Girlish

by Lara Lillibridge

  When Girl entered the house, she found her favorite of their four cats sleeping on the sofa, so she grabbed her up and dumped her into the car, ignoring her windmilling paws and plaintive yowls. Girl wanted to take both of the female cats, Persephone and Pandora. The male cats lived outside half the time and could take care of themselves. She crept upstairs without turning on the lights and grabbed her jewelry box from her dressing room, secreting that to the car as well. Although they didn’t have much money, Samson liked to buy her jewelry so that she’d look like a “high-maintenance chick.” Girl hoped that she could pawn it all and, combined with the cash, pay off the debts that were in her name and maybe have something left for a security deposit and some used furniture.

  Girl had packed away her summer clothes into two small suitcases a few weeks before, which she had then hidden in the storage space behind her closet wall. Before she could retrieve them, she needed to find the other cat. Suddenly, Samson spoke through the closed bedroom door.

  “What are you doing, Girl?” His voice was glacial and tightly controlled, which unnerved her more than if he had yelled.

  Samson had told Girl what happened to the last two girls that left him: one, he hit, and the other, he raped. She didn’t know if the stories were true, but she wasn’t going to take any chances. Samson always said he would never hurt Girl because he loved her too much, and so far, he had never laid a hand on her. She knew, though, that whatever love held him back in the past was gone now. The counselor had stressed that women in abusive relationships are statistically most at risk of being murdered when they tried to leave. Only a hollow-core door separated Girl from an unstable man high on morphine and in possession of four guns, two of which were semi-automatic.

  “I’m looking for Pandora,” Girl replied, trying not to let her voice shake.

  “She’s in here with me,” he said. “If you want her, come in and get her.”

  Girl ran. She left the cat, left the suitcases, and ran down the stairs, out to her mother’s old car—hers had been totaled in an accident the month before, and Mother had let her drive the 1985 Camry she kept in New York and drove in the summers. Girl careened down the icy road, jumping the curb at the corner. Her hands steered the car forward, but her eyes watched only the rearview mirror. She made it to the expressway but when she passed the exit for her storage unit she didn’t stop. Samson might be following, and he might expect her to go there.

  Girl just kept driving, glancing over her shoulder. She had secretly written down directions to her aunt’s house in Pittsburgh, her first stop on her way to Florida, and hidden them in her car, just in case. She didn’t take her foot off the gas pedal until she made it to the interstate. Girl had promised till death do we part. This, then, was the afterlife.

  cue theme music

  i will survive

  Girl arrived at her aunt’s house after midnight. Her aunt was waiting up for her, though her cousins were asleep. Aunt Kiki gave Girl her bedroom to sleep in, and Girl fell asleep with an aching heart, trying not to think of Samson’s smiling face, of the better times, before it had all come to this. Girl didn’t think she’d sleep, but she did, clinging to her giant, slobbery dog. When she woke up her aunt had gone to work, but Stepmother was there. She had flown up from Key West to drive down with Girl, and taken a cab from the airport, an expense Girl had never heard of her ever indulging, certainly not when Girl was there to pick her up. “I didn’t want to stress you further,” Stepmother said.

  Although Girl loved her stepmother and knew Stepmother loved her, she was never the person Girl turned to in a crisis. Mother had taken a part-time job at a tax preparation company, and Stepmother didn’t have to work, so she had flown up on less than twelve hours’ notice to help. Girl thought maybe she and Stepmother needed a road trip to help her lose her resentments.

  They turned on the Weather Channel and saw that a big storm was approaching, so they decided not to wait until Aunt Kiki got off work to leave. Girl didn’t have anything to pack, didn’t even have clean underwear, so they loaded up the dog and cat and got on the road. Girl was too afraid to call her boss—she couldn’t deal with the guilt of leaving without any notice, so she tore five pages from her diary and handwrote a note, hoping her boss would understand. Girl fed her letter into a hotel’s fax machine the first night on their four-day drive south.

  They listened to the radio to drown out the cat, who cried the entire trip. Every time Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” came on, which was at least once a day, they turned the knob all the way to the right and sang along at the top of their lungs. They ate at Cracker Barrel whenever there was one, and picked up some Hanes Her Way underwear and simple clothing and toiletries at Walmarts and truck stops. Girl had her emergency money in the trunk, but Stepmother insisted on paying for everything. “You’ll need that later,” she said. The storm they saw on the Weather Channel had left a foot of snow all the way to South Carolina, where cities didn’t own many snowplows and towns were shut down. With every mile they drove, the terrible sadness inside Girl lessened. She could feel her past flowing out behind the car like long ribbons undulating in the wind, stretching all the way back to Rochester, New York. Round about Georgia she felt the ends of those ribbons fly free, the ties that bound her in helplessness ripped away by the wind. Taking action had given her strength. Girl was only twenty-six, and it could only get better from here. Finally, they pulled into the driveway in Key West, 1,600 miles from where Girl began. The January night was warm and sweetly scented with night-blooming jasmine. The change in latitude made the night sky look different—the constellations loomed closer, seemed more personal. “That’s Cassiopeia,” Stepmother said, pointing to the constellation. “It makes a W in the sky.” From then on, it was Girl’s favorite, and she looked for it whenever she looked at the stars.

  key west

  Every night after work, Girl went rollerblading on the bike path next to the Atlantic Ocean. She began at Higgs Beach, first changing into Lycra shorts and a tank top in the round bathhouse. She filled her water bottle at the drinking fountain and then followed the path until it ended at a stoplight at the top of the island, then turned back—seven miles round trip. Rollerblading reminded her of roller-skating as a child—it tapped into long-forgotten innocence, a place where nothing mattered as much as the vibration of concrete through her feet. When Girl got too hot, she took off her tank top and skated in her exercise bra, enjoying the honks from passing cars. She jumped over cracks in the sidewalk, but tried not to sway too much to the music in her headphones—she didn’t want to be too dorky. But the sun sparkling on the water filled in all her broken pieces with joy and hope.

  Key West was an island of misfits, artists, and broken people who came to “the rock” to put themselves back together again. Girl dressed in donated clothing from Mother’s friends and things she found at the Salvation Army. She went to the “Gay Church” with her parents, to “Gay Bingo” at the 501 Bar on Sunday afternoons with Brother, who was spending the winter there as well, and to the straight dance club with her new friend, Lorraine. Girl got a job at a car insurance agency, and soon knew enough people to recognize faces in the grocery store. Soon she had a drag queen roommate who helped her accessorize and shared her clothes, as well as a few other close friends. She was able to say “my mom’s a lesbian,” without anyone acting shocked or fascinated. She hadn’t known how much she needed that. For the first time, she lived in a place that wasn’t segregated by sexuality—people mixed freely. She kissed a girl or two, now that she could be curious without feeling like it would be fulfilling some unspoken prophesy. In the end, though, she liked kissing boys better.

  Girl found a new good boyfriend, one her parents liked, even.

  “Be sure your apartment is clean every time he comes over,” Stepmother told her. Girl was lying in the sun in a bikini at her parents’ house, as she did most Sunday afternoons between church and Bingo.

  “Are you fucking serious?” Girl asked.
“My lesbian stepmother is giving me man-trapping advice?”

  “I’ll teach you to make Swedish meatballs,” Stepmother said.

  “I know how to cook, Stepmother,” she said. “And whatever happened to feminism?”

  “He’s a nice boy, Girl.”

  Girl flipped over onto her back.

  “You really have a beautiful body,” Stepmother said, a small smile on her lips. Girl wanted to throw up. She reached quickly for her shirt.

  “What? There is nothing wrong with that. Don’t push your issues with your father off on me. We are both women.”

  Girl thought about it. She couldn’t put into words this feeling that her lesbian stepmother was more like a man than a woman. She thought about how she herself talked to her friends—they complimented the outfit, not the body. “That swimsuit is so cute on you,” she had said to her best friend’s teenaged daughter. Not “you have a beautiful body.” She opened her mouth, and closed it again. There wasn’t anything she could say that would make sense to Stepmother. Girl put on her shirt and walked inside.

  defective

  Mother went out of town for a few days. “She can never handle it if I go anywhere without her,” Mother confided in Girl. “Yet, if she goes out of town without me, she’s totally fine. She doesn’t even always remember to call.” Girl promised Mother that she would “keep an eye” on Stepmother while mother went on the writing workshop or whatever it was that she was so looking forward to, wherever it was that she couldn’t bring Stepmother along.

  Stepmother called first thing Saturday morning. Girl had agreed to help her replace a mini-blind in their rental condominium.

  “Well, I had a bad night,” Stepmother said. “I couldn’t sleep, and at two a.m. I realized I had forgotten to give the cat his medicine. So I gave him his pills, but then I got confused, and the print on the bottle was small that I couldn’t read it, and I thought I had given him the dog’s pills, and I thought it would kill him, so there I was, crying, completely naked, holding the cat in my arms and trying to call the vet.”

  Girl had seen Stepmother naked often enough to be able to picture this clearly. In her head she saw Stepmother hugging that orange tabby to her massive, lumpy body. The cat was himself the fattest cat Girl had ever seen—so fat that even the stump of his tail was fat, and his stomach dragged a hairsbreadth off the ground. He had surpassed Garfield-fat and was in the realm of Jabba-the-Hutt-fat, all except his tiny yellow-eyed head. Girl imagined Stepmother hugging him against his will, so that the skin of his eyes pulled back at the corners and his arms stood stiffly out in front of him like Frankencat.

  Girl started to say, “You should have called me,” but shut her mouth quickly. She did not actually want Stepmother to call when she was naked and crying at two in the morning. “Did you get through to the vet?” she asked instead.

  “I’m so embarrassed,” she answered. “He was very nice, and explained that even if I had given the cat the dog’s pills it wouldn’t kill him. But he must think I’m a total lunatic.”

  “Of course he doesn’t,” Girl lied. “I’m sure he gets calls like that all the time. They’d rather you call and be safe than to not call and accidentally kill the cat.”

  They agreed that Stepmother would come pick up Girl, and they would measure the window of the condo, buy a new mini-blind, then go back to the condo and put it up. There was no part of Girl that wanted to do this, but she had promised Mother, and she had no valid reason not to help out. She owed them so much.

  When Stepmother picked Girl up, Stepmother was sobbing, and they did the awkward front-seat-of-the-car-hug thing. It was the sort of crying that allowed no breath left over for words: shoulder-heaving, low moaning, tears and snot dripping onto her T-shirt. Girl made useless soothing noises. The day quickly fell into a pattern: they drove to a store while Stepmother cried the whole way. When they reached a store, she instantly stopped crying, wiped her face, and blew her nose. Stepmother and Girl entered the store, but for one reason or another, they never could find the exact mini-blind Stepmother wanted, so they got back in the car, Stepmother started crying again, and they drove to the next store and repeated the process. No mini-blind was purchased, although Stepmother did buy some sandwiches that they ate on a dock while looking at seagulls. Girl didn’t know how Mother did it, but she could finally see why Mother could never leave Stepmother. Girl always thought that Mother’s attraction to Stepmother was her abject neediness—Stepmother was her emotionally defective child that would never leave home, and Mother had been left too many times by people she loved.

  Girl knew that she should be more understanding. Although she acted gentle with Stepmother, inside Girl was emotionally removed, like she was observing a case study. When the roles had been reversed and Girl was the one who could not pull herself out of the river of sadness, Stepmother always tried everything she could to help, but unlike Girl, she acted out of love, not obligation. She really wanted Girl to escape the hold of despair, not because she was a burden, but because Stepmother knew how terrible sadness could be, and she loved Girl deeply. But Girl looked at her from inside a shell, and she could not feel the love Stepmother thrust on her. She dodged it, tried to end the conversation or get out of the room.

  Girl knew that feeling of the blackness lapping at the edge like waves, and that it was sometimes soothing to let go and the sadness crash over her—to give in to the cold bleakness that pierced her chest and settled into all of her bones. Girl’s hips would hurt from the terrible sadness; her face felt like a mask that didn’t move into proper expressions easily. And she knew that there was an intimacy in the blackness, and although she had long breaks from it, sooner or later it always returned. No matter how long it had been, her body remembered, like riding a bicycle. But Girl would rather be alone in her shell of functional sadness than admit they had this defect in common.

  a second wedding

  Girl never cooked Swedish meatballs for the boyfriend her parents liked so much, and she didn’t clean the house before he came over, but he asked her to marry him anyway. This time, Mother and Stepmother both went along on dress-shopping missions, even driving up to Miami for a day.

  Girl tried on a simple satin slip dress, and Stepmother ran a finger down her butt-cheek. “You are going to have to wear support hose with this one. You jiggle.” Girl jerked away—she hated when Stepmother touched her butt, and the irony of her fat stepmother who never wore pantyhose or even a bra telling her that she was too jiggly enraged her. Yes, she was gaining weight, and she was failing at dieting, but whatever happened to the feminist messages they lived by her whole life? Wasn’t Girl supposed to love her body just as it was and fuck standards that say women have to be sexy to have value?

  “You can’t eat that taco salad,” Stepmother told her when she took Girl to Wendy’s. “You’re too fat for that skirt,” she said when she visited Girl at work one day. Still, when Girl tried on an A-line wedding gown in the right size so it wasn’t too tight, Stepmother teared up. And when Girl married that boy her parents loved, Stepmother and Mother walked her down the aisle together. Brother stood as her “man of honor,” and Liz drove nine hours to wear a bridesmaid’s dress along with Girl’s only other remaining childhood friend, Rebekah. The rest of the wedding party was composed of her new husband’s relatives—Girl never had that many people who belonged to her, but the few she had all showed up. Even her cousin made it, after driving fourteen hours from Tennessee in a car that wouldn’t restart if she turned it off. Girl cried to see everyone who loved her all gathered in one place. Her new husband’s khaki pants, short hair, love of golf, and family cookouts seemed to guarantee Girl’s ascension from misfit to mainstream. Her white picket fence dreams were all coming true.

  Three years later, Girl, her husband, and their ten-month-old baby drove across the border into Canada for Mother and Stepmother’s legal same-sex wedding. Girl and Brother signed the marriage license, and Mother and Stepmother danced together while Girl’s b
aby son played trucks on the dance floor next to their feet. Finally, they were legal, more legal than their domestic partner registry in Vermont a few years before, and even though the United States would not yet recognize their marriage, a sovereign nation had done so. New York State voted to recognize all same-sex marriages performed outside of New York long before they legalized such unions inside their own border. President Obama ensured that the country quickly followed suit. They finally got to file joint tax returns. They would get each other’s Social Security someday. No one could force them to leave a hospital if their spouse was in intensive care. More than that, though, was the feeling of legitimacy. Pride. The world’s value system had finally caught up with them.