Girlish

by Lara Lillibridge

  Then her anger rolled in—the smoke from the detonation. Why had they not told her sooner? Girl already carried the secret of their sexuality, it wasn’t like they were afraid to burden Girl with things she could not tell her classmates. This new secret might have actually helped. If she had known this growing up, she could have been someone different.

  Girl wrote in a pink diary from September 1982 through January 1983. The book had been a gift for her ninth birthday. Girl wrote “Important” on the cover in red ink. She wrote down her pen pal’s address inside the front cover, the back cover, and on a separate page. Girl only wrote seven entries in the diary before she gave up. In those seven entries, only three of them were about more than just the weather.

  November 13, 1982

  “I am either wacko or strange. Can someone please turn me off? Everyone acts like I am strange. Most everyone hates me. List of friends: Rebekah (D), Gwen (D), Betsy (S), Alisa (D). D= definite. S = sort of.”

  October 8, 1983

  “Stepmother has been very depressed lately. Sometimes I worry about her.”

  January 12, 1984

  Girl wrote “WILL” at the top of the page, and divided up her possessions between her friends. “Mom has bank book. Stepmother has silver coin. Avanga [cat] will go to Gretchen. Charlotte [hamster] to whomever.”

  She had been a depressed child, occasionally suicidal, raised by a depressed, rage-filled parent, but it hadn’t been her fault. The whole time, Mother had insisted that everything was fine, that Girl and Brother were just difficult, intolerant children, but she knew there was more to it. Mother knew and never gave Girl absolution.

  i’m just wild about harry

  During February recess her junior year, Girl flew to Alaska to spend a week with Father. On the way back, she almost joined the Hare Krishnas. The man selling copies of the Bhagavad Gita in the Chicago O’Hare airport wore a navy blue beret over his shaved head. Girl didn’t want to buy a book, but she was never good at turning away salespeople, so here she was, standing in the middle of the concourse talking to a stranger about religion. The man, who was not much older than Girl, took off his beret and long wavy hair from a patch at the back of his head fell down to his shoulder blades. Suddenly Girl was willing to leave the airport and attend his meeting. She always had a thing for long hair and shaved heads.

  She had to check her flight first. She walked to her gate and saw that she had a two-hour delay, so she returned to the United terminal, but he was gone. Would she have really gone? She didn’t know. At her core, she was responsible, but Girl was certainly looking for something to believe in, and she wanted more than anything to belong to something that felt like family.

  But the long-haired, shaved-head man had vanished, so she had to make other plans. The two-hour delay was now a full-on cancellation. Girl waited in line for the gate attendant and rerouted her flight through Buffalo, the next-nearest airport to her parents’ house. She was good at flying alone. The only problem was that she was unable to reach Mother.

  That year, Stepmother had bought a cabin in the woods an hour outside of Rochester. For the first few months she went there alone, and not even Mother was allowed to visit. Soon, though, it became their hideaway, and Girl and Brother were not even given the phone number. Girl knew that her parents were at the cabin, and were planning on driving from there straight to the airport, and even though she called the phone number to the house in town, she only got the answering machine, and she couldn’t leave a message when calling collect. She doubted they would check the weather and see the storm—she wasn’t even sure that they had a television at the cabin.

  Girl called her best friend’s mother collect. Her best friend’s brother refused to accept charges. One thing Girl knew from having one parent in Alaska and one in New York was that telephone operators have an unexpected degree of leeway. She pleaded with the operator and got her to reverse the charges to Mother’s house even though there was no one there to approve the charges. Girl told her best friend’s mother that she needed someone to keep calling Mother and tell her to pick Girl up in Buffalo, seventy miles away, instead of Rochester. All she could do was hope that her friend’s mother could track Mother down. Girl could not wait to make contact before she boarded the next plane. She needed to go, and had to hope that someone would be there when she landed.

  Mother and Stepmother greeted her at the gate in Buffalo, so proud that their daughter had figured everything out on her own. Girl didn’t tell them about the Hare Krishnas, and secretly read the Bhagavad Gita in her room. The man had written his address in the back, and after she read it, she planned to write him. When she reached a section detailing celibacy and the rightful place of the man as head of the spiritual family, she closed the book and stopped dreaming of the man with the half-shaved head.

  the day the word changed

  They changed Stepmother’s diagnosis from clinical depression to manic-depressive, and with the new word came new pills and new instructions. Do not leave her alone in stores, as she might go on a spending binge. (This doctor obviously did not know Stepmother, and how she practically wept every time she opened her wallet.) Stepmother was to avoid large crowds, as they might trigger an episode. There were new behaviors to be watchful for: compulsive spending, hypersexuality, lack of impulse control, all things that signaled a looming break with reality and descent into full psychosis. None of these behaviors had been a problem before; it was only the new word that made them possible. But it was Girl’s sixteenth birthday the next week, and the invitations had been mailed to all eighty girls in her class. The party hall had been rented, the band had been hired.

  “Girl, we may have to cancel the party,” Mother said. “Stepmother has been diagnosed as bipolar—manic-depressive. She can’t be around large crowds; it might trigger an episode.”

  “But we already invited everyone from school!” Girl said.

  “This family’s mental health comes first.”

  Girl’s face stiffened like a mask, hard, uninhabited. Inside her rib cage was only cold, blowing wind. Not a hurricane or tornado, but the wind that whips away your body heat and pricks cold needles from the inside out. Girl stayed in the wind for three days, waiting to see if the “may have to” turned into a “we are going to.” She didn’t read books, she didn’t talk to her friends. She waited inside her body-shell to see if this sweet sixteen party would be sacrificed for Stepmother.

  It wasn’t that Girl wanted presents. She didn’t mean to be selfish. It was just that at Our Lady of Mercy, she had gone to her friends’ parties. They were the kind of girls that parents fussed over. They didn’t do their own laundry or take the bus downtown or try to hold their mother together. These girls didn’t go to AA meetings at night or smoke cigarettes at the bus stop, and they certainly didn’t spread their legs for boys who didn’t love them. Girl wanted very much to be one of these girls—someone nurtured, protected, loved. So when Mother sat down with her one summer night and asked if she wanted a sweet sixteen party, Girl had exploded into fireworks inside. Mother had picked out light blue paper for the invitations. She ordered pizza and had the cake decorator spell her daughter’s name the new way she preferred since she was fourteen—Girlh, with an added “h.” Mother asked Girl if she wanted to hire one of her teenaged friend’s bands to play, and of course she said yes.

  A band and dancing and Girl was so excited that she even agreed to invite only her classmates, no boys, because that was how Mercy Girls did it. And maybe this party would make her acceptable to the girls at school and maybe she could learn to be sweet and protected and feel all the weight of her mother’s love, and not just her fractional allocation. Job/spouse/daughter/son/volunteering/politics. Girl was only entitled to a mother-sliver, but this party meant she would get the whole share for just one day.

  Mother decided to let the party go forward. She invited a few of her own friends as chaperones, but they were chaperoning Stepmother as much as the teenagers. Mother would keep Ste
pmother in the kitchen, where she would have friends and space and not too much chaos.

  Girl pulled the top of her hair up into a tiny ponytail so you could see the shaved sides of her head. She put on her black-and-green-striped jumper over a black turtleneck. Her preppy clothes did not match her punk hair, but she wanted more than anything to be like the preppy-punk girls at Mercy—Sandy and Cyn and Sioux and the beautiful, tiny Joelle.

  “Let’s just put regrets only on the invitation,” Mother had said. “That way we don’t have to count everyone who is coming, just who is not coming, which is a smaller number.”

  Girl had only had gotten a handful of regret phone calls, and only a few girls at school had mentioned not coming, although several had said that they had thought the tri-fold 8 x 11 invitation had been junk mail and tossed it out. Girl figured there would still be around sixty people. She smoked cigarettes as she waited with Brother and her best friends, Rose-Marie and Becky, for the guests to arrive. The band placed two folding tables next to each other to create a stage and decorated it with stolen street signs, a stop sign, and one flashing yellow construction barrier.

  One car pulled up and then another, then a few at once, and then they stopped coming. Only eight girls came. One-tenth of the invitations.

  Mother was relieved, although she knew her daughter would be disappointed. Now Stepmother could come to the party. Now it wouldn’t be teenagers running everywhere and screaming too loudly. She and Stepmother came out of the kitchen to serve the pizza and cake together. It was exactly what Mother needed. The whole family was all together in one room. Stepmother pulled Mother onto the dance floor and they did a little jitterbug. Girl never asked for a party again.

  brother moves to alaska

  Brother and Girl stood in the garage smoking cigarettes before he caught his flight to move to Alaska. The garage was their space where parents never ventured. When Mother and Stepmother accepted that smoking was a vocation the children were quite fond of, they dragged an old couch in there and found the children a radio. There was only one bare bulb for light and the one window hadn’t been washed ever, so it was dim, brown-lit with the feeling that the ceiling was made of dust and cobwebs, even when the door was open. But yellow-brown light was warmer and more comforting than the clean white light of their house or school.

  Girl was wearing her favorite earrings—wooden giraffes about an inch and a half long. She and Brother stood and smoked and tried not to talk about him leaving. Girl took off her right earring and held it in her closed hand so he wouldn’t see it. Girl loved these little giraffes so much—could she break the set? Would it even matter to him? Brother went inside for a moment, and Girl carefully pried off the hook, so it was just a wood statue. When he came back outside, Girl pressed it into his hands.

  Brother put the giraffe into the pocket of his black leather jacket. He didn’t say anything, and Girl opened her mouth to stammer out an explanation of what she was trying to say with the giraffe. One look from him silenced her, though. Brother took off half of his slave bracelet—the chain had broken long ago between the yin-yang ring and the one on the silver wrist cuff, but he always wore them as if the chain still held them together. He kept the ring on his big finger but removed the wrist cuff and put it in her hands. Girl ran her thumb over the white and black stones and felt the crack in one of them with her thumbnail, then put it on her own wrist as their parents called the children to get in the car.

  Sixteen was a bad year for Girl. Her brother was gone and Stepmother was on mental-health disability, so she was home every day after school while Mother was at work. Girl was going to visit Brother and Father in Alaska for a week. Her father had a new wife, #Six, and Girl liked her. She had even told #Six about the weird sex abuse stuff with her father.

  There was that time in the bathtub with Dad that got a little weird, when he asked Girl, “Where’s the penis?” And maybe let her poke it. Maybe not. She wasn’t clear on what exactly happened, just that she felt squirmy inside and dirty and bad when she thought about that day. She did remember clearly the time Father and #Four had sex while the children giggled and peeked, and how he invited them into bed for a family snuggle afterward. There were all the dirty jokes he told Girl in grade school and the way he didn’t make the joke about “a blond” but instead about Girl or her sister Juli, and how she felt soiled by his laughter. There was the way he sat on her bed when she lived with him in high school and made small talk while she got dressed for school without averting his gaze, or the fact that he walked around completely naked, and that Girl knew all of his mistresses by name. There were the limericks and songs he taught Girl and Brother, the naked mermaid on his cribbage board, and the mug shaped like a breast with a drinking hole in the nipple. The photograph he took of Brother on the toilet that made Brother cry. But Father never touched Girl.

  “Covert sexual abuse,” Girl’s counselor informed her: an inappropriately sexual relationship between parent and child. Lack of appropriate boundaries. She told Girl that it didn’t have to be worse than that. That alone counted as abuse, even if he never touched her. Girl wanted to believe her, but she wasn’t sure she could.

  In tenth grade Girl told her biology teacher in high school that her father raped her, knowing it was a lie. She hadn’t meant to say it; it just came out when the teacher kept her after class for not turning in an assignment. Girl was crying. She didn’t know why she said it. She knew it wasn’t true, and she knew she was betraying every girl that had been raped, but she didn’t know how to take the words back. She didn’t know how to say that there was something fucked up and wrong about her father that scared her and made her feel dirty, but she didn’t know what it was. She knew a lot of other girls had it worse than she did. Girl didn’t have any right to complain, and all she knew was her father was coming to visit and she did not want to see him.

  She told all of this to #Six: not the lying part, but the weird feelings and the jokes and the watching her dress in the morning. Of course, Brother and Juli knew all about Father’s over-sexual nature—they were the only ones who really knew. Girl was supposed to visit Father and Brother in Alaska, and the night before she was supposed to leave her father and Brother called her, both of them on the phone at the same time.

  “I hear you’re telling people I sexually abused you,” Father said. Girl could hear Brother breathing on the phone extension. “You are a little liar! You know I never touched you. This is the worst possible thing you could ever say.”

  “Dad, all those jokes? And the watching me, and—”

  He cut her off. “It’s all in your head. I never abused you and you know it.”

  Girl lost her words. She breathed like she was crying, all fast and jerky and her throat was closed, but she was too angry for the tears to fall.

  “I will not be the one who stands in judgment for this,” Girl said at last.

  “Maybe you will,” Brother replied.

  She hung up on both of them. She did not board the plane the next day, and she refused to send back her ticket for a refund, even when Mother asked her to.

  “Girl, it’s a thousand dollars. I understand how you feel, honey, but it’s a lot of money,” Mother said. Girl turned her back on Mother and faced the wall. Mother asked again a few weeks later, but Girl still would not give back the ticket.

  bunny costume

  Girl was sixteen and trying to grow out her mullet. Mom and Girl had redecorated Brother’s old bedroom for her, and Mother let Girl pick out everything herself. Girl fell in love with a deep emerald green plush carpet at the remnant store. They painted her walls a clean, crisp white, and found a wallpaper border with pigs and cows and farm houses not because Girl loved farms (although she kind of loved the idea of them) but because it had that rich emerald green Girl loved so much that year. Mother bought her the white eyelet puffy comforter Girl had wanted ever since she was a little girl dreaming princess dreams and looking at J. C. Penney catalogs. Mother also bought her two throw pi
llows, a dusty rose one that matched the pigs in the wallpaper and a ruffled lace one that was scratchy to sleep on but pretty when Girl made her bed, which wasn’t often.

  Girl was sixteen and it was Halloween, and for once Girl had a boyfriend and a costume party to go to, just like she had always dreamed that she would. She was a reformed bad girl now. She wanted to be sexy and cool above all else, but still a good girl. She wanted to be pretty and sweet. Girl had stopped having sex with boys that didn’t love her. She had found religion—Girl started reading the Bible in an effort to argue more effectively with the born-again Christian kids she had been hanging out with. One night she had a sore throat, and she defiantly prayed, “God, if you exist, make my sore throat disappear by morning.” She figured that was probably asking too much, so she amended her request: “or at least by the day after tomorrow.” The next day her sore throat was gone, and suddenly she became a believer. She prayed on her knees every night and every morning, and she prayed out loud with friends and they all held hands. Girl got nervous when it was her turn, because Rose-Marie started with “Jesus,” and her boyfriend Jacob started with “Lord,” but it sounded kind of like “Lerd” when he said it, and Girl knew he thought you should only pray to God and not to Jesus and she hadn’t been raised Christian so she didn’t have a history of words to fall back on. “God,” Girl said in her little scared voice and hoped someone kind and forgiving was listening, because she was new to this good-girl stuff but she wanted it so damn badly.

  Girl’s family kept things they didn’t have a place for on the floors of closets. In the living room closet, far back in the dark left corner, was Stepmother’s old Easter Bunny costume. It was made out of terry cloth, like a towel with all the loops of thread. Brother had worn it when he went as roadkill last Halloween, covered in dirt and fake blood. He was so tall the costume’s feet dangled around his knees and added to the carcass effect. But Brother was in Alaska with Dad now, and it was her turn to claim it. Girl was surprised that someone had washed it and that the terrycloth came out white and clean and fluffy.