Let’s forget that ever happened, she says. Let’s not even talk about that ever happening.
We watch the girls weave their fingers around the boys’ necks for the slow dance. The boys rest their hands on the girls’ butts, or just above them. They all stand in place—they don’t move a single step—they simply shift their weight from left leg to right leg, swaying a little. It’s unimpressive, I think. It’s not dancing at all.
Did I blow it with Quince? I ask.
No, she says. She’s quiet for a pause after that. He told me he feels too shy or something. He said something to one of the girls like he’ll ask you to dance when he’s got more courage. When the time’s right.
Clarissa won’t look at me as she says this.
Maybe he can’t even handle me, I say.
I think that’s it, she says. I think that’s it.
My father picks me up at ten o’clock. He’s trying to be sober this week, so he’s staying close to home, smoking more, yelling less. He lights the end of a new cigarette from the butt already in his mouth, flicks that filter on the school lawn in a scabbed trail of light.
How’d it go with Prince Charming? he asks.
I love it when my father asks me questions. These moments come in slivers; they’re bright and fleeting, and, when I catch the insides of them, I feel like the most important man in the world is really listening to me, and with the power of one of his nods or Uh huhs, or Sures, or laughs, I, too, am important. My father will always have that way about him. But tonight, my throat feels so lumpy and hard I don’t want to talk much.
He got too shy, is what I say.
My father turns up the radio. It’s a Jim Croce song, his favorite.
You ever listen to the words here, son? he asks.
Operator, oh could you help me place this call, sings Jim.
No, I say.
You should, he says. It’s a sad, sad story.
The truth is, I waited and waited for Quince Pearson to ask me to dance. I waited on the bleachers long after Clarissa was picked up, until there were only a few people left on the dance floor, until it was only Quince and Candy Schwartz, their arms wrapped tightly around each other, her thumbs hooked on the back belt loops of his cargo pants. I waited until I saw them kiss on the lips, until I stomped down the steps in my platform shoes and tapped him on the shoulder, Hi, Quince, Hi, until he looked at me in a sad way still lined with kindness, cocked his head, and said, Hey there … what’s … up? I waited.
I open the window of the car, stick my hand out into the hot wind. I like the resistance of it. We’re miles from the ocean, but I swear I can hear the crash of all those littered waves.
You can keep the dime, sings Jim.
That’s the most important lyric, my father says. Remember that part, he says. After all the calling and calling for his sweetheart, he doesn’t even want to get through in the end. Love’s barely ever worth it.
At home, my mother sits on the living room floor with a joint in her mouth and the red velvet chocolate box where she keeps her stuff. She punches numbers into the CD player, jumps up when I walk through the door.
Hi, baby! she says. How was it? How was Quince? What happened to your skirt?
Ripped, I say.
My mother knows me best. She knows everything by just looking at me, even when I don’t want her to, even when I steady my eyes and fake it.
Take off those shoes, she says. To hell with middle school dances. We’ll have our own dance. We’ve got the CD player!
I kick my feet until my shoes thud against the wall and then the floor. My father picks up one of the eight remote controls from the coffee table and sits down on the couch. I watch my mother give him that Don’t even think about it look and he understands, stands back up.
My mother punches in a new number. Takes a hit. The robot player spins and spins. The speakers thump something disco, chords hot and elastic. The three of us dance in a circle, facing one another on the gum-bald carpet, snapping our fingers, throwing the dice. My father lets me stand on his feet as he shuffles and grooves. He holds me tight. He dips my body backward till the room tips over. He says, One day, you won’t even remember this night ever was.
BUGS
I discovered them in a Cracker Barrel bathroom. The bugs, that is. Ruthie Mitchell’s mom took us to a Cracker Barrel off the Sawgrass Expressway for a real-life experience, for a change of scenery, and we like this. The triangle peg game, the slopping grits, the rocking chairs, Dolly Parton singing through a tinny speaker. We could be other people in this place—adults on a highway in the cool bruise of night, taking shifts to drive a million miles north to find Jesus, or husbands, or any other world outside our middle school.
But in the bathroom light, in the mirror, I see it. Something moving on my head. Just a fleck, really. No fatter than a poppy seed. I lean in closer to the mirror. Dolly is singing about her coat of many colors, and I move both palms to either side of the part in my hair. I push down with my hands to flatten the hair like a sponge, and I see them, bugs, skittering away from the light, away from my part, running down to my ears.
I don’t mention my bugs to Ruthie Mitchell or her mother for the rest of dinner. I don’t want to ruin our adventure; I don’t want to be a bad guest. Instead, I eat my chicken-fried steak and I nod to everything they both say and I am quiet, very quiet, in the car ride home to Ruthie Mitchell’s house situated right on a cemetery. I wait until we turn on Airplane!, until the two girl scouts beat each other to heaven, swinging each other by the pigtails, and then I say, Your house, Ruthie. Do you think it’s haunted, seeing that people are buried in your yard?
Maybe, she says. I mean, probably.
I think my head is haunted by some critters, I say.
Mrs. Mitchell calls my mother immediately. She checks Ruthie in the guest bathroom, their bodies bent over the sink. Bugs, she says. Bugs everywhere.
Who has more bugs? I ask.
Why should it matter? You’ve both got them.
I think Ruthie must’ve given them to me, I say. Because I don’t live dirty.
Really, I’d had a feeling about the bugs for months. I’d never seen them, but one day, in art class, Gleb Ankari screamed Lice! pointing right at my head. I scratched at the scabs already hardening on my scalp, and started crying. Lucky for me, I could tell our art teacher also hated Gleb, who always drew cartoon tits and ass—It’s ART!—and gave him a Saturday detention for harassing me, the shy girl with a chronic itching problem.
We’ll call you Alligator Girl, my father once nicknamed me, like a superhero name, or a freak show star!—I got the head-to-toe eczema from him.
When my mother arrives at the Mitchells’ house, Ruthie warms a baby bottle in the microwave. She curls up in a beanbag chair in the living room, sucking milk from the bottle. She’s worked up, Ruthie Mitchell, my thirteen-year-old friend; she barely wants to say hello. Ruthie’s got the bugs, too, I say, and she’s pretty upset. Mrs. Mitchell tells my mother I’ve got a pretty bad case, the worst she’s ever seen. You didn’t notice until now?
I don’t live up my daughter’s ass, my mother says in the car, How would I notice? My mother shakes her head. Has she noticed that her daughter sucks on a bottle? We both laugh so hard our car swerves off and edges into the thick, Florida grass.
Day One: My mother brings home a Publix bag of stinky chemicals from the drugstore. She sits on a lawn chair in our backyard and has me sit on a towel between her legs. She uses a nit-pick to ease out the bugs and eggs. The worst occasion for Chinese hair, she says. We should be done with you by Christmas. She soaks the comb in a bowl of rubbing alcohol. She kisses me on the shoulder. I’ve got you, she says. If I see one more, I’ll nuke ’em.
Day Two: She buys a box of neon shower caps. Wear these around the house, she says, and when you sleep. I can’t stop crying when I see myself looking like a Mario Kart Mushroom in the mirror. I feel like a dumb kid, like someone filthy. Your dad and I will wear them, too, she say
s, so you won’t be the only one looking like a stupid shit! She snaps a yellow cap on her head. The elastic digs a red line into her forehead, and I feel like I have never loved anyone more.
Day Three: My mother tries to suffocate the bugs with mayonnaise. She spoons it out with her hands, piles it on my hair. She twists the black and white mound until it looks like ice cream, and snaps a new cap over it. I gag into the kitchen sink, dry heaving.
So there’s a nymph, a nit, and a louse, she says, on day four. We need to kill every one. She’s been reading about it, highlighting pages she’s printed from the library. She tells me to sit in our bathtub, and I wear a ruffled bathing suit that fits too tight. She pours vinegar, vegetable oil, apple cider, then Listerine. My eyes prickle. She smothers my head in Vaseline before snapping on a new cap.
Day Five: We scald them. I sit in the bathtub again, knees to my chest, my bathing suit warm, just out of the dryer. My mother’s cap is green today. She holds the shower head right to my scalp, turns the knob. Bite me if you have to.
Day Six: A straightening iron to every separated strip of hair. We listen to the bugs sizzle-pop inside the clamp.
Each morning, my mother takes me back into the yard. I sit on my towel; I yank off my cap. She combs through every section of hair, picking at movement. She tells me, for the first time, stories about growing up in Hawaiʻi. The old banyan trees in her backyard. The feeling of the Nu‘uanu Pali winds on her shoulders. The places where she still misses her father, her ‘ohana, makuakāne, Here and here and here, she says, touching every corner of her body. Honey girl, there are so many people I’ve never quit missing.
Each night, my mother boils the combs and tools in pots of water. She tumbles my clothes and blankets on high. She places my stuffed animals in the freezer. She drops my jewelry into tiny plastic bags, seals them tight. She stays at my bedside kissing every knuckle of my hands until I fall asleep.
They chose you because you’re the sweetest, she says.
When I wake in the middle of the night, it’s not because my mother and father are throwing ashtrays and glasses at each other. There are no crashing sounds. No cries. No smells of burning plastic or voices belonging to people who are neither my mother nor my father. Instead, this week, I wake to the hum of my mother’s vacuum. She is covering every inch of the house—checking, cleaning, protecting every pillow—as if, by this simple act of cleaning, she is making the promise of a new life for me, a life in which two parents take care of a child. A life as simple as that.
By the following week, the bugs are gone. My mother checks the tender spots behind my ears. The warm places behind my neck.
Nothing, she says. All good to go.
Are you sure? I ask. I still itch.
You’re good, she says. Nothing. She tears off her cap. Kisses me on the forehead.
I’m sure you’re thrilled to go back to school. She winks.
Later that night, in the bathroom mirror, I move my palms back to my part. I press down on the hair again; again; I wait. This time, I don’t see anything. I don’t see anything moving at all. My hair is just my hair. My scabs have peeled. There’s nothing alive on any inch of my head—no nymphs, no nits, no lice.
But they were right here, I say.
THE LIZARD
Here’s another early memory: I’m chewing up a grilled cheese sandwich on the floor of my living room when I see it, the lizard, dashing out from behind the TV unit. It skitters across our white tiles on its lizard legs. Its head twitches around and around, looking for something in lizard motion, unpredictable in a way that makes me feel sick. I don’t trust it.
My father is asleep on the couch, a sports game blaring, the remote still gripped in his hand. His chapped mouth hangs open; he’s zonked but balanced, almost poised, on an elbow.
I pick up one of his empty glasses off the coffee table, a thick layer of extra crystal on the bottom of it. I’m clumsy with the glass; my hand can’t even wrap the circumference. I sniff the inside. Gag, dramatically. I decide I must capture the lizard, show it who’s boss. I decide that I must take control, for once, of a situation.
The lizard is unmoving beneath the kitchen counter. I take off crawling toward it, and it runs. I stand up, chase the lizard into the kitchen. I rush it up and down the wall, cupping my glass against the paint. My bare feet slap-slap the tile as I chase the lizard through the hallway, and down one step, until it slides beneath the mildewed crack of the garage door. This isn’t enough. Now that I’m chasing it, now that my chest is pumping, now that the lizard is scared, I don’t want to stop. I open the door and let my eyes adjust. Sunlight leaks around the garage door like a glowing picture frame. I look under paint buckets, around the oily car stains, I will find it, and then I do: the lizard, motionless, in the far right corner of the garage.
You can trust me, I say, Shhhhhh.
I move slowly, carefully. I make my voice sound high and coddling.
This time, when I approach it, the lizard does not run. It stares at me, breathing, its little red lizard balloon pumping at its throat.
I’m not going to hurt you, I say. I said that.
Once I am squatting right next to the lizard, I move the glass out from behind my back. I stare at the lizard, its darting eyes, the tiniest nails. I hold the base of the glass in my palm; I am perfectly still for two counts of Mississippi before I snap the empty side down, right on top of the lizard. The glass does not break, but the lizard does. The edge of the glass has severed the tail off, right in the center. It went down smooth, without resistance, as if the tail were made of lizard putty. The lizard tail begins waggling across the concrete garage floor while the rest of the body jumps inside the glass, pushing against it.
My scream cleaves the air as I run back into the house.
I never take the glass off the lizard. I never let the air in. Instead, I become afraid of the garage from that day forward, that awful rubbery smell, what it meant to be a grown-up.
For years, the lizard came to me each time I began falling asleep. I couldn’t push it out from behind my eyes—all those lizard movements—the way it had finally trusted me. I thought of the way I had chased it, the blood rush of that. I thought of not much else. A body, severed, does not die right away. It fights, thrashes. Every part of it remembers.
CHICKEN & STARS
My mother is late, later than usual. I’m waiting outside the middle school building under the palms, alone, and I wonder if she’s fallen asleep somewhere. I wonder if she remembers it’s a school day.
My mother and father have been in their Other Place lately—the place they go when the sweating glasses come out, the pipes and powders and smokes that smell like acrylic nail drills. I’ve been calling them Magic Sticks, because it is only a matter of minutes between the blaze of those glass sticks and that Other Place, where my mother’s voice changes pitch and her throat bobs differently and suddenly there’s danger outside every window—bandits or elephants or the FBI or my dead grandfather—and we all play along with the same fantasies and fears.
I’ve been learning about some of this stuff from Whitney Houston on the news. I ask my mother about this, but she says it’s not the same thing. Sometimes she buys a white powdered ibuprofen from the pharmacy and mixes it into her iced tea. She says, See? Look. Read the package, it’s harmless. This is what you saw, she says.
My mother’s black truck grumbles up around the corner. Her truck is not fancy. It has dents all over; a few of my horse ribbons, sun-bleached, hang from the rearview mirror. My mother likes to call her car Big Beau, petting the dashboard affectionately.
I roll my suitcase over, yank the handle of it when the wheels snag on the sidewalk cracks. I open the backdoor of the car, chuck the suitcase in—It’s about time—and slam the door. I open the passenger door and scoot in.
My mother’s face is battered, blue. Her bottom lip drags down as if an invisible hanger were hung from it. Both eyes are almost entirely sealed shut. Dark marks the size of boxe
d chocolates cover her arms. She reaches for my hand and holds it.
There was a fight, she says.
He’s asleep on the couch when we arrive home. My father has never been a bedroom father, a kitchen father, a backyard father, an office father, a roof father; he is a father of the living room couch. I wonder if he was always this way, with his other family, that other life none of us are supposed to mention. He keeps a worn photo of two boys in the slip of his wallet, boys in the sun, playing ball. Even though their faces are crinkled as petals, I can see that they have his nose and eyes.
Now my father is facedown on the pink leather cushions, and I sit down next to him. His left arm dangles. I lift it and let it drop. He feels dead to me. Even like this, I love him.
Beneath his arm, on the floor, is his crown-sized ashtray overflowing with orange filters. It’s almost beautiful this way, like an exotic flower, or a Bloomin’ Onion from Outback. When my father is too drunk to walk or drive for more cigarettes, he lights each and every butt in the ashtray, one at a time. He sucks at them between his fingers like he’s drinking a milkshake through a cocktail straw. Around the couch are several empty vodka bottles, a cracked cobalt glass, rolled-up hundred-dollar bills, a smashed mirror. My father doesn’t move no matter how much I touch him.
I watch my mother fill a cup with water from the kitchen sink, holding steady to the counter. We’re rich—at least I think we are—but everything in our home has begun to smell. Our sulfurous well-water smells like cheese gunk, the kind that collects in the refrigerator drawers, so we plug our noses to drink. My mother points to our pantry, and I walk over to it. The wooden door hangs off its hinges. The shelves inside are split perfectly in half—that’s where my face went—all the screws yanked from the walls. I lift a can of Campbell’s soup from the pile of them on the floor, Chicken & Stars, twist it around and around in my hand. It is easier to look at your favorite soup than it is at blood. Campbell’s soup, my every meal, the first thing I learned how to make for myself—that thermos necklace I always keep at my chest—mine. A large can of Campbell’s is exactly 1 lb., it says so on the label, and this is the measurement by which I weigh everything else in the world. I weigh 81 soup cans. My pony Nicky weighs 705 soup cans.
Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls Page 7