I wondered where I’d next lay my head. I had thought I could get at least to DC sometime after daybreak, but I’d obviously miscalculated. Maybe I should get off the highway and find a spot in the woods to sleep. I thought of the variety of crash pads available to a brave wayfarer like myself: the teepee, the geodesic dome, the shack constructed entirely of old car parts.
My shadow rose up in front of me and I turned to see a car coming around a curve. I regretted not having a sign like that guy we’d picked up when we first got to Roanoke. My sign could say RIDE WANTED BY FREE SPIRIT or NEW YORK CITY-BOUND. While I was thinking of this, the car pulled off the highway and I watched its lights through the woods till they disappeared and it was dark again by the guardrail. The stars overhead were both loud and silent.
I remembered Jill telling me a story about a hitchhiker her family had picked up, a skinny girl in a sundress. The girl was shivering so Jill’s mom had lent her a sweater. She asked to be dropped off at a graveyard, saying her house was at the back. When her mom realized she’d forgotten to get the sweater back, she went back to the graveyard where she found it draped over the gravestone of a girl who had died the year before. I started to worry that maybe I was dead. That maybe my whole family was dead. That we’d died in a car wreck on the drive down to Virginia and that Bent Tree was actually limbo, that every single person in Bent Tree was dead. Or maybe that everybody else was alive and I’d died in my sleep; I was the ghost girl walking along the highway looking for a ride.
I finally got a ride with an old man in a baby-blue sedan with a bobblehead dog in the back window and a pine tree air freshener hanging off the rearview. I lied and said my grandmother wasn’t feeling well so I had to hitchhike back from a youth group meeting, a lame excuse but one he seemed to go for. I was worried about him trying to touch my thigh or ask me some obscene and terrible question about my private parts. But he was sweet, offering me a butterscotch candy and saying we didn’t have to listen to his oldies station, we could switch to one with rock and roll. He told me his granddaughter was hoping to go to Africa on a mission for the Baptist Church.
“They live like animals over there,” he said.
I knew this was not true from the missionaries who used to come to our rectory and show slides, but I decided not to say anything.
“How will she help them?”
He laughed.
“Tell them about Jesus for starters,” he said.
Great idea, I wanted to say. That’s definitely going to help.
He asked me what I thought of CB radios because he was thinking of getting one. I was disappointed that he was sort of ordinary. I watched his profile; his thick glasses reflected the dashboard light. Maybe I was supposed to strangle him and take his car to New York City myself. It was evil, but then my life would finally have a trajectory. I looked down at my hands. Did they look like weapons?
“I need to get out,” I said suddenly. “I can walk from here.”
He would not let me off on the side of the highway, insisting on taking me to my “grandmother’s house.” I pointed to a big white colonial, thanked him, and jumped out, walking as quickly as I could around to the back. I stood in the dark yard beside the picnic table and sandbox. Inside I could see the glow off the back of the stove. I stood there thinking of sleeping underneath the picnic table. Then a light clicked on in an upstairs window and I watched a man walk to a crib and pick up a baby. I ran back up the driveway and toward the highway.
I was still nowhere near New York City. I passed a gas station and started back up the ramp toward 81. I looked into the trees. If I were in a story, now would be the time for my guardian angel to show. I was hungry, tired, and, most important, heartsick. The beautiful girl with white swan wings would give me advice. Or maybe it would be the unicorn girl with Jill’s huge glittering eyes, wearing her puka beads, her horn changing colors with her emotions like a mood ring. Bright lights came up behind me and I turned, blinded by blues and whites.
In the backseat of the big Plymouth patrol car, I cried so intensely snot ran out of my nose. The trooper handed me a box of tissues and glanced at me from under his wide-brimmed hat. The mountains were dark, a sort of deep blue-black that was darker than black and more mysterious. The trooper took off his jacket and passed it to me. I lay my head down on the seat and listened to his radio go on about a car accident in Lynchburg.
I cried because I didn’t want to go back to Bent Tree, then I cried because my mom was always at 3 going down to 2 and also my dad was a space cadet, hanging off our life together like a man suspended from a window ledge. But after a while, the car moving along the highway calmed me and my eyes closed; I felt light, light enough that God could carry me around in a dream. I was at the old church standing on the lawn among my neighbors from Bent Tree. It was cold and everyone was bundled up in heavy coats with hoods. We were staring into the little woodshed that had always held the light-up nativity. But the figures of Mary, Joseph, the wise men, the cow, the camel, and the sheep were all missing. There was just the manger, a raw wood trough filled with straw. Everyone was angry because my dad, who stood beside the trough holding the plastic baby Jesus, could not get the baby to light up. He tried different things—fed the baby with a dropper, carried it around the barn three times one way and three times the other. Let me hold it, I said. At first my dad shook his head but eventually he handed the baby over. I cuddled the little thing to my chest and while it didn’t light up completely, I saw, inside its chest, light showing murky and faint through the hard plastic.
“Miss!”
I sat up.
“You all right?”
“Yes sir,” I said. We were heading up the mountain toward Bent Tree.
“You’re taking me home?”
He glanced at me in the rearview mirror.
“I found a girl about your age in a ditch a few years ago.”
“She was dead?”
He nodded.
“She was hitching just like you.”
“I am never, ever, ever going to hitch again,” I said. “I promise.”
He turned his head to glance at me in the backseat.
“You look like a smart kid.”
“I am,” I said. “I just lost my head this one time.”
“If you swear to me you’ll never do this again, I will leave your parents out of it.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said, relieved. “From now on I will be the most law-abiding person in the universe.”
I tried to sound as sorry and believable as possible.
He let me out at the Bent Tree sign and I walked up the hill with my suitcase. Julie was asleep inside her car, her cheek pressed into the driver’s side window. I crept past her, into my duplex, and moved slowly through the dark. What a joke. I couldn’t even run away. In about a half hour my family would be up, Dad getting ready for work, my brother for school; they wouldn’t even know I’d been gone. Even if I told them, I’d get accused, as I often did, of being melodramatic. Nobody would even believe me.
The couch, the lamp, the gold shag, even my dad’s stack of books, looked strange and sad. In the duplex I lived in front of things, but outside, in the greater world, I could just be with them. The light coming on in the dream had snapped off. I was no longer connected to my family; the knot had come loose and I felt myself floating off.
I grabbed an apple from the kitchen and went up to my room. I couldn’t be on the highway in daylight, so I’d have to wait until it got dark to try again. Next time I’d ride with truckers and when I saw any car that resembled a state trooper I’d hide.
I lay across my bedspread. Out the window, mist floated over the mountain; I imagined that a dinosaur’s head could rise at any moment from the tree line and look around.
Julie was lying out on the sidewalk; she must have gotten out of her car and tried to walk to her duplex. She was all twisted up, her arms in a tangle underneath her, and I had a terrible feeling that she’d bumped her head and was dead.
I woke my mom and she ran out and helped Julie inside. Though I pretended to have a stomachache, my mom made me go to school. On the bus Dwayne came over and sat in the seat behind me. “I was wondering when she’d fall off the wagon,” he said. “That woman is the worst drunk in Roanoke!”
“How do you know?”
“Everyone knows,” he said. “She dances up on the tables at the bar at the Fox’s Den, and she got arrested for breaking every window of her boyfriend’s house.”
“She’s not drunk all the time.”
“She’s drunk enough,” Dwayne said. “And mean. She called my dad a cocksucker.”
In school I kept nodding off through my first few periods. Then in algebra I put my head on my desk and fell asleep. The teacher woke me up and sent me to the nurse, where I lay down on one of the cots and slept. She woke me just in time for the bus.
I walked to the back, plopped into a seat, and bunched my jacket under my head. Dwayne ignored the fact that I’d closed my eyes and began talking to me as if our conversation from the morning had never ended.
“And she’s a slut too,” Dwayne said.
“Whatever you say.”
“Whatever I say?” he said. “Just ask all the guys she’s been with.”
As I walked up the hill toward my duplex, I saw Kira standing out front in her yard.
“Snowball is sick!” she yelled at me.
I followed her up the stairs and she told me her mom hadn’t even looked at Snowball. Kira had the lights off and the blinds drawn, a candle lit on the table beside the bed. Snowball lay on his side at the bottom of the cage, panting.
I knelt beside her.
“Rabbits hide their sickness,” Kira said, “because they are at the bottom of the food chain.”
Kira picked him up. Snowball’s ears were indeed cold, and his head tipped to one side as if it were hard for him to keep even. There was a milky film over his eyes and, under the matted fur, his skin was blue. She plugged in a string of lights that she’d strung around his cage.
“He loves Christmas,” she said.
She told me she’d stayed home from school just to care for him—already she’d spread out carrots and lettuce, held him in the steamy bathroom, let him sleep with her up on her bed. Every few hours he seemed to perk up, but then his head got wobbly again and the fur of his belly heaved up and down.
“If anything happens to him,” Kira said, “I’m going to kill myself!”
I had an idea. I ran over to my room and got my tape player. In Kira’s room I set up the player beside the cage. I pressed the button down and Cher’s voice, thick as syrup, came out of the speaker. At first Snowball just lay there, but eventually he picked up his head and hobbled over to the side of the cage, leaning dreamily into the metal mesh.
My mom was at a 4 moving toward a 3 as she spread foundation over my cheeks and put glitter on my eyelids. She’d insisted on doing my makeup. Eyeliner too, even false eyelashes that made my eyes look like they’d gotten lost and just ended up by chance on my face. She took out the small curlers and tried to comb the short strands into a ponytail. She told me Julie had dumped out every bottle of liquor into the sink. I wanted to say big deal, big fucking deal, but I just nodded. Why was I looking up to her, anyway? I remembered one night a few weeks earlier, I’d come down to find my mom and Julie playing Mystery Date, Julie teasing my mom for getting the Dud while she got the Dreamboat.
I wondered if I should tell her what I’d heard about Julie. I knew, no matter what I said, my mom would just get mad. I had not planned to tell her. I wasn’t sure I wanted any of her hope on me. I knew my mom felt close to me when we did girl things together, like shopping or putting on makeup. But weren’t these the exact things that got you started down the road to becoming a sex slave?
“Look at you,” my mom said.
I turned to face the mirror and for a minute I did not recognize my features.
“You look beautiful.”
Now she thought I was beautiful. She should make up her mind.
“I think you look pretty,” Phillip said. He took my hand in his own and kissed the back of it.
At the high school auditorium the mothers were flushed and the little girls overwrought and heavily made up. All the outfits were red, white, and blue. The kindergarten tap class wore tiny sailor costumes, with white caps and big red ribbons on their tap shoes.
Kira sat backstage against the wall on a crate, reading a Nancy Drew mystery. I walked over to her. Snowball had been sick all week.
“How is he?”
“Not good,” she said. “All day I had to feed him water with a dropper.”
A Revolutionary War drumroll started up over the PA and a boy marched onstage in a tiny minuteman costume. He beat on the drum a few times before the red velvet curtain opened to show a giant American flag. Julie came out in a long white dress and welcomed the audience to the Bicentennial Revue. The tiny sailors shuffled to “You’re a Grand Old Flag” while Julie stood by the side of the stage directing. As the girls got older, the outfits, while still patriotic, got skimpier. The advanced jazz class wore denim short shorts and red tube tops. The girls on pointe wore red, white, and blue tutus and pirouetted to “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”
As we took our spots on the dark stage my heart roared in my ears. This was it; fairy dust would rain down and I’d change in an instant from the mess that I was into a Real Girl. Over the PA system the first few words of the Elton John song sounded distorted. I kept my eyes on the girl in front of me but got behind a step and then two and before long I heard my name hissed from the side of the stage. I looked into the curtain to Julie, her pale face floating in the dark like the wicked stepmother in Snow White. I’m not really sure what happened after that. I must have run for the stage door because the next thing I remember, I was walking in the cold drizzle down the highway, caught in a string of headlights. The expressions on the drivers’ faces were mostly amused. I could feel the gravel beneath my ballet shoes. One car honked at me. A high school boy leaned out the window and yelled, “I’ve seen better heads on a glass of beer,” then threw a wax cup at me. The lid flew off and ice hit my cheek. I wiped my lipstick off with the back of my hand and pulled off the red and blue feathers my mom had attached to the back of my head with hair spray and threw them into the ditch by the side of the road.
I assumed my family would be home when I got back to Bent Tree, but the car wasn’t parked out front and the duplex was black. Julie’s door was unlocked and I went right up the stairs to Kira’s room. The tape player hissed and the Christmas lights hung around the cage. Inside Snowball slumped sideways against the mesh. I opened the door and reached in. His fur was warm, and when I got him on my lap I saw that his eyes had cleared. I got the dropper and squeezed water into his mouth, his small pink tongue sucking on the nib before he settled deep into my lap, and I ran my hand through his fur again and again.
CHAPTER FOUR
SHEILA
I was not a 5 but a 6 moving toward a 5, and I decided before I dropped any lower I had to do something. Ninth grade was almost over. Before I finished junior high I had to get myself together. I did not want to end up stuck, anxious, miserable. I had to take myself in hand, not wait around, like my mother, for someone else to save me. I walked down to my personal cultural mecca, Loving Expressions Hallmark Cards, by the highway in a strip mall between the bathing-suit outlet and the Christian bookstore. In the back of the long rows of birthday and sympathy cards was a rack of magazines. That’s where I found my three textbooks: Mademoiselle, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vogue.
I studied the pages until my legs were numb. I finally bought a Vogue and brought it home, ripped out the pictures that captivated me—the way hair floated around a girl’s face, the way the cloth clung to breast and waist. It was a phantom lightness, a haunting delicateness. From scrutinizing the pages, I narrowed down the types of women I was interested in emulating:
Natural: This species wor
e very little makeup and dressed casually, in peasant blouses, often with embroidery. They wore jeans and sandals from India and seemed to have a lot of picnics. While they never played instruments themselves, they often sat on the grass beside a man playing a guitar. In their spare time they filled terrariums with tiny plants and layers of colored sand.
Hippie: This type was related in genus to the Natural but was more extreme. They wore jeans with rainbows embroidered on the pockets, see-through eyelet blouses and halter tops, and leather platform sandals. While the Natural might not be having sex, the Hippie girl both had sex and smoked pot. She sometimes wore leather vests with fringe. I’d seen a few contenders at Jill’s mom’s parties.
Disco: These girls were smooth, with long shiny hair, and wore sleek nylon dresses with ruched sleeves in Prussian blue or dusty rose. They drank and sometimes snorted cocaine in the bathroom. They could be spotted only at night. On 419, the Quonset Hut disco was filled on the weekend with wannabe Disco Girls, but to see the genuine article you had to go to Maxim’s or Studio 54.
Preppy: This was the only species I had seen up close. Once, in Tanglewood Mall, I’d observed a Preppy in her tennis outfit running into the Tennis Villa in the French Quarter to pick up her restrung racket. Outside of tennis whites, the Preppies wore cotton dresses in madras or bright green or pink. Preppy girls were closest to Good Girls. Good Girls did not have sex until they were married, and even then sex was a sacred event. Having sex was very meaningful to men who were having sex with Good Girls, almost like a church service. Sex with a Good Girl, unlike with a Disco Girl or a Hippie Girl, was never what I heard a boy in school describe as a “fuck fest.”
Sister Golden Hair: A Novel Page 15
