Girlish

by Lara Lillibridge

  “It’s okay. We can just rinse it off.” Mother put her hand out for the potato. “Anyway, one night this woman was in front of our house in the middle of the road throwing rocks and screaming at your father. I tried to tell her that he wasn’t there, but she didn’t believe me. She seemed to think he was hiding. So I had to call the police.”

  “God, Mother!” Girl handed her another potato.

  “Anyway, you should really talk to Dr. B. I bet she’d love to go riding with you.”

  Juli had heard that their father slept with all the nurses in the hospital, and even with a sixteen-year-old patient once, but Girl wasn’t going to ask Mother about that. It was too embarrassing. Besides, if it was true, Girl didn’t want to know.

  “Someone told me that Father slept with the mother of one of his patients.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me. Pediatricians aren’t supposed to do that, but I’m sure he did once or twice.”

  “Well, they said the woman tried to kill herself. Ended up in the psych ward.” This seemed the most likely reason for his exile in Girl’s mind.

  “I never heard that. What did your dad say about it?”

  “I didn’t ask him.”

  car trip, circa 1985

  “My mother didn’t want a boy,” Father said, looking out the front window of his yellow Subaru. It was just the two of them on the two-hour drive from Anchorage, where Father lived, to Seward, where he kept his sailboat. Girl would start eighth grade in the fall.

  “My mother already had two girls, Jean and Anne. She said my dad got her drunk and raped her because he wanted another child—he always wanted a boy. When Mother found out I was male she wanted to drown me but my dad wouldn’t let her. Then he went off to war and left me alone with her.”

  The sky out the window wasn’t very blue. The road from Anchorage to Seward curved around the end of Cook Inlet; the view out the window was gray-brown silt and boulders; the water had receded before cleaning up its mess. Girl knew she was supposed to appreciate the sparkle of the water and the great expanse of wilderness unsullied by human habitation, but all Girl saw looked cold and bleak.

  “Never walk out on that mud,” Father said, “you’ll sink in right up to your waist. Some fool always tries to drive out there every year and gets stuck. Look, there’s a pod of belugas.”

  Girl looked out the window, but all she saw were whitecaps on the ocean. No matter how often he pointed, Girl never saw the whales he was so fond of.

  “Uh-huh. Pretty,” Girl said, because she had to say something.

  “Did I ever tell you about my dog?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you know where I grew up in Olympia, Washington. The closest kid was five miles away.”

  “The boy who lit his model planes on fire and threw them out the window?”

  “Right. I didn’t like him very much. He was kind of weird. I was happy it was too far to go over there often. So my best friend was my dog, Pooh!”

  “Like Winnie-the-Pooh?” Girl asked.

  “Right. And because he was all white and had a big brown spot on his rump.” Father’s eyes sparkled as he looked at Girl. He turned his whole head, ignoring the road like it didn’t need watching. It made Girl crazy but he always did it.

  “What kind of dog was he?”

  “Terrier-like. Medium size. Wiry hair.”

  “Okay.” Girl wound a strand of hair around her finger and loosened it again.

  “Anyway, Pooh and I had a wonderful time exploring the woods! We’d mosey along through the woods. World War II had just ended, so I’d pretend we were spies, reconnoitering, going on missions. Chasing rabbits. We’d stay out all day until Mother rang the dinner bell.” Father’s mother had an unusual dinner bell in the dining room. She would hit a descending series of bells and end with a giant gong that resonated throughout the whole house with a deep note that you could feel vibrate in your whole body, like a timpani drum. When Grandma Mary was feeling kind she’d sometimes let Girl ring it, but only once per day. The gong looked like a black iron kettle and she hit it with what looked like a tiny wooden baseball bat, maybe eight inches long.

  “What happened to Pooh?”

  “He barked a lot, and he woke my father up every morning. Dad said I had to train Pooh not to bark, that if he woke him up one more time he was going to shoot him. But they wouldn’t let him sleep inside, so there wasn’t anything I could do. One morning the dog started barking, and I heard the gun go off from my bed.”

  Girl had stayed once in Dad’s old room at Grandma Mary’s. It still had his old bunk bed and model airplanes hung from the ceiling. He had a little brown desk in front of a window that looked out on Puget Sound. From their house you could only see ocean and forest; there wasn’t another house anywhere nearby. It should have been a great place to explore, but Grandma Mary didn’t seem to like kids very much, and Girl didn’t like visiting her. The house seemed to breathe disapproval and discourage laughter. Girl noticed that her father had the smallest room in the house.

  “He didn’t really shoot him, though, did he?” No father would do that to their kid, Girl thought. Father passed a car lazily. He always set his cruise control for fifty-seven miles per hour, just two miles over the speed limit. He had done extensive calculations and decided this was the optimal speed to drive on the highway for gas conservation and motor efficiency. This stretch of the trip consisted of miles and miles of highway with the inlet on one side and mountains rising up on the other.

  “I thought he was just trying to scare me, but I ran down the back stairs as fast as I could, just to be sure. It seemed to take forever to get outside, but I wasn’t allowed to use the front stairs, so I had to go around.” Father’s mother had inherited a million dollars in the Depression. The first thing she did was build a huge house on ten acres of beachfront property on Puget Sound. Girl had counted seventeen rooms the last time she was there, if she included the maid’s quarters in the basement. Girl always loved the spiral staircase at the front of the house, but kids had to use the “children’s stairs” closer to the kitchen, even the grandkids like Girl. Grandma was inflexible in her rules and had a way of reprimanding children without raising her voice that was scarier than if she had yelled. It was like she had no warmth inside her at all.

  Girl was chewing on her hair as her father talked. She knew she should stop that, but it was a nervous habit. She mindlessly twisted a lock of hair between her fingers, then absentmindedly rubbed it across her lips. Next thing Girl knew she was sucking on it and chewing it. Girl wiped the broken hairs off her tongue and rubbed them on her jeans.

  “I got outside and there was Pooh, lying on his side. Dad shot him through the heart. Dad looked at me and didn’t say anything. He just went back in the house. I was hugging my dog and crying and he just walked away. He killed my best friend. I took a shovel and dug a hole. I took off my pajama top and wrapped him up in it as best I could. Tears were streaming down my face. It took a long time to fill that hole back up, and all I could think about was revenge.”

  Girl was chewing her hair again, her body tense. This anxious oral fixation would morph into smoking in a few years. Girl wished she didn’t have to wear a seatbelt. There was something about being alone with her father that made her want to be able to escape quickly, but he always made her buckle up in the car. Father had taken Girl and Brother to Washington, DC, to lobby for seatbelt laws the year before, and he’d pull over and stop the car if he saw that Girl was unbuckled. She looked at the car door and unlocked it. She didn’t know why, but being alone with Father scared her, even in a moving vehicle.

  “After I buried him I went to my room and went through my closet and found some old clothes.” Father went on. “I sewed them together like a scarecrow. I even sewed a head from my winter hat. I went outside and got straw and grass and leaves and stuffed it, so it was a life-sized doll of me. Do you remember that big window in Grandma Mary’s bedroom?” Girl nodded, even though she didn’t. Girl knew
that Grandma’s room was on the second floor, and the house was on a slope, high up from Puget Sound. She imagined that her grandmother could see the ocean over the top of the pine trees. Kids weren’t allowed in there, so Girl had only peeped in once or twice from the hall.

  “Well, every morning as soon as my dad woke up, he’d open the curtains and watch the sunrise over the water. So I crawled on the roof and dangled the scarecrow down so it looked like I had hung myself.”

  “Wow,” Girl said. She wasn’t sure how to respond. She wasn’t even sure how a kid could get on the roof.

  “I did it over and over, every morning. Got him every time.”

  Girl closed her eyes and laid her head back on the tweedy brown headrest. Her windbreaker was zipped up, and she buried her hands in her pockets, tunneling into herself for comfort. Grandma Mary’s house didn’t look like much from the front. It was white, with a dark red door. It didn’t look big at all, because it was built into a hill. The back of the house, which faced the ocean, was four stories tall, so the basement was really at ground level. There were four separate doors to the outside, besides the attached garage. The main door and the private entrance to Grandpa Doctor’s medical clinic both faced the driveway. Girl’s grandfather had died before she was born, but his office was kept like a dusty shrine filled with ghosts. Girl wouldn’t have been surprised if she heard lingering screams of forgotten patients. No one was allowed in there, but Girl didn’t want to go in anyway. She ran by the door as fast as she could, even though she was twelve and old enough not to believe in ghosts. With her eyes closed now, Girl could picture dark gray specters in a foreboding swirl around the ceiling of the exam room as Grandpa Doctor loaded the pistol he brought home from the war. She pictured her father running out the front door, the tall trees softly releasing leftover drizzle in the way trees around Seattle always seemed to start their day. But that wasn’t right. The front door faced the driveway. If Grandpa Doctor was going to shoot a dog, he wouldn’t do it out front where anyone could see.

  The dog would have been in the backyard. If someone walked out the workshop door at ground level, below the kitchen balcony and dumbwaiter, there was a huge lawn leading down to the beach. That’s where Girl would go, if Girl were a dog. The dog probably chased the seagulls in the sand, his little white paws gritty and his head looking up at the clouds of birds he raised with his shrill barks. Girl saw him clearly, his tongue hanging out one side, the edges of his mouth curling up in doggy bliss as his ears flopped behind him, his wiry fur parted by the wind. A young dog could run a big circle from the beach to the house and back, bits of grass kicking up behind him, dirt and sand clinging to his toenails. Grandpa Doctor’s bedroom window was on the third floor from the back of the house, but a piercing yap would carry from far out—there was so much clear open air and no city noises. Terriers like to bark—even Girl knew that.

  Pooh laid very still in the grass behind Girl’s closed eyelids, white fur sticky with red Jell-O-like goo. His front paw gave a reactive twitch as his brain stopped firing.

  Girl’s dog at Mother and Stepmother’s house, Wimpy, had died that year of cancer. When Wimpy took her last breath, her whole body arched up, her head and tail reaching toward each other to form a circle with her prone body. Mother, Stepmother, Girl, and Brother sat around the dying dog and cried. When Wimpy’s body arched up, Girl thought she was trying to lick her and had reached out to touch the dog’s black muzzle. “Don’t touch her,” Stepmother yelled. The dog had been Stepmother’s before they formed a family. Girl wondered if a dog that had been shot made the same death arch or if it fell where it stood and lay there twitching. Mother had explained that the paws still moved as the energy left the brain. It didn’t mean the dog was dreaming of running. All the doggy dreams were already gone.

  Would there have been splatter? Did he shoot him at point-blank range? Did her grandfather call him, and did Pooh run up happily, expecting a good ear scratching, just to have a cold muzzle pressed into his fur? Where would her father have buried him? The beach would be easiest to dig up. They had a handyman who lived in a cabin down by the water, part of the permanent house staff. Maybe he had helped Father dig the grave. Girl had dug holes lots of times before. Digging in grass meant first you had to stand on the shovel and sort of jump on it to bite through the plant fibers, then cut out a big square of lawn and set it aside. You had to push through rocks and tree roots, pinkish-white worms wriggling in brown soil. Sand was easier to dig up—as your shovel bit deeper the darker wet sand gave way easily, the bottom of the hole softening with water. But beaches were impermanent. The tide might unbury the dog, letting birds pick through the sand and hair to get at the soft bits. Girl wouldn’t risk the beach, if it were her dog. Girl would choose the grass, even though it would take longer. She wasn’t about to ask her father what he chose, though. Father always said that it wasn’t lying if it made the story better. Girl didn’t want a better story—she wanted a true one.

  conversation with wife #5, stepmother #2, circa 1986

  Father had separated from #Five the summer before Girl turned fourteen. He had fallen in love with the new youth minister at church. #Five was Girl’s second stepmother and Girl had never liked her much. #Five was ugly and mean. She was tall with short, permed hair and dark, snaggly teeth. Girl never knew what her father saw in #Five. The house they lived in had been #Five’s house before they married, so Father was the one moving out. Girl had never liked the neighborhood of tiny, charmless houses. The fact that Father hadn’t lived in that part of the city before they married, even though it was walking distance to both his office at the hospital and the airstrip where he kept his plane, told Girl that it must be an inferior neighborhood. Girl was glad he was moving, even though it was unfair that she had to spend her vacation helping him pack. At thirteen years old, Girl had better things to do.

  Girl was taping up boxes of books in her father’s study when #Five walked in and sat in his wheeled office chair. It was wood and didn’t have a cushion. She didn’t spin, not even a little. Girl would have spun or at least rocked from side to side. Who sits in a rolly chair and doesn’t wiggle at all?

  “There’s something you should know about your dad. I think you are old enough,” #Five said. Girl didn’t know why #Five thought they needed to have this bonding talk now, the day before the moving van came. No matter what she said, it wasn’t going to make Girl like her all of a sudden.

  “When your dad was little, maybe six or eight, he crawled into bed with his sister, Anne. She was just a few years older, and they were touching each other, the kind of experimenting all kids do. It didn’t mean anything—just natural curiosity.”

  “Uh-huh,” Girl replied. She remembered a version of I’ll show you mine if you show me yours with her own brother, when Girl was five or six, but Girl would never tell #Five about that. The memory made her squirm.

  “They say that experimentation is natural at a certain age,” Girl replied. It was what the book about puberty and sex that Mother had given her said, anyway. Girl put more books into a box so she wouldn’t have to look at #Five.

  “Well, anyway, Grandpa Doctor walked in and caught them. He figured your dad was too young to be held responsible, but Anne should have known better. So he made Anne strip and whipped her, and made your dad watch. So now, the closer he gets to a woman emotionally, the further he runs from them physically. This all came out in therapy.”

  “Oh.”

  #Five looked at her expectantly, but Girl didn’t know what to say. She wished #Five would just go away.

  “Well, anyway, it’s not his fault. Just thought you should know,” #Five said as she walked out of the room. Girl never told her father what #Five had said, and Girl never saw #Five again.

  Brother and Girl helped Father move from his ex-wife’s small ranch house to a bottom-floor unit in the apartment building he owned. It had brown carpeting, white walls, and a large stone mantel that ran the length of the living room. The kitchen had
an almost-modern counter that did double duty for kitchen prep and eating space. The apartment was large and utilitarian, identical to all the other one-bedroom units. The four-plex itself was one of a half-dozen buildings set off the main cul-de-sac in groups of twos or threes—a development well thought out but then abandoned, the individual buildings sold off to various investors. #Five, her father’s newest ex-wife, was a realtor. Owning rental property had been her idea. It was 1987, and the Anchorage real estate market was hot, or was going to be hot, or might be hot someday. Girl thought the place was depressing, and like all of Father’s places, didn’t have room for both children.

  photographs

  Mother didn’t have a lot of rules for the children. She didn’t like to hear dirty jokes, but she didn’t mind the children telling them to each other. Mother didn’t swear, but she didn’t complain when the children did—other than motherfucker. That word was banned. She didn’t mind them kissing people in the back seat while she drove. She didn’t think clothing was necessary around the house, though they had stopped going nude camping the year after Girl started “developing.”

  “Why aren’t we going to Sabra’s Pond this year?” Girl had asked.

  “Well, since Michael took over, it’s gotten over-commercialized. People with cameras hiding in the bushes, planes circling overhead,” Mother said.

  “I wish he hadn’t put that ad out,” Stepmother added. “It’s not a safe place anymore.”

  But there was more to it than that—Mother thought puberty might make it awkward for the children. As it was, they went one summer too long. The last year, Girl’s breasts were starting to appear, and she was growing hair between her legs. Girl struck up a friendship with a twenty-eight-year-old man, eating breakfast alone with him in the woods, something expressly forbidden, but how was Mother supposed to make Girl feel safe and warn her of the dangers of adult men at the same time? He came into their campsite at night, after everyone was asleep, and left presents for Girl to find when she woke: pretty rocks, which were all right, and a vial of perfume, which somehow wasn’t. It was easier to just stop going.