when I scampered into his camper
and ended up staying there,
giving him things he was used to hunting for
but never catching.
Be it in the slow dance or the forest,
Bobby likes to have flesh here and there.
He likes bringing me into his garage
and kissing me beside the kill.
Give him an animal without its skin,
or me without my underwear,
and you’d have typical Bobby:
his left hand resting on the flanks,
his right not pausing until
it was inside the body,
until it had found for certain
the meaning of tender.
Meteor Shower
Tonight, my dad calls me outside.
At first I think he’s found out
where I was last night
or what I did,
but all he wants to say is that
tonight there’s a meteor shower,
big bath of stars
that comes once a century.
I knock out a laugh of relief
and we stand under the night sky
which seems to be falling to pieces all around us.
He pulls me close and says my little girl
and for a moment
it’s as if he knows
that I’m not anymore.
Bonjour, Tristesse
I am flunking out of French
and it’s not all ooh la la
and oui, oui, oui,
it’s pretty much all
oh merde and au revoir.
Here’s what I want to know:
how am I supposed
to speak a foreign tongue
when I’ve never even seen
another state?
How am I supposed to know
about everywhere else
when I can barely even
navigate my way
around here?
Good Girl
For all her noise about how she hates it here,
next year my sister is going to a college
only two hours away.
She just got accepted today
so now she has her life mapped out
so now she is a good girl
leaving the rest of us
to go bad.
Winter
Winter is upon us
and ice is everywhere,
especially in our living room
where my dad and Susan sit
barely speaking.
Something has happened between them
and I don’t know what it is
but I can tell already
it won’t melt away.
Seasons come and seasons go
and I’m going to have to say goodbye
to another one.
Gossip
Sometimes I imagine I’m talking to my mother
and when we’ve exhausted
the secrets of other girls,
I tell her the gossip of my own life:
how Tara gave Bobby to me
without even knowing it,
how Jenny Arnold barely talks to me anymore,
how there’s talk of putting Denise in an institution
how I think I love Bobby but maybe
it’s just that I can’t seem to stop thinking
about Randall Faber’s final day in the rain.
I imagine I’m talking to my mother
and somehow it’s making it all better
because she’s holding my hand
as we sit together on the sofa,
the dogs panting at our feet
and some sweet thing
burning in the oven.
The Way Love Goes
I wake up in the middle of the night
to the sound of someone crying.
I go into Spencer’s room
and even though he’s fourteen
and almost grown up
I find him curled like a kitten
in a ball at the end of his bed
all soft and sweet and young.
I ask him what’s wrong
and he says our parents don’t like each other anymore.
How do you know? I say and he says,
Because your dad ate a steak for dinner
and he didn’t even care that it made her cry.
I try to tell him this is the way love goes,
it is fluid like tides or weather,
just when it seems like it’s going away,
it comes back
and even if it doesn’t, that’s okay.
Finally he looks at me and says
Is that the way it is with us?
and I tell him he’s an idiot and a goofball
and I will always be his stepsister
and I will always love him
and because it’s the only way I know
I bring him my globe
and say If you ever need me
I’ll always be somewhere on this
and I stroke his hair
until he sleeps again.
New Flames
Two days before Denise burns her house down,
I have a dream I’m hovering above the town.
I see patches of snow on the land,
I see our house and Denise just outside it
one hand on her lighter,
one foot out the door.
I see my father,
knee-deep in the sand
of his half-finished garage
and my stepmother,
fleeing the kitchen,
crackers growing stale in the cupboards,
the cheese molding into hard curls
like my hair in seventh grade.
I see my father and Susan collide in the hallway,
wrap around each other like vines.
From up above the land
I see them crawl and cycle
towards the bedroom,
Susan’s cheeks as red
as the ointment
she once slathered
on my stepbrother’s scraped knee.
They duck under a beam
and they are lost to me.
I am left hovering up above
my own house,
bits of hunger falling
out of my hands,
spinning to the ground and
landing like ash on the snow.
Things They Taught Me
Like my mother,
I want to stand still
so I can run fast.
Like my sister,
I want to get smart
so I can fail tests.
I want to plant flowers
so I can pull weeds.
I want to make friends
so I can have enemies
I want to fall in love
so I can break hearts.
I want to learn stick shift
so I can drive away from here.
I want to learn to put things on paper
just so I can watch them burn.
I want to grow up
so I can forget this.
6
the Wrong road Out of town
Away
After they take Denise away
to the hospital
and say it isn’t as bad
as it sounds,
I call Bobby.
Come and get me, I say,
and take me away from here,
take me as far away
as you can imagine
going.
Goody-Goody
I may think I’m a badass
but before I leave,
I tape a note to the fridge.
(Be home soon. Love, Penny)
As the road ticks by beneath
our secondhand tires,
I berate myself:
How can I be expected
to go somewhere real
and do something great an
d
be someone wonderful
if I’m still the kind of goody-goody
who leaves a note?
Fun
I wake up and we’re on a highway
one and a half states away
from everyone I’ve ever known.
Bobby makes a joke about
how maybe we should
rob a Quickie Mart for fun.
I don’t answer, instead I think how
I feel farther off the map of my life
than I’ve ever felt.
But wherever I am,
I surely must be closer to my mother,
at least that’s what I tell myself.
The Hand of Kentucky
I was the darling girl with chapped lips,
the one wearing her mother’s shoes,
savvy with drink.
I was holding Bobby’s hand
when his compass needle slid towards Kentucky
like a thief in a dank-water town,
the bluegrass, the racetrack
too bright now for him to ignore.
I’ve always loved Bobby despite my sister or myself,
despite the smell of garbage around his house
or the bad habits he can’t help bringing to bear.
And now Kentucky is like a hand up my skirt,
I can’t move towards it or away from it,
I can’t say no to Bobby and
his big fist of plans,
so he hitches me in and locks the door tight,
he knows we’ll drive until the tip
of Kentucky is three fingers inside me,
he knows that when we cross the state line
Kentucky will have stunned me and won me.
I’ll roll my head back against the seat
and moan, the memory of my own hometown
barely even matching
the sweat around my knees.
Rest Stop
Bobby is peeing
and I am looking at the cars fly by,
picturing myself hitching a ride
from a trucker
or better yet,
the Perfect Family.
They could take me in
and love me
like I was their own
until one day
I’m grown and wise and tall
and famous for saying smart things
and then I could go back
to my hometown
and all the people I loved
would be there
alive and bright and well
all the stars lined up
in exact constellations
the way they were made to be.
Inside Lucky’s
We stop at a roadside bar in Arizona
because Bobby is the only person in the world
who has gotten lost trying to find the Grand Canyon
but once we’re inside,
he forgets about asking directions
and immediately he drinks too much
and talks too much
and the bartender pulls me aside
and asks me if my parents know where I am.
I realize I am on my way to becoming
just another teenage runaway statistic
and I am with a boy who thinks
playing twenty U2 songs in a row on the jukebox
makes him cool.
If Jenny were here
she’d say what would really be cool
is to play Merle Haggard
like the locals do.
But I’m not with Jenny, I am with a boy
who is making an ass of himself
and I’m wondering why being here
doesn’t feel like
I ever dreamed it would.
Sleepless in Arizona
Watching Bobby, I realize
the thing about a guy you’ve
spent your whole life loving from afar
is that even though he’s real
you’ve really made most of him up.
That’s probably why I hate Sleepless in Seattle.
My stepmom thinks it’s romantic
but what she doesn’t realize
is that Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks
have done so much fantasizing about each
other
that if they were in the real world,
getting together would
definitely be a disappointment.
What if you were imagining Tom Cruise
and you got Tom Hanks?
Or what if you were imagining Tom Hanks
and you got Tom Arnold?
Say what you like, but here now,
looking across the room at the boy
I thought I so-called loved,
I am living proof that
a good imagination may be
the best friend of loners
but it is definitely
the enemy of lovers.
How My Mother Felt
Sitting on a gin-soaked stool,
watching the locals drink themselves silly
I wonder if my mother ever felt the way I do:
so proud of herself for getting away
that she couldn’t understand
why all she thought about
was going back.
I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For
As the eighteenth U2 song plays
(we’ve heard this one twice now),
Bobby sidles up to me
and slurs, How about robbing that Quickie Mart?
I stare at him. You’re joking.
C’mon, Penny. He gives me a drunk smirk.
Your sister would do it.
Getaway Girl
Head bowed, I’m on my knees
in front of what feels like thousands.
I’m being arrested for driving the getaway car,
I’m telling my story a mile a minute.
When I finally stand up and
crawl into the cab of the waiting cop car,
pieces of gravel cling to my kneecaps.
I’m not nose-job beautiful
but attractive enough to know
people are looking my way;
I’m no brain surgeon but I know enough
to point the finger at Bobby,
whose idea of dinner is a pint of peach schnapps,
whose mouth had been wooing my collarbone
all night, urgent as bees to a begonia.
Bobby’s the one with the bright idea
of robbing the Quick Western Grocery,
Bobby’s the guy who got us to where we are now,
some faraway county’s tin can police station.
My fingertips are touched with black,
I make my mark on a white card
and on the forearm of Officer Ron,
who I touch long enough to say,
Can’t we talk?
When he says no, there are traces of black
along my cheeks and neck,
places my fingers don’t remember touching.
I sit there and try to imagine myself miles away
from where the whole stink started,
my knees so tired from kneeling
that I forget the time when all they were good for
was casually holding me upright
and always pointing out the place
my skirt should never touch.
Right Where I Left Him
C’mon, Penny. Snap out of it. Whadya say?
My little imaginary Robbing-The-Quickie-Mart fantasy is
over and Bobby’s still standing right where I left him,
smirking away. You know your sister would do it.
I’m not my sister, I say. I look at him standing there,
and then I speak three words I never in my life thought
I’d utter to Bobby Lanegan: Take me home.
Huh? He stares at me.
Right now.
He burps. What’s gotten i
nto you?
Some sense, I say and turn and walk to the door.
When it opens, the light hits me in the face,
giving me a little slap like the ones
you sometimes see a mean mom giving her kid,
a little slap that says some dark red dreams
are meant not to sleep in for long
and now is the time
to wake out of this one.
7
the flanks of home
Over Now
Bobby doesn’t say much on the drive home
which is okay.
I can tell by the look on his face
he knows like I do
that our love, if you could even call it that,
wasn’t meant to live long,
it had a short lifespan from the start
the way certain things do
that are born one season
and are dead by the next.
Short Lifespan
Premature and underweight, our love was born in
winter.
Once it was born, it grew up fast.
It was crawling one day and walking the next,
sucking a tit during breakfast, getting teeth by
lunchtime.
Pretty soon, it started sneaking out at night.
The police would find it lying in someone’s yard,
staring up at the stars.
One day we left it with a sitter
and when we got home, the sitter was gone
and our love was in the living room,
calling all its friends.
The next day we took it to the doctor,
who said it had a disease.
It couldn’t live in a regular house,
it could never have a normal life.
Our love, he said, wouldn’t last the winter.
It is spring now and our love has been laid to rest.
Even though I’m advised against it
I can’t help thinking about its short little life—
how its first word was you and its last was me,
how it would come home drunk after a dance,
how it learned to swim in only an afternoon,
how the two of us stood at the edge
of the community pool, cheering it on,
amazed that such a clumsy creature
could even begin to float.
Phone Call Home
When we get to the ferry,
I call my father.
He doesn’t say much,
just that he’ll pick me up
The Geography of Girlhood Page 6
