Girlish

by Lara Lillibridge

  christmas

  Girl and Father sat on the living room floor to exchange Christmas presents before she went back home to New York for winter break. No matter where she lived, home was Cooper Road, the house Mother and Stepmother bought when she was in kindergarten. Father’s apartment had no tree or stockings, and he had only three packages for her to open, unlike the mountain of presents she knew awaited her at Mother’s house. Girl opened the biggest box first, a navy blue sweatshirt that said LIFE IS SHORT, EAT DESSERT FIRST! It wasn’t the kind of thing she would ever wear, and she pretended that she didn’t know that it was the bonus gift from the catalog his girlfriend, Daisy, bought a lot of gifts from. The second gift was more her style, although it still played to Father’s love of funny T-shirts. Girl smiled when she opened the mint-green sweatshirt with a puffin on it. It said, “When Puffins Go Bad,” and the bird was wearing a black leather jacket like Girl’s and was adorned with a real dangly earing. Girl gave him her only gift—a white bone belt buckle engraved with a mountain goat that she had stolen from the mall specifically for him. It cost $14.99, and it was the most expensive thing she ever stole, but she wanted to get him a present he would like and she didn’t have much money of her own. Mother always gave her money to buy gifts for family members, but Father didn’t, so she supplemented her allowance with the “five-finger discount” and the guilt kept her up all night. She knew it was wrong, and after a few shoplifting trips she never did it again. She’d rather have nothing and hate herself a little less. She had so much to hate herself for already.

  Her final present from her father was a twelve-pack of condoms and box of spermicide suppositories. “Knowing you, this will be gone in a week,” he said. She had just lost her virginity a few months before, and she looked down so he wouldn’t see the shame his words brought. She said nothing, and he handed her an envelope containing a funny card with sixty dollars inside. Girl spent every penny of it on presents to give to Mother, Stepmother, and Brother when she went home to spend Christmas with a real tree and stockings hung by the chimney with care. She was happy to have enough money left to buy something for Suzy, too. Girl bought her a blue-and-black satin teddy that she really wanted for herself, but she would never spend that much unless it was for someone she loved. Suzy thought it was too slutty to ever wear and stuffed it in the back of her nightgown drawer so her mom wouldn’t find it. At the mall, Girl found a music box in the shape of a carousel and bought it for Mother, but when she opened the box in her room at Mother’s house, it looked cheap and stupid. She hid it in her closet and tried not to cry.

  boys

  Father didn’t mind if she had boys spend the night, even if it was on the rare occasion that he was sleeping at home. Once she had gone to a party with her friend Cindy and a guy named Richard that she and Cindy both had a crush on. He had blue eyes, long chestnut hair, and broad shoulders, and he always wore a denim vest with a Harley-Davidson patch on the back over his black leather jacket. He was only fifteen, but his girlfriend had already graduated high school and had a baby, so she didn’t go to parties. The three of them stood at the end of the hall at the party, peering into the living room.

  “I feel so out of place,” Cindy said.

  “I do, too,” Girl replied. She didn’t even know whose apartment it was—some friend of Richard’s that she had never met. But she had always wanted to go to a real party like they showed in the movies: cigarette smoke clouding the air, a keg in the kitchen sink, loud heavy metal music blaring from the silver boombox on top of the fridge.

  “But you don’t look out of place—look at you!” Cindy said. The apartment was filled with Native Alaskans—you didn’t dare call them Eskimos if you didn’t want to fight. In fact, now that Girl looked around, they were the only non-Natives there. With Girl’s dyed black hair, dark eyes, and black leather jacket, she did look like everyone else there, unlike Cindy with her blond hair and preppy clothes. Girl left Cindy and Richard in the hallway and walked into the living room, feeling for the first time that she didn’t stand out. Girl knew one or two of the kids from school, and obviously they knew she wasn’t Native, but they didn’t seem to care. Alex, a girl she hung out with in the smoking section at lunch, held a glass bong to Girl’s lips and after two hits she wasn’t insecure about anything. “Whoa,” Girl said. She had never used a bong before, and the room was suddenly throbbing around her, like her pulse was vibrating the light. Alex held up the pipe again, but Girl shook her head, instead going over to the kitchen table where everyone was drinking beer and playing quarters.

  “What’s quarters?” she asked, embarrassed that she had never heard of the game.

  “You bounce a quarter on the table into a cup, and if you miss, you have to drink. If you get it in the cup, you pick someone else to drink,” Aidan explained. She had seen him around school, but never talked to him before. “Come sit down,” he said.

  “There’s no room,” she said.

  “You can sit on my lap.”

  Aidan was Native Alaskan, with long frizzy black hair and slightly almond-shaped eyes. At East Anchorage High, there wasn’t any tension between Native and non-Native students that she could see. The tension was between the preppy kids and the “stoners” like Girl. Aidan was definitely a stoner, and Girl had a thing for dudes with long hair.

  How did people even bounce a coin on a table anyway? Girl wondered. When Girl dropped her quarter, it just lay on the tabletop and mocked her. Aidan was the only one she knew at the table, but whenever one of his friends bounced their coin into the red Solo cup, they always picked Girl to take a drink. She hated beer, but drank it anyway. She wasn’t going to look like a wimp in front of a bunch of seniors. She liked sitting on Aidan’s lap. She liked that he wasn’t afraid to kiss her in front of his friends.

  The party was apparently for some guy Stan’s eighteenth birthday. He had short black hair and big wire-rim glasses.

  “It’s your birthday, you have to chug!” one of the women yelled, and Stan put the keg spout into his mouth. “You have to do eighteen seconds! Everyone else did twenty!” the same girl encouraged. “Chug, chug, chug, chug,” everyone chanted, while the loud girl counted off the seconds. When she got to eighteen, Stan let go of the spout and slid down the cabinet to sit on the floor. “Everyone else only did four seconds, but don’t tell Stan,” the instigator told Girl with admiration. Stan stayed on the floor for the rest of his party.

  When it was time to leave, Girl invited Aidan to come home with her. Girl, Cindy, and Aidan took a cab back to Father’s condo, but she had forgotten her key and they had to knock until Father let them in. Normally Father wasn’t there, so Girl had gotten lucky. She didn’t have any money left for cab fare to go to someone else’s house.

  “Is Aidan spending the night?” Father asked in front of both of her friends. Girl had sobered up some and didn’t want Aidan to sleep over now, but she was on the spot. “Yeah,” she said, and that was that. Too late to back out. Girl had twin beds in her room—Cindy fell asleep in one, and she and Aidan shared the other. They had sex because that was what she was supposed to do, after inviting him over. All night, Girl had to keep getting up to pee. She was exhausted, but Father woke them all up at nine and told her she had to go to church, whether she wanted to or not. He dropped Aidan at the bus stop on their way, but drove Cindy home. Girl had assumed that he would drive Aidan home, too, but Father had refused. Girl wasn’t sure why, but it embarrassed her. She didn’t think Father was racist, but he always drove her white friends home. Maybe they were just running late. After that, Girl and Aidan said “hi” to each other in the halls, but neither of them wanted more.

  A few months later Father had to go to an out-of-town conference. Girl’s new boyfriend, Bradley, was over at her house when Father got home from work. Bradley was nineteen, and what they called a “second-year senior,” a nice way to say that he had failed a grade. He had platinum blond hair down to the middle of his back, and he styled it with a curling iron
and sprayed it with Aqua Net aerosol hair spray, the same brand Girl used. He didn’t have a car and rode the school bus with Girl. He didn’t have a job, but he played the guitar. Mother wouldn’t let her date anyone over the age of eighteen, and Stepmother would never have approved of an unemployed boy with no college plans. Father liked him a lot, as he did all of her boyfriends. Not only did he like the reassurance that she wasn’t gay, but he just seemed to like males more than females in general. The only weird thing was that he insisted that Girl’s friends call him Dr. L, unlike her mother, who was on a first-name basis with everyone.

  “So, Bradley, I have to go out of town for a week. Would you like to stay here with Girl while I’m gone? That way she won’t be lonely,” Father said.

  “Sure, Dr. L.” Bradley never said much, but he smiled a lot. Girl didn’t let on that she wasn’t ready to have sex with him or have him spend the night. She just went with the flow, and tried not to feel like Father was giving her as a gift to this teenaged boy in an effort to get Bradley to like him. She didn’t understand Father’s guilt over leaving her alone, either. Wasn’t she alone every night anyway? How was this different besides not having to dress as fast as she could so that her father wouldn’t walk in on her changing in the morning?

  george

  More than anything, Girl wanted a dog. Her father had a husky, Chuckchi, but the dog wasn’t allowed in the house. Chuckchi slept outside on a long chain attached to a dog house Father had built himself. When he went to work every morning, he unlocked the padlock that connected the chain to the dog collar and brought the dog to work, where he hooked her up again outside his office window. Every day after work he took Chuckchi for a run in the park. Most of the time, Girl wasn’t invited to come along. She hated that dog.

  Father didn’t own a television set, so when he was at Daisy’s house (they had moved into the same condominium complex and lived across the street from each other) Girl read books and talked on the phone. She slept holding the cordless phone like a teddy bear, in case anyone called in the middle of the night. That year she was into horror stories—Stephen King and Dean Koontz and stories of alien abductions and true-life crime. She didn’t miss the television—she had never watched much after she outgrew cartoons—but after she closed her paperback, the condo filled with creaking noises and big, scary shadows.

  Girl heard a noise, and worked up her courage to get out of bed. It was probably the heat kicking on, she told herself … but what if someone or something was there? She was all alone, so she made herself get up and walk downstairs past the curtainless windows—was someone watching from the bushes? She locked the sliding back door and flipped the deadlock on the steel front door, then ran back to bed as quickly as she could.

  But what if someone was already inside and she just locked them in with her? Her bedroom window was large plate glass, with only narrow crank-out windows on the sides. Could she get a window cranked open and jump out, landing on the dog house without breaking a leg? Better to unlock the front door, so she could get out quicker and not mess with the deadbolt. Girl crept out of bed and ran as fast as she could for the front door and unlocked it, then ran back to bed. A dog. She wanted a dog to bark at invaders and sleep in her bed at night. She could trust a dog to keep her safe.

  “Can I have a dog?” she asked her father.

  “Sure, but no puppies. It has to be housebroken. It has to already have its shots, be fixed, and it has to match the carpeting,” he answered.

  The next week she brought it up again. “So this dog …”

  “I told you that if you want a dog, you have to vacuum the entire house every day for a week, to prove that you can be responsible.”

  He hadn’t said anything like that, but Girl vacuumed three times a week for the next couple of weeks, and guessed that was close enough. She figured that he wasn’t home enough to be able to tell the difference.

  “So when can I get a dog?” she asked him.

  “I never said you could get a dog,” he answered.

  Girl brought up the dog in her support group in the nurse’s office.

  “He seems to go back and forth on getting a dog,” the nurse said. “Why don’t you just get a dog and see what happens?”

  That weekend Suzy’s mother took her to the dog pound. Girl walked past the wriggling little black lab puppies—no puppies, her father had said—because she didn’t know how to housebreak a dog, even if they were adorable. She stopped in front of a full-grown Newfoundland—her favorite dog of all time. She loved big dogs, but the kennel tag said he had been removed from a home for biting someone, so he wasn’t up for adoption. All the dogs were barking and barking and it was making her nuts. She looked down the rows of dog cages. There was a black-and-brown dog halfway down on the right that wasn’t barking at all. It was a medium-sized mutt that looked like Wimpy, Stepmother’s old dog, that had died the year before. He sat and looked at Girl, his tail thumping the ground. The tag said he was six months old and already fixed. Father’s carpet was dark brown, so Girl figured he’d match well enough.

  “Can I see this one?” she asked the kennel attendant. The dog came out and jumped up, putting his paws on Girl’s stomach.

  “Sit!” She told him, and he sat, then he sat up with his paws dangling. She had always wanted a dog that could do that. Girl paid the forty-five dollars from her allowance and Suzy’s mother dropped her and the dog at home.

  “What are you going to name him?” Suzy asked. As soon as she got home, she had called Girl, and they were talking while the dog sniffed around her house.

  “Do you remember baby Huey, from Looney Tunes?” Girl asked. “He always said, ‘I will hug him, and I will love him, and I will name him George, and I will sit on him like a mother hen!’”

  “And I will spank his bottom when he’s bad!” Suzy answered.

  “And you know George Carlin? He does that routine about how he has the name that never ends. G.E.O.R. (pause) G.E.O.R. (pause) G.E.O.R.G.E.O.R.G.E!”

  “He’s so funny,” Suzy said. “George was my grandfather’s name. I like it.”

  “Oh, my dad’s home,” Girl said. “I gotta go.”

  When Father walked in, he didn’t say anything.

  “Look, Dad! I got a dog! He’s fixed and housebroken and he matches the carpeting! And look, he can sit up! Sit, Georgie!” The dog sat and pulled his back straight, his white paws dangling pathetically.

  “That’s nice, but he’s going back,” Father said, without any emotion in his voice at all.

  “But you said—”

  “I said you had to vacuum every day for a month.”

  “You said I had to vacuum for a week!”

  “The dog isn’t staying.”

  Girl took the dog’s leash and ran outside. He didn’t try to stop her. She walked up the hill to her old neighbor Wayne’s house. Whenever she got into a fight with her dad she went to Wayne’s. He was a tall, dark-skinned sixteen-year-old, and his father was never home. She thought of him as her adopted brother. She called Suzy and told her what happened.

  “Hang on, I’ll call you back,” Suzy said. When she called back a few minutes later, she had a plan. “My mom says you and George can move in with us.”

  Girl moved in with Suzy, and then she had rules and chores and all the normal things that kept her from spinning out of control. She and Suzy shared a room, and one wall was covered in magazine cutouts of fashion models. Suzy had a wooden screen that hid her laundry basket and a long closet big enough for both their clothing.

  Suzy was sick. She had asthma and no longer went to school—instead, a tutor came over a few times a week. Girl helped her with her homework instead of doing her own.

  “All I ask is that you make sure Suzy takes her medicine,” Suzy’s mother had told Girl, but Suzy said the pills made her sick and she hated her breathing machine. Girl didn’t have the heart to force her or make her feel bad for it.

  Girl got the flu. Girl went walking in the woods with som
e of the boys at lunch, and she told them she wasn’t getting high anymore. She didn’t like feeling dirty, bad. In the shower, the soap ran down her body, but she still felt unclean. She knew she shouldn’t get high. If her mother knew, she would be so disappointed. Girl would do anything not to disappoint her mother, even though she lived a quarter of the earth away. Girl swore she was done with drugs, so she told her friends she’d just keep them company as they walked into the rough tundra at the edge of school property.

  “Sure you ain’t gittin’ high,” Frank said. “Leonard, you believe that?” Girl didn’t like Frank much. He was thin with long, scraggly black hair, and he wore a denim jacket instead of a leather one. His face was pointy, like a weasel’s.