My early-morning joy slams into stomach-grinding fear. I glance at my watch—6:25—before shifting my bike into tenth gear and crouching low behind the handlebars, racing toward my new school. Bring it on.
As I ride closer, I notice tire tracks have ripped donuts into the front lawn. Across from the school, a cow barn is covered in graffiti. “HARRISON KICKS ASS!” “RAIDERS ROCK!” “WESTSIDE IS CRUISIN’ FOR A BRUISIN’!” West Side. That’s where our three older siblings went to school; it’s Lafayette’s smart high school, where the Purdue professors send their kids.
I swerve into the driveway and pedal to the back of the building, remembering the location of the gym from our orientation tour. There they are, about twenty girls, clumped around the back door, bags dumped at their feet. A few sit on the curb, smoking. They look up at me with sullen faces when I coast into view. I am relieved that this look is common to all teenage girls and not just me, as Mother believes.
“What’s wrong with you?” she’ll ask, scowling. “Why don’t you smile more?”
She’s one to talk.
The bike racks are located across from the gym entrance, and as I unwind my bike chain from under the seat, I sneak peeks at the girls. A couple of the smokers I’ve seen before, a fat girl with blond pigtails and a girl in a Tab Cola shirt.
The day after we moved in, Jerome, David, and I were so bored that we rode five miles along the shoulder of Highway 65 to a Kwik Mart. A group of girls, stuffed into cut-offs and tube tops, their eyes raccoonish with black eyeliner, were leaning against the shaded wall of the cement shack. They sucked on popsicles and cigarettes and jutted out their hips at the trucks and jacked-up Camaros that pulled in for gas.
They tittered when we glided into the station, panting and sweat-stained. It was a scorcher, one of those days where the heat feels likely to peel your skin right off. Jerome stopped beside the gas pumps and gawked at the girls while David and I propped our bikes against the building.
“Better watch out, Rose Marie,” one of them shouted. “I think he likes you.”
Rose Marie twisted her dirty blond pigtail around a finger, staring at Jerome and sliding her grape popsicle in and out of her mouth real slow. Her friends squawked with laughter, then poked their fingers in their mouths and made gagging noises.
Jerome grinned at Rose Marie and tucked his fists under his biceps to make the muscles pop out, Totally Clueless. Seeing this exchange, I ran into the Kwik Mart and bought an orange push-up before racing away on my bike. I didn’t want to be seen with the boys at that moment.
“What’d you take off for?” David asked when he caught up to me, an ice cream sandwich melting in his hand. Jerome was farther behind him.
“The smell of gasoline makes me sick,” I lied.
After threading the bike chain between the front tire and the rack, I click the combination lock shut and stand to face the crowd.
Dozens of eyes land on my face, then slide away. It’s a small community. They know who I am. I’m the girl from that new family, the one with the blacks. Sure enough, Rose Marie elbows the Tab girl and they both stare at me, smirking. I unzip my backpack and pretend to dig around in it for something important as I cut a wide circle around them.
There’s a girl sitting alone against the wall and I walk in her direction. She’s dark-haired and olive-skinned, blatantly foreign to these parts as well. We belong together, she and I; we’re both outsiders. She watches me approach, but looks away when I stop and lean against the wall a few feet away from her.
I look at my watch. 6:37.
“So the coach is late?” I ask, trying to sound casual as I zip my backpack closed.
“Seems that way,” she says without looking at me. She plucks a dandelion from the ground and flicks its head off between her index finger and thumb. Mary had a baby and its head popped off . . . Her shoulder-length black hair is feathered about her face, Farrah Fawcett–style, just like mine and every other girl’s here.
“You nervous?” I ask, a bit loudly.
She shrugs.
Across the road, a row of cows plods single file toward the graffitied barn. “EAT, SHIT, AND DIE!” someone wrote over the wide entrance.
“So, what’s your name?” I ask her, sitting in the grass. Talk to me, please. Finally she looks at me, her black bangs skimming her dark eyes like a frayed curtain.
She says something in a foreign language.
“What?”
“You can call me Mary.”
“What country are you from?”
“Arcana,” she says.
“Where’s that at?”
“’Bout two hours east of here.”
“Oh,” I laugh, embarrassed. “I’m Julia. Guess we’re both new.”
She nods, and plucks another dandelion from the ground.
Squeals pierce the air and we turn to watch a group of girls surging around a boy who’s standing over a bicycle, across from the gym entrance. He’s shirtless despite the chill air, wearing only light blue satin running shorts. He thrusts out his chest— tan, broad—and a few of the girls grope it as he laughs.
They scatter when a black Camaro roars into the parking lot. It screeches to a stop slantways across two spaces, and a man in aviator sunglasses jumps out.
“There he is,” Mary says. “Coach Shultz.”
The shirtless boy pedals away, and we stand and move toward the other girls. Coach Schultz comes at us with swooping arms.
“Everyone inside! We’re late!”
“No, you are,” someone mutters.
He jingles a key into the door and holds it open, sizing up bodies as they flow into the building. I thrust back my shoulders as I walk by him, hoping to make a good impression.
In the dank locker room, Mary and I migrate silently to a corner. I try to keep my eyes to myself as I quickly strip off my shorts and T-shirt and snap into my Speedo, but can’t help but notice when the big-chested girl next to me unhooks her bra and her boobs fall down like half-filled water balloons. My own boobs are still little-girl pointy—I’m what people call a “late bloomer.” At sixteen and a half, I haven’t gotten my period yet and am still cursed with a boyish, narrow-hipped body.
The door cracks open and there’s a whistle blast.
“Enough lollygagging, girls!”
Coach Schultz orders us to pair up for warm-up exercises, and everyone immediately nabs a partner, leaving Mary and me for each other. I walk over to her. We do ten minutes of stretching on the tile floor next to the pool, and then the real competition begins.
The coach has us swim fifty yards, freestyle. Some of the girls claw through the water like cats, barely reaching the halfway flag before wheezing to a stop. Coach Schultz orders them out of the pool, and among them I see Rose Marie, sucking in air through her smoker’s mouth and coughing. I grin; the process of elimination has begun.
When my turn comes, I knife through water, happy to deafen the murmuring around me. Twelve strokes to the deep end, flip turn at the black T painted on the bottom, twelve strokes back. This is one thing I do well.
David and I learned to swim at the YMCA when we were six. After I learned to float, my favorite thing to do was to scissor my arms and legs into the middle of the deep end while the other kids huddled at the ledge, terrified of letting go of the tile lip.
“Come back!” David would squeal, twisting his head around to look at me with huge eyes. “Don’t go there!” But the feeling of being alone and hard to reach enthralled me, and I went from polliwog to shark in record time.
Coach Schultz blows his whistle and orders the girls who made the first cut to do continuous laps, alternating between breaststroke, backstroke, and the crawl. I lick the fog from my goggles and press them back to my face, pushing them against my cheekbones until they suck lightly on my eyeballs. At the end of my eighteenth lap, I notice a forest of legs in a corner of the pool. There’s a whistle burst and I rise to the surface along with a handful of other girls, including Mary.
“There’s my A-team, right there,” Coach Schultz shouts, leaning against the lifeguard tower with a clipboard. We call our names to him, and he writes them down.
In the locker room, everyone hustles back into their clothes in hunched silence. I exchange a smile with Mary and pull my shorts over my suit before fleeing the sour gloom, fearing that one mean look will puncture my high spirits. As I bike back up County Road 50 in the swelling heat, carloads of girls with wet hair pass me. Sweat trickles down my face and pastes my Speedo to my body, but I’m elated. I’ve made the swim team and found a friend.
We go to Kmart for our annual trek to buy school clothes, and I hole up in a dressing room with a mound of clothes, hoping to find something that doesn’t look like it was bought at Kmart. This is tricky. I choose a few pastel oxfords and polo shirts—although these have swan icons instead of the trendy alligators and horses—and a pair of plastic penny loafers. A pair of fitted paint-splattered jeans gets nixed by Mother when I walk out to model them for her.
“What do you want people staring at your butt crack for?” she asks loudly, causing several shoppers to turn in our direction. She walks to a rack of dark denim, grabs two pairs of baggy jeans and throws them into our cart as I look away, tears stinging my eyes.
None of the kids I know would be caught dead in the Kmart parking lot, but Mother views blue-light specials as manna from Heaven. Polyester slacks, two pairs for $10? We can outfit the entire family! Reduced-for-quick-sale toothpaste? We’ll stock up for the next five years! Our family shops at Kmart for the same reason we drink instant milk and eat Garbage Soup and use dish detergent for bubble bath: We’re cheap.
Mother still hasn’t gotten over the Great Depression. I know that if I complain about my school clothes, I’ll be subjected to stories about how her family was forced to eat withered apples from her father’s general store in Corsica, and how she left for college with only two flour sack dresses to her name. Shame on you! You don’t know how good you have it! I’d just as soon stick my hand in a vat of boiling oil than hear it once more.
Mother says money we save by being frugal helps the cause of missionaries around the world, but it certainly doesn’t help mine. Once again, I’ll be Dorky Girl at school. My only hope is to find more baby-sitting jobs, so I can acquire enough money to go shopping at Tippecanoe Mall like a normal person.
In the men’s department, David greets us cradling an armload of satin basketball jerseys emblazoned with Big Ten logos. Purdue. Michigan. Notre Dame.
He looks at Mother with a wide-eyed mixture of hope and apprehension, and she shakes her head and strides to a table piled with T-shirts. Colored Hanes, $2.99! Mother scoops several into the shopping cart.
David hugs the shimmering jerseys to his chest.
“What’s wrong with these?” he asks, alarm rising in his face.
I look at him and roll my eyes.
I was three years old when my mother told me I was getting a baby brother.
When she said “your baby brother,” I assumed he’d be mine and mine alone, and swelled with self-importance. I would no longer be the baby of the family; I, too, would have someone to boss around.
A crib was placed in an upstairs bedroom and I’d check it several times a day, peering between the slats to see if my baby had arrived. Time after time, I was heartbroken by the empty mattress.
“Baby here today?” I’d ask Mother.
“Soon,” was always the reply.
The day he arrived, on March 17, 1970, I was in the basement, lost in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood; the older kids were at school. After the show ended, I went to the kitchen for a butter-and-sugar sandwich and Mother hushed me. My baby brother was sleeping, she said, and I was not to disturb him.
I waited until she started washing the dishes before creeping upstairs on my hands and knees. The door to his room was closed, and I paused on the threshold, listening to pots banging against the sink, before pushing the door inward.
The sun streamed through yellow curtains as I approached the crib on tiptoes, breathing hard. Finally. Inside it was my baby doll, asleep. I stared in awe at his molasses-colored skin; nobody told me that my baby would be brown.
I pressed my face between the slats and marveled at him, at the chalky trails of dried tears crisscrossing his face, at his size. He looked much smaller than I was, although he was only four months younger.
He was my baby, and I had to touch him. I reached between the slats and poked his arm with a finger. Too hard. His eyes flipped open, big and brown and watery scared, and I snatched my hand back. His bottom lip started to quiver.
“Shh, baby, shh,” I whispered. “Don’t cry.”
I glanced behind me at the open door; Mother would paddle me if she caught me disobeying.
But my baby didn’t make a noise, he just watched me with those big brown eyes, waiting to see what I’d do next. I reached back into the crib and touched the black fuzz on his head, gently this time.
“It’s okay, baby,” I whispered.
I kept my hand on him until the long fringes of his eyelids drifted shut and he fell back to sleep.
CHAPTER 3
EDUCATION
I’m fully awake and staring into the moon face of the alarm clock when it starts to clatter at 5:30. Acid surges up my esophagus. This is It. The Day That Will Determine Everything. Whether we are Winners or Losers. Predators or Scavengers. Rejects or Normal. It’s the first day of school.
Through the bedroom window, dawn reddens the horizon. I jump up to turn on the ceiling light and sway momentarily in the blinding whiteness. In the dresser mirror, I examine my face— no new zits, Thank You, Jesus—before thrusting myself into a blue Kmart polo shirt that matches my eyes and a pair of baggy jeans. I tried baking them in the dryer for six hours while Mother was at work, but they refused to shrink.
In the bathroom, I lay out the tools of beauty—curling iron, ultra-hold Final Net, frosted pink lipstick—on the counter and tape a picture of Farrah Fawcett to the mirror. I ripped it out of a magazine at my dad’s office and have locked myself in the bathroom every night for the past week to practice her hair, her eyes, her smile.
After I finish painting my face and crimping my hair, I shellac my head with haispray and step back to survey the results. I look at Farrah, I look at me. I look nothing like Farrah. My eyes are too small, my mouth too large, my hair too limp. But we’re wearing the same shade of turquoise eye shadow, and I suppose that counts for something.
I’ve decided to make a party impression at Harrison. Party hardy. That shy girl who barely raised her head at Lafayette Christian is gone. The new Julia will throw back her head and laugh as if she didn’t have a care in the world. And this laughter and happiness will make her attractive to people and win her admiration and friends.
But first I must get into a party mood. I lock my bedroom door and pull a mayonnaise jar swirling with amber liquid from a box of sweaters in my closet. Southern Comfort. It helps my parents laugh when they stir it into their bedtime cocktails, so I figure it should help me too. I’ve been siphoning it from the bottle bit by bit whenever Mother forgets to lock the pantry.
I tilt the jar against my lips and the booze blazes down my throat like hot sauce. I’ve been practicing this as well, and now know the first swigs are always the hardest. I plug my nose and hop from foot to foot until the fire subsides, and after the fourth swallow my taste buds are numbed enough that I can dump it down like water.
When I bend to slip on my plastic Kmart shoes, I lose my balance and fall giggling against the closet door, my insides warm with the boozy embrace. The intercom crackles.
“The bus leaves in thirty minutes,” Mother says. “You miss it, you walk.”
“I’m getting ready already!” I yell at the speaker.
Good morning to you, too. I take another swig of Comfort. Not a care in the world.
At the breakfast table, David sits over a bowl of cereal as Rejoice Radio—the soundtrack of our famil
y life—blares in the background. He’s also gone to special lengths for the Big Day. He’s hot-picked his Brillo pad hair into a soft halo. Wiped the smears from his glasses. And traded in his usual T-shirt and jeans for a short-sleeved white oxford and khaki slacks—an outfit demanding respect.
“I see you busted out the ‘No Mo’ Nappy’ this morning,” I say, sliding into the chair across from him. He gives me a grim look and goes back to staring into his cereal.
For some reason it’s okay for him and Jerome to tease each other about their hair ointments, but if I join in, they get huffy. I tried one of their products myself in seventh grade, lured by the label’s promise of “tresses that glow with the silky sheen of Africa.” Queen of Sheba Conditioner it was called, and I caked it on. It made me look like I’d dipped my head in bacon fat, and I was able to rid myself of it only after a week of scrubbing my hair with dish soap and baking soda. The boys called me grease ball for months afterward.
I fill my bowl with generic bran flakes. I can feel the alcohol spread through my body as I chew the cardboard flakes. A hymn I recognize comes over the intercom:
Asleep in Jesus! Blessed sleep,
From which none ever wakes to weep;
A calm and undisturbed repose,
Unbroken by the last of foes.
I wag my spoon over my bowl like a conductor’s baton and David raises his head.
“What’s your problem?” he says.
“Great tune.”
“It’s about death.”
“Yeah,” I shrug. “But it’s got rhythm.”
He cocks his head and stares at me.
“Somebody punch you in the face or something?”
“What?”
Jesus Land Page 4