“Get a bucket!” Father yelled to #Four, jumping out of the old brown armchair. He held the doll at arm’s length while it continued emptying its body cavity of water. #Four ran to the kitchen to get a bucket, but it was too late—Father and the rug were soaked. Girl was glad the doll peed on her father, even if it was really just water.
Girl and Brother watched as Father and #Four put the last few boxes into their yellow-and-white Dodge van they called Big Mama. They closed the doors with a final bang. Father had a scraggly hippy beard and his hair curled over his collar. #Four had long white-blond hair past her shoulder blades, straight and fine as corn silk. They were all smiles as they gave the children one last hug and climbed up to the white leather front seats. They were moving to Alaska. Father, #Four, and her teenaged children were driving from Rochester, New York, up the Al-Can Highway to Anchorage, over four thousand miles away. The van trailed dust clouds and exhaust as the children waved until Big Mama turned the corner at the end of the city block. Girl didn’t know why Father didn’t want them to go, too, and she wondered if she would ever see Father again.
After the van drove away, the children went back to Mother and Stepmother’s house on Lake Road. Mother was in graduate school and worked as a nanny for a family with nine children. The two-bedroom house was part of her salary and sat at the top of her employer’s property. They all shared the same yard, though the children knew the manicured lawn, like their house, wasn’t really their own.
When the children got home, Brother went into the bathroom and turned on the faucet. The sink was old and it had two faucets, one for hot and one for cold, each with a white porcelain x-shaped handle. Brother took a photograph of Father that he was holding in his hand and held it under the running water. He rubbed his thumb over and over his father’s picture until the color came off and Father’s face ran down the drain. Girl wondered how he knew that would happen.
When Brother was five and Girl was four, they went to visit their father in Alaska. #Four’s children were there: Jane, the oldest, was sixteen; Sara was fourteen; and Anne was twelve. Three girls with long, straight, white-blond hair. So pretty and cool in their hip-hugger bell-bottoms. Girl’s half-sister Juli was twelve, the same age as Anne, and Juli was blood, not step, so Girl always loved her best. Father and #Four only had two bedrooms downstairs, so they split up Brother and Girl. In one room slept Juli and Sara, in the other was Jane. There was a brown couch in Jane’s room, and a camper in the driveway. Brother and Girl alternated nights—one in the camper, one on the couch—then they switched, except neither of the youngest children wanted to sleep outside in the driveway alone. The camper smelled like mildew, it was scary, and there was no one nearby.
One night it was Brother’s turn to sleep outside, but he cried to Father. “I’m scared, I don’t want to sleep in the camper, I wanna sleep inside,” he said. As usual, Father could not resist his only boy.
“Fine,” he said, “Girl can sleep outside again.”
“But it’s not my turn! I slept there last night!” Girl protested. Her lower lip stuck out and her face melted into tears. It was so scary outside alone. It wasn’t fair.
“Stop your blubbering!” Father yelled, scooping up Girl and throwing her across the room. Her small body thudded against the couch, then was still. Juli ran to her sister’s ragdoll body, not sure if she should touch her, shake her, pick her up—willing her to cry, to speak, to breathe. Finally, Girl opened her eyes and put her arms around Juli’s neck.
“She’s sleeping with me tonight,” Juli said, and that was the end of it. She wasn’t going to let anything happen to Girl, not if she could help it.
juli and sebrina
Juli loved Girl more than anything. When Girl’s mother got pregnant, Juli knew she would have a sister because she had prayed for a sister every night since God took Sebrina away. The first time Girl’s mother was pregnant she had a boy, which was fine and all, but Juli already had two half-brothers from her own mother’s first marriage. This time, she knew God would give her a sister, and He did.
Juli was eight when Girl was born, and she flew from Seattle to Rochester to see the baby. Juli was short—she hadn’t outgrown her clothes in three years, but her parents didn’t seem to notice—and she had coarse red hair and baby blue eyes behind thick glasses. She couldn’t wait until she was old enough for contact lenses.
Juli didn’t remember much about Sebrina. She had only one memory, really, of them sitting together in a red wagon. Juli reached back to hold her big sister’s hand. Small hands sticky-warm, heads together, giggling. Knowing she was safe, because her big sister was behind her.
June 1967—Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” was top of the charts. The Six-Day War came and went in the Middle East. And Juli’s sister Sebrina died of brain cancer. Blond hair falling out in long strands on the floor, leaving her naked head always cold—she never wore her little blond wig.
Sebrina was on morphine but it made her face itch and she scratched her nose raw and bloody, so Father and Sharon tried not to give her the drug unless they had to. Sebrina couldn’t swallow very well and could only drink from a straw. Sebrina was not allowed to play with friends because the neighborhood kids would stand around gawking and hoping she’d die in front of them so they could watch. “Do you think she’s gonna die today?” they whispered, but not quietly enough to keep Father from hearing—children poking each other, giggling, talking too loudly. Sebrina, scab-faced, shorn head, blue eyes looking hopeful.
Father was given a blank death certificate to fill in when the time came, which was not exactly legal, but a professional courtesy between doctors. Everyone knew it was just a matter of time.
Sebrina slept in bed between her parents. One night she awoke and asked for a glass of milk. This time, Father chose not to give her a straw. He gave Sebrina the cup of milk and watched her drown as she tried to swallow. There was no law that allowed mercy killing, and it seemed pointless to make her continue to suffer. Father did not wake up his wife when their daughter struggled and sputtered and died.
After Sebrina died, Juli escaped her bedroom every night to look for her missing sister. Sometimes they found Juli outside in the street, trying to find Sebrina.
Sebrina’s body was donated to the local medical school. “Few kids have cancer, it seemed selfish not to,” Father told Girl. “They would call us when they were done with this bit or that, and ask if we wanted it piecemeal. So we didn’t bother to claim her body,” he explained. Had Sebrina’s mother wanted to donate her little girl, or had Father insisted on being pragmatic and she was too despondent to fight him?
Why didn’t they at least claim her bones? What did the university do with her four-year-old skeleton when they were done dissecting Girl and Juli’s sister? “We didn’t bother to claim her body.” No body, no grave, no headstone. The little four-year-old blond girl came and went with nothing to remember her by. She was the first child given chemo at the University of Washington. She’s probably in a textbook somewhere.
But God gave Juli another sister, and this time, she would not let anything happen to her. When Father and Girl’s mother got divorced, Juli refused to visit Father until he agreed that Juli could stay for a week in the trailer with Girl. She didn’t mind getting up at 6:00 a.m. when Girl woke up. When Girl came riding up on her Big Wheel and gave Juli her found treasure—a dehydrated frog that had been run over by a car and was as flat and hard as a potato chip—she thanked Girl and told her what a wonderful present it was. She held the carcass between two fingers and only threw it out when Girl wasn’t looking.
joyride
The carpet in the trailer was 1960s vintage, already a decade old and filled with musty smells and the stains of someone else’s history. Mother and Bonnie, her first girlfriend, were still asleep, their bedroom door locked. When Girl and Brother woke up, Mother had carried them to the living room and sat them in front of the TV, then went back to bed, the same as always. Today, Bonni
e’s son, John, was there as well—it was a family sleepover.
“The rainbow bars. Turn it back to the colored bars one,” Girl said to Brother. His longer arms meant that he always won their battles over the TV channel.
“No, the dots. The fighting dots,” Brother said, holding the knob so Girl couldn’t turn it back. The children watched the test pattern every morning as they waited for the broadcast to come on while they sat on the carpet eating Cheerios.
“This is stupid,” John said. He was Bonnie’s son, a soon-to-be-quasi-stepbrother. John was a year older than Brother and surly. He already went to kindergarten, not just nursery school.
“No, just watch,” Brother told him. “Once we saw a rocket take off.”
John rolled his eyes, but it was true—one morning the familiar black-and-white dots were suddenly replaced by a tall rocket erupting off its launch pad, the needle-tip rising into the clouds. Girl was there. She saw it. It could happen again.
John ignored the younger children and walked to the door, standing on tiptoe to slide the deadbolt to the right, the white metal door to the trailer swinging free. John walked outside, and the siblings followed into the chill of the early morning air.
They had a piece of straggled lawn outside their trailer with a good tree big enough to hold a swing, but the driveway and road were gravel. The siblings were lucky that John was tall enough to unlock the door. Outside was always better than inside, especially before cartoons came on.
That crisp, early morning, the three children found that Mother had forgotten to lock the door of her school-bus-yellow VW Bug. John graciously allowed the siblings to climb in first, sliding over to the passenger’s side. The children were small and skinny and fit side by side easily on the dark gray seat. Girl could not see over the dashboard with its round dials and overflowing ashtray. John took the driver’s seat, but he earned that right by providing those extra inches of height that bought their freedom. His five-year-old hand released the parking brake, and the tires crept down the incline, gaining speed, and now they were flying, soaring, as they rolled down the hill. A Herculean man loomed out of nowhere, his hands pushing on the hood of the car, shoulders bulging in his tank top as he caught the vehicle and stopped their joy ride. It was okay, though. Girl had felt that rollercoaster feeling in her belly and she had seen a man stop a car with his bare hands. It was enough. After that morning, Mother installed a slide lock close to the top of the trailer’s door, where John couldn’t reach.
two montessori schools
Brother went to preschool and Girl didn’t, which she thought was completely unfair. There was no way Girl was being left behind while he got to do something as neat and fun as he made preschool sound. At drop-off one day Girl went up to his teacher and apprised her of the unfairness of the situation. The teacher said any child that could speak that well should be in school, regardless of her age, so Girl got to go, even though she was only two. Mother was cleaning houses and going to college, so having the siblings together made her life easier.
Although they were eighteen months apart, Mother always treated the children as if they were the same age. The children had the same bedtime, the same rules, even the same friends. Girl always got to do whatever Brother did, and Girl thought of them more like twins than older and younger siblings. She resented anything that implied otherwise.
Girl and Brother attended Trinity Montessori school. They poured water into little dishes of clay to learn the difference between islands and peninsulas. They shook buttermilk in jars with marbles inside to make butter. They traced letters made out of sandpaper and read The Jet, which had an orange cover and was clearly better than any other early reader in existence—it involved a man’s hat falling into the mud—what could top that? But there was something weird going on at Trinity Montessori. There were a lot of parents with closed-up faces, mouths turned downward. Some of Girl’s friends stopped going.
“Now, Girl, you may hear some people say bad things about the school director. Some people think she is a bad person and don’t like her, but I think she’s a nice person. She just had some problems and went a little crazy, but she’s okay now. You are totally safe there.”
Mother always talked to the children on an adult level. She explained to them how the director of their school had been a nun and had given birth to a baby in the cathedral of a Catholic church and then killed it, but Mother was really sure this was an isolated event and that the nun had probably been abused by a man so it wasn’t her fault, and Mother was quite certain the director wasn’t going to kill random kids, and the church was sure, too, or they wouldn’t let her continue to teach at the school.
Girl wasn’t bothered by it. If Mother said it was okay, it was okay, just grown-up stuff. What she hated was when she wore a leotard under her skirt and had to pee really badly and wound up hopping around on one foot trying to get everything off in time, and sometimes she didn’t quite make it. The small spot of urine in her underpants humiliated her, because it wasn’t her fault that not all her leotards came with snaps at the crotch and that she could never remember which ones did and which ones didn’t. The other thing she hated were tights that were too short, and how her legs felt as if something was tied around her thighs, making it harder to run or climb things. Girl loved to climb things. But she was a little wary of Sister Maureen, in spite of what Mother had said, and kept a suspicious eye on all of her teachers.
Next door to Mother’s white trailer was a pretty yellow one. Girl wished their trailer was a real color, not just white. She wished the trailer park had a paved road instead of a gravel one, because she had to push the blue pedals of her Big Wheel extra hard to make it go, and sometimes the front wheel would spin but the rest of the three-wheeler wouldn’t move at all. In the yellow trailer next door lived two women with a couple of dogs—one nice black-and-white one and one mean-sounding German Shepherd that barked all the time. The neighbors also had a rabbit that hopped around the living room without a cage and chewed up their telephone wires.
When Girl’s family first moved in one of the neighbor ladies had come over to introduce herself.
“Hi,” she said, with a southern accent. It sounded like “haah” to Girl. “I just fried up some milkweed buds and thought I’d share,” the neighbor said.
“Uh, thank you,” Mother said, waiting for the woman with the sporty-short brown hair to leave before she threw out the cooked weeds. Honestly, some people were just too strange.
Girl liked when the woman in the yellow trailer let her pet the rabbit, but if Girl woke that lady up on a Saturday when she and Brother were swinging on their tire swing—man, could she yell. A year later Mother ran into this neighbor lady (who had since moved away) at a lesbian social. She asked Mother to dance and they wound up kissing, even though they both were living with different partners.
Mother went home and told Bonnie that very night that they were through, and she and the children moved into a little yellow two-bedroom house with bunk beds. Stepmother came over to the little yellow house shortly after Mother and the children moved in. Mother made lasagna, and everything was going fine until Girl threw up all over the table. Do you know what thrown-up lasagna looks like? Pretty much the same as a dish of lasagna after a few slices have been cut, when it’s goopy and unfurled, the noodles and ricotta swimming in an oily red sauce. Stepmother asked for seconds anyway, while Brother jumped up and down singing, “Stinky noodle! Stinky noodle!” over and over again. That second piece of lasagna won Mother over, and Stepmother moved her boxes of art supplies and clothing and musical instruments in, taking over the side of the bed closest to the door.
Girl and Brother were sent to a new school, Webster Montessori, where they had to sit still in little chairs, and Girl was told not to make her eights by stacking two circles on top of each other but instead to make the twist that was always so hard. They had to learn French and when the children talked too much or got out of their seats, the teacher would grab their earlobes
and pull down hard, making them burn long after they were released from her grip.
“Teacher threw Billy’s shoes out the window today,” Girl told Mother on the ride home.
“Why would she do that?” Mother asked.
“Because he untied them during class. And there’s a dog outside that eats shoes.” One of the schoolchildren’s favorite ways to interrupt class was to untie their shoes, requiring the teacher to stop and retie them.
“Did she ever throw your shoes out the window?”
“Yeah, but the dog wasn’t there that day so she just pulled my ear.” Mother had no idea what Girl was talking about, but it sounded crazy.
Girl could tell Mother didn’t believe her, but it was true, exactly like she said. The teacher was mean and Girl missed Trinity Montessori, even if the director killed her baby. Girl thought that it didn’t make sense that nice people sometimes did worse things than mean people.
stepmother
Stepmother had become Mother’s same-sex life partner, or “wusband,” as she liked to call herself after they had their own private commitment ceremony in the woods. When Girl said “her parents,” she meant this woman and her mother. She never considered her father one of her real parents. He was just Father, who lived far away and had a new family. Although she visited him, he was mostly important for his absence. Day-to-day life was Girl, Brother, Mother, and Stepmother. She didn’t remember much of life before they became a family, just little snippets of things, but Girl did remember how happy she had been in the single-wide trailer before Stepmother came to live with them.
Girl remembered one nice woman Mother dated, who played the guitar and sang songs. She liked her a lot better than Stepmother, but that woman went into the hospital and died. It would be many years before Girl learned that this woman and Stepmother were the same person—the woman who went into the hospital to have a hysterectomy came out someone with a hormone imbalance that turned her into someone unrecognizable.
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