Girlchild

by Hassman, Tupelo

  If a mourner did suffer this slip in decorum, she would surely say something after the kiss and not run around to the front of the Porta-John and turn the handle, would never hide inside, climbing on the lid of the toilet to watch through the vent as the boy, and boy he is, returns to his seat and high-fives his friend. The high-fives betray his belief that he’s caused feelings to flower in her, which will alleviate the pain of this new crushing reality, instead of the ones he’s actually made bloom, cheap and tough as funeral carnations: nausea and instant regret.

  For further details on how to behave under these sorrowful circumstances, refer to more comprehensive works, such as those by Emily Post or the Manners section of the Girl Scout Handbook.

  caution: children

  Pigeon left a casserole on the porch. It’s left over from the Lions Club picnic held yesterday in Mama’s honor. They pushed the tables together behind the Truck Stop, stacked them high with pies and wieners and potato salad, and threw the back door open wide so the jukebox could save us from talking. I managed to stay even after I kissed Marc behind the Porta-John, but the thought of food only reminded me of his disgusting tongue, so when “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” came on, I snuck in the back door and out the front and headed unseen for home. At least that’s what I thought, but Pigeon must have noticed and that’s why she brought the casserole. Tuna, with peas. I didn’t answer the door but I watched her through a corner of the curtain, knocking and calling and then setting down the dish, tightening the tinfoil around its edges.

  I don’t eat it even though I like to look at it, and there’s no other food in the Nobility that’s still good, though I can’t bring myself to throw away the sliced cheese turning to liquid in the wrapper, the milk turning solid in the carton. I’m pretty sure I’m not hungry, that I can’t get hungry, that I’ve forgotten how, and I’m happy like that until a melancholy music makes me remember. The Four Humors Ice-Cream Truck is coming slowly down the Calle. Not playing its usual ragtime ditty, the echo of a sweet sugar high, but instead, the saddest song that ever made its never-ending way through scratchy speakers and across front yards. The most forlorn music ever to entice children from Big Wheels and jump ropes comes rippling down the Calle, and before I know I’ve decided, I’m reaching into the tip jar, stepping to the door, down the porch, sliding in between parked cars to stand on the Calle and be noticed by the Ice Cream Man.

  As he climbs from the driver’s seat to the window in the back, the truck lurches under his weight. I can smell his sweat before I see his face. His onion odor mixes with the sweet sugar of pixie sticks and licorice that hang down in a tangle of Christmas lights from the window’s top and sides. The twinkling lights rinse the Ice Cream Man’s face in alternating shades of red and pink and green.

  He does not speak, but inclines his head to the side to indicate the fading menu and then looks down at the pavement so pointedly that I follow his eyes and find my order there at my feet, in the way the skid marks almost curl into letters, reminding me. “Two drumsticks,” I say. Mama’s favorite.

  He takes the money with one hand, and with the other turns a switch on a lamp whose bare lightbulb reveals cardboard boxes and cases of soda stacked to the ceiling. He holds first one bill and then the other up to the bulb, examines each side carefully, then sets them on a six-pack of root beer and opens the freezer in front of him with its stickers of spiral-eyed, upside-down children enjoying giant popsicles in the shapes of rocket ships and atom bombs. They stand on their heads, frown at their ice creams. The dry sound of ice scraping against ice reaches me with the shuffling of frozen cardboard and rasp of the Ice Cream Man’s breathing. His voice comes around the freezer’s lid, more melancholy than the music that still fills the air. “Don’t go,” he says. “I have it right here.”

  The spiral-eyed children fall away as the Ice Cream Man pushes two drumsticks through the canopy of candy and lights. His face shines red and green, is so slick I can’t tell the difference between sweat and tears.

  I open up one drumstick as I walk up the Calle. Flowers, candles, mementos are accumulating on the shoulder, washing up from the road, from the river of people that have come by to pay their respects. I kneel down beside a bouquet of toilet paper roses decorated with drops of dew-like glue, the saints whose faces glow from Save-Rite-bought candles, San Gerardo Maiella, San Martín de Porres, San Simón, Niño Jesús, and Saint Jude. Other candles with no visible saints flicker or have died. Purple and white and yellow wax puddle the asphalt. There is a picture of “Johanna,” so the writing on the label says, preflight. It is a picture of a picture, fuzzy, and too small in the round frame. I finish my drumstick, and then I leave the unopened one to melt between a rosary and a wooden truck, a dirty length of yarn tied through its front bumper.

  gifted

  Grandma’s sent my sixteenth birthday gift from her Space 2 on Taylor Street in Portola, California, far from casinos and the desert wind. It arrives wrapped in a shoebox, furniture for a doll’s room made from crochet and scrap: shag rug, bureau with embroidered gold handle, bed with mattress, quilt and pillow, fireplace with twig and paper to burn, a bent paperclip as its grate, and a hope chest whose lid hinges back to reveal the links of stones, small as beans before they sprout, their chain broken here and here, together in a row as long as ten, apart alone as one. And with them, her instructions, to protect them, to join them, as if the people of a family could be held together with gold plate and hot glue. And just below that, one more tear from Grandma’s felt-tip on onionskin,a few more make believes for one of your shelves. The furniture is for the little girl I’m not anymore, the one Grandma and I are both saying good-bye to. The stones are for the adult that even the State is starting to recognize, the woman I’ve become, and what Grandma thinks that woman might do.

  Grandma swears that one day a Hendrix will shine bright enough to light her world, or a corner of it, or at least her table where she sits and drinks her beer with ice and listens to talk radio deep into the night, her television gone, sold to buy drugs for one of her children, food for one of her grandchildren. Always stolen from, always replacing, always forgiving, always believing, that sums up Grandma Shirley Rose and this is her summing up of me. Even before the Briefcase Men started showing up at Roscoe Elementary, before my name appeared in the Gazette, Grandma had these words to say, quietly, over coffee and oatmeal, over RC and bologna sandwiches, “Someone’s got to make it and it has to be you,” her sweet, sick Grandma smell mixing with the smoke of her cigarettes, the cold breeze from the Calle, and the sage-and-sandpaper sound of her voice, pushing me to do it, to take my chance, to make belief.

  dream

  The Girl Scout Handbook has a section on Finding Your Way When Lost and I just about know it by heart. The number one most important thing for a Scout to do is to stay where the rest of her party last saw her. I’m waiting at the wall down by the landfill I call a pond because the wall’s the oldest thing around and there isn’t much of it left. It’s only a few feet long and only about that high, but the stones don’t budge, and for all the spray paint, the grass keeps growing up around it. I don’t know what the wall used to do before we got here, but I’m using it for waiting, I’m using it for not panicking, and, like the Handbook says, most important, I’m using it for not wearing myself out by aimless wandering.

  I’m waiting for Grandma. We are going to the greenhouse. I can’t explain the presence of the greenhouse, rusted and nearly roofless. It slants at the far edge of the pond, the door forever swung open. The greenhouse is the only place on the Calle that has a memory of the possibilities for careful nurturing that lie even within an aluminum frame, even in a portable home, the delicacy in the hothouse promise. This one had been empty for years, I think, until Grandma arrived, which she does most nights, even though, no matter how hard I look, I’ve never seen Mama in a dream or anyplace else.

  We go inside the greenhouse and Grandma points above our heads. At first all I see are slices of night sky sh
owing through the ribs that are all that is left of the roof. But Grandma is patient, and so am I, and I begin to make out that there are thin whorls of metal separating us from the slants of starlight. Chicken wire has been rolled from one side of the building to the other just above us, leaving a few feet between itself and the arched frame of the roof. The wire’s coils and circles are coated with a fine layer of rust. I know it’s rust because I touch it when Grandma tells me to, because I do what Grandma tells me to, I bring some of it down to crumble between my fingers, burning orange and rough, and I feel something else there. Roots. The tiniest plants have somehow twisted their roots round the coils of chicken wire, have taken root in the air. They brace themselves against the thin wire, draw nourishment from the metal, and grow straight toward the sky as if soil were only a myth.

  pretty theft

  I never met V. White outside the pages of Mama’s welfare file and was barely getting to know her, anyway, when one afternoon, not too long after my brothers and I had our caucus, a man from the County came down to the Calle, parked his sedan on the gravel, and though it was broad daylight, checked his car’s alarm twice before knocking at my door. V. White may be long gone, but the County lives on, and I tell the new guy the story we’ll use until my emancipation is finalized. I tell it just the way my brothers and I rehearsed: my third-oldest brother, Ronald Joseph, is my legal guardian and has moved to the Calle permanently until I finish school, but he isn’t home just now.

  The Worker is as unmoved as the embroidered horse running in place across the left pocket of his shirt. He asks if he might use the bathroom before he leaves, to which I say that he might, though I know that this errand has less to do with relieving himself and more to do with relieving his curiosity. His real reason for venturing out to the Calle is to check the Nobility for signs of my brother’s life and while none of my bros are actually coming to stay, we’ve covered our bases. A can of shaving cream sits rusting on the bathroom counter for just such an emergency, and while the Worker takes his tour, I sit on the couch and find myself face-to-face with my own reflection in the shiny gold locks of his briefcase. And that’s when I do something the elder Hendrixes and I haven’t rehearsed. I reach out my finger, just one finger, and push. And the shiny gold locks go SMACK! down the hallway, the sound flattening up against the closed bathroom door.

  The sweat from my fingers clouds the metal as I lift back the lid, and there, in between a yellow legal pad and the latest edition of Barely Legal, is an accordion file, and inside it, filed under H for Hendrix, under T for Trash, and under L for Living on the County, is a slick set of papers that are surprisingly familiar, copied from carbon, with V. White’s and Mama’s names and a case number running across the top of each one. And I develop a quick filing system of my own. I file those papers fast under S for Sofa, C for Cushion, and M for Mine, and then I close the briefcase up, quiet as you please. And I know this will stay quiet too, because if the Worker even suspects I’m the one who took the file, he’ll know I’ve seen his magazine and won’t want his boss to learn just how those unaccounted-for minutes of the County’s time are spent. When the Worker comes back into the living room he finds his briefcase right where he left it and he looks me up and down slowly and says, “You’re still a sophomore, aren’t you, Rory Dawn? Just turned sixteen?”

  I nod yes, in my most Barely Legal of fashions, trying to prepare myself for what’s coming next, but it isn’t the warning about minors living without supervision that I feared. The Worker may be coming on to me but he’s not actually onto me. He doesn’t suspect anything. His question, predictable and ridiculous, proves it. “It’s never too early,” he says, and he pauses as he reaches down for his briefcase, his eyes on my bare feet, “It’s never too early to start thinking about the future. What are your plans after graduation?”

  I suck my teeth, feeling my chipped front tooth, the jagged edge that’s never been a priority to fix, and I give the Worker, like all the Briefcase Men who’ve come before him, the answer he’s looking for. “I was thinking about vocational school,” I say, remembering the counselor’s recommendation to Mama from her welfare file, the copy whose twin I just stole back from him. My feet itch from his staring and I rub them on the carpet, trying to figure out what he’s waiting for, and then I’ve got it. “I mean, if my grades are good enough.”

  It’s the right answer, all right. The relief shows on his face. Secure that his job will be an easy one, that Hendrix, R.D., can fall safely off his radar screen, he asks for Ronnie to give him a call, and then he leaves. I watch him take the turn off the gravel onto the cement, and then I take the stack of papers out from beneath the couch cushion and put them in the hope chest where all the other ideas of Mama’s worth have washed up. If the Worker, with his suspicions and his habits, with his locks and his logos, thinks for a minute that his documents are any kind of testament, if he thinks he can read me just because he can read these, well, as Grandma would say, “He’s got another think coming.”

  sophomore attempt

  Stephanie Harris is pregnant, her once-proud upper-middle-class white collar has turned a deep crimson blush from shame, and I wonder what wish her Mama made over her fifteenth-birthday cake. Boys still go to Jupiter to get more stupider, but girls work at bars to get their candy bars, at least I do. During the day I have to go to school, though, or Pigeon says she’ll eighty-six me herself.

  I go to shop class and hear the whispers that I’m only taking it to see Marc, but really it’s because everything else seems pointless. Cars, at least, can get you somewhere. There’s no way to make sense of Mr. Lane’s drafting class after Mama’s accident, no way to draw angles and arcs. When the standardized tests come, I color my bubbles in a zigzag pattern, design a crooked heart, and still get a C. At breaks I sit alone in the quad and eat licorice from the vending machine, and after a month, all I’ve learned is my locker combination and that as soon as I can figure out how, I’m outta here.

  ownself

  Pigeon lets me hang out at the Truck Stop after school, but only if I bring my homework along. I wash glasses by the trayload and inventory the empty Coors and Olympia kegs that wait in the backyard to be picked up by the delivery man, and I count the unopened bottles of bottom-shelf whiskey and gin that wait in the stockroom to be drunk up by the regulars. I broke four glasses so far, but Pigeon says that my doing the inventory makes up for it, because, she says, and it’s a lie, I’m the mathematical genius and she’s got no head for numbers. The rest of the time I sit around and “get my studying in.” I spread it out and lay down a pencil, but there’s no point in any of it except for The Divine Comedy, assigned by our new English teacher whose first year at Roscoe hasn’t beaten the life out of her yet. At least Dante’s circles of damnation are a good match for the curves of the Calle that I follow on my way from school to the Truck Stop every afternoon.

  I’d rather just sit and watch Pigeon do her work, watch the regulars take their seats like an assembly line shift, watch the night pull its own barstool right up to the edge of the screen door. I sit around at the table by the jukebox that still only plays country, underneath the cardboard signs and their one prayer, repeated to the infinite, HOGS AND CALVES FOR SELL. And I tell the new guys, when they ask if I’d like a drink knowing I can’t be old enough, when they ask if I’d like a drink hoping I can’t be old enough, that the only thing getting felt around here is the pool table.

  And if I promise I’ll finish my homework, and if no one’s in but Dennis and the Ice Cream Man, Pigeon lets me go behind the bar and practice mixing drinks. My screwdriver is coming along but Pigeon says my martini “deserves a warning sign,” and it’s all a waste of cheap liquor, anyway, because no one around here orders anything but shots and chasers. Still, she lets me keep trying. She takes one sip of each and throws the rest away, and there’s something so pretty about the sound of ice cubes ringing against a metal sink, about the way that Pigeon says, “Better try again tomorrow,” that makes me fee
l like I will.

  local dive

  The Calle is silent except for the sound of my bare feet on the steps. The slap of skin on cement. The television shadows are dying down to static, preparing for rebirth in the plumage of the rainbow test pattern whose sudden brightness will wake sleepers to the loss of another night, the empty hours to go before morning.

  I walk to the edge of the pond and stare at the crepe paper and candy wrappers, the waste still left from the last Revival Night that floats on its surface. The aluminum of beer cans star in the sand and the water is ink. There are words at its bottom, answers down there, and the spelling is shaky at best.

  On the other side of the pond comes another girl, she has no clothes and her hands move quickly over herself, to hide or hurt, it seems the same. The motion is frantic, as if she’s caught in a wind. Sometimes she uses her hands to cover her body. Sometimes she uses them to cover her mouth. Both things seem equally important, equally impossible.