It is hard to be thirteen, or sixteen. It’s hard when there are no rules and you have to make them up on your own. It is hard when you aren’t allowed to say that you don’t want your parents to see you naked anymore. I was primed to take offense. What I did know was that I didn’t have words to explain how a glance from my lesbian stepmother felt like a man’s gaze. I wasn’t allowed to suggest that even though my father was a doctor, I did not want to change clothes in front of him. Modesty was not an option either in my mother’s house in New York nor my father’s house in Alaska. Eyes like fingers traveled across my teenaged skin. Constant micro-aggressions kept my nerve endings on high alert. I hyperventilated often, and told people I had asthma, even though my doctor told me it was all in my head.
I did what any sensible kid would do—okay, maybe not what even most sensible kids would do—but I found community with the born-again Christians. The women at church made very clear rules. I was forgiven for my misdeeds and given a blueprint for staying on the right side of appropriate. I was adopted by a new pack, and had a new alpha, but it’s hard to shake off your family of origin. Sure, I could go to the Christian Youth Organization meetings and sing songs about Jesus and try to pretend I didn’t feel dorky, but when they told me that I was sinning by wearing stretch pants to school, I never went back. There was no way I was buying that I was responsible for causing impure thoughts in men. I had too much feminist ingrained in me for that. It seemed belonging to a group was overrated. All I ever wanted was to form a family of my own.
Once I was married and had my own children, I was finally just like everyone else. Then, the differentness of my family was one generation removed. Oh, I still played the pronoun game when talking to strangers. My stepmother’s androgynous name, Pat, made it simple to mislead people, and I did it easily and with a light touch. But I only did it when I didn’t trust someone. Most of the time, I mentioned my parents’ sexuality casually as it came up in conversation, and if acquaintances expressed shock, their discomfort sparked my derision instead of shame. It told me that these new people would never be part of my tribe, and I no longer cared about fitting in with theirs.
It was only complicated when I visited any of my parents. Both of my ex-husbands have seen my stepmother and my father naked on multiple occasions, and as much as my ex-spouses begged me to make my parents wear pants, I had no control over either of them. Stepmother swam in the pond in a white T-shirt and white underpants with a hole showing her crack when my first ex-husband and I visited, and she often gardened in her underwear, even in the front yard. “It looks like a bathing suit!” she said. No one agreed with her. When my father came to visit, he was a fan of giving goodnight hugs in a T-shirt that ended at his navel, his full, blue-headed genitalia swinging in the wind. Neither of my husbands appreciated the “let it all hang out” philosophy.
In my house, children are allowed to remain innocent. I do not watch my ten-year-old change clothes and he is allowed to take as long as he needs in the bathroom. I do not let my youngest child do naked bottom dances in front of his older brother, because it embarrasses him. When my eldest went on an overnight school trip, I allowed him to bring a bathing suit to wear in the shower, as he requested. I teach my boys that no one has a right to look at them without clothing if they don’t want them to. I let my boys wear dresses or camouflage pants or superhero costumes or whatever outfit matches the identity they want to try on that day. I let them visit all of their grandparents, but I don’t let them spend the night with any of them. They are my wolf pups, and I protect them.
the fight
When Girl was seventeen and in her senior year of high school, she attended an award ceremony with Stepmother because Mother had a work conflict. It was a black-tie dinner, and Girl loved getting dressed up—she had gone to proms with everyone she could wrangle into inviting her, including Brother, when he broke up with his girlfriend the week before his junior prom. Stepmother got a lot of awards, like she did every year, and they piled up on the round table: Disability Insurance Sales Leader for the local office, the state, and the region; Million Dollar Round Table; and an invitation to the annual leader’s conference for the top two hundred salespeople in the country.
Stepmother handed Girl one of her prizes, a Steuben glass cube engraved with American flags. “These suckers are worth a couple hundred dollars,” she told Girl quietly. “Even though this one is ugly. I like the birds best. They’ll be yours someday—you can sell ’em and make a few bucks.” Girl was proud of Stepmother, and liked how the other insurance agents came up to Girl to comment on what a good job Stepmother did. “She’s a firecracker!” one man said. “A pistol!” said another. Everyone treated Girl like a real grown-up, even though her white dress with the blue skirt and big off-center bow was a little more “prom” than “cocktail.”
For once, she was able to let go of the resentment that was as much a part of her as her hair color or her glasses. Bitterness was hard for her to release, but this time, without Brother or Mother or anyone else around, Girl softened toward Stepmother. It had to do with the way Stepmother treated her with respect, the way her eyes shone with pride when she introduced Girl to her coworkers. And it had something to do with watching Stepmother graciously receive her praise, seeing her as a success, instead of an instigator of turmoil.
When they got home, Girl decided to confide in Stepmother. She didn’t do this very often—Mother was her chosen confidant—but some things were too hard to tell her mother. Like when she went on the pill freshman year, it had been Stepmother she told first.
“Brother has been making me uncomfortable lately,” Girl told her.
“What happened, honey? You can talk to me. It’s okay,” Stepmother said. They were both changing out of their fancy clothes. Girl was hanging her dress up in her closet, Stepmother was in the doorway. Their bedrooms were across the hall from each other.
“Well, the other day, when we were at the coffee shop, he reached up under my shirt and grabbed my breast.”
“Why did he do that?” Stepmother was enraged, as Girl had counted on.
“He said he was trying to tickle me,” Girl answered. He had been furious when Girl yelled at him. You’re being too sensitive, he said, he hadn’t meant it at all, he said, and it was an accident. Girl was always too sensitive. Accidents happen. She didn’t know how to think about it yet.
“I always worried that he inherited some of your father’s perversion,” Stepmother said. She was always saying that Brother was just like their father, and she didn’t mean that he was headed for a career in medicine. She thought Father was mentally unbalanced, sinisterly perverted, and a pathological liar.
“But, Girl, I always wondered if you two were too close. It’s really your fault that he crosses the line, because you always let him see you in the shower.”
Girl sank to the carpet and covered her ears with her hands. It was not her fault. Their house only had one bathroom, and every morning everyone in the family was in and out of it. If Girl was in the shower, Brother was on the pot and Mother was blow drying her hair at the sink. It was the only way everyone got out of the house on time. Their parents took the children to nude beaches. Mother and Stepmother raised the children not to be modest—hell, they weren’t allowed to be modest. Everyone in the family walked around naked, it wasn’t like Girl was parading nude to entice Brother like some sibling cock tease. How was Girl supposed to create boundaries where none existed?
“Girl, I’m just saying that it wasn’t normal how you let him see you naked, or in a towel. What did you expect?”
Girl screamed to blot out her words. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. She was balled up, her knees pulled close to her chest, her back against the closet door.
“Stop screaming! You’re hysterical!” Girl wouldn’t stop. Girl needed to drown out her stepmother’s voice. Stepmother slapped her across the face, once, twice, four times. Girl kept screaming.
“Liste
n, you are crazy,” Stepmother said in quiet, tightly controlled words. “I am going to call the ambulance and have them take you away in a straitjacket! They will lock you up!” Her face was red and her eyes cold and filled with fury.
Girl stopped screaming abruptly, terrified of the men with straitjackets. She was just a kid. No one would ever believe her that she wasn’t crazy, wasn’t hysterical, but was just trying to drown out the voice that said it was all her fault.
Stepmother left the room and Girl called her boyfriend. Mother still wasn’t home. “Come and get me,” Girl told Jacob. “I need to get out of here. She hit me.” Girl hung up before Stepmother could hear her. Girl always swore that if Stepmother hit her again, she would leave and never come back. It was a relief that it had finally happened. Girl wrote a note to her mother on a napkin: “Stepmother hit me. I am moving out. I will be staying with friends.” Girl always promised Mother that she wouldn’t run away without telling mother first where she was headed so Mother wouldn’t worry.
“You know, after you calm down, if you want to talk to me you can,” Stepmother said through Girl’s bedroom door. “You can even wake me up in the middle of the night if you need to.”
“I’m on the phone,” was all Girl said in reply.
When Jacob pulled up outside in his diarrhea-brown hatchback, Girl yelled, “I’m taking the dog out!” She left the napkin-note on the stove for her mother and ran out the door. She put the dog in the fenced-in backyard, confident that Mother would hear him bark and let him back in.
notes from the fourth wall
stepmother’s side of the story
“Do you know the one thing I am most ashamed of?” my stepmother asked me years later. “The fight when you ran away from home.”
“Yeah. I’m not sure it’s going into the book,” I said.
“You must write it,” she told me. “If the story is to be accurate, you must write it. But here’s how I remembered it: you and I went to the awards ceremony. You confided in me and we were having a nice conversation, and then you started screaming for no reason, so I slapped you because I thought you were hysterical. I had been told that when someone is hysterical you have to slap them across the face. All I could think was that the neighbors would hear you screaming and think I was abusing you and call the police. I was so afraid of losing you. We were lesbians, and if they thought I was abusing you the police could take you away and I’d never see you again. I’m so sorry for that. Really.”
I made some sort of there-there noises. “It’s okay,” I said. It wasn’t, but there weren’t any words that would make it so. Throw a plate on the floor and look at the broken pieces. Tell the plate you are sorry. The plate is still broken.
“But you know, I always thought maybe you really left just to spite me. We had told you that once you turned eighteen you would be out of the house for good—either in college or working full-time. So I always thought you left first just to defy me.”
“That really had nothing to do with it,” I answered.
“Well, I just wanted you to know why I did what I did,” she said.
We hugged awkwardly. I always hugged her sternum to sternum, with my butt sticking out so she couldn’t pat it. I hated when she patted my bottom.
scraps of paper
After Girl left home—running away sounded more dramatic than she thought was justified—she stayed a week or two with one friend, then another week with a different one, always moving on before she wore out her welcome. A teacher let Girl stay in her guest bedroom for a month, until she needed the spare bed when her own mother came to town. Girl was at Sandy’s house when the ice storm hit.
“Wake up, girls,” Sandy’s mom said. “There’s been an ice storm. There’s no school, and we lost power. We’re going to your grandmother’s, Sandy. Girl, you are going to have to call someone for a ride. The radio said over 750,000 people lost power, and no one knows how long it will take to get it back on.”
Girl and Sandy looked out the frost-covered window, rubbing the pinky sides of their fists on the window to clear it. Outside was surreally beautiful. Icicles hung from every tree branch so heavily they bowed in curving arcs to the ground. Bushes were encased in ice, each twig wearing a thick coating. Whole trees had fallen over, their roots sticking out of the ground like large wheels. A black power line hung across the road. Everything was still, super quiet without traffic noises—there was a state of emergency, and roads were closed. Girl had never noticed how noisy houses were, with fans, furnaces—the electronic buzz of radios and televisions—until suddenly all the noises stopped.
Girl packed up her clothes into blue, plastic grocery bags, and Jacob came and got her. He had arranged for her to spend the day with his adult sister and her baby, because although she didn’t have power either, she had a gas stove. Girl knew the sister—every Friday Jacob’s older siblings and their children came to their father’s for dinner, and most of the time Girl was invited, too. They all crossed themselves and recited a prayer in unison that Girl didn’t know and wished she did, so she just bowed her head and looked at the red plush dining room carpeting. She was shy around them, but they were always nice, and when Jean’s daughter took her first steps, it was to Girl’s outstretched arms, not her mother’s or grandfather’s.
School was closed for a week, then two, and finally three whole weeks, but Girl wished it were in session—it would have made it easier for her to find a place to stay if people had power, and given her somewhere to go during the day at least. Jacob didn’t have power either, but his father let her stay in one of his empty bedrooms: he had five children, and only two were still at home. They had a gas stove and a gas heater in the family room. The bedrooms got down to fifty degrees, but with extra blankets it wasn’t that big of a deal.
Girl constantly looked through the “roommates wanted” section of the newspaper, calling every place that seemed likely. No one wanted to rent to a high school kid, even though she assured them that she had child support from her father and could make rent. Finally, Mother’s best friend Marty found a coworker that agreed to take her in, but not until after the ice storm.
“I’d let her stay here,” Jacob’s father had told him, and that was what Girl had been hoping for, “but I don’t want you to feel obligated to stay together. If she’s living here and you want to break up, you won’t be able to.” Sigh. While Girl understood the Catholic man’s position, it would have been so much simpler to be living with her boyfriend and his family. Then engaged, and then married. Fast-track to a new family. But he had said no, so she waited for the ice storm to end so that she could move in with this stranger named Ravina.
Every night, Girl wrote diary entries on little scraps of paper, then tucked them inside her student planner. She wrote practical things, like lists of people she could stay with—ranked by feasibility—and entries filled with self-doubt, like on the night she left:
“It’s hard to believe I’m a runaway. I think that sounds so serious, but I guess that’s what I am, technically. I wonder if I’m just making something out of nothing. Am I overreacting? I always thought runaways were either awful or came from awful families. I wonder if I’m all wrong. I am scared that they’re right. Tomorrow things will be clearer. I need my toothbrush.” And, on another day, “I don’t wanna ever go back. Maybe I’m sick, but I’m enjoying this. Well, maybe not enjoying, per se, but I’m comfortable within myself. I am still sort of scared that this is wrong and that I’m overreacting. I know that there are a lot of worse cases. I don’t know anymore. Now I just almost hate Stepmother–especially for afterward saying that I could wake her up if I needed to.
1. I am not crazy.
2. If I had stayed there Saturday I would have gone crazy.
I sort of feel lost and scared. I feel as though there is no going back. I miss my mother holding me but I can’t be a part of her sickness.”
Mostly, though, when she was all alone in the night, she wrote about how terribly she missed h
er mother. Some nights she cried. She tucked her diary scraps of paper into her calendar and didn’t show them to anyone. It was the only time in her life that she kept a daily diary, and she wasn’t sure why she did it.
She remembered once when she was so sad that she thought she would break apart, back in junior year. She just cried all the time and Stepmother thought it was hormones and she said with a voice full of fear, “Judy, I think Girl’s depressed!” And Girl only cried harder because she did not want to be defective, she didn’t want to be like Stepmother. And she remembered how Stepmother and Mother took her out of school for a few days and they all went down to the little cabin in the woods with a round, wooden bathtub that was too big for the hot water heater and Mother heated water on the stove so Girl could have a bath in that big, glorious bathtub. And she remembered the way Mother looked with her closed-lip smile, her eyes crinkling behind her glasses that looked just like Girl’s, and how she used to sit on her mother’s lap and push and pull on her mother’s lips—it was a game Mother used to play with her own mother. The goal was to make the lips line up right, except Mother would always exaggerate her movements so it was impossible, and Girl would get scared that Mother’s face would never go back to normal ever again. Mostly she remembered the feel of her mother around her, holding her when she cried, like sinking into a warm bowl of pudding, soft and safe and where the hole in Girl’s chest was finally filled up.
When Girl first left home, she had called the Center for Youth Services, an outreach program for runaway teens. They had free family counseling, but after the first session, her mother showed up alone.
Girlish Page 25