How to Wrestle a Girl

by Venita Blackburn

  In high school Rowina convinced Amani to join the track team. No one teased the athletes, but by then everyone’s personal trauma became so cumbersome that bullying had gone out of fashion anyway. The two of them kept up their games, though, of prey and predator, of mother and daughter, lover and fool. They didn’t always want to play at the same time. One afternoon on the track field, Rowina had bad cramps and Amani felt a joy and lightness inside that almost made her want to kill someone. They lined up in the lanes. Amani sensed Rowina’s nausea, then swatted at her for being vulnerable. When a predator spots a victim there’s little that can dissuade it from attack. Amani ran side by side with Rowina, still playfully swatting at her when Amani was sure the coach couldn’t see. Rowina yelled at her to stop it. Amani bared her teeth and growled with a smile. Somehow turning to each other full-on ruined the trajectory and their feet tangled in a devastating fall. They rolled over on each other before coming to a stop, bloody elbows and foreheads well-earned.

  “Aw shit!” the coach yelled.

  The two of them went to the lockers for first aid after receiving a few more chastising swears from the coach, Rowina too angry to even speak. She went into the cage with all of the equipment, opened and slammed the cabinets looking for something remotely first aid in nature, then kicked a sack of soccer balls that spilled out on her foot. Amani stood quietly by the door to the cage, holding her elbow. Only when Rowina finally found the case of rubbing alcohol and bandages did she look at Amani and see just how much damage had been done. Amani took the brunt of the tumble. Rowina had what might be a bad bruise on her hip and shoulder but no blood on her face.

  “See what you did?” Rowina said. “If you’d listened to me the first time, we wouldn’t be here. Kids never listen.”

  “I’m sorry, Mommy.”

  “Sit over here, you little dumbass.”

  Rowina gestured for Amani to go to the benches near the lockers. The first-aid kit exploded when opened, bandages fell to the floor in a hurry. After a skeptical look at the messy contents, Rowina made a selection: an alcohol wipe, some ointment, tape, and a few cotton pads. Once the blood was cleaned and Amani patched up she growled again, the urge to kill not quite satiated.

  “Shut up,” Rowina said, looking her in the eye.

  Amani growled lower, and this time Rowina growled back. Amani lunged at Rowina and put a soft bite on her cheek. Rowina screamed in shock and delight, falling off-balance, and knocked the first-aid kit to the floor. Amani crawled on top of Rowina and made an exaggerated sniffing motion around Rowina’s face and neck, stopping when their eyes were level. Rowina smiled and gently bit Amani on the chin, a slow acceptance of her bizarre apology. Amani’s hands loosened their animal grip on Rowina’s waist and shirt. They looked at each other, closer and for longer than they ever had before. All the clichés are true about how love strikes at the heart, how it rings like a bell in the chest and reverberates throughout the spine. Amani kissed Rowina. Her chapped lips mashed against Rowina’s mouth, growing warmer and wetter and more suffocating by the second. They didn’t kiss as hunter and prey or as if in friendly game. They kissed like lovers recognizing each other for the first time. After a few minutes, they were calm again and sat in silence. Eventually Rowina stood and Amani followed. They scavenged some expired ibuprofen from their coach’s desk drawer and went back to the field.

  The two got older, taller, stronger. Time changed their shape and altered how everyone, especially men, perceived them. The boys became their own dense units patrolling the school and streets. Amani didn’t see them until the athletic scouts came to town. Women’s sports didn’t come with the potential of new cars and exposure to professional opportunities. The men’s sports did. Before that time, it was enough that Amani and Rowina paid attention to each other, but a foreign promise emerged: money. When a senior with a new Mustang gifted by some university in Texas asked Amani on a date, she immediately sought Rowina’s advice, and, in a way, permission. It was exciting for both of them, to be wanted by someone of value to the world at large. Things were fine after the first couple of dates. Amani recapped unenthusiastically before falling asleep on the couch with her hand under Rowina’s shirt. With each new encounter Amani became more fascinated with the workings of athletic scholarships and how much a contract could be worth if the trajectory toward professional status, merchandising, and endorsements continued. One evening, they had a pot of spaghetti waiting for them as dinner courtesy of Rowina’s father.

  “Are you staying tonight?” he asked Amani while halfway out the door for his graveyard shift. Amani was in mid-nod when Rowina replied for her.

  “Not tonight.”

  Amani turned as if she’d been kicked. The door closed. They looked at each other for a long time. Rowina didn’t have the words for jealousy and didn’t know that it was possible inside of herself until then. She could only punish them both for it. They would sleep cold and apart that night and many more to come.

  “Remember how your dad was always mad at something nobody ever thought about?” asked Amani, one hand over the other on the café table.

  “Vaguely,” Rowina replied, disingenuously laughing a little, giving herself away.

  “C’mon! The recycling bins!”

  Rowina laughed. “I haven’t thought of that in years.”

  “He was all, why they gotta be a different color? Trash is trash. They should all just be clear, then nobody gotta be worried about a code.” Amani mocked in a gruff man’s voice.

  “He got that citation from the city for putting yard waste in recycling.”

  “Is that what it was?”

  “That and horoscopes.”

  “Oh my god, the horoscopes! How they gon’ know what happened on my birthday a thousand years ago when everything in the sky is dead anyway? Starlight is billions of years old, those stars have long blown up. They don’t even count!”

  Laughing, Rowina held up a hand to stop Amani from continuing.

  “I don’t know how he could be the sweetest man and harbor so much hate for recycling bins. He did have a point about the stars,” Amani said.

  “Did he? Sure, the body is gone, but the light is still there, the energy maybe. All the lights in the sky are just ghosts, tugging on us, this way or that. If we have to be pulled by something dead, why not starlight?”

  Amani became very still and put her hands in her lap. She didn’t laugh anymore.

  “How is your dad, Ro?”

  Rowina smiled and shook her head. Amani sighed.

  “When?” Amani was almost angry in response.

  “A year ago almost.”

  The waitress brought their meals in the silence between the two. Plates slid against the wood, one after another.

  “Enjoy.”

  “Thank you,” the pair said in soft unison.

  “Has he come to see you?”

  “Not yet. No. No, he hasn’t.”

  “My dad never came to see me either. I used to feel angry about it, you know? Like who did he choose anyway? Some hooker I never met?”

  “Maybe.” Rowina smiled. “So you stopped being angry about it. We weren’t chosen. We weren’t enough to come back for.”

  “But that’s just it, isn’t it, Ro? We were enough. We lived together with those men and never had anything left to say. It was complete, a day started, a day finished. Release between the dead and the living has to be mutual. Your father loved you, Ro, and never had anything else to say about it.”

  Rowina could taste the bitter aioli and feel the muscles in her neck and shoulders seize upward, the ache behind her eyes.

  “We’re almost out of time, Ro.”

  Amani smiled at her. That seemed the worst point of the day to Rowina. The mention of time struck her like a cramp. She had questions. Why did you choose me and no one else? Can it be undone? Is death temporary? But she knew all of those answers from seeing her own mother before she left the second and last time. They don’t come back again, and you don’t ge
t more time. Amani sat quiet, smiling, her skin flushed, every freckle vivid. Her lips separated, on the verge of speaking, then abandoned the impulse. Instead she stared at Rowina, waiting. The memory of Amani continued to pulse, warm and suffocating. The dead come back to listen, Rowina remembered from somewhere. You can say anything to a ghost. It’s supposed to be liberating, enlightening, freeing, a final judgment of things unsaid, but to be alive just then seemed laborious and unbearable and something else, like victory or avarice. She didn’t hate Amani or pity her or herself or even mourn her as she should have, but if there were words for kicking a woman while she was down on the ground, Rowina wanted to say them, to gloat for having hot blood and breath and the sun on her arms, for Amani being so reckless in love and calculating in everything else. Why couldn’t that be reversed just once in her brief life and maybe everything would be different? Maybe they would’ve loved unabashedly until old age, unrecognizable to the past, doing gentle yoga classes together every other day, making love with bodies only youths find terrifying, walking through museums with docent fierceness, reveling in that marvelous surprise of finding another person standing beside you who is yours.

  When Rowina’s dead mother made herself a plate of eggs and sausage before taking a seat at the table, Rowina continued to scream as the eggs were eaten one forkful at a time, the coffee drained and meat consumed. When only hoarse rasps remained in Rowina’s throat, her mother spoke.

  “Is that all you have to say to me, then? Aren’t you worried about becoming a woman?”

  Rowina closed her mouth and thought of herself as a thing transforming, changing like some cartoon insect on a video during science class, except in the videos the narrator never asks the bug if it’s worried. She and Amani had played at being mothers, imagined them religiously, all their mannerisms and funny words. The mothers they played were perfect because they were there inside of them to call forth whenever the moment demanded. Rowina hadn’t been worried about becoming a whole woman on the outside unable to retreat back into the body of a child ever again until then, and her mother seemed satisfied with that. As if to worry was the real lesson, the only lesson worth knowing as a girl. Her mother got up and washed and dried her plate before returning it to the cabinet. She hung the towel on the stove handle after shaking it straight, then headed to the back door, slipping on her sandals and leaving without turning around.

  At the café, Rowina felt stupid, an ordinary kind of stupid for having wasted so much time in her own mind hating someone she loved because she was afraid of losing that love to begin with.

  “You are the worst of all, Mani,” Rowina finally said. “Of all my dead. This is the worst.”

  Amani laughed and took Rowina’s hand, nails indenting her skin, pressing deeply, unyielding, wanting to get closer than ever possible as always.

  Part II

  Grief Log

  DATE

  DATE

  DATE

  DATE

  DATE

  DATE

  A whole life empties out like rice on the floor.

  Fat

  When the PA removed the cast, it didn’t smell as bad as I expected. The cast cracked off like a broken shell, my arm the tongue of a sea creature exposed, cold and vulnerable. As soon as it came off I slid from the noisy exam bed to leave, but there was more to do and the PA put up his hands in protest. I didn’t get it, really, the cage door had been unlatched and I could go throw my skin under the sun, maybe even join the softball team again, although my sister, T, wouldn’t let me. She waited by the car, so she could vape. Most bones heal well with treatment, I vaguely remember him saying when I was brought in. His breath smelled like red onions and honey-mustard salad dressing. After a bone breaks a blood clot seeps in around the halves. After a while a kind of prebone net grows inside the hematoma, slowly taking hold of the bone and pushing out the blood. Eventually the bone net solidifies into new bone and everything is fine. A seventy-mile-an-hour softball hit my elbow like cannon fire last spring. They gave me pain meds and surgery and pain meds and metal screws and more surgery and more pain meds and then nothing and more nothing until now.

  “You’ve put on some weight,” he said.

  The PA’s name was Paul or William or Paul William. I didn’t look at his chest because I didn’t look at people too often. Paul or William was white, with a spotty beard and shiny thinning hair cut close. He wasn’t a man in a sexual sense to me, but his energy probably was supposed to be sexual. I hadn’t gotten used to that thing that happens to people. I would feel it around Coach sometimes, not the desire to have sex but the reminder that it was possible, like storms are possible when clouds appear. Paul or William didn’t know a lot of things. He didn’t know why I was alone at the pediatrician’s when all the other teenagers had their parents dutifully in tow. He didn’t know my father died of sleep apnea the previous winter. He didn’t know my mother was so depressed she had cashed the life insurance policy for half a million dollars and spent every day high as shit while me and T managed the household, and I personally had to listen to a grown man comment on my medically insignificant weight gain. Paul or William was new, meaning he was a well-intentioned ass hat.

  I quit softball like T wanted, sat around all summer, but I hadn’t noticed the change in my body. Perhaps a different kind of girl would’ve been hurt by that. A different kind of girl would’ve told her mother, who would have filed a complaint and exchanged letters with lawyers to feel all that could be done for her daughter’s emotional fortress had been done. A different kind of girl would’ve given him the evil eye and silent treatment until he walked back the comment to something so unrecognizable that it becomes a spell that conjures a nurse to finish the appointment. A different kind of girl would’ve said fuck you and your eyebrow mole. A different kind of girl would’ve tried to seduce him to prove her worth and fall headfirst into a bucket of low self-esteem and thirty-seven minutes later, in the Wendy’s parking lot with a cock in her mouth, feel for a brief moment victorious.

  T had sex with Coach even after she made us quit the team. It still was mysterious. I couldn’t call it love. I’ve seen the videos of what is supposed to happen and I still can’t imagine it, sex with men. Men are like giant tortoises—big and round and dense and kind of cute in a slow ancient way. I don’t mind men, but I just don’t want to do them. I’d rather slide lettuce into their mouths and watch them chew.

  Paul or William wasn’t our doctor or even an actual doctor. After Daddy died our actual doctor met us one time at a physical to tell us he got a job in another state. He seemed so sad about it, the timing, that he would be going right after we lost our father, like it was such a cosmic tragedy or insult. He really overthought it. Me and T were like it’s okay and it was okay, very okay, totally normal, but Dr. Lee was soggy eyed, apologizing over and over. It was a lot. Paul or William became the new normal. To be young and lack ambition seemed the new normal. He finished wiping down my arm and doing tests for mobility.

  “You can exercise again now with more freedom. You used to be fit, you know.”

  That time was too much. I looked Paul or William in the face hard and wanted to thump his right nipple and send a sting through his whole heart. The look on his face reminded me why I don’t like to look at people, how simple they are; it’s like they’re made of soup cans stacked up and held together with Elmer’s glue, dental floss, and hope. Their big chicken-noodle-soup heads will always crack open and say something stupid.

  “I didn’t mean it like that!” Paul or William said in a hurry. “I just remember you were an athlete, right? My nephew plays football now. He’s okay”—he wobbled his hand in the air—“getting better. Plays receiver but should probably hold the line, doesn’t have the hands for it.”

  I stopped looking at Paul or William, to be kind or maybe just to demand silence. This was the Kaiser Permanente in Long Beach, one city over and noisy. Nearly every seat in the waiting room was always filled. I met T outside. She look
ed like herself, face a perfect pear wrapped in the blue air from the vape. The palm trees in the landscaping sighed in the late morning breeze. I wanted a breakfast sandwich, some kind of potatoes, and an apple pie. She looked down at me and grabbed my elbow hard to see if it hurt. I didn’t flinch, so she was satisfied.

  “He called me fat,” I told her.

  She laughed, looked along my body, shrugged some, nodded some, kicked my calves lightly as if checking tire pressure, and said, “Yeah, kinda.”

  Lizard Sex

  Lizards having sex is a lot like wrestling. On a trip to Phoenix visiting two of the aunties, I saw a ball of dirt on the wall that turned out to be two lizards going at it. I had to be maybe twelve and the idea of sex was fine, something distant and only interesting to adults, though I’d begun to intentionally touch my own body. Strange things would arouse me then and maybe now, like Gilligan’s Island, all those odd white people on an island forever. It wasn’t gay or straight or the parts that were supposed to be romantic. Skipper and Gilligan would turn me on sometimes, the way the skipper would beat Gilligan with his cap and smash it back on his own head. Who knows?

  At Auntie Rae’s house in the desert during July we didn’t do much until the sun went down or barely came up. She had the nicest house of everybody we knew and made the drive from California to Arizona worth the sweat and gas. Walking out there was like being suspended in the mouth of a giant beast, the air became breath moving over us. We got to drink slushies and Capri Sun nonstop, though, which I appreciated. Me and T went swimming with the cousins. Auntie Rae’s husband was Black while Auntie Jackie’s latest boyfriend was white. Auntie Jackie had two mixed kids and Auntie Rae had all Black kids. Me and T thought all of the cousins were kind of fucked-up but just thought Arizona was like that. They didn’t sound quite like us, didn’t play quite like us, but they weren’t as foreign as Auntie Tammy’s kids in Alabama. They were a whole bag of different accents, but we liked them better than the Arizona ones. Sometimes the Black cousins teased T and the mixed cousins for being lighter than the rest of us, the bitter kind of teasing that is fused with hatred and envy and resentment at the imaginary notion that there is a difference of any significance at all. It was a feeling older and bigger than anything we could hold on to, something inherited in the way the adults talked about each other and their children, like how Auntie Rae gave compliments to the beauty of Auntie Jackie’s kids with her lips turned down like she tasted salt in her coffee. T would just do laps and return underwater to grab us by the ankles and drag us under, everyone laughing and drowning.