by Michelle Tea
She stares at me, then lets me loose with a final shake and turns her back. She steps into the silky fawn dress.
“Well, that just shows what you know.” It’s early in the day, but the wide straps of her bra are already gouging into her shoulders, scoring the red welts we see when she changes into her nightgown at night. She tosses her head, talks to the mirror. “You listen here. I’m getting married today, and there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, that you can do about it. Do you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“For your information, young lady, I am happy. You can be happy, too, or you can sit in the corner and snivel. Is that clear?”
“Yes.”
WHEN THE ELDER ASKS, “WHO GIVES THIS WOMAN IN MARRIAGE?” my brother, confused, must be prodded to speak. “I do,” he says, worried, his eyes casting about to see if he’s done the right thing.
THE PROMISED WEALTH DOES NOT MATERIALIZE. OUR STEPFATHER visits numerous doctors until one agrees to sign the papers that say he has black lung. He has bullied our mother into selling her share of the store, into selling our house, into buying a trailer and moving hours away to a trailer park in a small town where we know no one.
We start the new school shabby, in castoffs. If we want clothes for school, my stepfather tells us, we can have a yard sale, sell our toys. Our mother urges us to comply; we’ll feel so much better if we have some nice things.
The first disability check arrives. He stops working, stays home. He’s constantly there, watching.
The money problems worsen. Our clothes are not replaced. We start the new school shabby, in castoffs. If we want clothes for school, he tells us, we can have a yard sale, sell our toys. Our mother urges us to comply; we’ll feel so much better if we have some nice things.
All Saturday we sit in the yard. Strange kids pick up my horse models, my brother’s Matchbox cars and Tonka trucks. One by one the items go, my plastic family of smoke-gray Arabians scattered.
We make almost a hundred dollars. It can buy new shoes for both of us, new pants for my brother, maybe a sweater for me.
My stepfather takes the stacks of ones. There will be no clothes. Everything that’s ours, he says, is his. Get used to it.
We go to school ragged, mismatched, hopeless.
IN RURAL AREAS, THE OCCASIONAL TRUCK HAS FARM USE PAINTED on its sides, a special dispensation to relieve the family farm of the expenses of a license, insurance.
In the back, sometimes, gaunt children ride, their arms wrapped tiredly around their knees, hunched amid bales or firewood or piles of scrap. They stare dead-eyed into the car behind.
My brother and I are those children. Our arms are wrapped around our knees. Our stepfather drives our Farm Use truck all over town: to the post office, the grocery. We sit in the back, staring at children belted safely into seats beside their parents. Sometimes, they’re children from school, children we know. They point, talk to their parents excitedly, stare at us in fascination and disgust.
MY ASS IS A MOVING TARGET. I CANNOT PASS THE COUCH WITHOUT a slap, a pinch, a long stroke that ends in squeezing. I walk as quickly, straightly, as invisibly as I can. “This girl of yours sure does love to wiggle, don’t she, Mother?” he calls to the kitchen.
“Yes, she does,” comes a deadened voice.
AS TIME PASSES, THE RULES INTENSIFY. WORK IS A PUNISHMENT; after school, we clear brush until we cannot see to sickle. We carry wood. Dig ditches for the gas lines. Food becomes a measured thing. Each mealtime, my stepfather dishes himself up from the pots. Then my mother may help herself to half of what he has taken. Then, while he watches, she can spoon half of what she’s taken onto my plate. A portion half the size of mine goes to my brother. If my stepfather wants one peanut butter and jelly sandwich, my brother gets one-eighth. If she gives us more than my stepfather calculates is correct, he beats us with his belt.
We sit at dinner, our eyes on our plates. If we look our stepfather in the eye, ever, without being told to, we’re beaten.
“How those little titties of yours doing?” he says to me. “They must be sprouting pretty good right about now.”
If I do not keep eating, I’ll have stomach pains later, or I’ll have to eat dry the packets of Carnation Instant Breakfast we all get free in gym and which the other girls leave lying in their lockers.
After class, I try to make my voice casual. “Are you going to eat that?” I say, pointing.
They look at each other, grinning. Then back at me, their eyes cool and repelled. “No. My god. Take it if you want it.”
You’re supposed to pour it in milk, but I have no milk. On the school bus, I sink down so no one can see me and rip the top back, pour the dry grains in my mouth, chew. I learn to like it.
“Must be like two puppies. Isn’t that right, Mother?”
“Yes.”
“Two puppies with brown noses.”
Something in my throat is clogging, but I chew, eyes down, head down. My brother keeps eating. I feel my mother’s gaze like a beam of heat in my hair.
DOING DISHES, I PALM A STEAK KNIFE FROM THE KITCHEN, EASING the drawer silently open, sliding it into my pocket. In bed, I slide it under the side pillow, practice grabbing it in the dark, my hand darting to catch its handle fast as a rabbit’s dash.
He finds it, lying beside me in the darkness as he has begun to do, breathing, his whole body stiff and heavy in the bed next to me. First, on top of the bedspread. Now under the sheets.
I think of nothing. I do not pray. I lie there in a stillness so extreme I might be dead, each nerve a wire humming with still terror.
“What’s this?” he says. He sits up. “Turn that light on.” I do. The room jumps to brightness, and I pull my arm back to my side. Only my eyes swerve to see the knife gripped in his hand.
“What you got this for, girly?”
I look at the window, the door, long for my mother to appear. “It’s so isolated here. I get afraid. Of robbers, I mean.” My voice is strangled, unbelievable.
“Is that so?” His grin leaks slowly across his mouth. It’s a good game, cat and mouse. “Robbers.”
“Yes. It’s isolated here,” I say.
“Well, no robbers are gonna get you. I’m here. I’m here to protect my little girl. You don’t need this.” He rises and moves around the bed to stand above me. “We don’t want you cutting yourself by accident, do we? A sharp knife like this?” He holds the blade in my face. I push my head back into the pillow.
“No, sir,” I whisper.
“Then I’ll just take this back to the kitchen.” Quick as a fox, his free hand reaches out and flips back the blankets, unzips my quilted pink nightgown, sternum to crotch, flips the fabric open. He stares down at me, my breasts, my hipbones, my white underwear. His eyes glitter. He grins down for a minute.
“So cover yourself up,” he says. My hands fly to my waist, but the zipper snags, sticks, jerks upward. “Don’t be so modest,” he laughs. “Fathers have a right to see their daughters. It’s natural.” The corners of the room are thick with shadow. “And what am I?”
“My spiritual father,” I whisper. I am a wax doll, empty, pliant, a cunning image of the girl who used to live here.
“That’s right.” The lamp clicks. The darkness becomes deeper darkness. “No more knives. You hear?”
“Yes, sir.”
His steps shake the trailer as he moves down the hall.
THE WAY TO MAKE MY STEPFATHER A PIE IS THIS. FIRST, YOU MAKE the crust, the light, flaking, curling crust he requires every day. My mother does this with her family recipe and sets it aside. I meet her at the table in the yard, each of us holding a small knife.
Then you peel the apples—the small, sweet ones, the kind he likes, I don’t know their names, I’m not allowed in the grocery store—and then you cut them in half, top to bottom, straight through the center. Then you cut the halves in half. Then you scoop the core out with the knife, following the lines in the apple’s pale meat. Then you slice the cored quarters.
The slices will go into the crust, the dish will go into the oven, two pieces, hot, will go into their bowls, and his will get a scoop of Breyer’s vanilla ice cream. Many times he tells us it’s the best ice cream, as BMW is the best motorbike and Nikon is the best camera. Both of which he has. “Bavarian Motor Works,” he likes to bellow, apropos of nothing.
My brother and I do not eat pie. It is a punishment. “Five desserts!” our stepfather yells when we err, leaping triumphantly to his feet to make the little marks, /////, on the sheet pinned to the wall for that purpose. When I run away, I am up to minus seventy-six desserts. We never get to zero. When we get close, he’s more watchful. He loves to let us get to two or three.
It’s fall. He’s inside watching television. My mother and I sit in the yard, peeling, coring, slicing. The glossy apples disappear under our knives, emerge as neat pale slivers lying flat in the dish. I feel the slight resistance of the flesh, then the final quick thunk as blade hits board.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she says in a low smothered voice.
I carve a red curling spiral away from the flesh. She glances at me, sighs noisily. “I just don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“What about?”
“About him.”
I think she’s going to talk about running again. I’m sick of running, sick of waking up in the motel bed to hear her whispering into the phone, promising, apologizing, giving him directions. I’m sick of the pains in my stomach when we head back east again. Maybe she’s starting to plan, I think. But we have no car to run in now. He sold it after the last time. We’re ten miles outside a little town in rural West Virginia. We know no one but Witnesses.
And we’ve been through that, spent nights at elders’ houses, the blood drying on her lip, her eye blacked, my brother bruised and shaking, the two of us huddled silent on a strange couch. They send us home. It’s a family situation, a private matter. They acknowledge the rule my stepfather holds over her like a swinging blade: Except in cases of adultery, a wife cannot divorce her husband. It’s a sin. We go back.
But leaving isn’t on her mind.
“I don’t know what it’s going to take.” My quarters fall into clean fans of slices, which I gather and drop in the dish.
“What what’s going to take?”
“What it’s going to take to satisfy him.”
My knife steadies itself against the board. “Meaning what?”
“He’s never satisfied.” Her voice drops to a whisper. “Nothing I do.” She pushes a long lock of gray back from her face. All the curl’s fallen out of it since he’s made her grow it out. “Three, four times a day he wants it.”
I cut my last apple through its center.
“You’re a big girl. You know what I mean.”
The halves into halves. The half-moons of the cores, the pith and seeds into the pot of waste.
“I could lose my mind,” she says, her voice breaking. I stop cutting and look up. She’s crying, but her hands don’t stop moving. I can hear the creek. My brother is scything weeds in the distance. “I think it might kill me or something.” She keeps her eyes on her apple, her knife. The trees rise dark up the mountain behind her. “He needs some other kind of—some kind of outlet.” The only sound is her knife hitting the board as the slices separate.
I stare at her, at the wide dark bowl of the valley we live in. She glances up at me, then at the dish of apples.
“Here, have one,” she says, fishing out a slice. Even though apples have been forbidden to my brother and me for months, I can remember their taste, their sour springing juice. She shakes it at me anxiously, glances at the trailer windows. For him to see this would mean a beating—for me, at least, if not for her.
“I think I’m done,” I say, and stand up.
THE BEST PROFESSIONALS HAVE NEVER SEEN AN ARREST
NAOMI BEGG
WHEN I WAS FIFTEEN, I USED TO INVITE MY FRIENDS TO MY HOUSE ON THE weekends so we could watch people get arrested. Every Saturday, we’d gather around my living room window with snacks and maybe the TV on low in the background, and wait for something to kick off. When we heard the sirens coming up the hill to my street, we’d guess which kind of police vehicle it was: the car, the small van, the big van with the cages in the back. My mom was such an expert she had a one hundred percent success rate at guess-the-police-car. But she’d been playing since long before us.
If my friends and I were lucky it was the big van—like the time my neighbors took too much drugs and the only way the police could get them in the back of the van was to handcuff both their wrists and ankles and drag them out of their apartment block. Other times, like on small-car evenings, things would be less exciting, although somehow more memorable. Like when the man across the street didn’t take his medication and began running around the street in nothing but his tighty whities, in the rain, shouting “God is the cure for cancer!” It seemed strange he got arrested for that.
Naturally, after some time, my friends’ parents found out what was happening and my friends weren’t allowed to come over anymore. Certainly not on a weekend. Rather than being upset, I was amused. I thought my friends’ parents were weak, and sheltered. Those children will never get anywhere, I thought to myself, if they can’t even handle a few drunk arrests.
Fast forward a decade-and-a-bit, and all those same friends enjoy much more success than me. One is a train driver—a job which has very little social status but, I have discovered, an excellent salary and benefits. One studied law and is now a police officer—we don’t speak anymore but I can only assume our weekend vigils in my living room window played a part in that decision. I have friends in project management, scientific research, website administration. They all earn more than me, have bought or could buy houses, drive nicer cars, go on more vacations, and generally have a much higher standard of living.
My friends were not smarter than me. All of us were among the top students in our year group. They weren’t, at least as far as I can remember, more sociable or more likeable or more capable—again, we were all about the same caliber, give or take. We all went to reputable universities, got good degrees, and did internships and volunteer work in our chosen fields.
And yet.
And yet, I moved back in with my mom “temporarily” two years ago to save money and I still work part-time jobs to pay my bills. I teach at my local college, but it’s not quite a full-time position, so I also have a retail job at a convenience store, selling milk, cigarettes, vodka, energy drinks. This is the same shop I worked in as a teenager, during the time my friends and I used to watch arrests out the window. I recently acquired my first car—unfortunately, it’s twelve years old and even though I’ve only had it a few months I’ve already had to replace the battery twice.
I’m not unhappy, not really, but it’s taking me much longer to get myself “sorted,” whatever that means, than seems fair.
As it turns out, there is very little use in the professional world for the sorts of skills I was brought up to need: an instinct for when a fight is about to break out, no fear of wild-eyed addicts, the ability to seem friendly enough that you’re not a snob (that’ll get you a kicking) but not so friendly that you’re a friend (that will also lead to a kicking). Meanwhile, since becoming a lecturer a year or so ago, I have discovered an inability to complete all sorts of tasks: calling colleagues (how should I introduce myself?), asking for help, using certain kinds of software, asking for help, sharing ideas, saying “no” to extra work, and asking for help.
I am ill-equipped for professional life. I always knew it would be the case, and as a student I applied for thousands of “admin” and “business” jobs, placements, and volunteer opportunities so I could learn, improve. In all cases I was rejected because I had zero prior experience, and in an overcrowded market where the other applicants could do the job in their sleep, why would anyone want to spend the time training me?
So, I continued in retail and
bar work, did some mentoring, some tutoring, and some baby sitting. Not with the aim of becoming more “employable,” or developing my skills, but out of sheer necessity. Life is expensive, and the kind of work I did, both as a student and a new graduate, was poorly paid. I had to hustle just to stay alive, there was no one else to support me. Occasionally, I would call my dad, a carpenter who fits windows and doors, and who could be counted on to rustle up enough money to replace my broken laptop or pay for the last week of groceries before payday. In that sense, I have been more privileged than others—even that is not possible for too many. And of course, as I mentioned earlier, I now live with my mom, which has given me a huge leg up financially.
I still spend a lot of time treading water, though. In hindsight, it was through doing all that hustling that I began to develop some of the skills I might need, but it was happening too slowly on a much too small scale. I could manage myself but I couldn’t manage others—that would come to hold me back later. I could make conversation with any kind of person under the sun, but I wasn’t confident in seeking out new information. I couldn’t—in fact I still can’t—negotiate or persuade, and they were skills I didn’t even know existed. I had thought myself tough, brave, insightful, but I was professionally naive. I moved from one year to the next—twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six years old—adding each day to the list of things I didn’t know or couldn’t do, and all the while, Professional Life became a scarier and scarier prospect.
There is an odd sort of psychological catch-22 that happens when you straddle both worlds, the working-class world and the professional world: You realize you want success but you don’t want to be a successful person.
I manage—nothing disastrous has happened yet, but it’s hard. I keep a work journal of successes and failures and I am trying to force myself to ask for help more often. I live in permanent fear that today is the day, this is the class, here is the moment, when my cluelessness will be exposed. I am convinced my recent lucky streak—decent job, decent salary, a little discretionary spending money—is time sensitive. That’s why I still stack shelves as a back-up—a girl can’t be too careful.
