Cousin Cindy takes me to the state fair, her favorite day of the year. She wants the wind in her hair, the rickety coasters. She wants to suck on cotton candy and ride the Gravitron until we crawl across the wall to each other, in slow motion, puking. I say, Sure, Cousin Cindy. I’ll go with you, sure.
Outside the Fun House, Cousin Cindy meets a man named Costas. He works the kabob stand, but says he owns an island somewhere in Greece. His white T-shirt is tight, dirty, grease stains blooming over the muscles of his chest. He looks like a movie star playing the role of Greek Kabob Man.
Is this your child? he asks Cousin Cindy, pointing a kabob at my face. She no look anything like you?
Baby cousin, she says. Ain’t she cute?
Too bad, I love kids, he says.
Costas gives us free meat all night. Kabobs piled on Styrofoam plates, lamb shawarma. We gnaw at the chunks of salty meat until our faces glow turmeric orange. When Costas’s shift is over, he leads us to the front of every line, wins us bags of fighting fish, Chinese finger traps. We tell Costas we’re ready for him to take us away to his island. We will eat all of his food and we’ll be good wives. Costas kisses Cousin Cindy goodnight with a gentleness I have never seen from a man. Cousin Cindy smiles the whole way home and, for once, doesn’t want to talk about it.
One week later, our family sits down to eat dinner at Stir Crazy, a restaurant in the Boca Raton Town Center mall. Grandma Sitchie informs me that I’m a very rude girl for reading Go Ask Alice under the table, and tells me it’s time I learn to hold knives and forks properly, instead of chopsticks.
Costas shows up with Cousin Cindy, hand in hand. He’s holding a bouquet of daisies wrapped in brown paper, and his shoes are flawless, shining. I think he must have bought them this very day, for us.
Good-looking fella, says my Grandma, nodding. Why Cindy?
I find her fascinating, he says. And obviously, quite beautiful.
Fascinating. She pauses on the word, sips her merlot. Do you know what your fascinating girl does for a living?
Cousin Cindy hates all fairs, all amusement parks, after this night. She says they’re for kids.
Cousin Cindy doesn’t call much anymore. She’s working the Cheetah Club at night, and Diamond Dolls during the afternoon. Tonight, in that year before my father checks into rehab, there’s too much noise in the living room to sleep. My mother is gone—she’s visiting her own mother in Texas—and my father has invited his friends over. I can picture each one of them on the other side of the wall as they yell, the scene building as I listen: Voss, with hair so gelled it looks like a swim cap; Harvey, with his old eyes and young girlfriends; Brad, shaking his baby bags of pills and powders; Nikhil, who once swallowed a live goldfish. I hear their voices boom, a wild clattering of glass. Something is funny, just so funny, but I can’t make out what it is.
I want to tell them to keep it down. I want to tell them I have school tomorrow, remember, there’s a kid here. There’s a kid who never makes it to school because of whatever you’re always doing in my living room, which is mine, with my horse pictures hanging on the walls, my ribbons, my shoes kicked muddy across the carpet, my hermit crab loose somewhere in the couch upon which you are sitting.
I open my door and walk down the hallway toward the living room. This is against the rules and I know it—Do not leave your room past ten P.M., do not interrupt when friends are over, do NOT. The light in the living room is an adjustment, the smoke; I have to blink hard and fast to see. The friends are all sprawled on the couch, the carpet, burning cherries of Marlboros in their mouths, some with their belt buckles hanging. My father is passed out on the floor with an ashtray next to his head. Between two of the men on the couch, the back of a woman. She’s wearing nothing but a cheetah-patterned bra, a thong. She’s snorting powder off a flat, metal end of a lobster fork that another man is holding up for her. Her hair extension is loose, swinging by a platinum thread.
Hi, Cousin Cindy, I say, but she can’t place exactly who I am to her, where she knows me from, why I’m even here.
When I’m in high school, Cousin Cindy tells me and Grandma Sitchie she’s a cam girl these days. She keeps her toddler son in the other room while she talks sweet to men around the world, crawling toward the blinking light on her computer, pulling her straps down, waiting for the money. This is how she explains the new job over dinner. She enjoys telling our grandma the details.
That’s a whore thing to do, says Grandma. You should be more like your cousin, she says, just look at her. She looks at me. Cousin Cindy looks, too. Homely as a toad but not a whorish thing about her.
Thank you, is what I say.
If only I could combine the two of you—
We know, says Cousin Cindy.
Who’s the father of this kid of yours anyway? Where’s the fella? Isn’t he brown?
He’s Italian.
He looks like a terrorist.
I make bank with my cam work; I even bought a new body.
And what about your son, Cindy? Your SON.
Pass the butter? I say.
There goes Cousin Cindy again. She’s on her cam, eyes black and clouded over as frozen grapes. Tonight, she gives her shoes a plug over the cam, They’re comfy, and on sale!, spreading her legs into a V, holding her boots by the ankles.
Her name on this site is Beach Miztress. There are two columns beside the cam box, “Will Do” and “Won’t Do” (Pussy, Anal, Toys, Lesbian, Group, Dom, Sub, Dance, Private), and a scrolling chat box of usernames and cartoon coins.
Cousin Cindy turns her back to the camera so the chatroom men can watch as she unhooks her bra. She’s got a large cactus tattoo with neon colors above her ass, Desert Dream etched in cursive on the cactus’s arm because Cousin Cindy was born out there, in Arizona. She had a life, other than this one. A childhood on red sand; a stepfather who—it’s been said—hurt her for years in the dark. She was once just a girl who played with action figures. A girl with scabbed knees and teen idols sticky-tacked her wall, a kid who just wanted to get out.
Mr. Big, are you there? she says.
I’m here, I type.
You want to see me put this tentacle in my ass? She holds up a rubber Octopus toy with suction cups. She sucks on it for us.
No, I type. I want to talk to you about politics. Who was your favorite president?
That’s a whacky fetish you got there, Mr. Big. She stares right into the camera, pinching her nipples, looking confused.
Shut it with the politics, Mr. Big. Are you a fucking fag? The other men in the chatroom type furiously, one after the next.
List one favorite president, I type. One policy. Anything.
I’m t-t-t-thinking, Cousin Cindy stutters a bit—her nervous habit.
Can you not list a single president? You fucking moron?
I want her to be humiliated. I want her to pull a sweatshirt over her head, focus her pupils, snap her laptop closed. In this moment, more than anything, I want to see Cousin Cindy cry.
I don’t see why you care, she says, forcing a giggle. We’re not here for that!
She’s right! the men type. On with the tentacle, please!
Prove me wrong, I type. Just one.
Can’t it be enough, she says, looking straight through my screen, to be quiet and love you?
CAN I PET YOUR BACK?
Something happened when I got to high school: I found pretty. I found pretty in my slick of teeth, the metal brackets popped off with pliers, the sticky strips of bleach in my mouth. I found pretty in emerald contact lenses, and the squares of tinfoil that sucked the dark right out of my hair. I found pretty in the tanning salon; Playboy bunny stickers arranged on my hips; that blue scream of light baking my naked body. I found pretty in thick foundations that smeared away my freckles, and in inch-long tubes of Styrofoam secured to my eyes for a lash perm. Pretty in the leather seats of high schoolers’ cars and in the back rows of movie theaters and on MTV; I found pretty on the Internet. I found pretty in a st
ranger named Lennox Price, queen of Fort Lauderdale, in the way she’d document her life on Myspace, her lonely car rides, her breast augmentation, her fishnet tops, the way she drizzled liquor down the mouths of men in the club scene. I found pretty in the plastic clamshell cases of pills—for regulation, not for sex—that bloomed my chest to a size C. I found pretty in acrylic nails and Abercrombie & Fitch and scratch and sniff G-strings on plastic hangers, pretty when I threw my riding clothes away—the breeches, then the boots—because I had been looking too fat to be a jockey too fat for show jumping too fat for the Olympics too fat too curvy too woman too soft (how many more times can a body betray you?). I found pretty in a homecoming Duchess crown, in the wave of my hand from the convertible car creeping around the football field because I was Most Changed—I was that kind of pretty. I found pretty in boys calling me hot. I found pretty in calling girls hot. I found pretty in calling girls fat. I found pretty in calling girls sluts. Girls. I found pretty when the same boy who once asked, Are you a goat? Can I pet your back? didn’t recognize this new version of me, and asked to jerk off into my eyes. I found pretty in the feeling of a razor nicking the hair off my calves, my arms, my back, my pussy, my stomach, my nipples, my sideburns, my armpits, my big toes, my fingers, my neck, my chin, until my skin buzzed with a smooth purity. I found pretty when I dreamed of being raped under bridges and being raped (while drowned) in a Jacuzzi and being raped in Temple and being raped in the gym locker room because I should feel lucky, I guess, being pretty enough for that. I found pretty in Skylar Fingerhut and her summer nose job and chin job and cheek job and all those oozing bandages, like nebulas on gauze, how she invited me over for the first time, let me lift a straw of chicken broth to her mouth as she healed, saying, Symmetry, that’s the key to all this pretty, and I felt as if I were fanning Cleopatra herself. I found pretty in telling my mom to stay in the car at the pickup line, and in the way neighborhood boys beat her hummingbird mailbox with golf clubs, slowly, so that one wing dangled, then both, then the beak; now, only the body is left. I found pretty in the swirl of my lunch from my mouth into toilet bowls, and in the spots of light I’d see when I’d blink away hunger. I found pretty in clavicles, in the nose ring I’d get while I watched a new friend have a needle shoved through the hood of her cunt. I found pretty in the cast of the Real World and in Carmen Electra, pretty on Chinese New Year, my family dressed in red, picking at the cheeks of a snapper, the way I could shift the food around my plate and go somewhere else behind my eyes and say, I’m not like you, I’m prettier than this. I found pretty in my C grades, then Ds, in new classes with no Honors, in the word expulsion. I found pretty in stupid. I found pretty when my father began referring to me as daughter instead of son when he got a call to move to New York, get out of town. The way he said, You’ll be fine staying here, growing up this way. You’re already such a good woman.
LONG LIVE THE TRIBE OF FATHERLESS GIRLS
Your name is Kinky Chinky, they say to me, these girls, as they drag on their Parliament Lights. Harley and Nelle—all ass and stomach and lip gloss and tongue rings—they don’t belong here at this party, though all of us want them.
This is the first time I’ve been invited, and I came here alone. This is the beginning of a story, a new one. This is me without a father or a mother or a best friend, a boat parade bash in a mansion overlooking the Intracoastal, 2003. I’m a sophomore, fifteen years old, my knees cratered and red from sucking off a boy named Brandon in somebody else’s closet.
Kinky Chinky, it suits you.
Another sophomore named Craig hosts this party every year around Christmas, where the richest kids in our class watch America’s finest yachts split black water like a zipper. Nobody misses Craig’s parties because they have the best drugs and shelves full of blue-colored booze. At least a handful of our class always ends up fucking in a closet, or in Craig’s hot tub, or on the floor of a bedroom, but usually I only hear about it.
Harley and Nelle corner me in the billiard room of Craig’s house. The lights are dim, Ginuwine’s “In Those Jeans” playing from somewhere downstairs. This is where they stand, smoking, staring at my knees.
Brandon Friedman? Really? He’s got the body of a fridge.
Harley Pelletier and Nelle Roman don’t go to our school. They’re childhood friends of Craig’s—their parents have done business with his parents. I knew Harley once before; she went to our middle school for one year before moving south to Davie. She was sweet then, with hair like fondue chocolate down to her waist, light oval eyes—just like Adriana Lima—clear braces that somehow never yellowed. She and I spilled chemicals into the mouths of beakers in our sixth-grade science class. I’ve never met a Chink before, she said to me once, lovingly, holding a scalpel in her gloved hand, a formaldehyde-softened frog between us.
Harley and Nelle don’t look like any other girls at our school, and the boys at this party can tell. Harley has a short, bob haircut now, body of a blade, with nose freckles and a silver tongue stud that glints when she speaks to you. Everybody calls her “Lips,” and she seems embarrassed by the nickname—These fish lips? Gross!—but we can all tell that she knows their DSL appeal. It’s the way she puckers them when she’s thinking, the way she wraps them around a bottle between every sip.
Nelle is more understated. She barely wears makeup—she doesn’t need it—and her tan skin glows as if lit up from the inside. She has deep auburn hair, hips and breasts, a tongue ring with prickly neon strings sprouting out of it like a sea creature. She calls this her Kushy-ball. Better blowies with this, she says. Drives men crazy. Tonight, she wears a neon-green Von Dutch trucker hat, which she turns backward and forward depending on which boy is flirting with her and how much she likes it.
You’re so cute, Nelle tells me. Is your hair really that thick or do you have extensions?
No, she’s really Chinese, says Harley. It was the same in middle school.
You don’t even look that Asian, says Nelle.
You’re actually really pretty, says Harley.
The two of them have a way of picking up each other’s sentences in quick succession.
You look, like, really sad though, says Nelle. Why Brandon? You’re hotter than that.
Because he asked me to, I shrug.
The truth: Clarissa recently spent the night with the first boy I ever thought could be a real boyfriend, the first boy I thought I loved. Eric was his name. He had big, friendly ears that he pinned back with cosmetic surgery a couple of years ago for his thirteenth birthday—bar and bat mitzvah year—the same year everybody but me gets their face and body fixed. I met him at Jewish summer camp, and he wrote me a love ballad called “Jazzy Girl,” which he sang as he dipped me across a keyboard for a kiss in the camp computer lab. Next thing I heard, Clarissa lost her V-card to Eric. The two of them tell me they only dry humped, but still I cry into my mattress, I cry on the phone to my father, I cry to Ashanti, I cry off fifteen pounds. I swear I will never speak to Eric or Clarissa again—I hope you two get AIDS—but many years later, when Eric takes his life in a motel room in upstate New York, Clarissa will be the first person I call.
I correct myself: I’m on the rebound. My best friend fucked my boyfriend. Once a fat bitch, always a fat bitch I guess.
BURN! They both scream. Let’s get you shwasted!
Harley and Nelle bring me a large glass of Red Bull and vodka. It’s weird to swish the vodka in my mouth, something as familiar to me as water, but somehow new, like this, when it’s mine. The three of us drink this combination all night, their fingers clinking the ice around in the glass. We cuddle up in Craig’s bed as the boats drag by. The later it gets, the more I feel understood by these girls. They both stroke my hair, my thighs. They move their hands up my shirt and slowly tickle my stomach—Such a sick bod! / Thanks, it’s the mono—and I don’t mind this. For the first time in years, I don’t mind being touched. The caffeine from the Red Bull has my heart feeling huge and my lips are numb and wet and I’m
biting them and pinching them to feel more like Harley and I have never been drunk before, I have never seen yacht lights flashing through windows, I have never seen girls’ faces this close up to mine, talking.
Craig takes out a disposable camera and tells the three of us to pose. He flashes the camera while we smile together in bed, on the floor, in the baby crib of his guestroom. Our faces are flushed, and we’re holding hands in every picture. Nelle’s green hat—we all took turns wearing it. I find the photos twelve years later, each photo scissored out in the shape of a heart. On the back of one are words, though I cannot remember who wrote them, or when. They read, Best Friends Forever.
I am a new person after our school’s holiday break. I don’t care about any kids in my grade; I continue ignoring Clarissa; I start lining my lips with dark lip pencils to make them look bigger. Harley and Nelle have decided to adopt me—File the paperwork, it’s official—and they pick me up from school at three thirty on the days I show.
Harley is sixteen now, older than me and Nelle, and she drives like a maniac. She weaves around other cars on I-95, plays chicken in the wrong lanes, uses turbo. She’s been driving crazy since years before she got a license, Nelle tells me, but none of this matters to us. The way we see it, Harley is beautiful, and she can legally drive, and that’s the end of it.
From my school, we go straight to Harley’s house. Her mother usually stays at her boyfriend’s apartment, but sometimes she’s passed out on the couch with a half-drunk glass and a bottle of nasal spray. Her father lives somewhere out west. Harley’s room feels so grown-up with navy-blue walls, clicking beaded streamers at her doorway, an open shower in the middle of her room, a mattress on the floor. My room at home is still pink with porcelain dolls and twinkle lights lining the perimeter, but I don’t tell them this.
Tonight, we’re going to a bonfire party off Dixie Highway called The Circus. Public school kids. Bass music. Nelle stands at the bathroom mirror smudging on charcoal eyeliner, a cigarette bit between her teeth. In my memories of Nelle, there’s never a moment that she is not smoking. Fuck, it’s making me water! she says, fanning the smoke from her eyes.
Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls Page 11