by Jen Bryant
an official member, I would consider taking her
if she thought she could dress appropriately
and pay for her entry.
I was kidding, of course, about the clothes
(you can wear anything you like) and the money
(only five dollars for a student, which I know she can afford),
but seeing as how Tiffany probably won’t have a free afternoon anytime soon,
none of that really matters.
part 3
“It’s the hardest work in the world to try not to work!”
—N. C. Wyeth
29.
Marianne Ferlinghetti invited me
to her thirteenth-birthday party
at the Bowling Palace.
This morning on the bus, she gave me
an invitation she’d made herself
that had a drawing of a cake
sitting on a table, with yellow frosting
and blue roses, and gifts of all
shapes and sizes floating over it.
Tiffany didn’t say anything, but I
know what she was thinking.
She and her friends call Marianne’s
group of friends “the potheads”—
and for the most part, they are right.
Which is why—even though Marianne and I
have known each other since kindergarten
and her mother brought food
to Daddy and me after you died—
I am careful not to spend too much
time with Marianne’s friends. They still ask me
to hang out after school at the old shed
behind the Longwood Baptist Church.
Some days, there’s a part of me
that wants to say yes. Maybe I am too
picky. Maybe they would let me hang out with them
and not smoke (but I doubt it).
I don’t seem to fit in to a group—
the Jocks, the Brains, the Preps, the Goths—
like most of the other seventh graders,
but I’m not uptight about it.
Mrs. Yocum thinks I should make more
of an effort—last year, she gave me this book
called Fitting In: Social Skills for Shy Kids
that had cartoons of students who looked
like aliens and sidebars with hints about
“establishing trust” and “knowing your boundaries.”
I looked through it one night and then
threw it in the trash. My boundaries
are pretty well set, and if I decide
to move them, I’ll be sure to tell Mrs. Yocum.
In the meantime, Blake and Ella and Tiffany
are just about all I can handle.
30.
“Georgia, you have to come over
right now. It’s awful, just awful. All of them
at once—oh, God….”
That was Tiffany on the phone this afternoon. She was half-crying
(and Tiffany almost never cries)
and her voice sounded funny—almost shy and kind of whimpery
(Tiffany is not shy or whimpery).
I ran.
And the whole way over, I’m thinking
how weird she’s been lately—too tired one day,
too jittery the next—
and I’m guessing what the “all of them” might be….
Maybe she’d had enough and she just
up and quit all her sports at once,
or maybe her big shelf of trophies
(and there are a lot of them)
came crashing down on her head,
or maybe she knocked out all her teeth
with a lacrosse stick.
By the time I arrived, my stomach was in knots
and I was out of breath.
I found Tiffany in her room, standing over her fish tank,
her tears plunk-plunking into the water.
About a month ago, Tiffany decided she needed
a pet, but since she’s hardly ever home,
she doesn’t have time for a dog or even a cat,
and she doesn’t like hamsters or gerbils or snakes.
I suggested fish.
“They’re easy to take care of,” I said.
“And they’re really good for stress.”
And being Tiffany, she didn’t buy just one or two, she bought
twelve—just like a girl’s lacrosse team. She even got one
with an exotic tail and named it Goalie.
But something went wrong with the water or with the filter,
’cause they were all belly-up in the tank,
some on the bottom, and some drifting slowly
on the current, like lost souls.
It was a sad sight. It was a lot less sad, though,
than the other things I’d been imagining,
so I sat on the edge of Tiffany’s bed,
put my head between my knees,
and caught my breath.
When I looked up, Tiffany’s tears had stopped, and those
twelve upside-down, slow-drifting fish looked so pathetic—
I couldn’t help it—I started laughing.
I thought Tiffany would be mad, but then she laughed, too,
and soon we were both
rolling around on the floor,
clutching our sides.
Then Tiffany’s brother, Teddy, came in (he’s in fifth grade).
He said: “Hey, let me flush them for you,”
but Tiffany insisted on a proper burial for her “team.”
Teddy helped us net them
and put them in a cookie tin. We took it outside and dug
a small hole under one of the scraggly twigs they call “trees”
in Tiffany’s neighborhood.
After a moment of silence, I played “We Are the Champions”
on Teddy’s portable CD player. Tiffany asked me
what she should say for the eulogy,
and when I said: “I don’t know, I’ve never been to a funeral,”
she looked shocked.
“I guess you should say something nice about each one,
but since there were a dozen,
and they were small, maybe one thing about them all
would be enough.”
We bowed our heads and Tiffany said
how they put up a good fight, how they all
stuck together in their tank and none of them
were selfish. Except she said “shellfish” and that made us
start laughing all over again. I said a final “Amen”
and we went inside to find something to eat. That’s when
Tiffany asked me: “How come you didn’t go
to your mother’s funeral?”
So I told her: “The night Momma died, I cried and cried
and couldn’t stop,
and I went into shock
and had to stay in the hospital.
Daddy had to go back and forth
between the funeral home and me, and while he was visiting,
Momma’s folks took over.”
I told her how, behind Daddy’s back, they had you cremated
and took your ashes to Savannah,
so that’s how come I never went to your funeral
or saw your grave, or, as Mrs. Yocum would say,
“had closure.”
Tiffany’s eyes opened real wide,
like they always do when I tell her something
she can hardly believe.
She asked her mother if she could skip practice
“just for tonight,” and Mrs. O’Neill said:
“All right, but don’t make it a habit.”
We made a huge bowl of popcorn and watched a few
game shows on TV. Teddy needed help
with his science project
(he’s growing seeds in gravel and tea leaves)
and then all three of us played one-handed W
ar,
which we’d decided we liked more
than the two-handed version.
They both walked me home. On the hill,
we picked a bunch of early violets and wild daffodils.
Tiffany chattered constantly
about nothing in particular, the way only Tiffany can do,
and I realized this must be the first time—in a long time—
that she didn’t have to be on a field or in a gym,
or in front of the Sisters, reciting scripture.
At the pasture, Mr. Fitz was turning Ella loose
after training her. The three of us leaned on the gate
and watched Ella race across the field, bucking and whinnying,
so relieved to be free.
31.
It was seventy-nine degrees today—
warmer than usual for April—
and a perfect day to sketch. But that’s not
what I did. Instead, I spent the better part of the afternoon
trying to find Miss Benedetto’s lucky rabbit’s foot.
I lost it when I ran over to Tiffany’s, so it’s definitely
somewhere out there
in those five acres of fields
between our trailer and her neighborhood.
As I was looking, I couldn’t help thinking
that this was one of those times, if I had a grandmother—
the kind that bundles you up in the cold
and makes you chocolate chip cookies
and lets you watch anything you want on TV—
this would be exactly the kind of time
a grandmother like that
would help me. She’d put on her flat-soled
shoes and her grandmother sweater,
and she’d walk the fields with me, searching.
Or she might offer to drive me somewhere
to buy a new rabbit’s foot
to replace the one I lost (even though I didn’t mean to).
But I don’t know my grandmother. I have
no one like that to call.
Instead, I need some other kind of good luck charm
to help me find the one I lost…. But mostly
I need the guts to tell Miss Benedetto
that I have been careless
with her gift.
32.
Every night for the past week,
I’ve been trying to sketch Daddy. After dinner, he stretches out
on the couch to watch TV, and he’s usually
fast asleep by 8:30. That’s when I
grab my sketch pad and sit at his feet, but every drawing
I’ve made so far—for some reason—
just isn’t working.
Then yesterday at the museum,
I found Andrew Wyeth’s Trodden Weed.
The sign said “Tempera,” and that Andrew had
mixed powdered pigment with egg yolk
and had painted slowly and in layers,
to get in all the details. The painting is a man,
but you can only see him from the knees down. He wears
a loose black coat and leather boots, and he’s stepping
on a big weed.
The sign also said it was
Andrew’s self-portrait, which he painted
after he’d been really sick. I guess the weed he’s trampling
is Death, and he’s showing how he beat it.
Right after that, I walked back to look at
Jamie Wyeth’s portrait of his wife—
the one with the plant, the chair, and the hat—
and that made me think about things…
how they can tell you a lot
about a person, how each object
is a story.
I got home early enough to fix us a hot
chicken dinner. While we were eating, Daddy asked:
“You been keepin’ yourself busy around here after school?”
I nodded and tried not to
choke on my chicken wing.
“Yep,” I said. “With the horses and homework and…”
Daddy chewed and waited for me to finish.
I should have said “watching TV” or “playing with Blake,”
but instead all I said was “…and other stuff.”
Daddy shoveled in his last bite.
He looked like he wanted to say something, but then
he closed back up again.
That was it—that was all we said.
He helped me clear the table and went off
to watch sports.
I was washing the dishes when I noticed
Daddy’s work boots and his tool belt
leaning against each other near the door, like two old friends.
Above them, through the glass, was Mr. Kesey’s willow tree,
which is as huge and droopy
as the magnolias I’ve seen in pictures of Savannah,
like the one you were sitting under
the day you met Daddy.
So while Daddy’s eyes were glued to Channel 10,
I grabbed my drawing pad and my best ink pen
and started his portrait.
33.
Today was Marianne’s birthday party
at the Bowling Palace. I didn’t go.
Two weeks ago, Mr. Fitz asked me if I could spend today
getting Ella bathed, groomed, and braided
for the Unionville Horse Show.
I said yes and I guess that was lucky,
’cause I didn’t really want to go to that party
but I didn’t want to lie
to get out of it.
I had just finished bathing Ella
and was walking her along the lane so she’d dry in the sun,
when Tiffany came flying up the hill.
She started jabbering away about her uncle Ray
who’d come to visit from Florida.
She was in a hyper mood, but she seemed happy enough,
and I could tell she liked having him around.
“He tells me stuff about my mother when she was younger,”
Tiffany told me. Then she asked: “So, G…. If you don’t know
your grandparents,
and you have never met your great-uncle Doug,
then how do you know all that stuff
about your mother?” So I explained.
“Just before Momma got sick, it was
Christmastime. She must have been thinking about
the past, about Savannah.” (Do you remember that, Momma?)
“She showed me a photograph of her brother,
and another one of herself with her mother
and father. But it was after her brother had died,
and their smiles looked fake, like they were painted on.
I remember she looked—already—like a dog chained too tight,
like she was desperate to escape.”
The rest of it, I told Tiffany, I got from Daddy
over the last six years—but only in little bits, now and then,
here and there. I have learned to watch him, like you might watch
a slow leak from a faucet. Sometimes it takes forever
before you see a single drip,
and if you time it right, you can catch it in your hand,
but you gotta be quick.
“Do you still have the photographs—
of your mother’s brother? And your grandparents?”
“I’m pretty sure Daddy tore them up,” I said.
“He might’ve even burned them….”
Just then, Daddy drove up the lane in his truck.
He stopped beside us, said he had to
get some supplies from the lumberyard for Mr. Kesey,
and could I come along for a few minutes to help?
That was good—I didn’t have to tell Tiffany about that week
before we moved our trailer out of the park,
when I rode wi
th Daddy three times to this place in the woods,
where he made a big fire
and dumped boxes full of your stuff
into the flames.
I remember standing next to him, wondering if that was what hell looked like
and praying
you weren’t there.
34.
“Paints, Paper, and Clay—Artwork by the Students
of Longwood High, Grades 9–12.”
That’s what the sign said at the bottom of
the big glass showcase next to the nurse’s office.
I was on my way there for some of those
fruit-flavored Rolaids (I didn’t do so hot
on Mr. Krasinski’s exponents test),
but once I noticed that exhibit,
I spent the next class period looking at:
miniature landscape paintings,
cut-paper collages,
metal sculptures,
watercolors,
pen-and-ink portraits,
ceramic vases and plates.
To me, every piece
looked perfect—every one of those high schoolers
knew what they were doing.
After gym class, I got a pass and found
Miss Benedetto. I told her I wanted to
withdraw my application for the grant program,
the sooner the better.
“I’ve seen what I’m up against,” I told her,
“and I don’t stand a chance.”
Miss B. pulled together two chairs, and we sat there
in silence for a while. “Georgia,” she said at last,
“I’ve seen some pretty incredible sketches
on the covers of your math book, not to mention
the stuff you’ve done in class.
