What Girls Learn

by Karin Cook

  “Hey, there,” he responded, a broad smile spreading across his face. Jamie surfaced and reached for a rag to wipe his hands. “Heard your mom’s in the hospital again,” he said, twisting the cloth between each of his fingers. He looked deep into my eyes, pushing me near tears. “So,” he said, tipping his face up in mine, “what’s wrong with her?”

  “Pleurisy,” I said, matter-of-factly. “She’s got fluid in her lungs.” I ran the toe of my sneaker along the rim of the tire. It made a squeegee sound. “They drained it though,” I added, trying to be cheerful, “she’s coming home tomorrow.”

  “And then what?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, “it just seems that she’s been sick for a long time now.”

  I wasn’t sure how to answer him. His words rang in my ears. Long. Time. Now. I couldn’t listen. I turned and walked away without a word. He called after me, but I ignored him and kept walking—hard, deliberate steps all the way up Connally and onto Cranbrook—so fast my heels burned inside my sneakers. Ahead of me on the road, heat vapors rose off the pavement creating a gassy mirage. I tried to stomp away my thoughts, but halfway to town, I lost control, my mind racing, No, Mama, No, over and over, Please No. Finally, my sobbing forced me to break stride and turn off the road. I ran to the clearing behind an old farmhouse and sat in the tall grass, bits of tar and gravel biting the skin through my shorts. There, I waited to be missed, watching the sun cycle through the sky and wondered if anyone would search.

  As a child, I had been taught not to wander off, but sometimes, it seemed, if I blinked too long, I would no longer recognize my surroundings. Mama had instructed me to stay put the minute I felt the sting of something unfamiliar. My phone number was written on everything I owned. In public places, I had a keen sense of who to report myself to. The right kind of older lady might buy me a lollipop, a man might lift me up higher than I could see on my own. Once, someone at the post office let me pore over a book of rare stamps; a bank manager gave me pennies to push into sleeves. Before long, Mama would arrive, looking frantic, her hair blown wild around her face, with Elizabeth trailing safely behind.

  I drew a circle around me with my finger, digging a moat in the dirt and gathering a pile of dried straw and twigs in front of my bent legs. The hot sun beat down on me, reddening my skin and warming the top of my head. I constructed a miniature raft, laying straw next to straw, binding it together with long sinewy strips of onion grass. Afterward, I pressed the leftover straw into the quicks of my nails, giving myself claws which I used to rake around the moat and then up and down my hot, itchy legs. The pain made my skin flush, cooling me against the afternoon breeze. I knew that with Mama in the hospital my disappearance would be perceived more as inconvenience than as tragedy. I dusted myself off and turned toward home, rehearsing a scenario about having been lost.

  As I turned on Connally, the trees overhead thick with birds, Jamie approached in the opposite lane. He made a U-turn, pulled up beside me, and opened the car door. The interior of his car smelled of rubber hose and exhaust, a burnt caustic smell that stung as I inhaled. He drove to the parking lot behind the junior high school and turned off the engine. Jamie took a deep breath and in a gentle voice told me how he had run away four times before the age of fourteen. He said that he always wanted his father to look for him, to send out a search party, or at least call the police. Once he even stole his father’s wallet. Each time, he returned home to a note from his mother excusing his absence from school because of a family emergency. She never told Jamie’s father about his departures.

  “She didn’t get it,” he said. “I would have given anything for him to beat me.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “My father never said a word to me,” he said, “he never even looked at me. The day he taught me to drive was the happiest day of my life.” He stared blankly at the items hanging from his rearview mirror. A key chain, a comb, a feathered roach clip. He had whittled a cross out of wood. At the thickest part, where the arms cross the body, he’d glued a photo of his parents the size of a postage stamp. He had used leather shoe strings to attach it to the mirror.

  “That’s driftwood,” he said, when he caught me looking, “from the beach.” He pushed at the leather knot, willing it to lay flat, so the photo would face forward.

  “I could braid that for you,” I offered.

  He considered this for a moment, twisting the cross in his hand and letting it go. It spiraled and then slowed, waving from side to side. “That’s okay.” he said.

  I understood without him having to say more: sometimes things are better left familiar and imperfect. I became aware of my thighs against the torn vinyl seats. I lifted my legs and sat on my hands.

  “Those new shorts?” Jamie asked, changing the subject.

  “I guess so,” I said. They were. Samantha had given them to me the month before on my fourteenth birthday in a hurried exchange at the end of my driveway on her way to the mall. Jamie stared endlessly at a spot near my hip until finally he reached over and pulled at a loose string hanging from the seam. It was the closest he had ever been to touching me. I held my breath as something adult passed between us. Jamie turned away. He wrapped the loose thread around his finger until it bulged and turned white.

  “I better get going,” I said.

  “Want to drive?” he asked.

  I looked at him quizzically at first. Then we switched seats, passing each other in front of the car without saying a word.

  I returned home to interrogations and reprimands. Nick’s voice got high, his face red; Uncle Rand stayed quiet, which actually felt worse. Elizabeth was sullen, she didn’t like when I did something unexpected. I agreed and apologized my way through each wave of the conversation. I had been inconsiderate and selfish, irresponsible and impulsive. What had gotten into me I could not say. But I was sorry. I promised never to disappear without warning again. I couldn’t bring myself to cry as I might have on any other day. In the end, none of their remarks or concerns mattered to me, not one had made me truly sorry to have done what I did. I did not reveal that I had been with Jamie. It might have saved me in the end for Nick to be able to imagine me by his side during those hours before dusk, but I kept that part private. I felt flushed and excited.

  I had learned to drive.

  I slammed my bedroom door and got undressed. Uncle Rand’s habit of forgetting to knock kept me on my toes while changing, standing close to my bed, a towel clenched in my teeth, ready to cover up or duck. But he did not follow me. My room was suffocatingly hot. I angled two clip-on fans at cross purposes to stir things up. In the distance, I could hear the first rumblings of fireworks. Nick and Elizabeth stood at the end of the driveway lighting coal snakes and sparklers, their voices loud over the crackling and hissing of neighborhood firecrackers. She was always more willing to be family with him, I could see it in how easy they were with each other. Without Mama home I wasn’t sure where I fit in.

  Occasionally Elizabeth called to me, shouting out a particular color or shape of light and suggesting that I come to the window and watch. She had taken to sounding self-assured, positing theories and making her opinions known. Nick responded to everything she said with a little surprise in his voice, as if he were seeing her anew. Maybe it was that he was seeing the Mama in her, the part that had always been there, but was only now starting to surface—the way streetlights can be left on all day and only become visible at night. Hers was the confidence that came of being desired.

  I mummied myself against their voices by wrapping the sheet over my head. Then, I relived my first drive. The weight of the car lurching forward off the pedal, the coolness of the steering wheel against my palms. I pictured the engine churning under the hood—pistons, valves, headers—all those parts I’d studied now fully in motion. I felt power to affect every move, the car responding quickly to the slightest pressure on the gas. Even my neglect had a result. I loved most that
airy, suspended feeling on a tight turn, when the car heaved one way while my body seemed to pull the other and it took a second for me to join the car, cradling my weight back at the center. Jamie warned me off that kind of turn, said that it usually meant that I was accelerating when I should be slowing down.

  Just before it got dark, Jamie let me speed up and move the car into second gear. He put his hot palm over my hand and rattled the shift in neutral. When it connected with the gear, the engine quieted. He guided me through the simultaneity of the motion, the lifting of my foot and the push of my wrist at the appropriate time. When I did it myself the first time it felt like spelling a word right on the page without even having to think about it.

  Thick with sweat, I turned under the sheet, watching the blades of Nick’s old fan spin under its cage. At the other end of the hall, Uncle Rand was playing his radio. The heat of the night, along with the sound of firecrackers, reminded me that it had been almost a year since he first came to stay with us. Last summer, I might have confided in him, revealing my adventure in exchange for some story about Lainey. But we didn’t talk that way any more. I didn’t like the way it made me feel to think too long about him. With those thoughts came the heaviness of pity. Partly for him, but also for the loss of him in my life.

  And you have your mother’s nose, her cheeks, and her chin, Uncle Rand had offered, kissing each part of my face—almost as if my features hadn’t been like hers until he suggested they were. I started to drift off, thinking about those times as a child when I would fall asleep in the car, my head pushed into a vinyl corner, and Mama would carry my limp body out against the busy sounds of life.

  That night, I dreamed that Mama died. Her eyes huge. Tubes everywhere. I raced toward her. The sky opened. Rain pummeled the earth in sheets so dense I could no longer see her. I turned back toward the house. There were no walls. Bedsheets billowed down from the roof.

  I didn’t tell a soul.

  Mama came home from the hospital pale and depleted. She took to her room, not even bothering to wear the wig over her patchy calico head. Elizabeth and I kept some distance, allowing her to rest while Uncle Rand and Nick ran interference around our needs.

  A few days after Mama’s return, I walked by her room and caught sight of Elizabeth sorting through a cup of jewelry.

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  Elizabeth gestured to the bathroom. I came in and stood by the bed to observe her. The sheets were pulled down, exposing the sunken, empty mattress.

  “Mama said I could have this.” Elizabeth held a gold pendant out from around her neck.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Cause I like it.” She let it fall against her chest so that I could see the full effect. “You could probably have something too.”

  I looked at the small collection of chains and lockets on Mama’s down pillow. Our baby rings and bracelets were linked together. There was a necklace made of horseshoe nails and an opal brooch. All these things she’d worn when she was well. To wear them now felt like giving up that part of her. Mama returned from the bathroom, wheezing slightly, and climbed under the covers. Her neck looked long, her shoulders delicate and bony.

  “Why don’t you girls go to the beach or something,” she said. “It’s such a beautiful day. You can collect some shells.”

  “Tonight is the Dove Island camp-out,” Elizabeth began, “you said we could go.”

  “You should go,” Mama said, sitting up straighter. Her voice was soft and raspy. “Can you stay overnight?” she asked, distracted.

  I looked at Elizabeth, startled. Mama had never talked like that. “I don’t think so,” I said.

  Elizabeth elbowed me. “Some of the older girls are,” she said. “We could camp with them.”

  I watched Mama’s face closely. What was she thinking? We had never even been allowed out past midnight. Mama drifted into a spacey silence, fingering her jewelry, displaying each chain and pin across her lap, then dropping the items back into her cup.

  “Don’t you want something, Tilden?” Mama asked as I turned to leave. “Go ahead and look. I never wear any of this anymore.” She picked up the cup and poured the jewelry into my hand. “I can’t believe there isn’t more than this,” she said, cradling a few stray keepsakes in her open palm.

  “It’s okay,” I said, holding out my empty wrists and fingers. “Things always break on me anyway.”

  By that afternoon, Uncle Rand had gotten wind of the Dove Island plan and intervened. He didn’t think an overnight was such a good idea. He negotiated a compromise with Mama, suggesting that we attend the bonfire and offering to pick us up at the dock afterward.

  Mama agreed. “No drinking, though,” she added.

  It wasn’t clear whether she was talking to us or to Uncle Rand. We all three nodded. Elizabeth raced off to pick out her clothes, practically skipping down the hall.

  I was slow to leave the room, stalling and waiting. “Mama?” I asked, after everyone else had gone. “Are you okay?”

  “Oh, I’m just tired,” she said. “I need to sleep.”

  Uncle Rand dropped Elizabeth and me at the dock in the late afternoon. Samantha and her brothers were waiting for us in their Whaler. The coiling of ropes and hosing down of decks gave purpose to time. Even Samantha, who was considered by her brothers to have a lazy streak, had found something to do. She was bailing out the back end of the boat near the engine. Her feet straddled each side of the hole. She was wearing her Yankees hat, her auburn hair in a ponytail, pulled through the clasp. Elizabeth and I stood aimless on the dock.

  “Hi-ya,” Sam said, holding her whole arm over her face and squinting up at us. Suddenly, I could see in the stretch of her arm how her body had gotten rounder since the day I first met her, a year and a half ago at school, when she sat skinny and silent on the other side of her divider.

  Her brother Stephen put out his hand to help us into the boat and pointed to the float cushions. “In case we get shipwrecked,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Seth chimed in, rocking the boat side to side. “You never know.” Together they started to hum the theme song to Gilligan’s Island.

  “Ignore them,” Samantha said, “they’re off their gourds today.” She made a sucking sound through her teeth and raised her eyebrows as a signal.

  “Want some?” Seth asked and gestured to a Baggie full of pot stashed in the cooler.

  Elizabeth’s eyes widened. I assumed that she was used to wine coolers, even liquor, but that for her, pot was probably the stuff of another crowd. She stepped a bit closer to me. Just when I thought that the distance between us was closing, she struck out on her own.

  “Better wait till we get to the island,” Elizabeth said, sounding more seasoned than I expected. She checked the parking lot where Uncle Rand was waiting in the car.

  “What’s up with him, anyway?” Sam asked, looking at me.

  “Nothing,” I answered quickly. “Why?”

  “It’s kind of weird, don’t you think … the way he hangs around. Doesn’t he have anything better to do?”

  “No,” Elizabeth said.

  I could tell that she was trying to be cool. I glared at her, a strong wall rising in me. It made me angry that she didn’t feel any of the same responsibility that I did to defend him.

  “Well, he doesn’t,” Elizabeth said, justifying herself to me.

  The island was small and green in the distance. I ignored her, pretending to inspect my float cushion as the Shaptaw brothers fended us off from the dock. The water lapped at the sides of the boat, sending cool salty sprays across my skin. Elizabeth kept talking—a constant, aimless jabbering—trying to lessen the effect of her previous words. When I wouldn’t give her my attention, she attempted to shock me.

  “He’s doing Lainey,” she said.

  Samantha spun around from her seat at the engine. “Really?” she asked, “How do you know?”

  “He told me.”

  “Big deal,” I said. “The whole world knows
that.”

  But I hadn’t known, only sensed something I didn’t quite grasp. After we had motored a quarter of a mile from the shore, I looked back and saw the car still sitting there. Elizabeth caught my eye. We rode in silence the rest of the way, the vibration from the engine rattling my teeth and the skin around my bones.

  By eight o’clock people were arriving in droves. For the boys, the style was to cut everything: the necks out of shirts, the legs off sweat pants—every appendage was framed in a curl of cotton. They wore bandannas on their heads. Two kinds of girls were present. The beach girls came from families who belonged to the yacht club and had been in and out of water their entire lives. They wore faded sweatshirts with the club insignia and boat shoes. The techie girls, from the vocational program, were tanners, not swimmers. The shoes were wrong and their long hair kept catching in their lipstick. There was a great deal of awkwardness at the tide line as they demanded to be lifted out of dinghies and carried to shore.

  The girls clustered first around the bonfire, stepping into the light of the fire, some poking at their arms to check how much sun they had gotten. Everyone seemed friendlier than usual. Darkness made people stand a little nearer to one another. Christy Diamo dragged over a four-pronged branch and offered to cook the hot dogs with it. The high school girls shared marshmallows, passing around fresh, cool puffs for each person to cook her own way. It had been Libbie Gorki’s idea to bring graham crackers and chocolate to make S’more’s. She built S’more after S’more, but never ate one. There was a rumor that she was anorexic and I had watched her distract attention away from herself on numerous occasions by preparing elaborate snacks for her friends.

  A large group of guys broke off to the side to do their drinking, alternately funneling beer out of a keg and shot-gunning cans. It seemed odd to me that such a pronounced division between the guys and the girls eventually wound itself back toward a pairing off—a sloppy falling together which felt random and destructive. As much as I tried, I could not envision it for myself. Most of what was happening around me felt foreign. Elizabeth was moving more easily in that world, full of trust and hope and fantasy. She could believe that things were different than they were. I felt myself standing outside and watching.