Girl wrapped it around her arm in a bundle and brought it to her room. What could she do with it? Girl pulled it over her clothes, zipped it up, and buttoned the hood over her hair. The ears flopped down on the sides—for some reason the ears had never been wired, but you could tell it was a bunny, at least for sure you could tell from the back where it had a white yarn pom-pom tail. The bunny suit was big enough for one and a half of her—the shoe covers reached her feet and the elastic wrist cuffs landed at her wrists, in spite of her too-long, gangly arms.
Girl rummaged through her underwear drawer and found the black strapless bra she had bought to go under a prom dress freshman year. It was see-through lace and came down to her belly button, because the bra lady at the store said her boobs were too big for a regular strapless bra. Girl stretched the sides around the terrycloth suit, and the eye hooks actually met in the back on the largest setting. Girl remembered that she used to have a pair of silver lamé bikini underwear that had ripped up the back, but she thought she had kept them anyway. Girl opened her white wooden dresser that her mom had bought when she was pregnant with Girl and had glued wallpaper cutouts on—a giraffe on one side and other animals on the other, back when she was dreaming of Girl and carrying her in her belly. They had taken the animals off when Girl hit puberty, but she missed them a little, even though she was sixteen. Girl found the black-and-silver pair wadded up under all her everyday panties. The back was black mesh, and there was a slit as Girl had remembered. Girl always felt they weren’t as sexy as she thought they should be—too garish—but the bunny tail fit through the rip with only a little stretching. Girl looked in the full-length mirror on the back of the door. She was marvelous. A Playboy Bunny. Anti-sexy but funny and playful, everything she wanted to be. Girl wondered if they had a tray, and if her parents would let her use it. They had a bag of disposable champagne glasses in the kitchen left over from New Year’s Eve. Maybe Girl could glue them to the tray? Like a cocktail waitress. Wasn’t that what Playboy Bunnies did at the Playboy Mansion? Serve drinks and wear ears and bunny tails? Girl and her friends were sober—would her friends think Girl was glorifying alcohol? But if she didn’t carry a tray, would they get that Girl was a Playboy Bunny? She went downstairs to look.
Stepmother was sitting at the dining room table, rubbing her eyebrows off as she always did. She had had half-brows for as long as Girl could remember—from the top of the arch to the outside corner of her eye was only stubble. Sometimes she wore Band-Aids over the bare half to keep herself from rubbing. Girl wasn’t sure which looked worse.
“Look, Stepmother! I’m a Playboy Bunny!” Girl felt like such a fabulous tongue-in-cheek creation. It was the best costume she had ever had. It was equal to Brother’s roadkill costume last year. And the only skin Girl showed was on her face and her hands—she wished she had black satin gloves. Girl used to have a pair of black gloves that were her grandmother’s, but they were too tight to fit over the terry cloth sleeves. Maybe Girl could find something else in the closet.
“Girl, that is awful!” Stepmother looked at her as if Girl was a skin full of shamefulness. Like a prostitute. A stripper. A real Playboy Bunny. Her eyes were staring at Girl’s silver panties like she had X-ray vision. Like they could burn through the lamé, the terry cloth, even her jeans underneath. She raised her little fist (her hands and feet were so small compared to the mountainous rest of her) and pointed her stubby finger at Girl’s crotch. “Look at your shiny pussy! Judy, you can’t let her wear this!” Stepmother could not stop looking at her shiny pussy. Girl hated the word pussy. She and Brother were not allowed to say pussy. Mother and Stepmother always said it was derogatory, disrespectful, that what Girl had between her legs was a vulva, a vagina. Girl could never ever say or even think the word pussy, so why did Girl now have a pussy full of shame that was drawing her stepmother’s eyes like a tractor beam?
Girl ran upstairs and ripped off the costume and left it on the floor in a heap, launching herself onto that white eyelet comforter she had been so stupidly proud of, stupid little girl. Girl cried into her pillow, cried black mascara rings onto the white lace and she didn’t care, she sobbed loudly, pushing the snot and mucus and shame out of her mouth into her pillow. She wasn’t a dirty girl anymore, she wasn’t a dirty girl, and Stepmother wouldn’t stop looking at her pussy and Girl hated the word pussy and she wasn’t trying to be bad.
Mother came upstairs. “I told her not to say ‘pussy,’” she said. “You can wear the costume. I told her it was ironic and funny and that you weren’t being too sexy.” Mother stroked the back of her head. She didn’t say anything about Stepmother’s laser beam eyes stuck on her pussy, or how dirty her words made Girl feel. It was about vocabulary, then, not eyes like fingers running over her teenaged flesh. Girl couldn’t even bear to look at the rabbit suit. She wanted to burn it. Girl never put it on again. Mother couldn’t understand that words from a lesbian stepmother felt more like words from a man than words from a woman. Stepmother’s whole demeanor had changed since she started lithium, but Girl was the only one who saw it.
you should masturbate
Now seventeen, Girl stood at her bedroom window smoking a cigarette, too lazy to go outside to smoke. From here she could see over the tops of the maple trees to the streetlight at the corner, and if she remembered not to daydream, she could see Stepmother’s car before it turned down the lane. Girl dared herself not to flinch as the car crept closer. How long could she continue to smoke this time? Dread tightened her stomach the moment Stepmother’s car turned toward their house, four blocks away. Two blocks. One block. She dropped her cigarette to the patio stones below and fled far into a book, so Stepmother wouldn’t speak to her if she was lucky. Girl wished she could play chicken longer without flinching. She wished Stepmother worked full-time again, so she wasn’t home so often.
9:10 a.m. and Girl was late for school. The damn snooze button was heroin, pulling her under again and again. Of course she had been up too late talking on the phone after her parents were asleep. She’d buy back an hour of that conversation and trade it for sleep if she could, but it was too late now.
“Girl! You’re late again!” Stepmother said, walking into Girl’s room without knocking. “You were on the phone after we told you to go to bed, weren’t you?”
“I was talking to Jacob. We’re having problems,” Girl said.
“You are always having problems. I don’t know why you need a boyfriend. You need to focus on school. If you dated girls you wouldn’t have these problems.”
For years, Girl had been terrified that she would turn into a lesbian in her sleep and wake up to a life of lies and hiding and would be ostracized forever. Stepmother had known she was a lesbian since she was twelve. Mother always said that she was a “political lesbian” and it wasn’t until she got heavy into feminism that she became a lesbian. Girl thought being a lesbian was just about the worst thing that could happen to you, and she was strongly anti-feminist, just in case. Her boyfriend’s father, just like every guy she ever met, had asked her gruffly, “Do you ever think you’re a lesbian?” when he heard about her parents. No, she was not a lesbian, and no, if she was, it would not magically solve all her problems. She had enough girl drama with her best friend to know females were not any easier to get along with.
Stepmother walked out and Girl dressed quickly, rummaging through the discarded clothes on the floor. Girl had clothing crises almost every morning that required several outfit changes, but she never hung things back up, instead throwing them in piles of clean, dirty, and semi-clean laundry. Jeans and T-shirts went on easy that morning without ironing. Girl hated wrinkles so much she’d iron Brother’s clothes for him, back when he lived at home. He was gone now, had moved to Alaska to live with their father.
Stepmother walked back in, one hand behind her back and an odd look in her eyes. She looked calculating, sinister, slightly unbalanced. She was grinning but it wasn’t a happy look. It was a look that made Girl’s hair sta
nd up on her arms and her leg muscles yearn to run. It was a look she was intimately familiar with since Stepmother started taking lithium.
“If you masturbated, you wouldn’t need a boyfriend,” Stepmother said. “I understand that you want sex, but you can do it yourself. I don’t know why your mother won’t talk to you about this, but someone has to.”
Stepmother brought her hands forward to show Girl a plastic torpedo the color of old teeth. Girl knew exactly what it was, and although catalogs listed it as a six-inch facial massager, ivory color, she knew better. Her brother had found their parents’ vibrator years ago in the nightstand table on Stepmother’s side of the bed and had showed it to his sister, but Girl wasn’t going to tell Stepmother that she had seen it before.
“Have you ever used a vibrator? Your mother likes it quite a lot. You could borrow it sometimes,” Stepmother said.
I have to get out of here, Girl’s brain screamed, but Stepmother was blocking the door. There was no escape.
“Just give me your hand. I’m not going to use it on you, I just want you to see how it feels.”
“No!” Girl pushed past Stepmother and ran for the stairs.
“I just want to show you how it works! You are being ridiculous!”
“You are not touching me with that thing! It was in Mom’s vagina!” Girl thundered down the stairs, one hand on the bannister and the other on the wall for balance so she wouldn’t fall. Stepmother caught up to Girl in the living room, the vibrator still clenched in her small, hairless fist.
“Stop acting like a child. I was just going to use it on your hand so you could see how it feels. I am a woman, there is nothing inappropriate about this. You are too sensitive. Don’t you push your issues with your father onto me,” Stepmother said. “I am nothing like your father. I have never, ever, done or said anything inappropriate. That’s your issue with your father. I am a woman, not a man.”
Girl shoved her bare feet into cotton boat shoes and grabbed her purse as she ran out the door, slamming it behind her.
Stepmother opened the door too quickly, banging it into the wall, her voice catching Girl before she reached the sidewalk. “There is nothing inappropriate about this! You are being silly!” Stepmother repeated, but Girl didn’t look back. School suddenly didn’t seem so bad now, even though she had left her book bag and hadn’t made a lunch. She ran the first block, then slowed to a walk and lit a cigarette. I cannot wait to leave this place, she thought, too angry to cry. The cigarette distilled her shame into resolve. I will tell no one about this, ever, she promised herself, but of course she told her friends when she got to school. It was proof that Stepmother was crazy—one more story to sum up why Girl needed to leave home.
Girl suspected that her mother would never believe her, or if she did, she’d say Girl was overreacting. Everyone always said that Girl was always overreacting. Girl knew that a lot of her friends had it a lot worse than she did. She knew what had happened wasn’t the same as being molested or raped. It made her sick and made her want to curl up and not let anyone touch her, hissing like a barnacle closing its shell when Stepmother walked by, but it wasn’t like Girl had been touched. I am just being too sensitive, Girl told herself, trying to believe it. She didn’t know how not to be too sensitive. But Girl felt that Stepmother’s vibe was off—nothing she could prove—but Girl had enough unsubstantiated vibes to fill a warehouse. Now, though, she had a story she could hold in her hands, she could turn it around in the light in front of her friends. She could give herself permission to leave.
gitsis
Brother came back from Alaska with a GED and a fiancée. Brother used to have a black Mohawk past his shoulders, but his new girlfriend had encouraged him to cut it short and get a job. Girl thought he looked like a geeky Q-tip, his frizzy hair a cloud around the top of his head. She liked him better with it long, but Girl’s opinion no longer mattered—she had been replaced by this fiancée and she was jealous as hell. Everything about the siblings now was oil and water, but they still kept trying to go back to how things used to be, before he moved away, before she found religion, before Stepmother became bipolar. Too much had changed.
Brother was sitting in a booth at Gitsis, his favorite diner. The place was a dive—brown, rectangular floor tiles laid in a herringbone pattern that were probably very cool in the 1970s, but now looked perpetually dirty. They served soda in dimpled, brown plastic cups; crinkle-cut fries on thick, ceramic plates; and coffee in beige mugs with one brown line drawn around the edge. Gitsis was two blocks from the High School of the Arts, where Brother used to go, and it was still his favorite hangout. He and his friends sat for hours drinking coffee, sketching in notepads, and talking about Rocky Horror Picture Show, music, girls, parents … all the usual teen discussions.
Girl had gone to Gitsis once with her uncle, and the waitress remembered him from his high school days, twenty years before. “What happened to your friend?” she asked. “The one who always ate french fries with gravy.”
Gitsis never changed. Twenty-four-seven breakfast and white hotdogs and hangover food. Girl hated it, but since Brother had moved into an apartment with his girlfriend, if she wanted to see him, she had to come here. She walked over to the table in her tight jeans and baggy sweatshirt, standing awkwardly next to the booth. There wasn’t room for her to sit. Brother reached up under her sweatshirt and grabbed her breast.
“What the hell?” Girl jumped back.
“I was trying to tickle you,” he said. “Calm the fuck down. I was trying to tickle you and I missed.”
Girl crossed her arms over her chest, willing her flesh to turn into armor. Her brother had grabbed her boob. Brother looked at her with unreadable eyes, his face tightened in his own anger. “Calm the fuck down. It was a mistake.” Girl ran out of the diner, her face a dry, closed-off mask. She didn’t believe in mistakes.
notes from the fourth wall
raised by wolves
“You say ‘I was raised by lesbians’ like you were raised by wolves,” a friend commented.
“Well, that’s kind of how I mean it,” I answered. I always identified with Mowgli from The Jungle Book.
We were our own pack, a subset of the larger world in which we lived. I wasn’t one of the wolves—I wasn’t gay—but because I belonged to them, I didn’t fit in with the rest of the society I lived in, either. I grew up straight in a gay world. I didn’t fit anywhere. As an adolescent, this not-quite-fitting only manifested in the straight world. The pictures on my living room walls didn’t look like my friends’ family portraits. There were so many questions I was asked and I had so few answers to give. But the gay community was home. I didn’t have any real extended family, and so our holidays were peopled with lesbian couples who always asked me normal questions, like what did I want to be when I grew up and how was school and did I like cats better than dogs. It was only in our group of same-sex couples that I was seen just as me, not as The Girl with the Lesbian Parents.
But once I was out of my parents’ house, I no longer fit in with the gay world. If I went to a lesbian bar with friends, I was treated like an imposter. Of course I would quickly explain that my parents were gay, and then their defensiveness melted off their faces, and I was almost one of the club. Almost. My experience was slightly different, and I didn’t fit in their circle anymore. Like Mowgli, I had to go find my place among my own kind. Even though I had mimicked the straight kids for most of my life, I still felt like an interloper. I spent a very long time trying to be just like everyone else, until everything that was beautiful or interesting about me had blended away to beige. I had to own my quirkiness and that of my family before I could ever find my place in the world.
But homosexuality wasn’t the only differentiating feature of my wolf pack. For this metaphor to work, the wolves have to have fangs, otherwise I might just as easily say that I was raised by manatees or goats or any other herbivore. “Raised by wolves” implies teeth crunching bones and snarling at one another a
s they fight over the dying carcass of some unfortunate dinner item. Slightly different from a herd of goats. Like a wolf pack, we had no personal space, no boundaries or modesty. We might as well have slept in a pile at the back of a cave, scratching at each other’s fleas.
Have you read about wolves marking their territory with urine? In our house it was with excrement. If my brother was pooping and Stepmother had to go, she made him get off the toilet and finish in the basement, where there was an old toilet with a pink seat. A yellow-stained shower curtain afforded a modicum of privacy, and a bare bulb hung down from the ceiling. Stepmother would never go down there herself to relieve her bowels. It wasn’t her fault that my brother took so long in the bathroom.
I think most people take modesty for granted as a basic human right. There’s something hard to describe about having parents that don’t conform to the normal rules like wearing clothes, and who tell dirty jokes to children or discuss their sex life in intimate detail with them. Couple that with a stepmother who yelled at gas station attendants when she thought the prices are too high—“I don’t appreciate your price gouging!”—and once stood up in the middle of a movie and yelled at the screen, “This sucks! It’s not fair that he died! He was supposed to live!” I was permanently off-balance. I didn’t know how I was supposed to act, so I watched other people. I mimicked proper behavior, like I was learning a foreign culture. I felt like a method actor, trying to pass as a normal kid. But having fuzzy boundaries gave me an unstable base, and that meant that I was always on the defensive. Like the lowest wolf in the pack, it seemed like everyone was a potential threat, except my mother. Did I snap and snarl unnecessarily at my brother that day in Gitsis? Was I too reactionary, defensive? It seems so in retrospect. No other boundary incursion occurred after that—accidental or otherwise. He returned to being the one person I was safe with in my family of origin.
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