would change the leaves from green to yellow and then orange and make the birds grow hectic. The kind of air that turned fitful sleep into deep slumber.

  • • •

  Uncle Rand offered to help me prepare for the spell-off. He tucked me in with a back rub, holding a bottle of Jergen’s hand lotion high above me, squirting quick cold lines along my spine and single drops around my shoulders. He spread the lotion out thick over my back and spelled words into me with the tips of his fingers. Some were words for objects in my room and I could look around me and guess what he might have been considering. But other, more surprising words, I had to lie still against and concentrate hard to make out. Words that had nothing to do with wallpaper, desks, or clothes. Words such as hurricane. Or Cadillac.

  “If you’re smart,” he said, challenging me, “try this one.” The way he spoke to me made it difficult to tell whether being smart was a good or bad thing. Something in his tone sounded harsh. He spelled out duckbill platypus, one letter at a time, dropping his closed fist against me as an indicator of spacing, the letters sliding onto my sides. I clutched my arms tight against my body, forgetting altogether how the words were spelled as his fingers brushed at my waist and moved under the covers along my hips and rear.

  As he continued, the spelling spilled over, fading from distinct letters into lines or waves. I pretended to be asleep, hoping for him to abandon the exercise and turn to bed. He raised the sheet back over me and gathered his bottle of lotion and glass of wine. I listened to the floorboards carry him to his room, the creak of the bed frame as his weight sank into the mattress, the deep clearing of his throat. While I waited, I tried to remember the last word that was spelled, the last full letter imprinted on my skin, willing his touch in order to test myself. By morning the words were gone and Mama woke me for a third time, frustrated and frantic, hollering that I was sure to be late for school. “What has gotten into you?” She looked at me for a whole minute, studying my face as if somehow my thoughts could be read on my skin.