by Jane Bradley
I watched the guys walk by, and then I sighed so hard I left a cloud on the window in front me. I drew a heart with the tip of my finger, and looked out through the clear space I made. I saw a man with gray hair and a dark suit pedaling down the street on a bike. A leather briefcase wobbled on the back of his bike. I wondered if he was a professor. Would I know him? Would he teach me things? Would he give me good grades? All I knew about college then was that people sat in classrooms and talked about books. I knew bells didn’t ring, and we wouldn’t have to crowd down the halls like cattle. We’d walk outside in college. We would eat apples and drink warm things and talk.
My daddy had told me that only the people in college could really vote: “Anybody can go in that booth and flip a lever,” he said. “But it’s only the votes in the college that count.”
That day at the soda fountain when I told them I was going to try to go to college, he just slid another ten-dollar tip at me and said, “What the hell.”
“You don’t know a damned thing,” I said and suddenly realized I was talking to the window. The heart I had drawn was beading up with water and already fading away. I looked around, hoping no one heard me talk to a window. But no one was there, just the humming Coke machine and the dull gleam from those polished brown floors.
I heard voices as a door opened down the hall, and I saw two women in skirts, sweaters, and high heels, with that done-up plastic kind of hair. One carried a coffee pot. They disappeared into a swinging door, one saying: “I told you. I told you he’d say that.” The other one laughed. I tried to remember if I’d ever laughed like that, the free wild silly way girls have when they laugh with other girls.
In the movies college girls giggled late at night, eating popcorn, painting toenails, and waiting for the boys to call them on the phone. I knew I’d never laugh like that. Not even in college. I’d be the serious girl. Like the ones who wore glasses even though I didn’t wear them. I’d read books and have discussions. I didn’t want to go to college just to talk about boys.
I saw the women come out and walk down the hall, heels tap-tapping, still talking and laughing. I watched where they went, looked up on the wall and saw the black plastic sign that had an arrow pointing their way: “Admissions.” I knew I might have to talk to them, or someone like them. That was the way it went in the normal world. I would have to talk to ladies like social workers in skirts and sweaters and heels. They would ask me questions, but they would never know me. They’d be like that social worker who used to come to our house and ask us if we ate, if we slept, if we went to school. We’d all answer the right way, Momma with her hair all brushed, and Daddy across the room in his chair, listening to everything we said. So we told her the right stories, and she made notes, and then drove away. I would watch her walk across the rocky driveway in her little white pumps. I wanted to chase her and scream: “You don’t know. Come back and I’ll tell you.” No one ever understood.
I looked down the hall at the brick walls and the brown floor, and saw my mother in that cage in the dark basement of the county jail. I was shaking inside. I wanted to run.
Taking a breath, I walked down the hall to the women’s room. I told myself to pee, wash my hands, take some breaths, focus on my heart beating, tell myself they couldn’t hurt me now. I tried to relax, then pushed the door open and went into the small square room with dirty yellow tiles, green cinderblock walls, and beige metal stalls. I stepped inside one, set the latch, pulled down my jeans, sat and looked at the pale gooseflesh of my thighs. I didn’t really need to pee, but felt I should try. I wanted to go in that admissions office emptied of everything I could. I didn’t want to fidget, didn’t want to stop in the middle of filling out forms and answering their questions, to say, “Excuse me, I need to go to the bathroom.” College girls wouldn’t say things like that, only little girls, shy girls in the back of an overheated classroom half-full of boys; only girls locked in cars had to get someone’s attention to ask to go pee.
I stared at the beige door in front of me and saw a wobbling oval peace sign like a mashed-up pie with crooked slices cut. On another wall red letters screamed: “NOW!” High above I saw a drawn penis. I gave up trying to pee and stood up to look. It wasn’t a penis, but the big-nosed cartoon face of a man peering out, fingers gripping the edge of a wall as he watched from nowhere, hanging there, beneath the scrawled words: “Kilroy was here.”
I didn’t know what it meant. I stepped out of the stall and saw my face, calm and relieved, almost happy that the face in the mirror belonged to me. In college they wouldn’t draw things like penises and boobs and butts on the walls. They had ideas like peace and women’s lib, and “Kilroy was here.” I turned on the faucet and let the warm water soothe my hands. I looked in the mirror and saw my new face. It was then I changed my name. I saw the round face, the smooth skin, slightly freckled, still what some would call cute. The girl in the mirror wore a black T-shirt and a rose-print handkerchief, twisted and tied like a necklace around her neck. There were delicate red-pink rosebuds scattered across the white cloth black border. The girl looked pretty; she looked smart, thoughtful and sweet. Nothing like Shirley Temple, not in that black T-shirt and the handkerchief tied kind of sexy on her neck.
I looked down, saw that I wasn’t really sexy, not with my flat chest, faded jeans, and those scuffed-up, square-toed boots. The face in the mirror floated in the reflection of fluorescent light. Who was she? They would want to know my story. How would I ever show them the girl behind that face, so lost and longing for someone to show her what to do, tell her who she really was?
“My name is Ivy,” I said to the face in the mirror. And the face looked happy saying it, liked the word that opened her lips, sliding from her mouth. “I-VY.” I saw the green ivy that grew on the brick wall outside. Ivy. Sometimes it made a wall, but it was alive. Ivy. Ivy Rivers. It was my mother’s maiden name. No more daddies’ names. I had taken Rivers from my mother the day I scooped up her ashes from the urn and threw her into the lake. I was Shirley Rivers then, but now it was a new face looking out.
Shirley was gone, but Momma was still in me. I could see her in the blue-veined skin of my throat, my freckled arms, my smell, like her smell, the fresh bread scent when I put my face to the back of my hand. Momma was scattered white ashes at the bottom of the lake, but she was in me. Her stories played and replayed like a film loop, my mother, the girl who buried her babies to dig them up again, the girl who cried under the pecan tree, counting the stripes on her legs.
I looked in the mirror and told myself that I would never be Shirley again. She was a dead doll, only a mechanical thing made with a tape coiled in her back and speaker holes punched in her chest. She was a made thing that could say happily, “It’s the best ever” while fingers pulled, penises pushed, and mouths covered her with the press of lips, whiskers, and teeth. Shirley was buried under the weight of those thighs and chests, those mouths and hands. Shirley was dead.
But Ivy could grow anywhere. It crawled up from black dirt. Tiny pale-fingered vines reached and dug into the dark brick and cracked mortar of a wall. Ivy could pull itself up and live, grow up and over a tree, a bush, a building, anything at all.
I looked at the girl named Ivy in the mirror and made her practice a smile. People always liked you better if you smiled. Ivy’s teeth were a little crooked, but I knew they were clean. I tried the smile, but it was too forced, false and scary. I made my face blank and thought of warm things, a towel fresh from a dryer, the oven when a cake is baking, hot cocoa made from scratch, biscuits forked open and spread with butter and jam. These were the good things once. And I would have them again.
I looked in the mirror. I looked nothing like Shirley Temple. Shirley Temple didn’t have long straight hair and crooked teeth, and she never, never wore a man’s black T-shirt. My mouth was really too thin to curve into a cute little doll’s-mouth bow. I sighed and felt the ghost of Shirley Temple break loose wit
h a chill, like the feeling of taking off sticky wet clothes.
I heard the door open, turned, and saw a black woman in a light blue uniform come in. The cleaning lady acted as if it were her own bathroom at home. She glanced at the sinks, with a quick sweep of her hand lifted the plastic liner of the trash can, then swinging it like a purse, she walked along the room and looked inside each stall.
She caught me staring in the mirror, but she must have caught a hundred girls doing the same kind of thing. I straightened the strap of my bag on my shoulder, then looked inside to make sure my papers were there. I fingered the black and white photocopy of my birth certificate, my high school transcript, the newspaper story of my mother’s drug bust and the obituary that told the public that “Momma B” was out of business. Not just locked up this time, my mother was dead. I snapped the bag shut, squeezing it at my side. It was a leather bag painted with bright butterflies and flowers, ugly I thought, but I carried it because Momma had made it for me while she was in jail.
The woman was rinsing a sink, but I felt her eyes watching me. I turned, looked straight in her face, and announced, “I’m going to college.”
She turned off the faucet, tightened her lips, looked at me and said, “Yeah, well you standing in my toilet now, and I got a sign out there says this toilet is closed for cleaning.” She stepped back and waited for me to leave.
“Goddamn bitch!” Daddy would have said. She was about my mother’s age. She was somebody’s mother. She had a wedding ring and that tired bored look, but she could have once been a pretty woman like my friend’s momma, Georgia Hanes. I could hear the words. “No one should hit a momma.” I turned away, walked toward the door, then stopped and looked back at her. “No one should hit,” I said.
She was opening the paper towel holder with a little silver key. She stopped and turned to me. “No one should hit anybody,” I said. “You don’t even know me.”
She shook her head and turned back to the paper towel holder, pulling the front open and staring at the small stack of those rough brown folded towels. “You get on with your talk, girl,” she said. “I got work to do.”
My roommate in the dormitory thinks that I’m a witch. She’s from West Virginia, and her daddy is a preacher like Oral Roberts. She says he has the power to call demons out and calls on Jesus to heal. She stares at me in the morning when I sit on my bed, lean against the concrete block wall, close my eyes, and meditate. I can feel her. I open my eyes just a peek and see her looking at me from a corner on her bed, her knees pulled to her chest under her homemade quilt. Her grandmother made it, she said. “I don’t have a grandmother,” I told her. “I don’t have a mother. I had three daddies once, but I never knew my real dad.” She stares at me, but I smile because I am alive now, and there’s no telling what a living girl named Ivy might say.
I don’t tell her I was a doll once. She wouldn’t hear it anyway. She thinks I am a witch. But I told my teacher. I told her in that writing sample on the first day, and now she watches me when I’m working, and she always calls on me when I raise my hand. I think she likes me. She told me she thought Ivy was a very lovely name. Lovely. Ivy. I have a lovely name.
The teacher lets us write. Free writing, she calls it. But I’ve learned that free does not mean easy. To write is to dig myself up, wash the dirt from my mouth, clean and press my clothes. To write free I have to struggle to spit the stones out, wipe the dirt and tiny bugs from my mouth so I can speak.
“Tell your family history,” the teacher said one day. “Your mother, father, just tell me who they are, what they are like, what they do for a living.” I froze. This wasn’t free. She wanted something, wanted me to give something from me.
To write, I think, is to be held down and tortured in a small room underground. To write is to be your own inquisitor lashing, burning, pulling the rack tighter, making the muscles stretch, joints separate, bones break, release.
I press my own ear to my mouth, and I hear the ripping scream, the gasping breath, the cry and sigh and whisper to be killed or freed.
“Confess, confess, confess, and it will go easier. All you have to do is say yes, it is me.” The leather cuts my wrist, back spasms on the rack.
I am a caught fish. The hook tears my mouth. I flinch and writhe, try to tear myself free, but the hook is set. I’ve swallowed it, and it won’t come up now without ripping some little piece of flesh. There is no way to win. To confess is a self-inflicted gutting, to remain silent a self-made bomb wired to my belly and set to explode. I bend close to my desk, breath held against the awful smell of my own words. Like my Sybil, a living thing once thrown down to drown in a sewer, a dead thing rotting and trapped. I could see the man I called my daddy stirring the gray sludge in the heat.
“Just tell the facts about your family,” the teacher said. “Don’t worry. It’s only a writing sample. Watch your spelling and your grammar though.”
I know I won’t get out until I tell, and so I do it. My body coils and spasms, but I throw it out, nose stinging, eyes burning, mouth twisting, choking on the hot bitter taste. I see bits of my own flesh ripped pink brown and floating like shreds of liver on a plate. They plop out and settle in pools of water and blood, and wait. I tell myself that this telling might kill me, might rip out all my organs and leave me barely able to breathe. “It might kill you,” I think, “but it’s the only way you’ll live.”
To write is to cast a line out, reel it in slowly, cast again, reel back, cast, reel, expecting nothing but being ready to yank in the first hit. Then it strikes, and you feel the shudder rise up from the muscles fighting hook and line under water. The tremor moves up the rod, spreads electric through hands, arms, shoulders and knocks hard in your chest. You keep the tip up, line taut but not too much, keep the tension strong and steady as you pull. Then you see the fish break, still fighting. You watch it beat the frothing water, dive, disappear and surface again twisting in the light as you pull and try to identify the type, size, and weight of what you didn’t know existed until it hit.
Sometimes, it is a slick rainbow trout that you hook, pull in and eat. Sometimes, it is a tiny, throw-back rockfish, barely enough to fry and suck the bones, or a minnow that pulls and steals your bait. But then there is the unnamed unknown one, sharp-toothed, slick, and muscled, and that is all you know. It changes, writhing, defying your grip as you hold it, but transforming every minute, making you a liar as you give it a name. But you hold on, feel the slick body, the sharp fin, muscle’s flexing twist. Then suddenly you feel the rip and push against your palm as it breaks, slips free and arcs in the air, and with barely a ripple dives under to feed and breed in the dark water below.
My name is Ivy. No. Shirley. No.
Free writing, she called it. Tell your family story. That is all you have to do.
I write, “My mother. My mother is white rocks and ashes scattered at the bottom of the lake.” I skip a line, then write, “I never knew my daddy, but I had three.”
My family story? What? What is one thing I know? I look at my notebook paper. I write Ivy/Shirley in the top right-hand corner of the page. I want to write beneath the name, “exceptional child.” But I don’t. This is a family story. Not just me.
I write that my mother was a woman sometimes and sometimes she was possessed. I write that now she is partly corked and saved in little vases and partly scattered at the bottom of a lake. I write I never knew my daddy but I had three. I write that I don’t have aunts or uncles, that I have no grandparents. They are all dead. It is a family curse, I say.
I hear the humming white light above me. I see the flickering one in the corner that makes me feel dizzy, makes me want to close my eyes and sleep.
My mother told me stories. She rocked me, stroked my arm softly when she was not possessed. I look at the clock and see I have ten minutes left, and that I have only written a few lines when I was supposed to fill at least a page. Others are alre
ady handing their family stories in, smiling, and walking away.
I stare at my paper. I hear my pulse, my heart, my rushing blood.
I close my eyes and see my mother’s panties. She tells me the story, as she strokes my arm. I see her panties; soft, white and folded in the dark space of his pocket. I see his hand reach in, softly rub and squeeze. I press my black ink pen on the faint blue line, see the whiteness stretch out like a straight open road. I grip the pen and tell myself it’s easy. I can say it, but I’m not supposed to. I can say it now because my mother is dead.
I know it isn’t what the teacher wants. But I’m in college, and she said she would be the only one to read it. “Free writing,” she said. “Just tell the truth. It isn’t for a grade.” I watch her already reading someone’s paper. She looks a little sleepy. She looks awfully bored.
I look back to my new blank page. Okay. My name is Ivy, and I’m a girl, a live one now. My mother is white rocks and scattered ashes at the bottom of the lake. I did it. I scooped her in tiny urns for the others and threw my share away. Now I cannot be my mother’s living doll. I have my own mouth, and I no longer eat the dirt. I open my mouth now and things fly out. And only what I want goes in.
I am alive, and I can tell the story. I see her panties slip into his pocket, feel the soft darkness there. “Just keep the pen moving,” the teacher said. “The rest of it will flow.” I press the pen to paper, see the straight white road stretching out to the red-lined margin, and I write: “When my grandfather died . . . ”