Girlish

by Lara Lillibridge

  Leonard laughed. His straight, shoulder-length blond hair was nearly white. They were best friends, yin and yang. He packed the pipe and passed it to Girl.

  “No, I told you, I’m not getting high today.”

  They laughed and pushed her back, so she fell against a tree behind her.

  “Oh yes you are,” Frank said. He held her nose shut, and Leonard held the pipe to her lips. She had no choice but breathe through the pipe. The boys were harmless, really. No one tried to kiss her or anything like that, and it’s not like Girl had kicked them or fought back or anything.

  When she woke up with a cough and fever the next day, she knew it was from getting high. “I should have fought harder,” she thought to herself. She felt so sick—she couldn’t remember ever feeling so awful. A few days later, Suzy got sick as well, but with her asthma she got it worse. She lay in her mother’s bed, struggling to breathe. When she had an asthma attack, her inhaler didn’t help, so her mother bundled her up and drove her to the hospital. They couldn’t stop her asthma attack, so the doctors induced a coma and put her on a ventilator. Girl stood in the doorway, watching the blue machine beep and chuff as her best friend’s chest rose and lowered. Her eyelids were taped shut. Girl knew it was all her fault.

  Mother flew up from New York to be with Girl, because the doctors said Suzy had only a one in a thousand chance of recovering. Suzy survived, but it was decided that Girl would move back to New York, so Suzy could go to a residential hospital program in Colorado. That May, when school ended, Girl boarded a plane for New York. George traveled in baggage in a plastic crate. She wouldn’t leave him behind.

  notes from the fourth wall

  cicadas

  to survive my father, i created an exoskeleton, like a cicada

  I had not seen my father in several years, and I had no aching desire to change that. When I thought about my father, I felt nothing. He wanted to visit last summer, and I didn’t know how to say no, for my children’s sake, if nothing else. Dementia was overtaking him, and the minute hand of the clock was stealing the person I used to know—every day he was a little less the man I remembered. But I still did not want him to come. Whatever he had or had not been to me, it no longer mattered—I was a parent now, no longer in need of parenting.

  When I was a child in my mother’s house, my brother and I spent our summers in the backyard. The grass was thick and dense beneath my bare feet, and the dark brown dirt always stained the pads of my toes. We carved fingernail x’s in our mosquito bites, in an effort to remove the itch. The cicada buzz reverberated in my ears, the tinny radio-static soundtrack of summer. I would find their discarded robot-alien shells as clinging detritus on the tire-tread bark of the maple tree. The exoskeletons were the color of toast, slightly translucent. It took me a long time to realize the shells were empty and could not bite, and when I mustered the courage to touch them, they crackled into broken shards beneath my fingers.

  I had spent a year plotting my father’s death when I was fourteen—I was going to push him down the brown carpeted stairs of his condo, and then inject alcohol into his veins and make it look like an accident. He was a doctor—syringes weren’t hard to come by, and I was overly confident in my ability to push a needle through someone else’s skin. But in the end, I didn’t have hands that would push my father down the stairs, no matter how much my rage instructed them to. My hands were useless wounded birds controlled by my heart, which still yearned for a Daddy who loved me.

  The years of unrequited love drained me of all emotion toward my father. I haven’t even been able to muster up anger in longer than I can remember. I have been full-grown for quite some time now. It was too late for him to return my golden-retriever-like love, to fulfill all those hastily made promises, or to take me to the father-daughter dinner dance. Whatever I hadn’t gotten from him I no longer wanted. But his impending visit made me think I should try one more time, at least to appease everyone else. The night before he came into town, I thought about his recent attachment disorder diagnosis. Was it fair to shut him off if he was inherently incapable of feeling emotion? Hadn’t he tried the best he was able, small though those attempts had been? He sent me stuffed animals each Christmas—weird ones, granted, like a three-foot-long snake made out of neckties or a weasel instead of the husky I had asked for—but he made time to go to a toy store and bought me something each year. He wrapped them up and wrote out a name tag with his favorite black pen. His handwriting was more familiar than his face. My father was always excited to see me, scooping me up in a tight bear hug and crushing my child-soft cheek against his black-and-red plaid Woolrich jacket.

  He didn’t think it mattered that I only saw him twice a year as a child, and I have learned how quickly time passes when you are an adult compared to the never-ending feel of a child’s summer and the eternity of fifteen minutes when I rubbed the toes of my shoes in the brown-gray dirt and tried to guess how much time had passed.

  I decided to attempt to loosen my shell. Perhaps I could learn to see him through adult eyes. Maybe his attachment disorder explained all of his past failings, if only I would stop judging him so harshly. I knew we could not make up for the lost years, but perhaps it was not too late to develop some affection for the person he had become. Maybe a relationship could be had on new terms, before his spreading dementia took the ability away entirely.

  My father and I sat across the table from each other and said nothing, like strangers at a train station. I looked at his eighty-year-old hands, ropy with thick blue veins and corroded with deep lines. His fingernails were thick and clean and longer than mine. I felt nothing—not sympathy for an old, tired man, not remorse for all he had never been. I was no longer a daughter-abyss needing to be filled. We sat in silence and he looked into the distance blankly. I knew I was supposed to say something, but I had nothing left to say. My father just stared out toward my garden with unfocused eyes. When I tried to make small talk, he responded with words like “oh,” words like air, words like emptiness. The cicada had flown, and the empty hard shell I had tried so hard to penetrate as a child was all that remained of my father.

  My father peed on the toilet seat and I sat in it. My children asked why Grandpa got mashed potatoes all over the table when he ate. He tried to assemble a simple wooden toy with my seven-year-old and glued everything together backward. My father, formerly an airplane pilot, boat captain, and pediatrician, could no longer distinguish between his left and right hands, could not translate a map, could not follow a conversation to completion.

  He asked to have a “heart-to-heart” with me before he left. I tried my best to avoid it. There was nothing he could say that would mean anything to me, and I hoped he didn’t expect validation of his parenting or proclamations of my love and appreciation. I just didn’t have it in me to pretend any longer. He stood up from the table where we all sat and asked to speak with me, and I could not come up with any more reasons not to. My father and I sat upstairs on my balcony, away from his wife and my family.

  I could still see a tinge of brown in my father’s gray hair. His face was foreign to me. He had shaved off his beard when I was twenty, and had looked like a stranger ever since. Even though I had known him clean-shaven for more years than bearded, I always saw him through the eyes of a child, and his face was no longer the face of my childhood. I wondered if his front tooth had always been longer than its mate. I noted how the extra weight he put on over the years filled in his wrinkles. He stared directly into my face, as he always had. I did not see him blink once. I could not sustain that level of eye contact, and looked at his hands instead.

  My father told me about his dementia, his Parkinson’s disease, and his relationship with his wife. He was sorry that he was moving closer to his stepchildren than to me or my brother. He was afraid I felt spurned. He told me that he knew he couldn’t function like he used to, couldn’t carry on conversations or walk with his old, easy gait. His cicada words bounced off my daughter shell. I just
wanted him to go home. I stared at his folded hands and made reassuring, meaningless noises, as was expected of a good daughter. But I was no longer a good daughter.

  My father’s hands curled loosely on his lap, so I could not see his talon-like nails. The metacarpals rose in sharp ridges above the wrinkled red skin. His veins were bluer than his eyes. The skin on the backs of his hands was made of some material different from mine, something thinner and less opaque, like the skin of lips, that would chap and tear easily. The eighty years of his life didn’t show in his face, but were betrayed by those red, fragile hands. My body remembered his hands teaching me to tie off the boat at the dock, to sew a patch on my jacket. My hands balled up so I would not reach out to stroke his fragile skin. I made an excuse to check on the children, and he followed me mutely down the stairs.

  another fourth of july

  On July third, they closed the street in front of Irondequoit Town Hall, set up a stage for a live band, and had the annual street dance. Girl’s hair was dyed black, curled in an ’80s pouf on top, and reached just barely to her shoulders if she pulled it straight with her fingers. She wished it were long—she wanted hair down to her knees, longer than her miniskirts, but she dyed it so often it was perpetually fried. She wore her Metallica half-shirt and a pair of denim short-shorts that were, to be honest, shorter than she intended when she bought them. You could just barely see the curve of her bottom from behind. She took a round black button from a band called Metal Church and attached it to the front side of her shorts, just below the left pocket, to draw the eye. She wore one lace fingerless glove on her left hand. Before the street dance, Girl applied black eyeliner on the inside rim of her eyes and pale pink lipstick, made paler by first applying a light concealer to hide her natural lip color. She was hot. Sexxy, with two Xs. She didn’t look fourteen years old, that was for sure. She and Brother smoked as they walked the mile to the town hall. Brother was a real smoker; Girl only did it occasionally to look cool. Secretly she hated the taste, but she loved the look of it, and it gave her something to do with her nervous fingers. When they got to the town hall, it was swarming with people. Brother and his best friend wandered off to get high, but Girl hung back, watching the dunking booth, just like when she was a little girl. A group of boys came up and surrounded her.

  “I know you,” Girl said to a teen boy with curly hair down past his shoulders, like Paul Stanley, her favorite band member from Kiss.

  “Yeah?” he replied with a sleepy-eyed smile.

  “You’re Brandon. You used to pick on my brother.”

  Brandon’s face fell, and Girl was filled with exuberant joy. This was the revenge she had waited her whole life for.

  “Your brother? Who’s your brother?”

  “Brother Lillibridge.” Brandon was squirming, really actually squirming, his head down, his chest and shoulders moving awkwardly. Just then Brother walked up. As metalhead as Girl dressed, Brother was just as punk. His hair was naturally black, and one side was shaved to the skin. He wore cut-off army pants and a black Dead Kennedys T-shirt, with a skateboard in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Two earrings pierced his left ear.

  Brandon looked up at Brother. Brandon had topped off at five foot seven, but Brother was not yet done growing at six foot four—he wouldn’t stop growing until he reached six foot nine in his twenties. Girl suspected that he willfully grew so tall so no one would dare to pick on him ever again. Brandon had to bend his neck and take a half-step back to look into Brother’s green eyes.

  “I am so sorry, man,” Brandon spluttered. “I can see you’ve changed. Look, let me shake your hand, and be friends, okay?” Brandon took Brother’s hand and shook it. Brother looked tall and bored. Girl was exploding inside with sweet revenge. Who’s the geek now? she wanted to ask them.

  the trestles

  When Girl moved back from Alaska, she became Brother’s baby duck, following him everywhere. She didn’t call any of her old friends—they were too “good-girl” for her now. They didn’t have sex or get high or even smoke cigarettes. Liz was still gone at the foster home, and she didn’t know how to find her. Brother’s world became her world.

  Brother made her get up early every weekday to catch a ride downtown with Mother. His friends all lived across town, and Mother’s office was halfway there. From Mother’s office they caught the number seven bus to Brighton or Pittsford, depending on the day. Sometimes they wandered Cobbs Hill with Brother’s friends, looking for but never finding weed. If they could find a ride, they went to the trestles.

  The trestles were a series of train bridges that spanned the brown water of the Erie Canal. Teenagers congregated on them to get high, play music, and watch the bravest of them jump into the water below. Brother jumped, Girl did not. Once, Girl walked down the embankment to swim in the water. The canal turned her white high-cut swimsuit the color of coffee with cream, and no matter how many times she washed it, it never turned white again.

  For those who did not care to jump into the canal, there were two options when a train came by: gather on the concrete stanchion below the tracks, or sit on the iron trusses next to the train tracks themselves, where the wind and dust tornadoed around you. It was here that they sucked on torn pieces of cardboard that someone said was homemade acid. By the time Girl and Brother got home, they both regretted that decision.

  “I’m gonna tell Mother,” Brother said.

  “Don’t tell Mother,” Girl said.

  “She can take me to a hospital and they will give me drugs to make it stop,” he insisted.

  “Do what you want, but don’t you dare tell her I dropped acid, too.”

  Girl went to her bedroom in the attic while Brother made his confession. Mother came up shortly thereafter. When Girl looked at Mother the acid made Mother’s bad eye glow extra red and loom twice the size of her normal one. Mother’s mouth was the hard straight line that broadcast, “I am so disappointed in you.”

  “Did you drop acid too?” she asked Girl.

  “Drop acid” sounded so funny in Mother’s mad voice, but Girl managed not to laugh. “No. I just took some Vivarin,” Girl answered. She figured Mother couldn’t complain about caffeine pills because she lived on coffee.

  Brother was in his bedroom, watching TV. A commercial came on for Purdue chicken, with raw chicken carcasses dancing across the screen. The carcasses spoke to Brother through the television. Brother never ate chicken on the bone again.

  Alone in her room, Girl’s heart was pounding so hard she could feel it in her fingertips, which she held out in front of her face. She stared at her hands, turning her head to one side, then the other. Next she looked at her feet. She had tan lines from her shoes, and her toes were white. Her two-toned feet scared her. Girl was convinced if she fell asleep, she would die, so she stared at her feet all night long, and didn’t close her eyes until she heard the birds singing their morning song. She never got high again.

  catholic school

  As soon as Girl moved back home and it was too late to change her mind, Mother informed her that she was being sent to Our Lady of Mercy, because “you need the structure only an all-girls Catholic school can provide.”

  Fuck. Navy-blue-and-white uniforms. Transferring buses downtown. Most importantly: no boys. The girls here were different—you didn’t have to be pretty to be popular, or even good at sports, and no one teased the geeky girls. Popularity was based on one thing only: money. Jessica was popular because she lived in a mansion on East Avenue, one that had an actual elevator inside. Girl had seen it herself at a party that Jessica threw. It was made of iron scrollwork, like a birdcage, and the boys from McQuaid, Our Lady of Mercy’s brother school, hung off the bottom of it as it ascended to the second floor. So it didn’t matter that Jessica had one blue eye and one brown eye, or that she was fat. It only mattered how much money her parents had. In other words, Girl was not going to fit in here. There weren’t many other metalheads, and the other students were kind of afraid of Girl, which sh
e liked quite a lot. She knew she wasn’t tough, but she liked appearing tough. When they played soccer in gym class, Girl ran toward the ball and tried to kick it, but half the time she missed. The other girls assumed she kicked their shins on purpose, and let her take the ball.

  Her only friends were still Brother’s friends. Mother signed Brother up for a drug education class, so Girl went to all his family groups. Really, she was lonely. When Brother was required to attend an AA meeting, Girl followed along, because she knew some high school boys that went, and they were cute. Something happened at that meeting, though. Girl had always felt like she was drowning, but at that meeting, she felt like someone had grabbed her hand and was pulling her out. She asked Mother if she could go to treatment, but Mother said, “Oh, Girl, I need one of you to be a success. I can’t handle both of my children being drug addicts.” So she didn’t go. Three months later, after attending AA meetings several times a week, she asked again. This time, Mother said yes.

  diagnosis

  They were sitting in a large circle of chairs at family group, everyone quiet and attentive. Ten other troubled teenagers, ten other sets of parents.

  “Stepmother has clinical depression,” Mother told the group. “She’s been on medication for six years. For Stepmother, depression comes out as anger.” Stepmother wasn’t there that night. The sound of Mother’s words set off a detonation inside Girl’s chest.

  There was something wrong with Stepmother. There was something Girl could point her finger at and say, “See? It wasn’t my fault. See? I was right—she wasn’t normal.” It was like all the Kodak slides of her childhood were dropping into a new carousel. Click-click-click-click. What was wrong with Stepmother wasn’t because Girl was a bad daughter.