The Geography of Girlhood
Page 5
without a second thought,
my sister goes.
Bobby stands there in the moonlight,
jamming his hands in his pockets
and for the first time
he looks like someone gentle and sweet
like someone I might know
or someone I might be.
Covering
My sister crawls in through her window
at three in the morning,
and I’m there waiting,
having already covered for her
and been yelled at by Dad
for being half an hour late.
Were you with Jeff Eckman? I ask
And she says, So what if I was?
I glare at her.
Bobby loves you.
Bobby is an idiot, she says.
No, he isn’t!
If he’s so great, why don’t you go out with him,
she mutters
and crawls into bed
pulling the covers up over her
lying, cheating, beautiful head.
Doctor’s Visit
I haven’t seen Denise all summer,
until today, when she came over
after her doctor’s visit.
When I asked her how it went
she said she told the nurse,
I feel restless, I forget street names,
my house key has been missing for days.
Remove your clothes,
the nurse replied,
and stand against the wall.
Pretend you are in your own house
or better yet pretend
your name means desire
in a different language.
The form they gave Denise was standard:
Chicken pox? Yes, she wrote, only last year,
contracted from the children’s section
of the public library.
Herpes? He was a brave man, she said,
his room was filled with war medals.
Alcoholism? Well, there is
a bottle beside my bed
but I don’t remember how it got there.
As for the doctor,
he had her lie on a table.
She said her body was remarkably quiet
as she recalled scenes from The Wizard of Oz.
I felt tears clotting my eyes
and I pulled her to me,
my faraway friend
who said she could still feel the stethoscope cool
against her heart,
who said she could still smell the cool paper
beneath her,
who said she knew that
if she wished hard enough
she could make herself well.
Sixteenth Birthday
For my sixteenth birthday, Jenny says I need to forget
about the fact that Denise won’t come out of her
room. Jenny says I need to forget about everything and
go a rock show. Jenny says I owe myself a good time.
When have you ever done anything crazy on your
birthday?
She’s right: last birthday, I went sailing. The one before
that, I went to a fancy dinner at a stuffy restaurant with
my dad. Of all of them, I remember my fourth birthday
the best. I ate cake and my mother gave me a globe.
She held it and said, Where should we go? I shrugged.
I don’t know. She spun the globe, then stopped it with
a finger. Wherever I’m touching, that’s where we go,
she said, lifting her finger off Mozambique. See? We’ve
got a whole world to choose from, she said. Later, as
she was tucking me into bed, she put the globe on my
dresser. If you ever need me, she smiled, just remember
I’ll always be somewhere on here. And two weeks later,
she was gone.
Pop. 6,578,940
As the ferry coasts into downtown,
all lit up and windy and magic,
I realize kids who grow up in cities
must never dream of
going anywhere else
because they’re already there.
A Date with the Night
Here we are, sixty miles from home,
standing in a club
with the coolest people on the planet
who can probably tell we’re from
the uncoolest place on the planet.
Jenny says we have to get closer to the stage
so we push our way to the front
where kids are sitting on the ground
and some of them are sneaking smokes
and wearing Yeah Yeah Yeahs T-shirts
and Jenny’s got a flask of something
and then the lights dim
and everyone screams
and the first chord is struck
and the lead singer runs onstage
wearing something
she starts to rip herself out of
and people are shoving and squishing
and I am in the middle of it all,
hot and breathless and happy,
like it was someplace
I was born to be.
One Day
When I get home from the concert
at two in the morning,
Spencer is sitting in the living room
reading Lord of the Rings
for the umpteenth time.
Don’t ask me how I got stuck with
the world’s biggest nerd
waiting up for me,
but there you go.
To make matters worse, he says,
maybe one day I’ll go to concerts, too
and he looks at me with this dorky look
as if I’m Arwen the Elf Queen
instead of just me.
Legal Now
Today I got a 96 on my driver’s test
which means I am as close to free
as being sixteen can be.
I am four tires and a miniskirt,
I am heaven on wheels.
According to the guy from the DMV,
I got the highest score
of any girl this summer.
He said, statistically, women
score at least 75% lower than men do
and I said, that must be one good thing
about being left with a dad
and not a mom.
Dial Tone
Bobby calls our house tonight
to talk to Tara
and I can’t bring myself to tell him
she’s out with Jeff Eckman
so I lie and say
she’s at a movie with Lisa Tavorino.
I ask if I can take a message
and he says No,
but you have a good night, Penny.
I sit there for a few minutes
listening to the dial tone
like it’s music or something
because that’s the first time
he’s ever said my name.
Rainstorm
The summer ended with a rainstorm,
the only rain August had seen in years.
It came down strange and sudden
as if to remind us
we may think we know
what’s going to happen
but we don’t.
Live Wire
While I was inside safe and warm,
Randall Faber went out
into the summer storm
with his brothers and his father.
While I was inside, safe and warm,
that’s when Randall Faber’s hand
first touched the live wire.
I imagine that was the moment
when everything went gold,
sonnets loosening in his cheeks,
the universe uncaged like a pack of stars,
the molecules sloping through him,
his mouth opening as if ripening for a k
iss
and that small ah escaping into the rain,
the three men watching their fourth
fall to the damp ground,
platter of leaves and shoes,
watching as their boy falls upon it,
his body a heave of light.
5
the river of sixteen
Who Loved Randall the Most
At school, there’s an unspoken contest
to see who loved Randall the most.
The results are based on things like
the amount of Loud Sobs Emitted During Third Period
or Handwritten Notes From Randall In Your Possession.
So far, his ex-girlfriend Janelle
seems to be gaining the edge
on his current girlfriend Tammy,
simply based on the sheer number of
Items of Clothing Received.
Tammy started dating Randall this summer
so she didn’t have time
to collect his letterman’s jacket
or his track jersey or his used wristbands,
two of which yesterday
Janelle wore simultaneously.
As for me, people barely remember
those few weeks in junior high
when I belonged to Randall Faber,
making this a contest I don’t care to enter
because all I have to show
is a sloppy old first kiss
and the ratty memory of a dead boy’s hand
that somehow found its way
into mine
and then out again.
Pop. 9,761
In big cities, kids die all the time
so when someone dies in a small town,
statistically speaking,
it’s like you lose
25 people
all at once.
Orchids
At Randall’s funeral,
Elaine talks to me for the first time in a year.
By the bathroom, I see Stan Bondurant
and Pete Larson, who last week
were almost in a fistfight,
and now they’re locked in a hug.
Fullbacks are crying by a spate of orchids,
girls who hate each other are holding hands.
Tennis players are sitting next to punk rockers,
band nerds and brainiacs are in the same pew
as cheerleaders and art freaks.
Jenny for the first time in a long time doesn’t make fun
of anybody.
Denise for the first time in three weeks comes out of
her room.
Elaine says, I’m sorry, and hugs me
and I don’t know if it’s about Randall or for the year
we’ve spent apart, but it doesn’t matter.
I don’t know how to put it other than
everything is turned upside now,
like a crab on its back
that can’t get upright again.
Losing You
Look what losing you has done to us.
The student body president doesn’t even bother
to give a speech on the first day of school.
A month later, the town slut gets voted
homecoming queen.
All the boys who were your friends
lose every bit of promise they have
to the bottle or bad grades.
You are in the ground now
and I stand at the Kanouk Island bridge,
fishing for something I’ll never catch
reeling in nothing but moss
losing nothing but time
my hook coming up empty
over and over again.
Sleeping Bag
Do you ever think of us here on Earth,
wishing you back,
turning to drug or drink?
Do you ever come back to spy on us?
Nights like this one, I spend the night
in the yard, looking at the stars and wondering
Are you somewhere up there in all that?
On the day of your funeral,
your mother handed out 4×6
copies of your school photo
and then we never saw her again.
Wherever she lives now,
it’s a place that never stops being night.
Me, I’m giving myself over to a foggy fiction,
photo in a yearbook,
sweet remnant of a kiss I’ll never have again.
In the end, I’m just a girl
on a sleeping bag in the middle of nowhere,
at the starting line of every mistake
she’ll ever make.
The Petty Thief
Lately, I’ve been having dreams about stealing
so I decide what’s the difference
between dreaming it and doing it.
At the market at the drugstore,
I take lipsticks, hard candy like the kind
in Grandpa’s dish, items small as bones.
The stolen lipstick looks perfect on my mouth
and I know that stealing
does not make me an evil person.
In fact, the easy fever
that comes when I step outside
makes me feel beautiful, ripe and waxy,
crazy for a man to come
sweeping along, fresh from prison,
and show me all that crime can be.
The bother and the guns,
the smell of urine in the front parlor.
With my pocketful of loot,
I traverse the halls
like some kind of starlet.
I eye the boys and the girls at school
and wonder if any of them
are living out their dreams
like I am.
The Urge
God, you’re depressing, my sister tells me as we’re
driving to school.
You really should snap out of it, Jenny says in the
library one day
before leaving to go talk to Jenny Able.
Denise would probably tell me the same things
but she’s busy sneaking cigarettes with the burnouts
out back.
Are you always going to be this sad? my stepbrother
asks.
All I know is that
the urge to run or kiss or steal or fight
is coming faster now, and maybe
my mother was right,
maybe the only place to go
is away.
Touching Bobby
You are the ex-boyfriend of my sister
a girl I’m not even sure I care about,
let alone love.
I am the girl who was always in her room,
lips sweating at the thought
of your police record.
Tonight, you show up at our house
and my sister is nowhere in sight.
I am a bungle of hubcaps on a hot day
waiting for someone to drive me off the lot.
Could I get a ride? I ask
and you open your car door for me.
All I want is for some of your bad boy
to rub off on my hands like newsprint.
As your blue-jeaned leg
whispers against mine,
the smell of grade school,
of paste and geography texts,
rises around us,
like the smell of something
already long gone,
like some powder
dropped on the ordinary world.
Everywhere
In Bobby’s car,
I feel like I’m a cork about to pop.
Bobby says, Where do you want to go?
and I shrug and say, Anywhere.
What I really want to say is,
Take me everywhere you took Tara
and do everything you did to her
and say everything you said.
What I really want to say
is,
Show me what it was like
so I could know now
what I could only guess at
back then.
The Marina
Bobby smells like beer and wood chips
and as we walk down the dock
he takes my hand
and a hot flash of happiness hits me.
The boats heave and squeak around us
and the moon sits fat and bright above us
as if from somewhere across the sky
the sun is sending it a kiss
full on the mouth.
Where Have You Been?
My stepmother asks me when I got home
and I say nowhere.
My sister looks at me funny.
She’s been with a guy, she says.
What guy? My dad sits up straight.
My stepbrother looks like he wants to leave the room.
I haven’t been anywhere, I lie.
After dinner, my sister stops me in the hall
and says, C’mon, who were you with?
You wouldn’t want to know, I say
because if anything is the truth,
that is.
Mementos
My stepbrother is telling me
how he danced with Beth Sczepanick
at the Friday Afternoon Dance
and he goes on and on
about what he said
and what she said
and what he did
and what she did.
It’s only been two years
since I was at that very same dance
but when I think of those days
they feel like snapshots
from the story
of someone else’s life.
Typical Bobby
It was typical Bobby, typical me:
typical of him to call me into his garage,
typical of me to follow.
I was sixteen, hoping for a kiss
or a jar of his mom’s peaches.
Little did I know I’d be greeted
with a freshly skinned half-buck,
another one of Bobby’s prize marks.
Red and helpless, it swung there
as Bobby showed me around
the circumference of the body,
showed me the parts his mother
would make into a meal.
Never much of a braggart,
Bobby didn’t put the deer’s horns
on his roll-bar the way Stan Bondurant does.
And he hasn’t told many
about last night in the woods