Girlchild
Page 18
She stops at the edge of the pond and her moving hands are too hard to watch. I bow my head, raise my arms, bend my knees. Water meets over my toes.
The Girl Scouts say that every good Scout should know how to swim. They say it makes other activities possible, for instance, life saving. But they never say whose.
sparks, nv
Most Holy Apostle Saint Jude, faithful servant and friend of Jesus, patron of desperate and difficult cases. The name of the person who betrayed our Lord has caused you to be forgotten, but not by me, and I implore you,
get me the fuck out of here.
(make your request here)
last call
Mama wants her ashes spread on Starvation Ridge, and even the 4-H Club isn’t ready to take that trip, but Grandma wants her ashes spread where pretty things grow. She tells me this on my last visit to her, my only visit by myself, a lone Greyhound on a long mountain night, vomiting all the way home. PLEASE, DON’T LEAVE A MESS, the sign in the bus bathroom begs all of us, the drunk and hopeful who make this trip between the trailers in the mountains and the casinos in the desert every payday.
She tells me this before the cancer that she arms daily with generic cigarettes makes its final push. Grandma can hear her death coming, and like Mama, isn’t shy to talk about it, but unlike Mama, there’s no mystery about how it will arrive.
She’s so tiny now, her skin gathers in folds around her shrinking bones like velvet in an old Reno whorehouse. When she lifts her arm, to drop an ice cube into her beer, to light a cigarette butt, I can see both her breasts, her whole torso, through the armhole of her housedress, so shrunk back is she from the size she used to be. Seeing her breasts like that, small like mine but wrinkled and low, they are my future breasts, makes her fragile to me for the first time, and mortal. It is the only thing that makes me understand what I never really did before, that Grandma will soon be no bigger than a blue jay. And as soon as she is, she’ll fly away home.
PLEASE, DON’T LEAVE A MESS, the sign repeats, PLEASE, but maybe that is only my head, only my stomach turning inside out to make this thing an un-thing, a never, the opposite of what I know it is. The truth. The doctors at Plumas County Hospital know she’s dying, she knows it too, and as her day draws to an end she holds my hand with sharp, strong fingers and says, “Girlchild, your Mama raised you right and now it’s up to you.”
I stumble back to my seat, try to time the sway of my heart’s sickness to the rolling of the bus on the interstate. The casinos’ promises fly by the window on too many billboards to count, their lights reflecting off the top of the suitcase that I’m holding tight to my chest. It’s the same suitcase that made the same trip with me when Mama and I were together barely two years before, and the same road rolls beneath us, potholed with words unsaid.
Death is different when it shows up early, invites itself to dinners, and keeps you company for late-night talks about paperwork and affairs and questions about whether a house or a body can ever truly be in order. I keep my suitcase out, ready to go back to visit as soon as more school can be missed without raising the County’s eyebrows any higher than I’ve already done, but before I can use it, Grandma is gone, off to join Mama on the very late shift. I haven’t opened that suitcase again, even though I know Grandma wants me to, wants me to fill it up and get myself out.
on the road
Every Girl Scout should know how to follow a map or to make a simple one to direct other people. This, from the Out-of-Doors section of the Girl Scout Handbook, under “Mapping.” Girl Scouts have long known the value of being able to judge heights, weights, distances, number, and time with reasonable accuracy. I never earned a badge, but I’m no different. I map streets from memory. The streets pulse in a circuit, paved with tar but haloed by streetlamp, the asphalt holy with blood. There is no stain on this road but the accident is always there, happened, happening, about to, we walk around it, watch it ripple in the heat on summer days. Mama is always on her way home here, coming home, home, not home yet. Mama is unscrewing a lightbulb, stumbling, and Grandma writes, forgets, scolds, saves, while the Hardware Man touches, Carol watches, ice cream melts, books are lent, teeth rot, shotguns fire, and the lid of the hope chest cracks open and shut. The streets of the Calle run in circles like the light that shines from Saint Jude’s candle, the ring it burns into this table, where I, hands to mouth and hands empty, sit. Some things, having seen them once, you always see.
parcel post
Without Grandma’s letters the mailbox is empty forever except for bills, guilty notes from my brothers’ wives, the Penny Saver, and the final package I don’t want to receive, and so I’m avoiding all things postal like a Bible plague, leaving out the back door, slipping silent over the back fence, looking out the back window so I won’t catch a glimpse of the mailman and go blind as Lot’s wife, salt in the wind. I dream of the back window, of feeding stray pit bulls at night who howl while I push the meat through the torn screen, until noise and the smell of flesh lead the Calle folks to think that I’ve died too. The Nobility is haunted and they come for my body with Maglites blazing hot as torches on a witch hunt, burning up the front walk until I stumble out the front door and tell the truth about being what I can’t deny but hate to admit. Alive. I wake up in a sweat to the sound of the postman’s knock and all the back doors and bad dreams in the world haven’t made one bit of difference to the blue of his shorts, the heaviness of her remains in my hands, and the fact that I have to sign to receive this package, because when brother Bob drew the short straw and had to go down to Portola to pick Grandma up from her temporary resting place at the Lesley Bros. Crematorium and Funeral Home, he fulfilled her wishes and sent her home to me, right as the mail.
Grandma’s box is the same size as Mama’s even though she was so much smaller at the end, but the weight is still what’s hardest to understand. That, and what I didn’t expect, a stack of letters from Mama to Grandma, letters originally sent from the Calle to Cali, now returned to a sender who left no forwarding address. Mama’s letters are all bound in string because Grandma saved her ribbon for other things, more permanent, because Grandma knew that soon enough these letters would crumble up and blow away down the Calle like everything else, stick to the fence in some fool’s garden, and sprout again with next year’s flowers.
a girl scout obeys orders
Ceremonies are ways to mark high occasions in your troop, the Handbook tells me, and even though my troop is still a troop of one, I’m marking this occasion high as the watermark that rises and blossoms junk from the landfill. Grandma wanted to be left where pretty things grow, and I’m not sure it qualifies, but I’m taking her to the pond because she did a lot of growing on the Calle, and anything pretty that came from Calle soil is because of her. Mama’s ashes will go to the Ridge just like she wanted and Grandma’s will stay on the Calle, where I can find her when I need her, feel her between my toes at least, put her grass between my lips. As long as I know where Grandma is, I’ll be able to find myself.
One of the smartest things the Girl Scouts say is that sometimes ceremonies that you make up for yourself have even more meaning than the ones you get from books. I guess the weatherman agrees, because as I walk the Calle a warm rain starts and just as it does, the electricity stops. Goes out, quiet, like my bare feet on the night cement. The streetlights disappear in darkness but I can see where they’ve been, like shadows burnt on paint, marking where portraits of a family once hung. Gravel oblongs in the moonlight where trailers used to be, like so many hands of cards being removed now, their wins and losses banked below them, because every good dealer, god or man, from Boomtown to the MGM Grand, is just another gypsy fortune-teller you pay to make your future known. His hand slides across the darkness now, leaves bills crumpled behind, gathers up the deck, and throws it into the landfill.
savage value
A 1972 Nobility double-wide trailer cost $17,450 when new and will depreciate at a rate of 60 seconds per minute of hurt, s
hame, and anger calculated at the rate of 4 syllables, or one al-li-ga-tor each. Alligators are savage animals useful for marking off seconds of destruction but unused to being kept indoors. The double-wide has been in use for 16 years and has suffered 5,845 days of depression by hurt, shame, and alligator. If the useful life of a double-wide trailer is 20 years, find the Nobility’s salvage value. What is the worth of the trailer after 16 years?
(Show all of your work.)
a. The alligator will grow to 18 feet in length.
b. Together they will make $36 selling scrap metal.
c. The woman must exert more than 90 pounds of force to move the stone.
d. It will take 21/3matchbooks to solve this equation.
fire sale
Old trailers like mine are tinderboxes, firetraps, accidents waiting to happen, but even so, the Nobility is all I have. I can’t sell it, can’t bear to think of the examination, the assessment, hopeful hands pulling back the corkboard to check for holes punched in paneling, pulling up Mama’s patchwork carpet to look for water damage on the floorboards. That carpet, jumbled and crazy, would be the very first thing to go, as misunderstood as anything good a Hendrix ever made.
According to the Girl Scouts, there are many types of fires, reflective and crisscross, trench and hunter, but they all start with the same basic ingredients, fuel and a spark or two. The stove is surrounded by kindling and I’ve got plenty of matchbooks. Their covers say THE TRUCK STOP in white letters on a black sky as a semi-truck rolls into the parking lot, its headlights swooping over the bar. Beneath the truck’s wheels, smaller letters warn “Close Cover Before Striking” and that’s exactly what I do. I close all the covers. The cover of the Girl Scout Handbook. The cover of the suitcase over a glass unicorn, river stones, and bundles of letters, the cover of the phone book after looking up the number to the Fire Department and giving them a ring. And then I pick up my suitcase and close the door. Grandma’s right. It’s time for me to strike out on my own.
A trailer will burn in sixty seconds and I’m going to let it. I’m going to let Saint Jude begin his good work on our homemade curtains, keep his promise to this hopeless cause and make Grandma’s God’s-Eyes burn bright tonight, burn holes right through the plywood and pressboard of the Nobility’s walls and cabinets. I don’t own a watch so I keep my own time, count one-alligator as I slip between streetlights and let all the beliefs of the Calle turn into ash, seven-alligator and let the shadows of the Hardware Man turn into smoke, eight-alligator as the smoke gathers and follows my beauty down the Calle to the pond and over those hills to whatever world is waiting for me out there. At twenty-five-alligator a window bursts behind me, and I turn around just in time to see an ember escape the Nobility’s core and rise up into the night air, shivering, bright and free.
YOUR NEW BOOK
This edition of girlchild belongs to you.
Official and unofficial Girl Scouts in many different parts of the world have had a hand in this edition of girlchild, particularly: Anna Hat Padgett, Lisa McCormick, Paula F.O.S.P. Parnello, Sara Marcus, Sarah Ciston, and Tavia Stewart-Streit. Many Girl Scout leaders, and other adults, also helped to prepare girlchild, particularly: Cathy Salser, Judith Remmes, Mamacita Marci Zeimet, Michael Hacker, Thorn Kief Hillsbery, Vicki Forman, and my strong Scouting family. Without the Eagle Scout faith of Bradford Earle, none of this works and the future is a myth. Many thanks, also, to Ben Marcus and Juliette Low for wanting better things for girl-children everywhere.
There are not Girl Scout patches splendiferous enough to award Bill Clegg at William Morris Endeavor for being a true friend and champion, and without the untiring guidance, patience, and grace of Courtney Hodell at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, this girl would be forever spinning her compass in the woods.
I hope you will like this book and that it will help you in your Girl Scouting.
Tupelo Hassman
The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case of Buck v. Bell
has never been overturned.
A Note About the Author
Tupelo Hassman graduated from Columbia’s MFA program. Her writing has been published in the Portland Review Literary Journal, Paper Street Press, Tantalum, We Still Like, and ZYZZYVA, and by 100 Word Story, FiveChapters.com, and Invisible City Audio Tours. Find her online at www.tupelohassman.com.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2012 by Tupelo Hassman
All rights reserved
www.fsgbooks.com
Designed by Abby Kagan
eISBN 9781466801455
First eBook Edition : February 2012
First edition, 2012
Illustrations on pages 150 and 222 by Eli Harris.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hassman, Tupelo, 1973–
Girlchild / Tupelo Hassman.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Girls—Fiction. 2. Trailer camps—Fiction. 3. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3608.A8613G57 2012
813’.6—dc23
2011041209